I had a chance to speak, very briefly, with Michael Praed when he was filming the thriller Dangerous Obsession (aka Darkness Falls) on the Isle of Man in 1997.

How did you get this role?
"I worked with [director] Gerry Lively on Son of Darkness, when I was a vampire with the teeth and everything, so Gerry wanted me in this. I'm also quite good mates with Oliver Tobias and Ray Winstone. My character is called Blue Eyes, which is kind of intriguing as I have hazel eyes. I appear briefly at the start and the end, so I'm only working on the film for a couple of days. This is the first time I've done a cameo role like this.”

What else have you made recently?
"I've just done a film called This Town in America. I suppose I will always be Robin Hood to some people. My first big break was The Pirates of Penzance, which was exciting for a whole range of reasons.”

I heard you’re learning to fly.
"Yes, I was terrified of flying, so to conquer it I'm learning to fly. I'm training for my Private Pilot's License."

What was the story behind Nightflyers?
"Nightflyers? Oh Christ! That's an interesting story for all the wrong reasons. I liked the script, but the week before shooting, the director gave us a completely revised script. It bore no relation at all to the original! Instead of bailing out, we stuck with it. In the end, he took his name off the film - he shouldn't be allowed to get away with that.”

Do you prefer film or TV work?
"I don't mind whether I do film or TV or theatre, in Britain or America. I'll go where the work is. Acting's a tough game."

website: www.michael-praed.com

Director: Denis Lawson
Writer: Denis Lawson
Producer: Gill Parry
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ruth Millar, Peter Capaldi
Year of release: 2002
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

This short story by Ian McEwan was very nearly filmed by the BBC in the mid-1970s but production was cancelled at the eleventh hour because (allegedly) a make-up artist objected to one of the props - a pickled penis in a jar. That may well be true, in fact, as the Beeb was certainly riddled with enough union politics at that time to make it easier and cheaper to scrap a whole production than replace a make-up artist. Now Denis 'Biggs Darklighter' Lawson, having already directed one short, has adapted the story as part of a Scottish short films project.

I haven’t read the original story, but McEwan is a ‘literary’ author, not an SF writer and this production certainly betrays the hallmarks of someone dipping their toe into the genre and then wasting a good idea by completely failing to understand the field’s potential. Basically, Scottish advertising exec Phil (Lawson’s nephew, the ubiquitous Ewan McGregor, who made this the same year that he made Attack of the Clones) receives several boxes containing 42 volumes of his great-grandfather’s diaries plus various esoteric items - including a (very large) pickled penis. His grandfather has endowed £25,000 to Phil if he will edit the diaries, which contain vast amounts of esoteric mathematical formulae and some very naive discussions of sex.

Increasingly obsessed with the diaries, Phil packs in his day-job, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend Maisie (Ruth Millar). In a nicely edited flashback we see that his great-grandfather (Peter Capaldi: Neverwhere, Wild Country) discovered an esoteric geometric shape which was in some way multidimensional - “the plane without a surface” - which unfortunately is represented here by an origami chrysanthemum. When perfectly created, this shape will disappear into another dimension, taking with it anyone who happens to curl themselves around the shape.

Phil and Maisie grow more distant, then seem to come back together again, but has Phil really forgiven his girlfriend for petulantly smashing the jar with the penis in, or does he have other plans?

Actually, this makes the thirty-minute film sound considerably better than it actually is. Not only is very little explained (that’s fair enough) but even less is explored. We don’t see or understand Phil’s growing obsession, nor is there even the slightest discussion of what such a discovery could mean, either in the flashback or the main story. Mostly this is an excuse for McGregor to get his kit off yet again and indulge in some lengthy romps with Millar which totally fail to add anything to either character or plot. It’s difficult to make a half-hour short drag unnecessarily, but Lawson has managed it here.

Without knowing the source material, it’s impossible to say how much of this lacklustre story is McEwan’s and how much is Lawson’s creation. But whoever is responsible, this is a real disappointment which simply doesn’t do anything or go anywhere. And why is there a pickled penis? Who knows? It’s entirely irrelevant to what little there is of the ‘plot.’

Some nice digital cinematography by Robin Vidgeon (Hellraiser) and editing by Kant Pan (Summer Scars, LD 50) don’t make up for the lack of story and shallowness of characterisation.

MJS rating: C-
Review originally posted 10th December 2005

Director: Julian Richards
Writer: Simon Lubert
Producers: Peter La Terriere, Tim Dennison
Cast: Emily Woof, Douglas Henshall, Clive Russell
Year of release: 2002
Country: UK
Reviewed from: VHS screener

Silent Cry is the 'lost' Julian Richards film. Shot in 2002, it remains unreleased outside Germany (not the first British film to find itself in this situation - see Project Assassin) although it did receive a belated UK premiere at the National Museum of Photography Film and Television in 2004.
Strictly 'work for hire', Silent Cry falls chronologically inbetween Darklands and The Last Horror Movie. While it certainly doesn't have the innovation and cult appeal of the latter, it shares certain stylistic/thematic traits with the former, notably an urban conspiracy based on corruption at the highest level and a protagonist whose accidental involvement in the situation proves to be anything but. I thoroughly enjoyed Darklands, being able to see past Craig Fairbrass' astoundingly wooden performance, but I'm aware that some other folk were less enamoured of Julian's debut feature. So I'm loathe to suggest whether or not Silent Cry is better than The Wicker Man Comes to Newport; I can however confirm that it does not have Craig Fairbrass in it which should be recommendation enough.

Emily Woof (also in the unjustifiably obscure Pandaemonium) is terrific as single mother Rachel Stewart whose baby dies only a few hours after he is born. But through her distress, Rachel realises that when she visited the baby in the hospital nursery on that first night - when he seemed to be perfectly healthy - she saw consultant Dr Richard Herd (Kevin Whately: Inspector Morse, Auf Wiedersehen Pet) up to something; he seemed to be switching ID tags on two babies. Was one of them hers? I may be reading too much into this but the sense that something was seen but not really registered brings to mind Argento movies such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Returning to the hospital, Rachel finds herself stalked by menacing, six-foot Police Detective Betts (Clive Russell: Neverwhere, King Arthur) and in escaping she unwittingly involves hospital cleaner Daniel Stone (Douglas Henshall: If Only..., Kull the Conqueror) in the situation. In short order, Rachel's world falls apart through the Terminator-like determination of the ruthless Betts. All she has to go on is the name of the mother of the other baby, ‘Joanne Dreyer’.

Rachel and Daniel's desperate search for the missing baby takes them into the seedy depths of London's nightlife, pursued at every turn by Betts who will stop at nothing - including cold-blooded murder - to silence them. Fortunately Daniel has friends in low places who provide unexpected help, including one scene where Betts is forced to back down which seems to owe a little to the old Amicus movie Tales from the Crypt.

Also in the cast are Frank Finlay (Ghosthunter, the 1977 TV Dracula) as Rachel's family doctor, Craig Kelly (Beyond Bedlam, Queer as Folk) as a colleague of Betts, Stephanie Buttle (Urban Ghost Story) and Richard Lumsden (from sitcom Is It Legal?) as Rachel's friends and Steve Sweeney (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as a friend of Daniel's.

Cinematographer Tony Imi also photographed recent-ish British horror thrillers Downtime and Lighthouse and many years ago shot the likes of Cathy Come Home, Up the Junction and Percy's Progress! Darklands’ David A Hughes provides the score. Tim Dennison also produced Evil Aliens and Room 36.

Silent Cry is a cracking little thriller, very tense and - in its third act - shockingly brutal. Julian Richards' direction is confident and effective. The biggest criticism one can make is that Simon Lubert’s script does depend on a maternity unit following practises that British hospitals haven’t used for some years now, such as keeping new-born babies apart from their mothers in a nursery, and other hospital-related aspects - such as easy access to a maternity unit - are pure fantasy. Evidently Lubert’s initial idea for the script came several years ago when this sort of thing could still happen.

Christ alone knows why this gripping, very watchable picture hasn't been able to find a UK release on either big or small screen, considering the rubbish that does make it into distribution.

MJS rating: A-
Review originally posted 4th January 2005

I interviewed Bill Paxton in the penthouse suite of the Dorchester Hotel, London in September 1995. He was over here with the cast and crew of Apollo 13 and most journalists wanted to interview Tom Hanks but he had no SF credits to speak of (apart from Big maybe) so SFX had no problem securing a chat with Paxton. Because of the lengthy post-production time required on Apollo 13, he had shot Twister since wrapping the space film, although that had not yet been released. A short version of this ran in SFX at the time.

Apollo 13 looks like it was very hard work. Was it harder than an ordinary movie?
"It was, but like the astronauts we portrayed, we had a tremendous sense of camaraderie. We all tried to make this film as good as it could be. We all felt an incredible sense of integrity and responsibility towards the material because it was a historical re-enactment of this famous voyage. And so we were unified and compelled to make this movie great. Yeah, it was a lot of work. There were a lot of cold days, when they refrigerated the sets so that they could see our breath.

“The flights on the aeroplane were very demanding, but at the same time, here we were as actors and film-makers doing something that had never been done in a theatrical motion picture. They took actors up in a set that had been put on a plane and it would fall out of the sky, and the camera crews would float and shoot it. So it was a unique filming experience. The filming of it was almost like a mission in itself. We all felt unified on our mission.”

Do you remember the Apollo 13 incident?
"I was 15 years old at the time. I didn't know all the myriad of problems that they'd had. I knew something had happened that had damaged the spacecraft, and the big question that I remember was: had there been a compromise in the integrity of the heat shield? Would the command module withstand the intense heat of re-entry? That seemed to be the big question on everyone's mind. When I read the script and started doing research I found out all the different things. One thing that is amazing is the whole idea that their survival literally came down to a plastic bag, the cardboard cover off a flight manual, space age bailing wire, duct tape... Unbelievable! All those things: the manual burn, the course correction, the idea that they almost skipped off the atmosphere before re-entry. So many things there."

Did you meet the real Fred Haise?
"I only had the opportunity to spend the best part of a day with him, down at Cape Kennedy. He was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule. He still is an aerospace engineer, working for Grumman, the same people who built the Lunar Module. He was chosen to be Lunar Module pilot because he was in the astronauts corps but he was assigned to Grumman, and he was one of the men who did all the tests for the Lunar Module. Remember that they were the back-up crew on Apollo 11. If something had happened to those guys before that flight, well it could have been Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the names that we know today."

The Apollo 13 story really is truth being stranger than fiction. Were there any occasions when people started saying, 'No, surely the scriptwriters must have made this bit up...'?
"The whole thing builds to this incredible climax that everyone knows the ending of. You almost feel like it's a Cinderella story. The movie's not a cop-out. It was this incredible triumph after all of this work and resourcefulness, this concerted effort. And the whole world waited. Everyone stopped what they were doing during moments of the flight, but especially at that moment of re-entry. It's so dramatic; they go into radio blackout because of the ionisation on the hull. They're coming in so hard, at 25,000 miles per hour, and there's no way that anyone can communicate with them. So there is that incredible suspense of waiting to see whether they lived or died in re-entry. So it's a natural for the movies. It is really one of the greatest human interest stories of modern times, that's been almost forgotten."

Do you think or hope that this film and the surrounding interest in the Apollo missions might get the space programme going again?
"It's a tall order, but I can only hope that it will pique the imagination of a whole new generation of young scientists. I've just finished a picture called Twister. It's a fictional story of this incredible atmospheric phenomenon we know as tornadoes that actually defy the laws of physics sometimes. I was working with a man who was a technical advisor on the film. He works for the NSSL, the National Severe Storm Lab, and he wrote me a letter. The reason he liked the movie so much was because he felt that it appealed to this generation that's coming along, who weren't born when this happened and have no personal recollection of it. It appealed to the sciences and it's a sad fact that academically the sciences are in a big decline, a decline in people going into mathematical fields and the physics fields. As a meteorologist, a big part of his work is mathematics and science. And this will appeal to young people to go into the sciences, so in that regard, yes I hope it does inspire young people."

You've done quite a few science fiction movies, including several with James Cameron. How did you first meet him?
"I met Jim Cameron when I was 25. It was 1980, he was art director on a Roger Corman picture called Galaxy of Terror and I was hired to be on his night crew as a set dresser. I had been a set dresser originally in the mid-'70s when I first went out to Hollywood when I was 18. In the interim I had gone to New York to study acting. I had come back and I was looking for acting work, but I was moonlighting as a set dresser. A buddy of mine introduced me to Jim and he gave me a job on the spot, and we got to know each other in the course of this production. I was making a small film at the time called Fish Heads that was based on a song by Billy Mumy who was in Lost in Space."

That was when he was half of the musical duo Barnes and Barnes.
"Barnes and Barnes, who were wonderful. I showed Jim this film I'd made to promote this song, and he realised that I had more of an interest than just painting a flat. So we became friends and colleagues. he was telling me at the time about a script that he was writing, that he wanted to direct, called The Terminator. We would be working late into the night and I'd say, 'What does the Terminator do then, Jim?''Well, he comes back from the future.''Let me get this straight...' It was actually not unlike that. He brought me into his circle - he's a very private man in many ways - but he accepted me as a peer very early on. We've been good friends. We're actually the same age, although I've always thought of him as kind of an older brother. He ended up tossing me a bone, as it were, to do a cameo in The Terminator. A few years after that I got the tremendous role of Hudson in Aliens."

I think that's what our readers know you best for.
"I think before Apollo 13, I've been best known for two films: Aliens, the role of Hudson; and another picture that had science fiction elements to it, that was a teenage comedy, Weird Science."

Aliens was a tremendous follow-up to a tremendous movie. Was there a problem in trying to follow on from such a huge hit?
"The script was incredible. I read the Aliens script and thought, 'My God, he's going to knock this one out of the park!' I remember reading the script for Terminator before it was made and thinking, 'This is one of the best screenplays I've ever read, if not the best.' I read Aliens and weirdly enough I was over here seeing my girlfriend - who's now my wife and the mother of my 18-month-old son, James - and I got the call for the audition. They were all over here starting to do the casting at Pinewood. I went in to meet Jim and read for him, and it's always very difficult reading for your friends because you really have no mystique with them. They know your bag of tricks. I much prefer to read for someone who doesn't know me. That way I can throw a persona at them, and they can't really know: 'Is he acting, or is he really like this? What's his story there?' The magician doesn't like to show how the trick is done, as it were.

“So I had a good reading, but I didn't feel like I'd really set the world on fire. I went back and I didn't hear for - oh God, it must have been six weeks. So then I got a call in the morning - it was night-time here - it was Jim calling to say, 'I want you to play the role of Hudson'. You could probably hear me howl all the way back to California. That was a great experience for me; a great role in a great production. I think Jim was very smart on a fundamental level. Alien was like this ride in a spook house, where you never knew when the monster was going to jump out at you. I'm boiling it way down. So Jim, instead of going down that road that had been so well travelled, he decided to make Aliens this ride on a wild roller-coaster. Alien was a whole departure for science fiction films in terms of the incredible design of HR Giger and the whole evolution of that monster from the pod to the face-hugger to its birth out of the human host to ... God almighty!

“It preyed on a lot of primordial fears: the idea of parasitic oscillation, that feeds off its host. It took a lot of fears: the classic vampire myth; the idea of cancers, of tumours that grow inside you. It really got you on a very gut level, a very primordial level, and it was so cleverly done. To have this heroic part played by a woman - Sigourney Weaver is the heroine of this movie as opposed to the classic hero - it really was an amazing piece of work. Ridley Scott did such a fantastic job on that film: just the sound of that movie and the way that story unfolds visually. I remember seeing Alien in a movie house in Times Square. If you had told me I was going to be in the sequel I would have just laughed at you, thought you were mad."

We have a thing in London called Alien War, which is Aliens as a sort of walk-through interactive experience.
"I've only heard about it. I don't really know anything about it."

If you get a chance while you're in London, you should check it out.
"Maybe I should do that. They'd better not mess with Hudson! That would be incredible. I was offered the chance to do one of these ride things and re-enact Hudson, but it wasn't going to be directed by Jim and I just felt that it was exploitation of the character. There's something sacred about that picture. It's a great piece of film-making, just like Apollo 13 is a great piece of film-making. It's so rare that you get a great story married to a great piece of film-work, with a great cast, under the guidance of a Ron Howard or a James Cameron. They're sacred things. You hold them and you're loyal to them and you guard them from any kind of explanation."

You were in Predator 2 as well.
"God, I've done a lot of science fiction films. Predator 2: for a while there I thought I was going to just do all the great sequels. Another great Hollywood monster. Predator and Alien are probably the greatest monsters to emerge from Hollywood since Frankenstein and Dracula. Predator was a fabulous idea, and I think that the first Predator is hands down a much better film than the sequel, although in the case of Aliens, I think Aliens is an equally good piece of film-making to Alien. I can't say that about Predator 2. I like the director a lot, I think he's very talented. I just don't think that they developed those characters enough in the story. It was shot a little too much in a sort of 'zow! pow!' cartoon character style. I don't think there was enough for the eyes to bit into on those characters.

“I thought the set-up to the first one was brilliant. I think it's one of Arnold's best movies, besides his work with James Cameron. I just love the idea of that monster: man has been a hunter, he's killed everything on this planet, including himself. And now comes this being from another planet who seems very primordial, but God, he's hunting man. I love the idea of that and I love the resourcefulness of the Predator."

And of course, at the end of Predator 2 there's that little shot of an Alien skull.
"Isn't that great? Jim and I both got a tremendous kick out of that. in the trophy case they show that Predator had beaten the Alien. I've seen this comic book - I've never read it - Aliens vs Predator, and I've heard they're trying to make that into a movie. I don't really know what that movie would be. And I heard that somebody's trying to do Starship Troopers, which has been around for a long time. Jim had us read that as a primer as colonial marines. I said, 'What would you read to get into this?' He said, 'I'd read Heinlein, and I'd read that.'"

Was it helpful?
"Oh absolutely. It's almost a throwback to the old times of imperialism, when you'd go out and you colonise different countries, if you were a British soldier. It's the same thing, just set in futuristic times."

You mentioned Weird Science, which is a lot lighter movie.
"I don't usually mention that so much. I'm not trying to distance myself from it but sometimes as these credits get older and you get further away, you like to think that people will know you for your contemporary efforts as well as your past glories. But I've always been proud of that movie. It was the first really great role I had in a studio film. I love John Hughes and I've always wanted to work with him again. Unfortunately we've lost track of each other. I had a tremendous rapport and collaboration with him. He gave me a lot of freedom to explore that character and I had a lot of fun with it. It's become a great archetype. I always liked Animal House and I always liked the actor that portrayed Neidermeyer in Animal House. So for me, that was my Animal House."

Do you worry about typecasting? A lot of your roles have been militaristic, crew-cut guys.
"I like short hair. I think a man with short hair, it's a strong look. It's a very positive strong look. And for that character and The Lords of Discipline, when I played a cadet at the citadel, and obviously, playing an astronaut I wanted to go for a buzz-cut there too. It just depends on the part. I've had hair down past my shoulders on films, like Indian Summer. I've also done science fiction movies that aren't so much science fiction, they're more like 'circus fiction'. The Dark Backward is a very peculiar movie that I starred in with Wayne Newton and Judd Nelson that I'm proud of. It's a really balls-to-the-wall performance. A lot of people said it was over the top but I like to go the wall sometimes in that regard. Obviously in movies like One False Move and Apollo 13 and Twister, Jan de Bont's new movie that I'm making with Helen Hunt, these require a more low-key, let-the-audience-study-you kind of work, as opposed to a full-blown performance."

What can you tell us about Twister?
"The movie follows these storm-chasers who are basically meteorologists who work from grants at local universities in the mid-West, who actually go out and try to put themselves as close to the tornadoes as they can, almost like a bullfighter, in the hope of gleaning certain knowledge about tornadoes. There's still a lot of things that are not known for certain. Obviously they understand the atmospheric conditions that cause these things. It's the most extraordinary atmospheric event there is, in a way; a tornado. This whirlpool, this vortex of air. Tornadoes can have winds of over 230 miles an hour blowing in them. It's not the wind that kills you, it's the debris. It can take a match and stick it right through your head. It can take a piece of straw and stick it into a tree. These things almost defy physics.

“The movie was written originally by Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Crichton. It's produced by Steven Spielberg and Kathy Kennedy. It's Jan de Bont’s follow-up to Speed, which was a tremendous international hit and a very exciting piece of film-making. So he's hoping to top himself and I think he's going to with this. I play one of these storm-chasers, I play kind of the gunfighter who walked away from the gunfight. My ex-wife is Helen Hunt who is still an obsessive storm-chaser. In the course of the movie we're trying to place this weather package, which is like a flight recorder, that's how we explain it to the audience. It looks like an industrial washing machine, with aeronometers and cameras and all these devices for measuring different atmospheric pressures. They're hoping to get it into the tornado's path and then it will be sucked up into the tornado and they can learn what really takes place inside of a tornado. There's always been a lot of conjecture about that. There's been a few eye witness accounts, but not too many people have seen the inside of a tornado and lived to tell about it.

“There's a rival team that's headed by Cary Elwes who is the corporate rat and really the big believer in modern technology, such as doppler radar and thermal imaging and all this stuff. Whereas my character is more of the Earth; he studies the signs of nature and almost has a sixth sense about the weather. He's totally corporately funded, he's after it for mercenistic reasons, whereas Helen and myself and the group that we chase with, we're more vocationalist. We're hoping that by unlocking the secrets of this thing that we can devise a better warning system that will save lives. So we're very idealistic, whereas Cary's character, he's more of a nemesis or an antagonist than a villain. The monster is truly the tornado. That's really what it chronicles; this fifty-year storm that's come in and it's just dropping tornadoes and every one of them's getting bigger.

“I've said this in a couple of interviews: I think this is going to be to tornadoes what Jaws was to sharks. Interestingly enough, people's perception of tornadoes is this sort of anthropomorphic entity/beast/rogue/murderer. That it's capricious, it'll kill everybody in one row of houses and across the street it won't even touch them , just break the windows or something. It'll pick up a baby, suck a baby right out of a house and drop it three hundred yards away totally unharmed. By the same token, it'll pick up a cow, suck it into the stratosphere and it'll rain hamburger. These things are amazing what they'll do. I saw pictures of just crazy things that didn't make any sense. I read many accounts.

“Some of the facts about tornadoes: the biggest tornado that was ever recorded in the United States was a tornado called the Tri-State Tornado of, I think, March 6th 1925. It stayed on the ground three hours which is a very long time. It started in a town in Missouri and before it was done it had gone through Illinois and Indiana. It had hit eleven towns, four of which were smeared off the face of the earth. It was very low to the ground and you couldn't even see the vortex. It was described as this 'boiling turbulent mass of blackness' moving across the southern part of the city. It was two miles wide, it cut a damage path 639 miles long, it killed 689 people, and it lasted between one-fifteen and four o'clock one afternoon in March in 1925."

You obviously do a lot of research.
"Well, you've got to. Any time when you're playing any kind of technical role like a scientist or an astronaut, you'd better know what the hell you're talking about because there's a lot of jargon in these professions. You talk about straight-line winds or convection or elicity or some of the terms that these guys use. You'd better know what the hell you're talking about, because if you deliver those lines and you don't know what they are, you're going to get caught. You're going to catch a bullet for your trouble."

Does production style differ between low budget stuff like Roger Corman movies and big budget stuff like Apollo 13?
"It's essentially the same job as an actor. I work just as hard on a low budget film as I do on an $80 million film. I approach the roles in pretty much the same way. If there's a profession involved I try to learn as much as I can about that profession. I find it a challenge as an actor to have a profession, it's a wonderful active thing to play. In any role you define the social background and the occupational background of the character. But there are different styles of acting, different kinds of movies. You do a movie like True Lies; I played the sleazy car salesman who pretends to be a secret agent to seduce these lonely women, and that's more like doing a restoration comedy piece. It's a bit heightened, you can goose it a little more. You can just wink a little more, you can just do a different kind of thing with it.

“Roles like One False Move and Twister and Apollo 13 are more challenging and I'm digging them because they require me to exert myself on a certain level and not always be trying to perform for the audience. I like the idea of the enigmatic portrayal, where you just be a vessel and the audience maybe project their own thoughts on you as they watch you in the dark. It's an evolution, this process we call film acting, or just acting in general. I love science fiction films. I was a nut on Jules Verne and HG Wells growing up, especially Verne who was just a brilliant writer. Those books are really worth going back and re-reading. A few years ago I re-read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

You've been an astronaut, you've been a colonial marine, you've been a cowboy. Have you got any ambitions left?
"I don't know. It really depends on the story and the characters. I don't really have many preconceived things. I'd like to produce films and develop my own stories. Different things will appeal to me for different reasons. I read a story in an old detective magazine of a man who was a journalist for a turn of the century newspaper. He got involved in this case where they found this dismembered body. It's almost like The Magnificent Ambersons meets Silence of the Lambs. It's a magnificent, gothic story, very creepy, and I would maybe like to develop that into a feature-length screenplay. I'm starting to move into that area. If, with Twister and Apollo, I get a little more muscle and I get the chance to produce something I might try it."

interview originally posted 3rd December 2006

Director: John Weidner
Writer: Robert Moreland
Producer: Talaat Captan
Cast: Billy Wirth, Cady Huffman, John Pyper-Ferguson
Country: USA
Year of release: 1998
Reviewed from: UK DVD

I’m sure John Pyper-Ferguson has done other stuff, but having seen this and his role as ‘Enoch Sean’ in the risible Osiris Chronicles, I can now only see him as an intergalactic pantomime villain. In Space Marines he is a space pirate (and embittered ex-marine) named Colonel Fraser. With his little Van Dyke beard, twirlable moustache ends, flouncy long hair and debonair dress sense, plus an impish delight in making poetic threats, he comes across as a cross between Lord Flashheart and Doctor Evil.

There is also, in an extraordinarily and atypically subtle moment near the start, a shared glance between himself and an underling named Lucky (Kevin Page: RoboCop, Dark Angel) which clearly implies a homosexual relationship. Lucky isn’t much to look at although Fraser’s main henchman is a muscle-rippling, square-pecced Germanic behemoth named Gunther (Michael Bailey Smith) who actually sports an eye-patch. Smith played ‘Super-Freddy’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, was the Thing in Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four movie, and was also in Cyborg 3, Men in Black II, Monster Man and The Hills Have Eyes 2.

The picture opens with a space cruiser carrying some sort of secret cargo that even the blue-collar crew don’t know what it is. Gunther and his goons board the ship, steal the cargo and kidnap the VIP passenger in charge of the stuff, Vice Minister Adams (John Mansfield). The prisoner is taken back to a planet where Fraser’s compound is besieged by a squad of space marines, clad in body armour and helmets which owe a lot to Starship Troopers (released slightly after Space Marines but well into pre-production when this was made).

Commanded by seasoned veteran Captain Gray (Edward Albert: Galaxy of Terror, Sorceress, Mimic 2, Demon Keeper and the voice of both Daredevil and the Silver Surfer in 1990s Marvel cartoons), these include TBG Rudy (Sherman Augustus: The Young and the Restless), loquacious techie nerd Hacker (Bill Brochtup: Rockula, Ravenous), avuncular sergeant Mike (Matt Topkins, who was in several episodes of canine literacy series Wishbone, as were numerous other minor cast members), rookie Tex (Blake Boyd: Dune Warriors, Dark Planet) and, we eventually discover, the movie’s main character Zack Delano (Billy Wirth, whose ridiculous floppy hair makes him look like a young Keanu Reeves, only with even less acting ability). There are also some unnamed, non-speaking members of the squad - in some scenes - who are very much there to make up numbers like the second row of the Walmington-on-Sea platoon. They all fly around in a spaceship piloted by a guy called Hot Rod although as he is never seen in the same shot as everyone else, it takes a while to realise that he’s meant to be in the same vehicle.

The attack is aborted on the orders of pole-up-her-arse Commodore Lasser (Meg Foster: Masters of the Universe, They Live, Stepfather II, Shrunken Heads and both Oblivion movies) aboard the battle-spaceship USS Missouri, whose demeanour and hairstyle show that she is channelling Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager. Before the marines retreat, Sergeant Mike takes a hit because of Tex’s inexperience, leading to bad blood within the squad, later seen bubbling to the surface during R&R in a holographic strip-joint, apparently somewhere aboard the Missouri.

The United Planets (or United Federation of Planets - it varies from scene to scene) want to try a diplomatic approach and send in Ambassador Nakamura (James Shigeta: The Questor Tapes, Die Hard, Mulan) accompanied by his diplomatic aide Dar Mullins (Cady Huffman, who guest-starred in episodes of Frasier and Mad About You). Zack is disguised as a diplomat, partly to accompany them but mostly in order to kick off a love-hate relationship with Mullins.

Fraser releases (then kills) the Vice-Minister and takes the other three hostage instead then piles into a spaceship and disappears through a Babylon 5-style temporary wormhole jumpgate star portal thing to an asteroid where his pirates are busy stockpiling antimatter (or something).

Gray and the other marines board the abandoned freighter from the prologue, hunting for the black box flight recorder - for some reason. Possibly my favourite moment in this uniformly silly film is when, on removal of the black box, a warning voice announces that the ship will self-destruct in two minutes and the marines spend a good thirty seconds simply standing around debating what this means. A subsequent raid on Fraser’s asteroid HQ (identified because it is the only mining operation in the sector, apparently) releases Dar and Zack amid a blaze of machine-gun fire but that rascally pirate has already escaped with man-mountain Gunther and the Ambassador, into whose body has been implanted a whole kilo of explosive antimatter.

This sequence really epitomises Space Marines and its skewed priority of action-sequences-before-sense: not only is every single person in Fraser’s HQ equipped at all times with a powerful weapon, whatever their role - and remember that this is a secret base on a lonely asteroid so they are unlikely to have many visitors - but also, despite advances in space travel way beyond the dreams of current technology, the weapon of choice for both pirates and space marines remains the M-16 automatic rifle.

Using Nakamura as a shield, Fraser and Gunther are able to make it to the home planet - and indeed the central council chamber - of the United Planets, where they demand a fortune in gold, or else they’ll detonate the bomb sewn into the Ambassador’s stomach. The Missouri follows them, refusing to answer all the (very reasonable) requests for identification and Gray’s marines, with Dar Mullins in tow, simply race through the council building, guns at the ready, and burst into what must therefore qualify as the worst guarded council chamber in the history of sci-fi politics.

Zack makes a move on Fraser but crumples to the floor because - eh? - he too has something inside him. Why this should make him crumple to the floor at this point is of less concern to the bemused viewer than how Zack Delano, having had plenty of time to shower and change since his release, nevertheless failed to notice the huge new scar on his abdomen. Eventually Tex redeems himself by shooting Fraser with a pistol but dies in the process. Somehow.

All this is presented with a po-faced seriousness (Pyper-Ferguson aside) that belies how silly and camp the whole thing is. This is an action movie without a great deal of action, a sci-fi film without any science fiction beyond a few generic trappings. So the marines are in a spaceship, so what? They could just as easily be in a lorry and it would make no difference to anything. The pirates stealing antimatter could just as easily be stealing nuclear material. The fact that they covet gold and use machine guns shows how firmly rooted in prosaic action motifs this film is, while giving only lip service to the idea of science fiction.

Space Marines is unimaginative, by the numbers, B-movie sci-fi which is only distinguishable from stuff made ten years earlier by dint of CGI spaceships rather than models. It is flatly directed from a dull script with cardboard characters. Having a leading man who doesn’t come to the fore until quite some way into the picture is a disadvantage but not as much of a disadvantage as casting the astoundingly wooden Billy Wirth (whose other genre credits include The Lost Boys, Body Snatchers, Seven Mummies and Last Lives). He gives the impression of having simply wandered onto the set, found there was a movie being made and joined in because he has an hour to kill. It’s impossible to care about him, or indeed anyone in a film where none of the characters are given any space to be themselves. As for the subplot about rookie Tex and his guilt over Sergeant Mike’s death, which looks at first like it might be important, that is completely ignored by the film (and forgotten by the audience) until the denouement.

John Weidner’s short directorial career includes two actioners - Midnight Man and Private Wars - and some TV episodes alongside more regular employment as editor on a batch of other DTV thumpers, such as Fists of Iron and Ring of Fire II. Robert Moreland’s other produced screenplays are aircraft thriller Ground Control and, in a slight change of pace, computer animated feature Happily N’ever After. However the creative ideas behind Space Marines lie with neither gentleman, but rather with the producer, Talaat Captan.

This was the last of a quartet of DTV sci-fi films produced by Captan when he founded Green Communications at the start of the 1990s, following Prototype, APEX and Digital Man. He had been working in distribution since 1983 (handling, among other things, Night Shadow, StealthHunters and kid-friendly horror anthology The Willies) and caught onto the tail-end of the DTV boom but it looks like these films were a means to an end, establishing Green Communications enough to move onto more serious fare. Oddly, he now seems to concentrate on aircraft-related thrillers; as well as the previously mentioned Ground Control he has given the world Jim Wynorski’s Crash Landing and James Becket’s Final Approach. The IMDB also credits him with a brace of hour-long, Christian musical productions in 2005. It must be the same guy, right? There can’t be two Talaat Captans.

Cinematographer Garett Griffin handled second unit photography on Magic Kid II before moving into the DP role on films such as Ring of Fire 3 and Nice Guys Finish Dead. Two editors are credited: Daniel Lawrence cut Captan’s three previous SF movies while Brian L Chambers went on to cut episodes of American Gothic, Sliders and Time Trax. Composer Randy Miller has an interesting genre CV, having scored Dr Hackenstein, Hellraiser III, both Darkman sequels, Firestarter 2 and the first film in the insanely long-running Witchcraft series.

Special make-up effects are credited to JM Logan whose sequel-heavy resume include Texas Chainsaw Massacre IV, The Dentist I and II, Children of the Corn IV, The Prophecy II, Curse of the Puppet Master, Python 2, Species IV and all three Wishmaster sequels. Visual effects supervisor David Hopkins worked on National Lampoon’s Men in White, Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and the title sequence of Reptilian, the US version of Yonggary! Another make-up effects guy, Anthony C Ferrante (Arachnid, Scarecrow) worked as unit publicist and shares credit with two other people for creating Gunther’s eyepatch.

Also in the cast are Angie Bolling (Murphy’s wife in all three RoboCop movies) as the Missouri’s navigation officer - who has one line - and TJ Myers (Time Chasers, Repligator, Bio-Tech Warrior) as a holographic pole dancer.

Quite why the UK release of Space Marines has been saddled with an 18 certificate is a mystery. The violence consists almost entirely of wild machine gun blasts, the sort that can take out a bad guy at a hundred yards when he’s hiding behind a barrel but which miss a good guy in plain sight at ten feet. There’s no nudity, no swearing and no drugs. Perhaps the BBFC official on duty that day was a fan of Billy Wirth and simply took exception to the fact that his name is spelled wrong on the sleeve (on the plus side, it does at least include the Token Black Guy in the cast photo).

MJS rating: C-

Review originally posted 21st August 2007

Director: Ron Ford
Writer: Michael O’Hara
Producer: Ron Ford
Cast: Anne Selcoe, Richard Erhardt, Daniel Ray Anderson
Country: USA/Canada
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener disc

The Road has a neat and original central premise, something sorely lacking in most zombie films which are usually content to be the 498th remake of Night of the Living Dead. It is also well-made - given its tiny budget - with some enjoyably bloody special effects that make up for the less-than-convincing acting.

The film’s biggest fault however is that, at 40 minutes, it is either too long or too short, possibly both. It would work better as a tight, 20-minute film, shorn of an unnecessary prologue and a frankly boring and largely irrelevant first act. Alternatively, the basic premise could be expanded to feature-length by replacing our loan protagonist in a car with a minibus full of kids.

But... you get what you get.

We open with a character identified only as ‘The Injured Man’ (Richard Erhardt) crashing his car on a lonely road at night while running drugs from one dealer to another - although this reason for his journey is completely irrelevant and never mentioned again. Stumbling through the dark, he sees a couple of dismembered-but-still-moving people and a dog that has evidently been run over but is nevertheless still walking around.

It’s a comic-book splash panel style of prologue, in that it doesn’t really have much to do with anything but it gets some gore effects on screen in the first five minutes. And it’s a good job that it does, I suppose, because it’s the last ‘horror’ we’ll see for quite some time.

Once the credits start, we’re introduced to heartless businesswoman Jean (Anne Selcoe: Home of the Brave, The Family Holiday) who is on her way to some sort of meeting and rings up her employee Gary (Daniel Ray Anderson) to find out the address (I dunno, I’d have looked that up before I set out). Gary doesn’t want to help her because she is planning to fire her partner Linda; presumably that’s Linda in a photo on Gary’s desk because he reveals to Jean that he and Linda are dating and he won’t help her destroy the woman he loves.

The thing is, it seemed (when I first watched this) that Jean was actually on her way to fire Linda but that can’t be right because she must know her own business partner’s address. Anyway, she blackmails Gary into helping her by e-mailing him from her Blackberry a scan of a newspaper cutting about a fatal drink-drive accident from his past. But he deliberately gives her the wrong address and then sets off after her with a gun.

Unsure about the address, with her mobile and her satnav packing up, Jean turns onto a lane later identified as Bluebottle Road where she occasionally stops the car, gets out, walks around then drives on. At one point she sees somebody but, when they get close, it’s obvious they have no head. (I kept wondering whether ‘Bluebottle Road’ was a subtle Goon Show reference, as in, “You rotten swine, you have deaded me!” But I’m guessing probably not...)

So anyway, is Jean shocked by this headless, walking corpse? Amazed? Puzzled? Horrified? Difficult to tell as she just drives off with no comment and no obvious display of emotion. More to the point, we’re nearly halfway through the film by now. This is where the story starts and it’s difficult to see why we need five minutes of ‘The Injured Man’ injuring himself or ten minutes of soap opera about Jean, Gary and Linda.

Down the road Jean’s car bumps gently into our friend from the prologue, somehow sending him flying several yards onto the verge where he lies, pleading for assistance in a flat monotone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the line “Oh God, please help me” delivered with less emotion. The dialogue reads like someone panicking but is performed like a note to the milkman: Oh God, don’t leave me. Two extra pints today please.

He’s terrified of being left there because “they’re coming - the dead ones”; the Z-word is never used in this film. So Jean drags him into her car, which has either run out of petrol or got stuck in a rut in the road, possibly both. And then ‘the dead ones’ attack. There’s about ten of them with assorted injuries: eyeball popped out, arm torn off etc. It’s an entertainingly varied group of the living dead including a tall goth bloke with long hair, a girl with a license plate stuck in her head, a delivery boy still clutching a pizza box and of course Bandit the pug, possibly cinema’s first canine zombie.

The most impressive effect is a zombie with a not quite severed head, attached only by a flap of skin at the nape. This hangs down the fellow’s back until he lurches forward at which point it pops back into place, before later flopping back again. This is neat and clever and funny and Ron Ford himself plays zombie-with-head-in-place.

While I salute the non-use of the Z-word (it reminded me of Joe Ahearne’s British TV series Ultraviolet in which no-one used the word ‘vampire’, giving the impression that it was set in a parallel world where vampires do not exist in tradition or fiction), there’s a problem here. What exactly is the threat from these walking corpses? If they were acknowledged as zombies then inherent in that is the fear that they will want to eat you. But although they lurch silently towards the car and then paw at the windows, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to indicate what danger they present. They might grope you, but as they move along in the traditional slow-time shuffle (these aren’t 28 Days Later zombies) they can be easily avoided.

Bereft of context, without the intellectual baggage of zombie-as-cultural-artefact, all we have here is a group of very badly injured people moving very slowly and it’s difficult to see why Jean would be so scared of them. In other words, in order to understand that they are a threat - rather than an inconvenience or even deserving of sympathy and help - she has to know what they are and her understanding has to match ours. She has to be in touch with the, if you will, zombie zeitgeist. Which she apparently isn’t.

Our injured friend does know what they are. Bluebottle Road has some sort of curse which means that anyone who dies on the road is doomed to stay there forever. My favourite part of the film is the little bit of exposition where Jean asks how this could be without the road becoming famous and TIM (as I might as well call him) explains why it is that local people know about the road but the story never goes any further.

But again, there’s a problem. Surely Jean is local? After all, Gary works for her and he’s only a few miles away (as evidenced by his appearance at the end of the film) so why doesn’t she (or Gary) know about Bluebottle Road? This would work much better if Jean was from a long way off and just passing through, in other words without all that boring phone stuff at the start. This would also make her more sympathetic - and TIM would be more sympathetic too if we didn’t have that prologue showing us that he’s a drug-dealer’s goon. What we’ve got here is a drug-pusher and a bitch trying to get away from some people who seem frankly harmless and thereby invite our sympathy much more than the couple inside the car.

I can see what The Road is trying to do, I can see where The Road is, ah, going. But I can also see how and why it’s failing to get there. The script really needed tightening up, divested of all the unnecessary stuff at the start and stripped down to its essentials. If it had to be 40 minutes long, the main story should have been filled out to that time - rather than attaching irrelevant background stuff at the beginning - and there are plenty of problems in this set-up which could be explored and thereby solved through that extra running time for the main story.

I’m being overly critical here. Ron and co have put a lot of effort in and done a grand job but the core of any horror film is the threat and these zombies are simply, well, vague. You really, really need to know what your threat is, in every detail, before you unleash it on your protagonists, rather than just ticking a box that says ‘zombie’ and assuming it’s all okay (even more so if you’re going to avoid using the Z-word). And it helps to have at least one sympathetic protagonist. There are only three characters here: one is an evil, soulless bitch about to betray her best friend; one earns his living by helping to drag people’s lives into drug-dependent misery; and the third one killed several people when he was drink-driving and now plans to murder his boss. Who precisely are we meant to empathise with?

This is deliberate - there’s little doubt about that. The film opens and closes with a radio DJ (played by young Mr Ford) bemoaning the amount of greed in the world and whether there is still time to change the road we’re on - very allegorical. The problem is that those who suffer in this film don’t do so because of their unpleasant nature or past misdemeanours, they just suffer. And with no sympathetic characters, there’s nobody to show us, allegorically, how we might change our ways.

I won’t spoil the ending but it involves Gary, a less than convincing make-up on Jean (it always look wrong when somebody’s face is plastered in blood but there’s none in their hair), an editing inconsistency that suggests Jean has turned off Bluebottle Road although she then seems to still be on it, and a final resolution that is inconsistent with the established lore because by then Jean definitely isn’t on Bluebottle Road.

There’s a car crash at the end which is really quite effective (as indeed is the one at the start, although that has the advantage of being in darkness) and you know, car crashes are extremely difficult to do on a limited budget for obvious reasons. We also get a revelation about TIM (though it has nothing to do with his drug-running job) which includes a brief shot of the best gore effect in the film. It’s all a bit of a mishmash at the end, to be honest, combining possibly the film’s best bit with some of its weakest moments.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy The Road but I did find it frustrating. There are parts that don’t really make sense - why, for example, after eventually driving away from the shuffling zombies, does Jean knock down the same zombies further down the road? - and other parts that aren’t necessary at all.

And while time and effort has been put into the make-up effects, there’s a small but annoying moment when Jean tops up her tank from a can of petrol in her boot (er, 'gas in her trunk’, I suppose). It’s annoying because the container is very obviously empty. There’s an episode of Seinfeld where the characters are wandering around a car park and Kramer is carrying a heavy item that he bought - a video or something similar. Michael Richards insisted that the genuine item be put in the box because, good as he is at physical comedy, you need the weight there to act against. Acting that an empty container is heavy requires world class mime skills. In other words, why not give the actress a genuine can of petrol? Unless you’re Marcel Marceau, it’s virtually impossible to carry an empty plastic container around the same way you would if it was full. Sorry to harp on about something so inconsequential, but I get annoyed by tiny things that would cost nothing to fix.

The Road was written by Michael O’Hara as part of an anthology script (Ron gets an ‘additional material’ credit) and is likely to end up being released as one segment in the third volume of the Goregoyles series from Canadian executive producer Alexandre Michaud’s Helltimate Studios, some time in 2008 (the film carries a 2007 copyright). Hopefully the opening sequence can be trimmed for the feature release so that it doesn’t swamp the film. Let’s face it, this is a movie for folk who love cheesy, gory low-budget horror and there’s no point wasting so much time before getting to the, ah, meat of the story.*

DP Phil Sondericker previously worked with Ron Ford on Fred Olen Ray’s Tiki, which also featured Selcoe and Erhardt in its cast. Ron, Raymond D Biddle and Russell La Croix all get an ‘additional photography’ credit and the editing is credited to Ron ‘with’ Michaud. Make-up effects supervisor Mitch Tiner is another Tiki veteran who also worked on Ron’s little-seen Snakeman, providing - and indeed wearing - the titular effects make-up. He also ‘does’ John Lennon in a Beatles tribute band! Shawn Shay and Jamie Kenmir also get ‘make-up effects’ credits.

David G Such, who scored Ron’s The Crawling Brain, provides the effective music while Christian Viel (director of Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain) gets a credit for ‘digital SFX’ which principally consists of some bullet hits. Tiner, Shay, Biddle and La Croix are all among the zombie extras, along with Ben and Connor Foxworth, Karolyn Clark, Joelene Smith and Richard Lee.

It’s always good to see a new Ron Ford film and I’d love to like The Road more than I do. It’s so nearly there but its deficiencies, in terms of both script and production, make it unsatisfying for those of us who know what Ron is capable of. Still, trimmed a bit and sandwiched between a couple of other horror tales, it would make a passable half-hour of unpretentious horror fun.

MJS rating: B-

* Update: After writing this review, the Goregoyles III project fell through and Ron re-edited The Road, tightening up the picture by six minutes, before releasing it as half of his own anthology Horror Grindshow.

Review originally posted 3rd March 2008

Director: Johannes Roberts
Writers: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Fiera
Producers: James Harris, Mark Lane
Cast: Claire Holt, Mandy Moore, Matthew Modine
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: trade screening

Following hot on the heels of The Other Side of the Door (due to the vagaries of distribution schedules) comes Johannes Roberts’ tenth feature, and arguably his best. 47 Meters Down takes a very simple premise and runs with it, to genuinely terrifying effect.

Claire Holt (The Vampire Diaries) and Mandy Moore (Tangled) are sisters Kate and Lisa. The former is the wild, free-living, risk-taking, not-settling-down type; the latter is the sensible one in a long-term relationship. Which has just ended unhappily, the unseen Stuart accusing Lisa of being boring. A holiday in Mexico with her sister should offer some solace but also a chance for Lisa to show Stuart that she’s more free-spirited than he gave her credit for.

Which is why, after a night of drinking and dancing with two local lads, the girls agree to a trip out to sea for a shark cage-based close encounter. Matthew Modine (The Haunting of Radcliffe House) is Taylor, skipper of the unprepossessing boat with its rusty cage and creaking winch. This is very much not an approved, certificated tourist excursion and Lisa has qualms about both the sharks and the operation, which Kate allays through sisterly – but irresponsible – persuasion.

Inside the cage, lowered to a depth of five metres, the sisters have some stunning but scary views of great whites, attracted by a chum bucket of offal. And thus we come to the end of act one and the predictable cable snap, sending the cage down to the titular depth.

So here’s the predicament. Kate (an experienced scuba diver) and Lisa (new to the underwater realm) are in a rusty cage, surrounded by assorted pieces of broken winch, with a limited air supply – reducing even faster than normal because of their panicked state. The blue water above them has at least two enormous sharks swimming around in it, and a dash for the surface is out of the question because they would get the bends. You don’t really want a slow ascent with a five-minute pause halfway when huge predators are circling.

Can Taylor and his Mexican crew get to them? Can they even be trusted to try, given the dodgy nature of the enterprise? No-one else knows the girls even went out on this boat. Also, they are just out of radio range, which means intermittent communication with Taylor is only possible by briefly swimming up a few metres. So if the boat did decide to leave, they wouldn’t even know.

Roberts and his regular co-writer Ernest Riera wring every ounce of nerve-shredding tension out of this situation. The ticking clock of the air supply, the uncertain reliability of the boat crew and their equipment, the ever-present threat of the great whites. This is an extraordinarily scary, claustrophobic film and one that will have you on the edge of your seat, alternately gasping and whimpering.

The relationship between the sisters is well-defined and it’s to the film’s credit that Ernest and Jo felt no need to include any sort of “I slept with your boyfriend” revelation. There’s enough going on here without adding relationship woes, and besides the sisters’ only chance of survival is working together and helping each other.

And yet, in a sense, there’s relatively little going on here. There are several action sequences, such as a trip across the ocean floor to retrieve a flashlight, but it is surprising at the end of the film to realise quite how few and far between are the actual appearances by any sharks. And that’s a Good Thing. It is the threat of the sharks that drives the terror of both characters and audience. When a shark does appear it’s swift and sudden and terrifying but much, much more than a simple, cheesy cat-scare. That’s what sharks do – they swim fast through the opaque water, suddenly appearing with mouths full of “many teeth, dear”. (Although, despite what that song claims, sharks are not known for their dental hygiene. They don’t really need to, given that they have multiple rows of teeth, constantly moving forward to replace lost ones.)

Putting today’s marine biology lesson aside, what impresses – really impresses – is Jo’s direction. For most of the film he has only two characters, in a single tight location, their faces partially obscured (fortunately they have different hair colours and outfits), their surrounding environment an amorphous haze and no actual sharks on screen. Yet the film remains visually gripping, a situation greatly assisted by the frankly awesome cinematography of underwater specialist Mark Silk.

Now, there have been a lot of dumb shark films made in recent years. If you’re not sure quite how many, take a look at the three-part blog I wrote for Hemlock Books last year here, here and here– and bear in mind that this is already out-of-date, failing to include such low-grade tripe as Shark Exorcist, Sharkenstein and Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre (no, seriously). 47 Meters Down belongs to that much rarer cinematic subgenre, the intelligent shark movie. This is a film that doesn’t have to actually show the sharks to be scary; not because of any fear of audiences seeing through the effects, it should be stressed. The great whites seen here (and indeed all other passing fish) are completely credible, authentic-looking CGI creations.

47 Meters Down proves that it is possible to make a genuinely frightening, serious, intelligently plotted, shark-based horror movie. In fact, I would venture to suggest that this is probably the best shark movie since Jaws – and certainly the scariest. There have been a handful of other intelligent shark movies but none of those have milked the horror potential of the subgenre as successfully as this picture.

Interestingly, the film this most closely resembles isn’t a shark film, it’s The Descent– and not just because of the female cast (discussion of the errant ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, this has no problem passing the Bechdel test). In a review of The Descent in Video Watchdog, which I quoted in my book Urban Terrors, it was noted that the film featured hot actresses in skin-tight outfits yet pointedly refused to objectify them. 47 Meters Down achieves the same laudable goal, avoiding the same easy win.

More than its gender credentials, Roberts’ film resembles Neil Marshall’s in its claustrophobia – the cage is a tiny haven of safety among the blue – and in the way that the situation gets progressively worse, danger piling on additional danger as vestiges of hope are dashed away in gut-wrenching succession. Marshall’s six women were trapped underground by a cave-in and nobody knew they were there and there were subhuman crawlers hunting them down. Jo’s two sisters are trapped at the bottom of the sea and nobody knows they’re there (except Matthew Modine and his crew of questionable honesty) and there are some 20-feet long specimens of Carcharodon carcharias prowling around.

There is also, like The Descent, [spoilers on] a ‘false rescue’, somewhat unsubtly presaged with a Chekhov’s gun comment from Taylor about the danger of nitrogen narcosis-induced hallucination. While it’s apparent, as we watch the sisters make it back to the boat with a good 20 minutes to run, that this isn’t real (unless the film has an extraordinarily lengthy credit crawl…), that doesn’t in any way distract from the very real terror of their ascent and their struggle to make it on board, which is one of the most seat-grippingly scary sequences in the whole movie. A coda of Mexican coastguard divers finally arriving provides the sort of upbeat ending that US audiences (or at least, US distributors) demand. But by fading to black before the surface is reached, Jo allows us to retain the very real possibility that this too is inside our heroine’s mind and no more real than the previous escape. Thus the film offers both the ‘real world trap condenses into mind trap’ existentialist nihilism of The Descent’s original ending, and also the pat ‘with one bound she was free’ resolution of The Descent’s American ending [spoilers off] for those who want it.

And, like The Descent, one watches this film thinking: “Why in God’s name would you even do that?” Why would anyone in their right mind go potholing? Why would anyone with any sense get into a shark cage, even a good one booked through a legitimate tour operator? I mean, I love sharks as much as the next man (a shout out here to Bite-Back, the shark conservation charity which thoroughly deserves your support) but if I want to get up close to them I can do that at the Sea Life Centre, thank you very much. Their glass tunnel is completely safe, requires no specialised equipment or training – and there’s a gift shop at the far end of it. That’s the sensible option right there.

Of course, if Kate and Lisa had sensibly decided not to go out on Taylor’s boat, there would have been no movie. Or, looked at another way, the movie would have been 90 minutes of Mandy Moore and Claire Holt sunning themselves by a pool. Which, now I think about, you know, would also have worked for me…

Produced by the ‘Tea Shop and Film Company’ duo of James Harris and Mark Lane (Tower Block, Cockneys vs Zombies) for Dimension Films, some of the underwater scenes were shot in a big tank at Pinewood Studios. Exteriors and surface shots were filmed in July/August 2015 in the more glamorous locale of the Dominican Republic where this was the first production in the big new water tank facility there. Although one might assume that the nominal stars don't actually appear too much after act one, aside from close-ups where you can see their faces, and perhaps spent much of the shoot warm and dry in an ADR studio. in fact both actresses spent a lot of time in the water, for which props should undoubtedly be given. Nevertheless, credit where it’s due so a tip of the hat also to ‘dive doubles’ Zoe Masters, Elspeth Rodgers and Jenny Stock (I think there was a fourth dive double, but only those three are listed on the IMDB). Only in a couple of shots are the 'actors' as CGI as the sharks and you won't spot those.

Tower Block director James Nunn was first AD, a duty he also performed on F (as well as numerous other BHR titles) and also shot second unit. A terrific score by North American duo tomanandy (Sinister 2, Resident Evil sequels) keeps the atmosphere charged throughout, abetted by corking sound design by Alex Joseph (Tower Block, Green Street 3). Production design by David Bryan (The Other Side of the Door), make-up effects by Kristyan Mallett (Howl), editing by Martin Brinkler (Storage 24) – all top-notch. Outpost FX were responsible for the absolutely enormous amounts of visual effects; basically everything underwater except actors, cage and props is created in a computer while lots of other CGI disguises the fact that this was all shot in, effectively, a big swimming pool.

During post-production the title was briefly changed to In the Deep and that was on the print which was screened (twice) at Cannes in May 2016 (actually it was Johannes Roberts’ In the Deep, but who could begrudge him the possessory credit?). However it has subsequently been confirmed that the film will revert to the shooting title (with that American spelling) on release, probably to avoid confusion with a US-Aussie film called Into the Deep, set for a UK DVD release in September. That is also about people trapped in a shark cage but it looks like a found footage movie (yawn) and so probably not something we need to concern ourselves with and certainly no real competition except among that key audience demographic, people who don’t pay attention when buying DVDs in Asda. The IMDB currently lists a Dutch release date of September 2016 for 47 Meters Down but who knows where they got that from or how accurate it is.

MJS rating: A

Director: John R Hand
Writer: John R Hand
Producer: John R Hand
Cast: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington, Bruce Culpepper
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.jrhfilms.com/soy

This is the second feature from John R Hand whose first film, Frankensteins (sic) Bloody Nightmare, is one of the strangest that I have ever reviewed: an avant-garde horror film with a deliberately (I think) impenetrable narrative. The most distinctive thing about Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare - and one of the few things that can be said about it with any degree of certainty - is that many of the shots were extreme close-ups, often lit from unlikely angles, rendering the whole film into a feature-length version of one of those ‘can you tell what this everyday object is?’ photo puzzles.

One of the few things which can be said with any degree of certainty about Scars of Youth is that Hand has at least now decided to move the camera further back so we can see who’s who and what’s what, although some scenes take place in deep, black, impenetrable shadows with only one item - usually a face - clearly lit. And nearly all the other scenes are shot with gels so that there’s a red shot or a blue shot or whatever.

Unfortunately, while the visuals are clearer here, the sound falls down badly. There is not a great deal of dialogue but much of what there is has been distorted so it sounds like an intercom or dodgy microphone. And fairly lengthy stretches of speech are consequently rendered incoherent. This may be deliberate - Hand breaking up the audio just as he broke up the visuals last time out - but I somehow doubt it. And while I’m not sure the film would be any easier to follow if I could hear the dialogue, I would at least have liked to give it a try.

You will undoubtedly have noticed, because you’re an intelligent person, that I have so far completely avoided any mention of what Scars of Youth is actually, you know, about. And that is because I haven’t a damn clue. I can tell you who is in this film, who made it, how long it is. I can even tell you that it is set 200 years in the future, thanks to the opening caption. But the plot? The characters? Hand is as obtuse and avant-garde as he was before.

Unless one is a pretentious wanker who spouts pseudo-intellectual rubbish and believes that every word is true, it is extraordinarily difficult to review avant-garde films. High-concept ones like Phone Sex are slightly easier but this is a film which definitely has a plot and characters, it just doesn’t want to take the easy option of revealing them to the audience.

The central character is called Paul (Jeremy Hosbein). His mother (Amanda Edington) has become addicted to some sort of drug which prevents her from ageing but makes her skin photo-sensitive and she now lives in a derelict building on the other side of a checkpoint. There are walls and fences which were erected a few decades ago by some figures wearing white protection suits (aliens? soldiers? Government agents?). Paul has a friend called Harold (Bruce Culpepper) who regularly smuggles across the checkpoint a small cylinder containing a recording of Paul counting or reciting the alphabet (because it is his voice that his mother needs so it doesn’t matter what he says). Paul lives in some sort of plastic tent with lots of old hardback books. We see flashbacks to when he was young, played by Hosbein’s own son Donovan (his mother, of course, played by the same actress without need for special make-up), and a photographer (John R Hand himself) took a picture of the two of them.

I think.

And most of that I gleaned from the first 15-20 minutes, after which it all becomes hopelessly - but I believe, deliberately - entangled and bizarre. For example, the recording cylinder never seems to be mentioned again. I would be lying if I said I had the slightest clue what is going on.

Let’s see what the synopsis on the JRH Films website says: “In a post-apocalyptic world 200 years in the future, society has broken down into fragmented groups who now dwell within a tangled wood, completely unaware of any civilization that exists beyond and governed by the white-suited agents of some ominous force, which could perhaps be nothing more than a high-tech manifestation of their own guilt and suffering. In this world, a young man living in a decaying wreck of a dwelling struggles to come to terms with his bleak existence while trying to save his mother from the grip of a strange black fluid which seems to prolong life but at the same time leaves it's users in a drug-like haze and causes scar-like tissue to cover their bodies.”

Well, er, that’s pretty much what I said. But that’s the first 15-20 minutes and this runs 82. What actually, you know, happens?

Very little happens, frankly, and it happens at extremely slow speed. There are long stretches where Paul or someone else simply stands still, pausing for a really long time. Maybe they’re thinking deeply.

But you know, all credit to John R Hand. He makes defiantly individualistic, personal, artistic films. The things that set his movies apart from the mainstream, from our conventional definition of a ‘good’ film, are things which he has created deliberately. Every image, every sound (well, maybe not the overly distorted voices), every edit, every bit of this film is Hand making a statement. I don’t know what that statement is, but I would rather sit through a John R Hand film, however incomprehensible (and consequently, it must be admitted, soporific) that might be, than suffer some of the don’t-know-don’t-care amateur rubbish I’ve reviewed on this site.

A few of the cast were also in Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare and one, Evan Block, was also in Drew Bell's Freaks remake Freakshow. Block is credited as ‘thief’ here but I honestly couldn’t tell you what that involved or where he appeared. I don’t recall anyone stealing anything in the film. But maybe they did.

Three years ago I didn’t give Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare a rating because I honestly had no way to judge it, no reference points, no appropriate criteria. I’m going to do the same with Scars of Youth, I’m afraid. How can I possibly give any sort of quantitative rating to a film which I didn’t understand? All I can say is that I think this is an improvement on the last one.

Review originally posted 14th February 2009

Director: Steven-Charles Jaffe
Writer: Steven-Charles Jaffe, Robert Jaffe, Ned Miller, Jim Block
Producer: Luis Calvo
Cast: Rip Torn, Robert Ginty, Cristina Hachuel
Year of release: 1982
Country: Spain
Reviewed from: UK video (Xtasy)

Long before he was Zed in Men in Black or Artie in The Larry Sanders Show, a very young-looking Rip Torn starred in this bizarre Spanish film (shot in English) as Professor Manz, an Egyptologist who summons and assumes the powers of the Egyptian scarab god Khepera. Robert Ginty (The Exterminator, and now director of shows like Charmed and Xena) is Murphy, an American reporter who spots something odd going on when the French Prime Minister, mid-speech, grabs a gun, shoots at his audience then commits suicide.

Murphy follows a nurse with mysterious psychic powers, Elena (Cristina Hachuel aka Cristina Sanchez Pascuel) whom he saw retrieving a scarab beetle from the dead man. His investigations bring him trouble as a mysterious man (who can vanish at will) causes explosions, gunfire and accidents around him.

Turns out Elena is Manz’s daughter. She and Murphy infiltrate the castle where ‘Khepera’ and his followers are holding a sacrificial ritual. Murphy is captured and placed in a sarcophagus and Elena is hypnotised into stabbing him, but remembers when she was forced to commit the same act against her own brother (something you stand no chance of realising unless you read it on the video sleeve) and stabs Khepera instead.

It’s an odd film, that’s for sure. The script is reasonable and Murphy is a likable character if not a terribly competent one (we’re introduced to him when the Swedish Ambassador catches his wife in bed with Murphy at a diplomatic reception!). Hachuel looks a bit like Sally Phillips from Smack the Pony. Khepera’s followers dance wildly in a mixture of masks and body paint while waving flaming torches, in scenes reminiscent of the later Darklands. And Donald Pickering (Zulu Dawn, Executive Stress) has a completely inexplicable role as, well, your guess is as good as mine. Curiously, Torn appears to have been filmed separately as he is never in the same shot as anyone else unless he is wearing a mask or has his back to camera - until the last ten minutes when he’s on screen with both the other leads and twenty extras.

Scarab (Escarabajos Asesinos in its home country) isn’t terribly bad or terribly good. It’s competently made and quite exciting if somewhat incomprehensible in places. Stephen Jones’ Essential Monster Movie Guide (there are no monsters in Scarab) says it has “plenty of naked women” but he’s seen a different movie to me because this just has a few body-painted topless dancers.

This was the only directorial credit for Steven-Charles Jaffe, who had been Associate Producer on Time After Time and Demon Seed (written by his brother and co-writer here, Robert, who also wrote and produced Nightflyers) and who went on to produce the likes of Ghost, Strange Days and Star Trek VI!

MJS rating: C+
Review originally posted 16th January 2005

Directors. Maurizio and Roberto del Piccolo
Writer. Roberto del Piccolo
Producers: Maurizio del Piccolo, Elenoroa Turri
Cast: Holli Dillon, David White, Saverio Percudani
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.moviedel.com

This is the third feature from the del Piccolo brothers who previously brought us the British The Hounds and the Anglo-Italian Evil Souls. This one is solely Italian although the dialogue is all in English (with a variety of accents).

As such, we can count this as part of the Italian Horror Revival, a reinvention of traditional cinematic conventions as groundbreaking – and as consistently ignored – as the more familiar (to readers of this site) British Horror Revival. Just as 21st century British horror film-makers have reacted against the gothic tradition, refusing to slavishly copy creaky old Hammer tropes, themes and imagery, so too have their Italian counterparts marked out new territory, unbeholden to the works of Argento, Bava et al.

To put it simply, we don’t need any new Argento films because we already have the old Argento films, just like we don’t need any new Hammer films because we already have all the old Hammer films. And yet vast amounts of print and pixels are devoted to each new feature from Dario (with Alan Jones inevitably touting it as a return to form, apparently assuming people will forget he said the same thing about the previous flops…) just like the press fell over themselves to lavish attention and praise on The Woman in Black, hailing it as some sort of rebirth of British horror cinema when it was actually an anachronistic throwback artificially bolstered with a stuntcast leading man.

To put it even more simply: film-makers in Italy are making terrific movies that you’ve never heard of, just like film-makers over here are. Principal among these are of course the films of my pal Ivan Zuccon but he’s absolutely not a lone voice. There are a lot of horror movies being made in Italy right now, many of which have little or no impact outside of their home territory. You have to search for these things.

(The IMDB lists 129 Italian horror features released between 2011 and 2016 but of course some of those are international co-productions that aren’t strictly speaking Italian while others are unfinished and possibly unstarted. Nevertheless I’d love to see Domiziano Christopharo’s Hyde’s Secret Nightmare, Luciano Onetti’s Francesca, Lorenzo Bianchini’s Across the River, Luca Boni and Marco Ristori’s Eaters, Raffaele Picchio’s Morituris, Anotonio Micciulli’s Tempo di Reazione, Tommaso Agnese and Gabriele Albanesi’s Italian Ghost Stories, Domi Cutrona’s Dark Red Blood, Brando Impota’s 46 Wounds, Alessio Nencioni’s Possessione Demoniaca, Lucas Pavetto’s Lui Non Esiste, and of course Alan Cossettini’s Sharracuda. Viva la rinascita dell'horror Italiano!)

The Brothers del Piccolo certainly have an advantage over many of their compatriots in how their British connections increase their visibility on the global horror stage. I’ve still not seen The Hounds but I enjoyed Evil Souls and I enjoyed My Little Sister also. Here’s why.

Truth be told, there’s not a great deal of story in this taut, 75-minute slasher. There’s not exactly a huge amount of characterisation and really very little dialogue indeed (even if your definition of dialogue includes screams). What you will find here is lashings of tension, some real horror and a refreshing attitude towards the clichés that bedevil so many similar films.

One image in particular stands out. You may remember (or you may not; on the balance of probability the latter is more likely) that in my review of The Other Side of the Door I bemoaned the tendency of horror film soundtracks to emphasise spooky imagery with music stings. As a monster scuttles across the corridor in the background, a massive chord always seems to crash onto the soundtrack, ostensibly underlining the horror but actually robbing the imagery of its intended effect. Well, there is a shot in My Little Sister, inside a tent, in which we see an unidentified silhouette, carrying an axe, cross the rear canvas. It’s only brief, the characters don’t notice it and thankfully neither does the composer. And the very absence of any sort of musical recognition makes it much, much more frightening than it would be if there was an accompanying orchestral “D’naaaaa!” Horror movie soundtracks: less is more, folks. Less. Is. More.

So: a young couple go camping in the woods. They are expecting to meet three friends in the selected clearing but, though the tents are there, the folks are not. A creepy guy with an axe warns them to pack and leave because of a local (male) psycho named ‘Little Sister’ but they dismiss his concerns. They have also spotted (and laughed at) a mad woman with bandaged wrists wandering around the forest.

Those three friends, we may reasonably surmise, were the three folks whom we saw tortured by a nutter in the prologue. He wears a padded anorak and a mask made of human skin and likes to peel people’s faces off. His name is Igor, and he is our protagonist.

Well, before too long, Igor/Little Sister has the boyfriend trussed up, ready for a face-slicing. The middle act is a very well handled game of cat and mouse as the girlfriend creeps around Igor’s house and outbuildings, trying to avoid him while staying close enough that she might be able to effect a rescue.

Igor’s back-story is revealed in some convenient home movies which are being watched by a silent figure in a wheelchair. Over the course pf the film we gradually learn more about Igor’s family and background, without any need for dialogue or explanation. The whole thing culminates in one of his victims taking a gamble on doing something utterly horrific in an attempt to trick Igor, taking advantage of his diminished mental faculties. It’s an audacious move for both character and film-makers which helps, along with other clever twists, to distinguish this from the many generic rent-a-slasher features out there.

The solid cast includes David White (Apocalypse Z, Zombie Massacre 2) and Holli Dillon (who was in Evil Souls and Steve Look’s 2011 zombie short Night of the Loving Dead). The brothers’ regular DP Tommaso Borgstrom does his usual fine work. The make-up effects are by someone named Chiara MechanicDoll!

My Little Sister is a superior slasher and a fine addition to the brothers' steadily building body of work, as well as to the Italian Horror Revival. If your idea of Italian horror is some creaky old giallo from the 1970s, here is a chance to see what modern spaghetti nightmares are really like.

No distribution has been announced yet.

MJS rating: B+

Robert Pratten wrote, directed and produced one of the best British horror films of recent years,London Voodoo. I spoke with him by phone on 16th April 2004; part of this interview appeared in Fangoria but most of it has not been seen before. (Two years later, I interviewed Rob again as he prepared his second feature, MindFlesh.)

Where did the original idea for London Voodoo come from?
"I think the original idea came from the murders in the Thames. They dragged up a young boy’s body who was the victim of a ritualistic killing. That got me interested in investigating bit more. As I looked into voodoo, which people were saying it was first off, I found not the religion that’s often shown in films as being nasty and evil, but a religion that provides comfort to a lot of people. And I thought, maybe I can take a look at this and do something different with it."

Were you looking for a subject for a horror film at the time?
"Yes, I wanted to make a horror film."

Something that you could do without a lot of effects and make-up?
"Yes, exactly. I was thinking in terms of the development of the genre, and some of the earliest films I like are by Roman Polanski like Rosemary’s Baby. If you look at it, the genre went through the slasher period of the 1980s and then we were getting these comedy parodies and so on. So I thought: where do I go? I don’t want to keep making stuff more and more violent, so why don’t I go back and try and do something that looks back, with a bit of suspense and intrigue, rather than have all the gore and violence right in your face."

Is there a bit of a Val Lewton influence there?
"I don’t know. We went travelling. We went to Miami, to New Orleans obviously and to Cuba. What we found in Cuba and Miami particularly was Santaria, which is a kind of offshoot of voodoo. People have integrated it as part of their lives. I thought, well, this is the voodoo that I want to show; not the voodoo of The Serpent and the Rainbow. I didn’t want to do that kind of thing because it was set in London and I couldn’t have people rushing around cutting the heads off chickens. I needed to find a new way in. I tried to find the spiritual side of voodoo, rather than the shock tactic of voodoo."

How long did you spend researching voodoo before you wrote the script?
"It went on in conjunction to be honest. It started off with just the few bits I knew, with a little bit of web research. Then I continued to write it as we went travelling and investigated, and in the first draft of the script, which was probably after about three or four months, one of the people who reviewed the script said, ‘It reads like a voodoo handbook’! So I had to cut back a bit on the voodoo and stick more with the plot and the main characters. So in total it took about nine months to finish the script and sixteen drafts."

The people with knowledge of voodoo that you spoke to, what did they think about their beliefs being the basis for a horror movie? Were they a bit cautious?
"Oh yes! Absolutely, because as a group they feel much maligned. Every voodoo film that comes out shows them as these evil types. When we got talking, we actually interviewed a white voodoo priest called Ross Hagen. He’s quite well-known in voodoo circles! In fact he’s the only properly initiated voodoo priest in Britain and he’s been very supportive of the project. In fact on the DVD there’s a twenty-minute interview with him. We went to interview him, the documentary unit, and then we’ve intercut his interview with bits from the film. In the film we don’t really explain the voodoo as such, we just get on with the story. then if you look at this interview, the significance of some of the things they do is revealed in that. He’s been quite supportive, particularly because we are showing it to be a religion that gives people comfort in their lives."

Where did you get your funding?
"It’s financed privately. We mortgaged our house to provide the bulk of it. My wife is a chartered accountant and she’s quite well connected with different people. We put together the script and a selection of the short films I’ve made as a package, then we went and got that. Once we had Steven Severin on board things moved a lot faster because he was somebody outside our circle of friends that had faith in the project. To be honest, it really gathered momentum from that moment on."

How did you get Steve Severin on board?
"I used to be a punk before I went into corporate life, so I’ve always been a Siouxsie fan. I was listening to the Join Hands album; there’s a track on there called ‘Icons’ with pounding drums and I was listening to that as I was writing the script. I thought, what about Steven Severin - this is right up his street, if you look at the different themes which are explored in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ music. So I e-mailed him via his website, just a four-line thing saying, ‘I’m doing this film about love and sacrifice and it involves voodoo in London.’ It was a long while because they were touring at the time, but he got back to me - I was amazed he even responded. I’d forgotten about it and got on with the script. He said, ‘Oh yes, I might be interested. Send me the script.’ So I sent him the script and he got back to me and said, ‘It’s refreshingly clear of all the usual clichés. I’m interested - let’s meet up.’ Then when we met up we found we both liked the films of Nicolas Roeg and David Lynch so we had stuff to talk about. Then what we did: in the film there’s a couple of montage sequences and Steven wrote the music before we did any filming on those. Then I was able to listen to that and think of different images before we went into filming, so it’s been quite a collaborative thing in that regard."

Where did you find your cast and crew?
"The crew is mainly friends of mine from film school and other people we’ve worked with on short films together. The cast, some of the supporting roles like Roy Hollett who plays one of the builders, Steve Halloran who plays the boss, they were the best actors from the short films that I’ve made. But the leads - Doug, Sara, Vonda - we auditioned them. We went through the Spotlight casting directory, looking for people with film experience and then had them in for an audition."

What sort of short films had you done?
"A mix really, because I was at the London Film School for two years so I’ve made seven in total. Three at the film school as part of the curriculum and then another four afterwards on DV or super-16. They’re a mix, they’re not really out and out horror films but there’s a couple there that look at spirituality, life and death and suchlike. But nothing that you could stick on the DVD! I treated those really as training exercises because when I gave up work, I gave it up to make a feature film. I knew that was what I was getting into so I just tried to make as many films as possible and explore different things each time I made one."

Did you shoot the feature on DV or film?
"We shot on super-16 then all our rushes were telecine-ed and put in the computer at home here. What we did was we edited in Avid Xpress DV and we output the cut film onto DVD and VHS in order to do the test screenings. Then we output the EDL, the edit decision list, the negative was cut and that was scanned at high def into a computer in Switzerland, professionally graded and then printed back to 35mm. So now what you see doesn’t resemble DV, now it looks like we definitely shot on film, thank goodness."

There’s a lot of night-time stuff where the cinematography is crucial.
"Exactly. It looks really nice now and we’ve got a Dolby digital surround track - so when the bass comes in, you really feel it! It’s a different experience in the theatre!"

There’s a British horror film revival. Do you feel part of that?
"Yes, I do. I think it’s good to be part of that. I’ve already started writing my next one and that’s going to be a British horror. I think it’s good and I hope that the revival continues."

Did you want this to be a distinctly British film?
"Yes, I did. I’m from London obviously and I think one of the ways that film-makers make their films original is by drawing on things from their past experience. Sometimes I think people try to be original but their stuff is so quirky, so original that no-one can relate to it. So I think just drawing on your own personal experience, that makes it original enough - to have stuff in there that audiences can relate to and yet still use the genre framework. Bodies in the basement, possession - they’re things that followers of horror films look forward to seeing and they want to see how you’ve done it different this time. So that’s what I tried to mix in."

What reaction have you had from screenings?
"It’s been really good. The best thing we did was a test screening back in September. There was 160 people, mainly horror fans with a mixture of goths and Swedes thrown in as well. They anonymously filled out questionnaires and we asked them about the pacing, which scenes they liked, and so on. We cut about another five to seven minutes from the film, mainly from the start of the film, before we committed to the final edit. And that helped no end! The last screening we did was in Phoenix at the World Horror Convention last weekend and people were coming up and shaking my hand going, ‘Outstanding!’ We’ve mainly showed it in the States and they really like it."

Is that because it’s so British?
"I think it’s partly that. We thought that the reaction would be good because 28 Days Later had done so well. But the reaction we’re getting is not so much because it’s British but because it’s - to quote one reviewer - ‘going back to the glory days.’ People in Phoenix, what they said they liked is that it credits the viewer with some intelligence. That’s what they really like about it; somebody taking their genre seriously and not tongue-in-cheek with a little wink at the camera: ‘Of course this is all nonsense.’ That’s really the type of film I wanted to make. I wanted to make a serious film, although there’s light-hearted moments in it, but I wanted to try to be as realistic as possible - like the Polanski ones."

You’ve got this deal with Heretic. What other deals have you got?
"No-one else as yet. We started the screenings in America then we’re spiralling out. We’ve had a good reaction in the UK but we’ve not signed with anyone yet. We’re still talking with different people. And the same is true with international sales. Bearing in mind that we only printed the 35mm at the end of January so it’s literally hot off the press."

What’s your next film?
"I don’t want to say too much about the plot yet because I know from before that when you’re developing the idea it changes quite a lot. But it’s definitely a horror movie with a little bit of science fiction, and it’s set in England again; not London but the green belt somewhere. At the moment I’ve done about 90% of the script - but it’s the other 10% which takes 90% of the work. What happens is you find a lot of half-baked ideas; some get thrown out and some get baked through fully!"

website: www.conducttr.com
interview originally posted 9th August 2005

In June 2006, two years after our first interview, Robert Pratten sent me some photos of preparations for his second film,MindFlesh(adapted from the Buddhist horrornovel White Light by William Scheinman). He also kindly answered some e-mail questions about the project.

What made you want to film this book and have closely have you followed it? (Presumably you have moved the story from San Francisco to London...)
“I met Bill (the author) in Phoenix at the World Horror Convention in 2004. I read a couple of his short stories and they were brilliant. I asked for more and liked them and when Bill told me he was working on a novel I said I wanted to be the first to read it! So, around November or December 2004 when I got Bill’s novel White Light, I just couldn't put it down and I called him to option it straight away. Since then I've been working on the adaptation to the screen, moving the story from San Fran to London  - which was easy - and translating the characters' thinking and internal dialogue to visual images and actions - which was hard!

“Then, at Cannes 2005, a producer and I pitched the project to Thai production companies to get the film made out in Bangkok. We struck lucky and on July 7th, while the bombs were going off in London, I was in Bangkok discussing how we were going to shoot the film there - having rewritten the script and set it in Thailand. By November 2005 it became clear that, although we had half the money from Thailand, the other half from the US wasn't going to come through and I decided I would shoot in London again! So it's been a long process but I have to say quite an enjoyable and exciting one.”

What exactly is ‘Buddhist horror’?
“Well, I could say ‘anything horrific written by a Buddhist’ which sounds like I'm being a smartarse but I mean it's a horror film or novel by someone with a different world view - a Buddhist point of view. There are various Buddhist views expressed in the film but I guess the key one is the idea that our minds create our own reality and that a single thought can change our environment. Bill is actually a bona fide practising Buddhist who, among other things, teaches meditation to prisoners in San Francisco. I'd like to be a Buddhist but I'm just not disciplined enough!”

What cast/crew names can you give me at this stage?
”The lead male role hasn't been cast yet but we do have our goddess - a French actress called Carole Derrien - and Chris Fairbank (Alien3, The Bunker) will play a character called Verdain who's a rather nasty parapsychologist. On the crew side, I'm delighted to have Patrick Jackson (London Voodoo) on cinematography, Arban Severin (Steven Severin's missus) composing and, of course, Sangeet Prabhaker as our prosthetics wizard!”

With the monster, why have you gone for a good old-fashioned suit instead of the CGI that one might expect?
“However much money you spend on CGI, the monsters still look like CGI monsters. With prosthetics I can get a monster that better integrates with the photography but also with the action. Inside the suit is an actress called Charlotte Milchard who is absolutely fantastic. It's still early stages - there's about another three weeks of work on the suit - but Sangeet and his team (Satinder Chumber, Andy Fordham and James Adams) have crafted a work of art. It's been very rewarding discussing the character and backstory of the creature and seeing how Sangeet has interpreted that into his sculpture.”

What did you learn from London Voodoo that you are able to apply to this project?
“Well, everything really - none of that experience is lost. What's different about MindFlesh is that it's very effects heavy including stuff shot against green screen so technically that's interesting and challenging in equal measure.”

When do you expect to start shooting and when might we expect to see the finished film?
“First day of photography is October 2nd 2006 but I'm aiming for a January 2008 release date. It'll take about a year in post-production - probably about six months just rendering the effects!”

website: www.conducttr.com
interview originally posted 23rd June 2006

Director: Aimee Stephenson
Writer: Aimee Stephenson
Producers: Tim Jackson, Guy J Louthan
Cast: Kate Vernon, Steve Parrish, Tim DeZarn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: US DVD

This early entry in the BHR has been on my wants list for a while. Eventually I got round to picking up a DVD off eBay and gave it a spin. Two things struck me. First, it doesn’t feel very British. Set in the American deep south, with an American cast, if you weren’t warned in advance that this is a British film, you wouldn’t know. The only clue is some London post-production credits at the end. That’s not a problem.

The other thing that struck me is that this is actually a bloody brilliant film. It’s a beautifully scripted, slickly directed thriller with an intrinsic supernatural element. From the brief synopsis I’d read I expected it to be something of a black comedy but actually it’s played straight, albeit with a jet-black streak of wry cynicism. It reminded me very much of the sort of thing that Joe R Lansdale writes, and fuller praise I could not give.

Christine (Kate Vernon, later in Battlestar Galactica) and Mike (Steve Parrish: Scanners III) are a young married couple, living in a small house in Shitsville, in the shadow of a huge chemical plant. They were in love once but now they mostly argue. She dreams of something better, he’s a sexist, arrogant pig. But they’re both equally concerned when they discover a dead body in their yard.

Christine wants to call the cops but Mike has been in trouble with the police before so they wrap the body in bin liners and bury it out back. Before they do so, Mike checks for ID and finds none but does extract an envelope from the corpse’s pocket, containing a list of names.

A little later, as tensions heat up between Mike and Christine, something snaps inside her and she goes crazy, battering her husband to death. Repentant, shocked and frightened, Christine wraps Mike in bin liners, redigs the hole and dumps him on top of the other corpse.

…So it’s a big shock when Mike reappears, clean and uninjured. As a ghost, he is no less abusive and mean than he was in life, perhaps even more so because he is now invulnerable. He has enough corporeality to grab Christine, but can also jump from place to place or change his appearance. He is also able to [spoilers on] converse with a silent, ghostly figure that Christine has glimpsed in the yard and hence he has discovered that this (ie. the first body in the impromptu grave) is a cop that she was having an affair with. This accusation prompts Christine to admit that she killed the cop when she discovered he wasn’t a nice guy who could take her away from all this but was just a lothario cheating on his own wife.

Before Mike died, he had picked up stories from work about a detective snooping around, asking questions. This is Chief Coveleski (Tim DeZarn, who played different characters in episodes of DS9, TNG and Voyager) who now comes knocking on Christine’s door. He suspects that she might be the woman his colleague was having an affair with before disappearing. Putting two and two together, he surmises that Mike probably found out about the affair, killed the cop and then did a runner. This isn’t true of course, but would exonerate Christine of the first murder. The results of which are currently buried underneath the body of her second victim.

And that second victim, whom she can see and hear but Coveleski can’t, is distracting and unnerving her while she’s trying to concoct answers to the detective’s questions that sound plausible but aren’t either (a) true or (b) potentially incriminatory. Adding to the complexity is that Coveleski is operating outside of the law. He doesn’t want to bring the cop’s murderer to justice, he just wants to locate the corpse so he can get his hands on the envelope. (We never find out what the list of names means. It doesn’t matter. [spoilers off] It’s a MacGuffin.)

I debated whether I should spoiler protect the details of the plot, given that almost no-one has seen this film which is long out of print. And then I thought hell yes, because I really, really want you to see this film. I want people to get it off eBay or Amazon Marketplace. Ultimately it would be awesome if a distributor could pick it up and give it a really good reissue. It was only ever released in the States, Maybe a UK label could get the rights, give it a digital remaster and add a producer commentary and whatever extras they can generate. (All the US disc has is trailers for this and a couple of unrelated films.)

Throughout Grave Matters there’s a sense of oppressive heat, from the baking sun in the day and from the clouds of steam and smoke emanating from the chemical plant at night. This is a hot, sweaty, claustrophobic film: atmosphere in spades, pressing down on all the characters. Well, I say all, there’s really only three main ones. (Robert Firth provides a couple of phone voices.) I love the way the plot twists; I love the conflicting ideals and motives of the characters, none of whom are particularly nice; I love the integration of the supernatural with the criminal. Although it’s clear that Mike’s ghost is real, by the end of the film I found myself questioning whether it actually was real after all, or whether the whole thing is psychological in nature. That’s the sign of a good ghost story, right there.

A 1996/2001 dual copyright date suggests this was filmed (as Dead Dog Blues) in the mid-nineties and finally finished off in post five years later. There is mention of how Christine had a dog which Mike beat and kicked, and that this hound was hit and killed by a car. A cutaway later in the picture shows a dead dog by the side of the road but that is presumably just random roadkill. And in one scene two local dogs get into the yard and start digging up the grave. So it’s clear that dogs featured more prominently in an earlier version of the script, possibly even in an earlier cut of the movie.

And regarding ‘blues’, there is a fine soundtrack of old Lightnin’ Hopkins numbers which I absolutely loved – and not just because they added extra layers to the atmosphere and setting.

Experienced DP Sidney Siddell lit the picture under his occasional nom-de-screen Jerry Siddell (but is credited as Sidney in the cast list; he appears in silhouette as a nosy neighbour). Producer Guy J Louthan had been working since the mid-1980s as production manager, producer and sometimes 1st AD on a range of features including Doppelganger, Jaume Balaguero’s Darkness and Fear of a Black Hat (and later, Seed of Chucky). Production designer Jordan Steinberg is a set dresser whose recent credits include Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Parks and Recreation. Costume designer Esther Lee has Hollywood costumer credits on the likes of Bridesmaids and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Film editor Jennifer Mangan (aka Jennifer Spenelli) has subsequently amassed an impressive roster of credits including the first Harry Potter, the Italian Job remake, Ghost Rider and Divergent.

The legendary Gary J Tunnicliffe provided the special effects make-up. The almost as legendary Neill Gorton provided the dead dog.

The earliest screening of this film that I know of, under its original title, was at Exofest 4 in Detroit in November 2003. My BHR masterlist has a note of an unidentified screening in November 2001 but that could be my typo. March 2004 was the date of the one and only DVD release, courtesy of York Entertainment (under the new title, with a misleading sleeve image and hyperbolic blurb). Moviehouse Entertainment, who had (perhaps still have) the distribution rights also considered selling this as The Burial. The IMDB lists it as a 2004 film which is just plain wrong, but then it also says this runs 90 minutes when it’s actually 70. And director Aimee Stephenson’s name is spelled wrong: it’s a PH, not a V.

Now I may be wrong on this, but I believe that Dead Dog Blues could be the first ever British horror film directed by a woman. So this is a significant – as well as terrific – movie. But who is Aimee Stephenson? A little journalistic searching revealed that the question should be “Who was…” as Ms Stephenson is no longer with us. And her death was as awful as it was bizarre.

Born in October 1956, Janet Aimee Stephenson started out as a model and actress before moving into film-making. Do you have the 1980 Roxy Music album Flesh and Blood in your collection? If not, no matter because here’s a jpeg of the sleeve. The nearest of the two girls is Aimee Stephenson. In the 1980s Aimee and her boyfriend Tim Jackson (producer of Dead Dog Blues) worked in the States on some Roger Corman productions although I don’t know which ones. In 1991 they teamed up with a guy called Sean Manchester who had written a non-fiction book about the so-called ‘Highgate Vampire’. The plan was to make a documentary, and possibly a narrative feature film, about the subject but it never came to anything for various reasons.

Loser was a short film directed by Tim, produced by Aimee in 2000: “On the run and escaping the past, Eddie and Alice have to confront their future together.” Aimee is apparently credited as script editor on a 2005 drama called Mouth to Mouth but that script must have been in development for a while as she was no longer with us by then.

In 2001 Aimee and Tim were in Peru, researching a book. The luggage hold of the bus they were travelling on contained some illegal fireworks which caught fire and exploded. Aimee caught the full brunt of the flames and suffered 48% third degree burns to her face, arms, legs and torso. Tim and 17 other passengers were also very badly burned. Despite her appalling injuries, the ambulance which arrived would only take Peruvians with Peruvian medical insurance. A promised second ambulance never turned up so the attending doctor drove them in his car more than a hundred miles to the nearest hospital. After a week there, Aimee was flown home (via Switzerland) to Salisbury – where she shortly passed away. I can’t imagine the pain she must have gone through, or what Tim Jackson and her other friends and family must have suffered watching her agony.

Aimee Stephenson never saw the DVD release of Grave Matters. She joins Andrew Hull (Siren) and Charly Cantor (Blood) on the short list of directors who made one British horror film then passed away absurdly young before it could be released. What Aimee left us is a brilliant, gripping, imaginative, powerfully cinematic movie that has barely been seen and never been written about. I can’t find a single review, under either title, online or among my magazine collection. There are a couple of comments on the IMDB and one on Amazon, but they’re pretty dismissive. There is precisely one still online (above, from the British Council website) and no trailer. Just like Blood (I haven’t seen Siren yet) the departed director has left a fine legacy in their single work which is waiting to be rediscovered and fully appreciated.

I honestly can’t recall the last serious film I enjoyed as much as Grave Matters. It’s an utterly brilliant movie and I wish more people knew about it. And about the woman who made it.

MJS rating: A

Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray, son of Fred Olen Ray, gave me this e-mail interview in February 2007 after I reviewed his short film Time of My Life.

What circumstances led to the production of Time of My Life?
“Well, it actually was the most affordable short I could come up with. For a first time director I just wanted to see if I was able, ‘cause I am willing.”

What did you set out to achieve with this film and how well do you think you managed it?
“Wanted to show others what I could do. For a budget of 3K I feel like I accomplished exactly what I set out to do.”

What have you learned over the years from your dad and/or from working on his films?
“Patience. Lots of it. The willingness to adapt and overcome problems as they arise. But the key thing is to try and keep the cast and crew as happy as possible.”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the ‘Olen Ray’ name, and any perceptions that might go with it, in trying to make it in the film business?
“Well that’s a good one. I have been asked recently if there was any relation. I guess the person I was meeting with was a fan of my dad’s. So I spent the next half hour talking about him. When I sit down and think about it there really isn’t any downside to it. He has been doing this for so long that people assume I have picked up something along the way.”

Why is now the right time for you to start making your own films?
“Well I have been trying to do something for the last two years. Just wasn’t happening. As a family, myself and my wife Robyn, we decided I needed some sort of reel to show. It wasn’t a matter of why now but why didn’t I do this sooner. I work for the government as an editor/photographer, so I travel a lot. That still is an issue but I am working it out.”

Now you’ve got my money, what are you going to do with it?
“We are working on a script now called Shadow of a Doubt. Don’t want to talk too much about it. As it stands right now we have raised a little over 2K. We are hoping to have raised enough money some time by this summer to start pre. We will see...”

website: http://deinstitutionalizedfilms.com
Interview originally posted 4th February 2007

In April 2006 I had a great time hanging out with Mike Regan, Mitch Coughlin and Blake Bolger on the set of Pumpkinhead III. I remember Mike saying, “Come and hang out in the make-up effects trailer - it’s the coolest place to be.” And it was. A couple of months later I did a phone interview with Mike.

Did you, Mitch and Blake volunteer for this or did you get assigned to go out to Romania?
"A little bit of both. All three of us were on the build at Gary Tunnicliffe’s shop. We’ve all worked for Gary before and we’ve all been out to Romania before. I was in mainly because I did the mechanics. Having worked for Gary before, he chose me because I could repair and I’d been out here before so he trusts me. I’ve worked for him for ten years. Mitch, same thing: he’s been working for Gary a long time and done a couple of projects in Romania. And Blake, just being an extra hand and being someone he could rely on who had been out here before. So those were kind of the criteria: people he was comfortable sending out here to take care of this."

Howe long were you out there for?
"I think Mitch was there a week longer than us but it’s been about two months. We flew out on 11th March, this is the end of May and we’re flying back tomorrow. Mitch was out the week before us so about ten weeks."

Let’s talk a bit about the suit. How heavy is it?
"That’s always kind of a tricky one because it’s different pieces. If you’re talking about the suit, the stilt variety, the stilts themselves are pretty heavy but it was made that way. You can’t really walk in them, they were bolted down long legs. Then the normal, walking around version, you have a foam suit and the head. I think the head is maybe six to eight pounds and the suit itself is about the same, maybe ten. It’s kind of hard to tell, the way it’s spread out over your body. The mechanical head is the heavy part. The stunt head’s not too heavy because there’s really nothing in it."

Are there several complete suits or do you just mix and match pieces?
"It’s kind of two complete suits. Basically we knew, this time around, that Romania wasn’t really going to give us the option of wire work for walking. The suit was built as one suit that’s a head-to-toe thing with the leg extensions and everything. There’s the option to have one leg free. You can take one step at the start of a walk. Then there’s a second suit that is right down to the performer’s feet and then basically you walk on a two-foot high platform that simulates the height of the legs. That allows you to frame the performer from his ankles to the top of the head. Of those two configurations, the hands could be swapped from one to the other, the head obviously could be swapped back and forth. It’s basically all overlapping pieces. There’s legs, a torso that fits from crotch to shoulders, hands that cover the arms - and a head. So two suits that are different configurations."

Is Pumpkinhead actually in the films much? How much use did the suits get?
"It was pretty active. I think the shoots were 25 days each or something. I know on Jake West’s film we pretty much shot every day with maybe just a day here or there off. And I think on Mike Hurst’s film Mike had a different shooting style and he tended to backload a lot of Pumpkinhead shots. There would be days when all we did was Pumpkinhead stuff and I think we had about a week off towards the end. That was to allow them time to shoot a lot of the dialogue stuff before doing the finale which was out in the rain so they wanted that to be the very last day, in case the suit was damaged."

Has the suit been knocked about a lot?
"It’s taken some damage but it’s survived enough. We have to take it back to LA and scan it. I think the CG guy Stephen is slated for about ten shots in each film of the CG Pumpkinhead, which will take care of things like emerging from a burning church, some walking shots or climbing up onto the roof. Things like that, we just couldn’t do in a suit. To the CG guy’s credit, I talked with him a lot about physical stuff and he’s in favour of using physical as much as possible or augmenting physical with digital. I asked him about how they do the digital and he said the model is basically going to be built the way we would do a suit. It’s going to be scanned from the suit so his hope is that, being based on the suit it should pretty much look like the suit. Hopefully you won’t be able to tell the difference."[You can. You really can. - MJS[

How do you actually go about shipping something like that from the USA to Romania and back? Any problems with customs?
"No, not really. A lot of the suit pieces were shipped out in crates, along with the other artefacts and supplies we needed. We took a couple of pieces with us but usually when they run them through X-ray machines it doesn’t show up because it’s foam. Occasionally they’ll ask us to open stuff, like the head could look weird because of all the wires in it. But you’d be surprised, usually when you open up stuff in an airport, people are kind of interested: ‘That’s cool. What’s that?’ It’s always fun."

Apart from Pumpkinhead himself, what other effects have you had to do?
"In both films we’ve done the new version of Haggis, the witch who resurrects Pumpkinhead. Obviously lots of blood and guts and killing. We did some transformation stuff for Lance Henriksen because in one of the films the idea is that, because he was the last one to summon Pumpkinhead then his remains are obviously used to bring it back to life. There’s an intermediate stage where it appears as Lance and then goes from there into Pumpkinhead. So we did transformation pieces for that. There’s a beheading, lots of things getting squashed."

How long did Haggis’ make-up take to apply?
"The very first application was three and a half to four hours and towards the end it was down to about three. It’s a three-piece make-up and then a hairpiece."

When I was out there you were burying skeletons in mud, which looked like the least glamorous thing you could do on a film set.
"Pretty much, yes. They always say that it never rains in June here and it seems that whenever we’re here in June it just won’t stop raining. We’ve had lots of wallowing around in mud that we really didn’t plan on doing. This morning, to celebrate the end of filming, I actually threw away the pair of shoes that I wore: they are just beyond repair. But burying skeletons in mud is part of the plotline in III. The doctor of the town, in order to subsidise his free medical care to the community, he’s harvesting organs and stuff from people in the town that die rather than giving them proper burials. Obviously, when a family member discovers this they decide to call up Pumpkinhead because they don’t realise it’s the doctor, they think it’s this family which owns the mortuary. They decide to get revenge for the improper treatment of their kin.

"The skeletons in the bog are the remains of the people; the furnace hasn’t worked so they bury them in the bog. So yes, my glamorous task was to hunker down and make it look like they’ve been buried there for a while. The problem was actually pulling them back out and cleaning them off. The worst part of it wasn’t even that. We had an actor on it who basically is submerged in it, to represent them disposing of bodies. They submerge him in it - and I can tell you, that actor was coughing up real bog water that got up his nose and into other places where you wouldn’t want water."

Did Jake and Mike both work well with you guys?
"They both have very different shooting styles. Mike tends to be very fast and have a very clear train of thought and vision. Jake tends to be a bit more artistic and sometimes it was tough to know exactly what he wanted until he was there and had seen something. I think maybe the short schedule hampered his style. He would have a grand vision of something and have to cut back to get it done in the time he had. But I saw a cut trailer for it and it looks fun so it will be interesting to see how they both turn out. I’m hoping they’ll be a lot of fun.”

Francois Reumont directed the excellent short horror film Dans la Nuit(aka At Night) which played Leicester as support to David Cronenberg’s Spider in March 2003. This e-mail mini-interview was done a couple of weeks later.

How did you raise the funds to make this film? Did you have any assistance from any national or European funds?
“As it says on the last line of the French language credits, ‘this film has been made without any kind of support’ - which is true. This is a statement I wanted to spread, especially for those who love fantasy movies and who are desperately seeking money every year to make their own films. Maybe to give them hope, and to show that this is possible, and that you don’t always have to wait for money from French institutions to shoot your own project.

“Of course I tried to raise money from every one of these people like the CNC (National Centre for Cinema) or the different French regions, but no one was interested in the script. As I knew more or less how things were going to go (French commissions are always reluctant to deal with true genre movies) I decided first to shoot the film on my own money, which meant 10 years of savings, and professional relations with the movie industry (working as a DP). The final budget of the film was around 22,500 Euros.”

How has a short French film made its way to Leicester? This is very unusual.
“Because of the connections I made in festivals around Europe in 2002. To cut a long story short, I met a British TV producer (Howard Martin, who makes the TV show outThere) at the Malmo Fantastic Film Festival. He liked the film very much, and after a couple of days watching films and drinking beers together with the other guests, he suggested that I send a tape to Alan Alderson-Smith at Leicester Phoenix Arts for his short film program. Alan sent me his agreement, and the copy was sent to the UK for a week in March 2003.”

[outThere is a late-night show on Channel 5 which features clips of extraordinary movies available on VHS and DVD in the UK. It was presented by 'Eden' for one series and then by Emily Boothfrom series two. I had the pleasure of meeting producer Howard Martin at Phoenix Arts when an episode of outThere was shown as support to the UK premiere of Ghosts of Mars at the first Far Out Film Festival in 2001. - MJS]

Was your cinematography work on other films just a step to directing? Which do you prefer and why?
“As a matter of fact I don’t really believe in all the classifications people use in the movie/commercials/TV industry. I like to think myself as a movie-maker, exactly at the same level as a production designer, an actor or a producer. Of course you don’t use the same skill doing all these different jobs, but at the end you converge towards the same goal: telling an audiovisual story. So that’s why I still work as a DP, and I keep enjoying it, exactly as an actor/director can go back to acting in someone else’s film.

“For me, working as a DP was just one way of getting experience over a lot of critical fields in terms of movie-making: learning how to use a camera of course, and how to frame or to light a set, but also keeping as close as possible to the acting experience, and even how to get the best from the smallest budget. I must assume for example that working as a DP on more than 30 short films since I left school in 1991 has been a huge help in terms of production managing, and knowing how to control your expenses. Something that I used a lot on my own film, since I was spending my own money!”

I spotted some thanks in the end credits: J Carpenter, PK Dick, a few others - how have these men influenced you?
“Yes, I wanted to put a little ‘coup de chapeau’ (tip of the hat) on the end credit to these guys because they are surely one of the main influences in that particular script. First Stephen King - for the general mood of the story, and the character of the mum (the model was Cathy Bates in Misery, so that’s the reason her first name is in the movie). Then John Carpenter - when he works on the King theme on his masterpiece In the Mouth of Madness. The accident scene is definitely an homage to this film. Stanley Kubrick - for the ‘Bring a blanket-bring a blanket...’ book, another nod to King’s The Shining, and of course Philip K Dick for the multiple levels of reality, and altered perceptions of it, which lead us to all the nightmarish structure of the film (Ubik).”

What do you think of David Cronenberg's Spider?
“I saw it in Cannes last year, and I was very happy with it. It was one of the best films I saw there, along with Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (a Death Wish movie told in reverse). I was very glad and honoured to be presented as support to this film in Leicester, as Cronenberg is one of my favourite directors. What’s more, I just had the pleasure of conducting a very long interview about Spider with Peter Suschistky, Cronenberg’s British cinematographer, last September for a French magazine that I write for, Le Technicien du Film.”

What will your next film be?
“Bonne question! I don’t know yet, but some French producers saw Dans la Nuit and asked me for a feature treatment on the basis of the same atmosphere. I’m actually working on it with my fellow scriptwriter. (I’m not the mythical French ‘auteur’; being director and screenwriter can work for the best but more often for the worst...) And so that’s why things take time. I never really learned movie-making from a writing angle, I work much more on the visual side of it, as I was explaining in the first answer. I would have liked so much to find a good, ready made horror/thriller script, but screenwriters are so difficult to find round here...!”

website: http://francoisreumont.com
interview originally published before November 2004

Director: Bruno Mattei
Writer: Claudio Fragasso
Producer: Alexander Hacohen (on screen), Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus (on box)
Cast: Lou Ferrigno, Sybil Danning, Brad Harris, Dan Vadis
Year of release: 1983
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK video (Guild, 1985)

The title, I Sette Magnifici Gladiatori, says it all really: this is The Magnificent Seven in Ancient Rome. The marvelously named Dan Vadis is the villainous Nicerote, all cape and codpiece, who holds a village in fear through regular raiding parties with his bandits. The local priestess (Nicerote’s mother) sends village girl Pandora (Carla Ferrigno) to Rome, equipped with a magic sword, to find one suitable to wield it.

That one turns out to be Barbarian slave, former Incredible Hulk and Carla’s hubby, Lou Ferrigno, who defeats Centurion Brad Harris in a chariot race but defies the Emperor’s order to slay his opponent. Lou and Brad gather five compatriots including the glorious Sybil Danning (also in another Magnificent Seven rip-off, Battle Beyond the Stars) whose costumes are worth the price of admission alone.

Once the seven arrive at the village, the film sticks slavishly (as it were!) to its source - which was of course itself an unofficial remake of The Seven Samurai - with Nicerote driven off then returning for a final showdown, resulting in the deaths of four of the seven.

An unashamed attempt by Cannon to recreate 1960s Italian pepla, this generally works and is undemanding fun. Stars Harris (The Fury of Hercules, Goliath Against the Giants) and Vadis (Triumph of Hercules) provide a direct link to the original subgenre, and both still stand up well, though they were 50 and 45 when this film was made (Vadis died a few years later). Director Mattei, though better known for stuff like Zombie Creeping Flesh (also written by Fragasso, whose later works include the dire Troll 2) and SS Experiment Camp, actually started out as an editor on films like Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (which starred Dan Vadis).

Danning, Ferrigno and Harris worked together on another latter-day peplum for Cannon - Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules, shot the same year. Also watch out for Mandy Rice-Davies, of Profumo scandal notoriety, as the Emperor’s favourite.

With Ferrigno’s torso vying for screen time with Danning’s cleavage, there truly is something here for everybody to enjoy.

MJS rating: B
review originally posted 20th March 2005

Director: MJ Dixon
Writers: MJ Dixon, Jason Harlow
Producer: Anna McCarthy
Cast: Stephanie Price, Andrew M Greenwood, Jimi Nix
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: http://mycho.moonfruit.com

MCU? MCU? Never mind the Marvel Cinematic Universe – here’s the Mycho Cinematic Universe!

Director MJ Dixon and producer Anna McCarthy burst onto the scene in 2013 with the stylish (if occasionally formulaic) Slasher House. The always terrific Eleanor James was a young woman being chased around a mysterious prison by three hulking cartoon psychos: a psycho with huge swords, a psycho with power tools and a clown psycho.

Big-swords-psycho got his own prequel the following year: the very entertaining and ambitiously structured Legacy of Thorn. Now his two compadres have also got their own films, released simultaneously in August 2016. Power-tools-psycho stars in Hollower (which I will watch and review shortly) but first here comes Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown.

Whereas Legacy of Thorn was Mycho’s homage to Friday the 13th, this movie openly references Halloween. In a small American town, on 31st October 1995, student Carley Lewis (Stephanie Price) misses out on a Halloween party in favour of a babysitting gig because she needs the money to pay her course fees. Carley offers to take her young charge Mary-Beth (Holly-Anne Dodkins) trick-or-treating but Mary-Beth’s parents say no – because of a recent murder.

In a terrific prologue we saw another college student, Sara Allen (Kylie Slevin: Plastic Toys) getting brutally murdered by a clown-psycho. Her boyfriend Danny Jackson (Lewis Cooper) had just left – well actually he’s somebody else’s boyfriend which is why he sneaked out without being seen. Now he has disappeared and so he’s the prime suspect for the murder.

Sheriff Hatcher (Jimi Nix, a spear-carrier in The Hollow Crown) is on the case, assisted by his two deputies (Georgie Smibert and Gary Baxter). He thinks the killer could be Carlton Layton, a mentally unstable guy who became a children’s entertainer after he was laid off, then came home one day to find his wife being unfaithful. Well, of course it is Layton. He is Cleaver. And he is out for blood tonight.

Like Dixon’s two previous released features (I don’t think we’ll ever get to see his debut Creepsville), Cleaver is drenched in almost Bava-esque colour - reds and oranges and greens - making every scene a painting. It’s a distinctive, attractive style which doesn’t distract from the storytelling. In fact, I think it adds to the film not just aesthetically but in heightening the unreality of what we’re seeing.

Because although this is set in the USA, it was filmed in England. And although Dixon and McCarthy do a sterling job of trying to convince us it’s the USA (and the cast generally manage pretty good accents; Price actually is American) the fact remains that it’s not the USA, we know it’s not the USA, we can see it’s not the USA. What it is instead is a cartoon USA, a slightly exaggerated, slightly hyper-real version of small town America. So yes, it’s a give-away every time we see a front door with a letterbox; yes, it’s a clue when shots of the Sheriff’s car are actually extreme close-ups of a dinky toy. But That Doesn’t Matter. This is not being presented as the real world, any more than Legacy of Thorn or Slasher House were.

There is clearly some justification for setting this story in the States, although I’m not sure why it’s 1995. (Legacy of Thorn was variously set in 2008 and 2012). Again, I’m quite happy to say that It Doesn’t Matter.

Structurally this is less complex than Legacy of Thorn, limiting itself to flashbacks of Carlton Layton’s cuckolding – although all is not as it seems, even here. What appears at first to be a straightforward coulrophobic slasher turns out to have layers that are revealed in the third act. Not everyone is who we assume they are, or doing what we assume they’re doing. Plus of course there’s plenty of blood, decapitation and screaming. Interestingly, MJ doesn’t feel the need to play too much on Cleaver’s appearance. Where other clown-slashers might feel the need to show as much of their villain as possible, Cleaver lurks in the shadows. The prologue in particular is a very effective use of keeping clown imagery in the background and thereby actually increasing the horror.

Andrew M Greenwood, who played Cleaver in Slasher House, reprises the role here. The solid cast also includes Pat Higgins regular Cy Henty as Mary-Beth’s dad (in an impressive comedy Frankenstein outfit) and Emma Wilde as her mom, plus Vicki Glover (Killersaurus) as Carley’s room-mate. Dean Sills (The Railway Carriage), Chan Walrus (Terror Telly) and the mighty Jason Impey are among a small battalion of associate producers and co-producers.

Although I probably enjoyed Legacy of Thorn slightly more, I think Cleaver is a more mature picture, with MJ honing his craft as his career progresses. It's certainly a cut above what the basic premise - nutter dressed as clown stalks town on Halloween - would suggest. Onwards and upwards now to Hollower and, after that, Slasher House 2.

MJS rating: B+

Director: MJ Dixon
Writer: MJ Dixon
Producer: Anna McCarthy
Cast: Adam Dillon, Becca Talulah, Nicholas Vince
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: http://mycho.moonfruit.com

Released in August 2016 alongside Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, Hollower is the fourth entry in the Mycho Cinematic Universe, an ambitious shared world of loosely connected characters, scenarios and stories which began with Slasher House and continued with Legacy of Thorn.

Right, that’s the links out of the way.

Hollower is MJ Dixon’s most mature work to date, less cartoonlike than the previous three and more interested in using characterisation, narrative and atmosphere to generate fear than simply being scary. It’s principally a three-hander, or rather a brace of intercut two-handers. Our framing story sees Nathan (Adam Dillon) - battered, bruised and handcuffed – questioned in a police interview room by Detective Miller (Nicholas Vince: Hellraiser, The Day After Dark). A sequence of flashbacks visualise Nathan’s responses and show how he formed first a friendship and later a romantic/sexual relationship with his neighbour Isabelle (Becca Talulah, who was a cheerleader in Legacy of Thorn).

Nathan is the young man who worked alongside Eleanor James' Red in Slasher House (which means that my assumption that this would be about the third psycho, the one who isn't Cleaver or Thorn, was wrong - sorry). He is agoraphobic and hasn’t left his flat in two years, ordering all his supplies online. His life is repetitive and small, his only pastime (apparently) being the creation of slightly creepy dolls. Isabelle, on the rebound from an abusive relationship, moves in across the hall. She’s attracted to the shy, reclusive guy opposite, especially when he stands up to her angry ex (Joe Hughes, a barman in Cleaver).

Slowly, very slowly, Nathan starts to engage with Isabelle, gradually making progress in dealing with his own mental health problems. It’s a sweet, romantic tale laced with occasional moments of delightful humour (his attempts to cross the hall to leave a present outside her door are a hoot) and scored with a variety of faux-sixties pop songs.

But always we cut back to the interview room and Detective Miller. We don’t know what it is that Nathan has done (or at least, is accused of doing) but it’s probably not good. And it probably involves Isabelle.

Dixon employs his trademark colour schemes, albeit with less startling tones, to emphasise the contrast between the two stories. The interview room is a chilly blue while Nathan’s flat is a mix of orange and reds. It may just be my old, rheumy eyesight but I got the impression that the flat eased gradually towards more natural shades as the Nathan-Isabelle relationship progressed. Apart from the hall and a couple of scenes right at the end, these are the only two locations.

As the story progresses – at 90 minutes this is the longest MCU movie yet but it doesn’t feel stretched – we start to get clues about what this terrible crime might be. Nathan says he can’t remember anything, and Detective Miller doesn’t go into detail. But it’s in the flashback scenes that we start to get our first hints. Unremarked, in the background, just occasionally, we can spot something significant, something disturbing.

To say more would be unfair and spoiler-ish. I will note that, like the other Slasher House prequels, this works as a stand-alone horror film and you don’t need to have seen any of the others. Frankly it’s more than three years since I watched Slasher House and my knowledge of it relies almost entirely on the review I wrote at the time. (I’ve watched and reviewed a lot of films since then…)

The three leads give fine performances, especially Dillon who successfully portrays two very, very different versions of the same character. Bam Goodall provides special effects, as he did for Slasher House, Thorn, Cleaver and Dixon’s segment of eagerly awaited anthology Blaze of Gory.

Stylish, spooky, slick and seriously disturbing in its finale, Hollower is an accomplished piece of film-making that shifts the Mycho team of MJ Dixon and Anna McCarthy up a gear. Still to come from Mycho are Slasher House II, Mask of Thorn and Return of the Killer Clown, plus who knows what other delights. You don’t have to watch every entry in the Mycho Cinematic Universe – but I’m glad that so far I’ve been able to enjoy them all.

MJS rating: A-

After reviewing Catherine Pirotta’s feature Dreamkiller in July 2010, I e-mailed her some questions which she kindly answered for me.

How did you hook up with veteran writer Clyde Ware, and were there any problems in working with someone who has been writing for the screen since before you were born?
“I believe that stories and dialogues read more real when the team behind is mixed. Usually you can tell when a script was written by a woman alone as its male characters don’t quite act/react 100 per cent like a man would, and the same happens when a man tries to write the character of a woman. But when a man and a woman write it together, most of the time both sides are covered in a realistic way. The same applies when young and older work together, and it is only for the best of the story and script. In Dreamkiller we had a younger character (Nick) and an older character (Dr Stalberg) working together on a team.

“Collaborating with someone as experienced as Clyde was definitely a great learning experience and I was fortunate to have Clyde to guide me through various traps that lie in the path of first time directors. I was introduced to Clyde Ware through Dario Deak who was at the time under contract with Delaware Pictures. I had met Dario a year before though a common friend Nick Rish, the lead actor of my very first short film Adopting Change. Nick also plays Detective Barret in Dreamkiller.”

What was your original conception of Dreamkiller and how closely does the finished film match what you set out to make?
“The title Dreamkiller was conceived to carry a double meaning, the obvious being the person or an entity that kills within a dream or a dream-like state. But the second and more concealed meaning derives from the question of ‘What kills our dreams?’

“How many of us wanted to do and dreamed of doing something only to be discouraged by others, even those closest to us? And they are only acting out on their own ‘fears’, the ultimate Dreamkiller. Regardless of people, what actually kills our dreams is ‘fear’ because it paralyses the initiative or creates discouragement, which leads to quitting. And that gradually leads to regret and ultimately death of human spirit. Fear is the core of Dreamkiller the movie and it ultimately carries the title. That is the story that we were set out to make and in that aspect, I feel very accomplished.

"But the original screenplay was much more elaborate and convoluted and it was difficult to ultimately make sense of it in the movie. Our original cut was over three hours long and we contemplated on making a mini-series of it (I’m kidding, though actually we are currently in active development of Dreamkiller - The Series). There are elements that had to be cut out, partially or entirely to make sense of the complex story and still fit it in an under-two-hours cut. Originally each patient had his/her own back story about their fear, there was a fifth patient whose story had to be cut out completely, also Nick’s sister Natalia had a whole subplot story, and the mother issue and relation of it with Stalberg was more developed. But in the process, I had to decide what was more important, and in this case it was to resolve the mystery/case at the expense of other, less important ones.”

How did you assemble your cast and crew?
“Dario was under contract with Delaware Pictures at the time, and was an element from the very beginning. For rest of the cast, some parts I gave to actors I had worked in the past in my short films, others we held auditions, the conventional way.

“As for the crew, I had worked with the DP John O’Shaughnessy before on one of my shorts (5 Minutes) and we got along well so that was taken care of. Then I had a few friends, former classmates that came on board because they believed in the project and in me. Our crew was small, less than ten. I can say that our cast by far outnumbered our crew.”

What aspect of the film are you most proud of and which bit would you change if you had the chance?
“I am most proud of the movie’s originality, unpredictability and the fact that no-one I have ever encountered that has seen it, was bored with it. Many have liked, disliked, loved, outright hated or liked and disliked certain aspects of it, but no one that has given it a chance had been bored or walked out on it to my knowledge, and I have seen many. Anyone that had seen it through the first 15 minutes or so had to see it through the end.

“At this day and age of remake after remake, sequel after sequel, rarely do we get to see something original. And I think I understand why, original is the hardest and the riskiest thing to do. But where are we going to wind up if we just keep doing what’s been done? Some of the most appealing and attractive words when it comes to movie projects to me are: ‘It’s never been done before.’ Most business people shy away from it. How will they know that it will work if it was never done before? Would we ever have aeroplanes if the Wright Brothers felt the same? The fact is, they did feel the same, but they did it anyway. They were scared and did it anyway.

“What would I change if I had the chance? Aside from bringing up production value in various locations such as Ninex laboratories etc., I would have liked to have been able to explore the detective Annette’s fear further. Her fear is ‘trust’, particularly in a relationship. A common fear of so many people who have been betrayed or burned one way or another. Without giving away the ending I’ll try to explain: I wanted her in the final scene (when she finds Nick with a gun) to be confronted face to face with overcoming her fear and hates to trust Nick, despite all elements that were pointing at him she needed to decide to trust him or not. And see the consequences of her not trusting and letting her fear have control over her. But the scene didn’t quite work basically due to rewrite in post (by editing) and so it is more simple, the way that you saw it.”

How has the film been received by audiences and critics?
“The film was very well received by audiences. We held over 16 weeks in release, and people kept coming even though we had no marketing budget. I believe that majority of people were able to relate on some level primarily due to their own fears and the ones that responded most passionately were persons that actually identified and directly related to their fears.

“We held Q&A sessions some weekends and people just would keeping talking about their fears. Sometimes the time was up and we had to move to the lobby because the next show was starting. Many people even wrote to us about it later.

“The film offers no fancy answers other than what most of us already know, that the only true way to defeat fear (worst of all enemies) is to be brave. To face it squarely and act in spite of it. Yet so few of us are aware of this fact and rarely act out on it. I belong to this group myself but I’m trying hard to ‘do it anyway’ and I hope by bringing it up to others I will become more accountable and strong to practice it.

“With critics we had mixed reviews. The very first reviews were great, stating that ‘this was the great beginning of several film careers’ etc., but then we got some bad ones, primarily focusing on our budgetary constraints and subjective feelings toward specific aspects of the movie. Sometimes there were personal issues, I guess we hit some nerve; and sometimes perhaps due to our perceived commercial genre or even title, they wouldn’t let themselves see more past that. A movie like Jurassic Park could be seen as a simple kid movie about dinosaurs destroying a place, or as an exploration (in an entertaining way) of how man likes to play God, and the potential effects of that. It depends on how much you want to see in it, you can let yourself go there or not. For me Dreamkiller was an attempt to do both, say something but also be entertaining. Not just pure commercial or pure artistic.”

What are your future plans?
“I’m working with Delaware Pictures on a whole slate of projects, some five completed screenplays and three more in active development. I’ll mention my two favourites, for the sake of time.

“Ry is a fantasy/action/adventure adapted from the ancient Balkan folk tales where the hero goes on a quest to get a special sword, the only one that can defeat the tyrant who enslaved his village. Every trial on the quest is a lesson and a metaphor. I was attracted to it for its (once again) two sided quality. The movie promotes the basic character ethic and moral values while at the same time being entertaining and fun. Like the original Star Wars. And there are issues and aspects of this story that have never been done before on film.

“The other one is an adaptation of a book we acquired in turnaround from Disney (Buena Vista) titled Old Man in a Baseball Cap. A true story of an American bombardier who was shot down over enemy occupied territory during WWII and rescued by Yugoslavian partisans. He was assigned to a tough woman (freedom fighter) to guide him to safety for 31 days on foot. During this journey they experience many adventures and of course inevitably fall in love. They learn both about love and about war, hence the title of the screenplay, In Love and War. Aside from conventional aspects of this story that are appealing I was particularly drawn to some more controversial aspects of it as it sheds a light on some not so well known or publicised facts regarding the only ‘Good War’ as we often refer to WWII.

"Aside from our film projects we are also in active development and talks about production of Dreamkiller - The Series (as per the suggestion of many studio and audience members). This was not set from the beginning but was brought up over and over so we decided it’s worth pursuing.”

website: WhatDoUFear.com