I interviewed legendary producer Ed Pressman on a double decker bus at Shepperton Studios in June 2006 when I was visiting the set of Mutant Chronicles.

When did you first become attached to Mutant Chronicles?
"I think it was 1990. I was introduced to the property back in 1990 and started developing it. I don’t know the exact years but I think in 1992 or so we were supposed to start doing it with Fox. Steve Norrington was supposed to direct it. We had it set up right after The Crow came out, but that came out in 1994 so my years may be a little mixed up. But we had it set up at Fox and Steve wanted a young actor named Russell Crowe. Fox said no way. He’d just come out of a film that Brett Leonard directed at Paramount that didn’t do very well so they didn’t want Russell Crowe.

“I was feeling pretty bullish about the project and when Fox said they wanted to cut the project by five million dollars I said we didn’t really want to do it. We’d set it up elsewhere which I thought we’d do easily. Maybe a bit over confident. We didn’t set it up elsewhere very quickly and while we were trying to do that, New Line offered Steve Blade.

“So we lost our director and it remained dormant for many years. Then I met Simon Hunter five years ago and we talked about it but it didn’t go anywhere. Then a year and a half ago Simon said he had a way of doing Mutant Chronicles that was very different from what we’d talked about in the past and very different from what we’d talked about with Steve Norrington. He would like to show us a sample of what the film might look and feel like if we would sponsor a seven-minute presentation using the new technology which he’d become familiar with over the intervening years.

“He used a lot of the technology that Rodriguez had used in Sin City but Simon hadn’t seen Sin City. This was his own version of that but applied to a very different genre than Sin City was. So he did this seven-minute trailer which was very impressive. Based on that we were able to attract Thomas Jane and John Malkovich and even before we had the full cast, Nigel Green came in and other distributors around the world which enabled us to make the film purely based on Simon’s vision as presented in that seven-minute trailer."

Do you think it’s to the film’s advantage that it’s being made now, rather than the 1990s, given how effects technology has advanced?
"Absolutely. From what I’ve seen so far, the film has a very original look. It’s not derivative of so many films that came after Blade Runner and looked at the future in a certain way. Even after The Crow, there was a kind of cinematic vision that was often imitated. Simon’s vision is quite original and to make a science fiction film which is like the opening of Saving Private Ryan with mutants is a very striking, new way of doing such a movie, which wouldn’t have been possible to do back then."

Shooting an advance promo is something that micro-budget films have done but hasn’t really been tried in a film of this size before. Do you think that’s a sales model that will become more popular?
"I think it certainly should be. I guess it depends on the kind of film being made. This had a very distinct, immediate effect. Just by seeing one minute of it you got the point. Certain other films may not have such a visual sensation that a few minutes would clearly indicate. For a certain kind of movie where you’re trying to show a certain style and visual approach that’s something different, I think it is a good idea."

How has the script changed?
"Oh, the script changed radically. After the Mutant Chronicles script was first done, there were things from that script which got used in other movies like Pitch Black and its sequel. They almost seemed derivative of what the original Mutant Chronicles script was. So we had to really reconceive it and Simon wanted to reconceive the story and the script so that it wasn’t derivative of itself or the films that followed it. A lot of work was done, ironically with the original writer because Simon went back to Phil Eisner after going through four other writers. In the intervening years there were five writers that took a hand in doing versions of the script and in the end it came back to Philip who was not attached to his original words and made some major changes under Simon’s guidance."

When you met Simon, had you seen Lighthouse and what did you think of it?
"I thought Lighthouse was a very impressive first film with a very modest budget, a successful job. With Simon himself and getting to know him, the biggest impression was seeing his command of the technology which was very impressive. Again, that was through the process of working with him on this little seven-minute trailer. It wasn’t simply talking about what he could do but actually executing it and coming in under budget, and getting to know him. When we first met, I remember that the director he most admired was David Lean so he was actually bringing a storytelling element to a different kind of genre and I think that’s a great combination, to not just be about the effect and the appearance but also to know about good storytelling. As a film-maker, I think he’s going to have a very bright future."

There’s a very long post-production schedule and it’s not out until 2008. How can you maintain the interest of distributors and audiences in something that takes that long?
"That’s an interesting challenge and that’s something that we’re wrestling with right now. My initial impulse is to announce with a teaser ad in the trades that production has begun on the Mutant Chronicles but it doesn’t make sense to say ‘coming spring 2008’. Do you want to start laying the groundwork on something that’s so far away or does it make sense to lay low until further down the line?"

Do you see Mutant Chronicles as a potential franchise?
"Yes, I certainly do. The world of Mutant Chronicles is very rich and there are many stories that could be told. It’s something we’ve always felt and I think Simon agrees. The first film is going to be very bold and R-rated and tough, something that’s not trying to compromise in any way on what a film should be. Down the line we could soften it up and appeal to a broader fanbase but right now we’re going for the hardcore audience."

You seem to have a lot of interesting projects in development. What’s coming up next?
"From an effects point of view we have an interesting movie coming out in November which is called Fur which is a film Steve Shainberg directed, the fellow who directed Secretary, with Nicole Kidman playing Diane Arbus and Robert Downey Jr paying this very hairy man. Kind of a compilation of all the freaks that Diane Arbus photographed are in the person of this almost wolfman character that Downey plays and the relationship between the two. We just finished shooting a film called Sisters which is a remake of the Brian DePalma movie."

That’s Douglas Buck’s film, isn’t it?
"Doug Buck is the director and he’s done a splendid job. We’re seeing the first cut, the director’s cut in two weeks. It stars Chloe Sevigny and Stephen Rae and a young French actress named Lou Doillon. We hope to have that ready to show the world at the end of the year."

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for Doug to do a proper movie because his shorts are so extraordinary.
"We were introduced to him through another film-maker named Larry Fessenden who was executive producer on the film. He told us how Doug was such a fan of Sisters and introduced us to his shorts, so that’s how that got going."

I notice that you’re also lining up a remake of Phantom of the Paradise.
"That’s right. That’s something which we’re looking for the right director because the original Phantom has a real cult following. There’s a convention every year in Vancouver now for Phantom of the Paradise fans and they invite Gerrit Graham and Bill Finley and treat them like kings. I think doing a film about the music business today could be a very exciting movie but until we find a film-maker it’s just an idea right now.”

website: www.pressman.com

After I saw Mark Redfield’s superb version ofDr Jekyll and Mr Hydeat Manchester in 2002 I knew that I had to find out more about this film and the people behind it. Mark kindly obliged with this phone interview in January 2003 and subsequently asked me to write some insert notes for the DVD release of the film, which I was delighted to do, incorporating some of the quotes from this chat.

Can you give me some background on Redfield Arts?
"Basically I decided to stop messing around with the theatre here on the East Coast and get down to the serious business of trying to make some movies. So I found some space in Baltimore where I have an edit suite and a scene shop and a place to store costumes and that kind of thing. I have some stage space; I found a warehouse. And I decided to concentrate on that. I started Redfield Arts about four years ago and got the space about three years ago. It took about a year to a year and a half and that’s when we started to bear down on Jekyll and Hyde.

“Now we’re selling Jekyll and Hyde, we’re in post-production with a drama called Cold Harbor about four brothers coming to grips with the suicide of their father, and a kids’ fantasy film called The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School. That’s in post-production, and hopefully that will be finished in May or June. We’re doing effects and editing, and we’re developing the next couple of projects for 2003 now that we’re in the new year."

Why did you start with Jekyll and Hyde?
"I’m not really sure, in some ways. We did it as a play about ten or eleven years ago. My producer and writing partner, Stuart Voytilla, he’s based in San Diego; when he was here in Baltimore and we were working together, we were doing a number of things. I had a couple of theatre companies, one of which was called New Century Theatre. We did a gamut of things: we did Clifford Onett’s Golden Boy, we did some Ionesco, we did some Shakespeare, we did The Tempest, The Front Page. We did a typical American rep kind of thing where you just do a little bit of everything-in-the-world theatre. It was sort of an actor-manager company, much like Redfield Arts is now: I’m out there raising the money and spending the money and I’m also the actor-director, so some things in some ways haven’t really changed.

“So I said: you know, it would be kind of fun to do something where I could show off, something I could sink my teeth into. We thought about it and said: no-one’s done a Jekyll and Hyde for a while. People would want to come and see it because people are going to ask, ‘How are they going to do that?’ It’s like Ben Hur. If you do Ben Hur, you’d better have a chariot race on stage and people are going to ask, ‘How are they going to do that?’ In some stage productions they’ll cast two actors - which is always kind of a cheat. So I thought: let’s do this because we could have a lot of fun with it.

“We wrote this play, we adapted it, and created a lot of new stuff on our own. I sort of stole some ideas from what I had read about an Orson Welles production, where the set was primarily black velvet - so you didn’t have to have a lot of scenery. You let the audience’s imagination work and that way we can more very cinematically through a number of scenes. We can be in alleys, we can be in the hospital, we can be in Jekyll’s house. So the initial adaptation of the play was in some ways cinematic. Then when we got around to turning it into a movie, we threw the play out in a lot of ways because it wasn’t working. We invented new material but kept the spirit of the thing and kept the thrust of Stevenson and the play - then it became this whole new animal.

“There was all kinds of new invention that we put into it because we could. I felt we could have some fun with Jekyll and Hyde and I wanted to keep doing fantasy pictures; maybe that was the other reason to do the film. I looked around and said, ‘Even though there’s a hundred Jekyll and Hydes, including The Nutty Professor, there really isn’t one right now on video or television.’ This is no scientific polling, but I would turn on the cable stations here and you would always get the ‘32 Fredric March or the ‘41 Spencer Tracy. I would go to the local blockbuster and you would have all the recent Draculas and Frankensteins. There really isn’t a Jekyll and Hyde out there so maybe we could take a cheeky attempt to get one out on the shelves and have people see it.

“Then there was the other thing that we had experienced. People in the beginning, when we were raising the money: ‘Why do you want to do Jekyll and Hyde? It’s been done.’ Then I would ask them: ‘Do you know the story?’ and people would say, ‘Well... he turns into this bad guy, doesn’t he?’ So they really didn’t know it. Of course the fans did, but by and large people really didn’t know it. So I said let’s take the risk, on such a low budget, and let’s try to do something. So that’s how Jekyll and Hyde came about."

What impressed me was that, apart from the last half-hour, your script is the first version to be filmed like the book.
"We really think it’s in the spirit of Stevenson. It may not exactly be the letter of the law. There are no women in Stevenson, there’s a lot of other invention woven through - and of course we made everybody younger which typically you do anyway. But that struck me as true too. There are recent adaptations - that I don’t want to help publicise! - in the last couple of years. There’s one with one of the Baldwin brothers that is a modern retelling where he and his wife go to Hong Kong and she is somehow murdered. This is all based on a synopsis I read somewhere. He goes to this old Chinese gentleman and gets this mystery drug and somehow he starts to take it, I don’t know what happens in this thing. And it’s called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde! So there are a lot of versions. And as much as I love Cushing and Lee, I, Monster doesn’t quite do it in some ways.

“So we really tried to stay with the spirit of Stevenson, using Utterson as the detective, and that fed into some other things. People say ‘I know the story’; well, they know a lot of stories. They know James Bond’s going to win. It’s always the ‘how’ - how are you going to get there? If the themes that you can withdraw from something still excite you, then it’s worth hearing it again. So hopefully we have done something that is entertaining. And what seems to be sometimes so obvious is to look at the original source material and there are things that people are missing. You hear this about Frankenstein! There are wonderful things in the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein - and then there’s wonderful things that are still missing. I’m finding that out: we’re researching now a project now - I don’t want to get into too much detail - a project about Captain Nemo. And there are marvellous things in Jules Verne! Great as the Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is, and there are wonderful things in the HarryhausenMysterious Island - but they’re miles away from who Nemo really is."

Apart from anything else, he’s Indian.
"Absolutely, which is a fascinating thing. I’ve just discovered that there is a French television version from the 1970s with Omar Shariff, very hard to find. But anyway it’s one of many projects that we’re very far from, we’re not anywhere near production. But I am definitely staying in fantasy. Two out of the three projects that we’re talking about tend to be fantasy/horror orientated. Not so much science fiction, I don’t know why, but they tend to be towards horror or fantasy. Maybe I find more leeway there to talk about people and find stories that I like. You tend to do things that you liked as a kid. You tend to come around to that.

“The reality is, I think, and this is kind of self-conscious in some ways too, is that I’m really in love with the Hammer pictures. And that I think was a very, very obvious conscious influence. Hammer, because of their budgets, are very compact. They’re very rich and they’re dense in their design. The Universal pictures had height! I think the screen was squarer. From Frankenstein to even the lesser-budgeted ones, they had height to the sets. Whereas what you get in the Hammers - or the Corman Poe pictures maybe - is you get a bit of density. That art direction - maybe those were heavy influences."

Given that your background was theatre, how did you assemble film-making people?
"For me, the eye has always been on movies, from the beginning of time that I can remember. I fell in love with movies, I wanted to make movies. I’m old enough just to remember having super-8 film, playing with animation and stop-motion as a teenager. like a lot of people I knew that I wanted to do that, even from childhood when I was playing and my first acting classes that I had when I was a kid. But the theatre was accessible. You could walk in the door, in the town that you lived in - here in Baltimore for instance. You could get involved and then, my God, you’ve got everything. You just go crazy.

“So very early I was acting, very early I was into design, very early into directing. But all along it was ‘but I want to be making films.’ And there have been some false starts over the years: projects that I think are still good scripts that I tried to raise money for. It’s difficult, just incredibly difficult to raise private money when you haven’t done anything. You have some good theatre credits behind you but people look at you and they somehow can’t make the imaginative leap. It takes a little bit of time. So in some ways the film-maker in me was always there. It’s just that I also love the theatre. It was easier and cheaper to get into. By the time I got round to producing my own plays it was certainly a lot less expensive than producing anything on any kind of film. So it took me a little while and there were a couple of false starts along the way."

Where did you find the investment for Jekyll and Hyde?
"It’s still what I’m doing in some ways, although I am talking now, pitching some much larger budgeted scripts - as a matter of fact just a couple of days ago - to producers who are attached to larger, familiar Hollywood companies. I had some meetings in New York. So it has slowly cracked the door open, to be able to talk to some people. But basically I just went to rich people, I kept knocking on doors until somebody sat down long enough to say, ‘I think you’ve got something and I’ll take a risk with you. I’ll get involved.’ In some ways, maybe compared to some other film-makers, we were a little luckier there because it really didn’t take so long.

“We had the original Jekyll and Hyde investor pull out a month before shooting began. And this was devastating because when you’re working on such a tight budget, we planned it, like my theatre background, I just planned everything. The company had a little bit of money and the first stuff that was shot was the stuff in the Carew house. I had a little bit of money and I said: ‘If we delay we’re going to lose the momentum. We’re going to lose the actors that we’ve put together here at this stage, and we’ve booked the locations.’ We shot some of it in a museum and I said, ‘We’re going to lose this.’

“So I had a little bit of money and I found the investor that came through within a matter of three weeks. So the first investor took the better part of a year to find, talking to many people - and it was one person, interestingly enough, too. Some movies you have many people putting money in. But I’ve been lucky in the pictures so far that we have found people to come on board. So we found a guy, Terry Woods, who’s the executive producer, who said, ‘I see something great here.’ We had shot for a week actually! Because I had just enough money to begin shooting that August. We were shooting the location stuff because in Baltimore here on the East Coast we have a heat situation where it can get kind of brutal, and I wanted to make sure that we got the location stuff done first before we moved into the sets in the studio. Then we were very lucky, because within three weeks of meeting with Terry he said, ‘I’m in with you’ - and then we were able to do it."

Did you shoot on DV?
"It is a digital picture. Most of everything that we have right now is digital. That helped us a great deal with the budget. Cold Harbor, the drama, was shot on film, so things are kind of a mix right now. What we’re planning for 2003, the horror pictures are primarily digital."

Where has Jekyll and Hyde been shown, apart from Manchester?
"We completed the picture - and this is fascinating - and we sent a rough to Gil. He responded relatively quickly - and I don’t know why that surprised, whether it was politeness or he liked it. From the moment the sound mix and the film was finally completed, it was a matter of weeks before the Manchester festival. So we got that finished just in time because he liked it and accepted it. So Manchester was first.

“Then a few weeks later - it seems that everything has been happening in four-week increments since then - it was shown in Los Angeles at another festival called Shriekfest where it also won. It won two awards there, including something they did for me called the Shriekfest Award for my hyphenate status as an actor/producer/director. They had also - and I didn’t know this until a week before Shriekfest - accepted another film that I played the lead in, a science fiction picture called Despiserwhich a fellow named Philip Cook made. That’ll be on video sometime in the Spring. There’s no date for that either. He went ahead and signed a contract for American and European distribution. I don’t know what else he’s got at this point but I know sometime in the Spring it’ll be out. There is no date yet for Jekyll.

“Then we did our premiere. We missed a deadline. There’s this new thing, the New York City Horror Festival, that some folks are doing. They started as film-makers. It’s funny, we missed the deadline but they e-mailed us on the day of the deadline to tell us we didn’t make the deadline, so I’m not sure what that was about. Then in November we had our Maryland premiere here in Baltimore. Everybody of course had been hearing about things and wanting to see it. Other than that, we have sneaked it at a couple of horror conventions on the East Coast and we’re continually being asked: would you show it? So we’re probably not going to do any more festivals at this point, we’re just going to wait and see what the release date on television and video will be - which will be sometime this year."

So have you got video distribution sorted out?
"We are now sorting that out. Actually just before Christmas we were presented with three offers so we’re seeing what happens now between now and February. There’s the AFM in February. Now that the holidays are over and people are getting back to business and can look at the film, we’re giving it some more time, seeing which might be the best company to go with. But how this thing works: there might be five different contracts for all the territories in the world as we work on this throughout the year."

I guess that Maryland is not a hotbed of film-making activity.
"It is and it isn’t. The internet and digital are the great levellers. Where, ten years ago, if you took a stick and threw it five miles you could hit another film-maker, well gosh, you could drop it outside your door now and there’s someone who is thinking about picking up a digital camera and doing something. There is so much going on everywhere. So there are more people working in Maryland right now - and I think that’s the same everywhere. There are friends of friends who are talking about things everywhere.

“One of the things that we do to help pay the rent at the studio is design and build props and sets for commercials or for other films or special events. There’s the whole thing of a corporation wanting to do some sort of theme party. But there are a lot of film-makers nowadays; nobody you’ve heard of yet, some of them just like me. Maybe they’re coming up and coming out and we’re just getting to know people. Obviously if you go to New York, two and half hours from me, it’s much fiercer and there’s a lot of people up there. But I’m very close to DC, only thirty minutes from DC. So all of a sudden, exponentially, you’ve got people trying to do independent film there. So it’s interesting how it has sort of exploded, certainly in the last five years.

“And in distribution, in the film world, digital has become accepted. It’s because of Lucas pushing and the fact that Rodriguez on the higher-end Sony 24fps video did Spy Kids 2, technically on video. Distributors are coming round to it. I think the festivals were the ones who tipped that over because there was a time just recently when they didn’t want to project anything on video, you had to have a print. That’s all gone, that’s all changed. So I think once the cue starts to come from the distributors and the festivals, all of a sudden people are empowered and they’re saying: ‘I’m going to make a film.’ I’m just seeing a lot more people. I’m getting calls from film-makers, saying: ‘What advice can you give me? I’ve been reading about you. What’s going on?’

“Hotbed, I don’t know - but there are more than I thought would have been in Maryland. And of course Blair Witch sort of comes out of Maryland. I think that also empowered a lot of people who maybe could put the equivalent of $5,000-$10,000 together. That might make a good demo but believe me, a lot of the films - and I’m sure you see a good number of them, and this is not trying to be cheeky because I do know where Jekyll lives on the scale - but I’m seeing a lot of terrible stuff. Because five or ten thousand dollars doesn’t really do anything. Everybody has such great ideas. Or they’re making a zombie picture which they think is manageable and it really isn’t!"

The crucial thing in any Jekyll and Hyde film is the make-up. Where did you get yours?
"I had tried to get a production off the ground called Conjuring Aurora which is in production. It’s a comedy about a guy, played by me, who’s a magician who dreams of the big time. He dreams of the Vegas thing, the television thing, the Lance Burton thing - but he’s doing children’s parties and he lives in his van. He’s at the lowest end of his tether and through a series of circumstances, helping a friend out, he runs into a woman who dumps an eleven-year-old girl on him, who claims to be his daughter. Well, this shocks him no end. And they spend the film trying to find Lucy, the mother, and are they really father and daughter?

“I had thought of this a few years ago. I had a little girl who played Tiny Tim to my Scrooge, and her mother was my attorney at that point! And this kid was fabulous, just charming. This brewed and I came up with a little story. She has since graduated from college. So I thought about it. I saw another little girl, watching a piece of theatre a few years ago, and that kind of reminded me of the story. Then along came The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School. To make a long story short, there is a sequence at the end of the script when my character is supposed to jump 40 years into the future. So I hunted around and I found Robert Yoho.

“Years ago we didn’t do Conjuring Aurora. We shot the bulk of the stuff with the little girl back in August, then when the leaves turn green again we’ll complete the picture - because I needed to get the stuff with her before she started to physically, bodily change too much. Pre-teenagers tend to suddenly shoot up! That’s when I first met Bob. I looked at his portfolio and I said, ‘I’m going to need to do a really successful age here. We’re going into Dick Smith territory here.’ This is a comedy drama where I want them to believe the characters.

“Well, when I originally set the film up of course we didn’t make it, but I had met Bob, and Bob stayed in the back of my mind. He was the first person I called and he said, ‘Of course I’m going to do it!’ On stage, I didn’t really do anything, I just changed the vocal and the physical and mussed my hair up. I had a dentist make a set of teeth and that also helped impede my speech to a degree. I played with a lot of rolling my Rs and melodramatic things with Hyde. So we got talking about him.

“The first thing that went out the window, the first thing we agreed on, Bob and myself, was to get away from the primitive primate idea. Remember that for a number of years you couldn’t see the Fredric March version. When we were growing up it was the big mystery: why did they take it off the market. But everybody saw the photographs in Famous Monsters of the ape-like make-up. That’s the first thing out the window - we just don’t even go there. Then I think in talking about him, the key for me in some ways - and it doesn’t come up too obviously - is not the idea that he drinks the potion. Like the Tweety and Sylvester, where Tweety drinks the potion and becomes this other Tweety. I think the idea is that Jekyll drinks the potion and drops his mask. That’s what’s underneath. So we said: why don’t we think of a satyr, think of the Devil, and think of the Joker? Think of the medieval image of a grinning devil. And there’s one idea of taking that to its conclusion that didn’t fully get realised. In hindsight, when you’ve lived with a picture, you say, ‘Oh, there are all these little things I would have liked to have done.’ One, for instance: in setting it in 1900 and pulling in some of the modern technology, I really, really wanted, in hindsight, to put a 1900 automobile in Jekyll’s laboratory.”

What was the make-up idea that didn’t get realised?
“Some of the sketches actually have these bony horn things that have broken through the skin. It looks like a big zit on his forehead. But if you look carefully that’s actually starting to happen; there’s this white breakthrough on the other side as the ridge begins to build up. So we pulled back and that’s as far as we got. Stage three. Because some of the sketches have this kind of horn coming out. Perhaps I was a little nervous about that. In such a rapid conclusion, in the dark, people might say: ‘What the hell is that? Is that a piece of banana stuck on his head?’ I was really worried that we wouldn’t know what it was without him suddenly getting cloven hooves or something. We pulled that back but that’s really the idea; it’s his psychological side, it’s dropping that mask and then fantasising that. Well, if it went to its extreme, he’d have horns. It’s very, very subtle. The prosthetics just help pull his face. Even when he’s grimacing I’m trying to do it while physically staying grinning, but the prosthetics help that.”

interview originally posted 4th June 2005

Director: Andrew Kutzer
Writer: Russell Devlin
Producer: Russell Devlin
Cast: Darren Maxwell, Audrey Lamont, Geoff Tilley
Country: Australia
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener disc

I’m not normally a one for watching completely amateur (in a non-judgemental sense) movies - fanfilms in other words. They’re all very well and good for those who like them, but I have enough films to watch already, thank you very kindly. But I’ll make an exception for this 17-minute Aussie short, partly because it’s not a fanboy love poem to some big-budget cinematic franchise, but mostly because it has been written and produced by my old mate Russell.

‘The Seventh Victim’ is a famous short story by one of the great SF writers, Robert Sheckley, who sadly passed away last December. He tended to write SF that bordered on, or toppled over into, satire. (Sheckley’s influence on the works of Douglas Adams was something that Adams himself tended to gloss over.)

‘The Seventh Victim’ itself has quite a history. First published in Galaxy magazine in 1953, it was filmed in Italy in 1965 as The Tenth Victim, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress (the title possibly changed to avoid confusion with the 1943 Val Lewton picture). There was allegedly an Italian TV version in 1979 too and there was a radio dramatisation in 1957 as part of the series X Minus One. Sheckley himself novelised the 1965 film and wrote two lacklustre sequels to it in the late 1980s, by which time his copious and rather notorious consumption of certain substances had severely dulled his literary edge. A new version, also called The Tenth Victim, was was announced in 2001, allegedly to star Catherine Zeta Jones; Brendan Fraser was reported to be aboard the project two years later. Although this never came to anything, when I interviewed producer Ed Pressman last month on the set of Mutant Chronicles, The Tenth Victim was still very much part of his portfolio of in-development projects.

The actual plot is relatively simple; most of the science fictional aspects are in the setting. In the future, war and crime have been eradicated by the introduction of legalised murder, co-ordinated by the Emotional Catharsis Bureau (ECB) which pairs up killers and victims. About one third of the population take part, but very few killers make it into ‘the tens’ - kills in double figures. There are also gladiatorial combats and ‘death races’ to entertain the populace.

Stanton Frelaine (Darren Maxwell, director of Alone and The Psychology of Killing) is assigned his seventh victim and is shocked to discover that it’s a woman, Janet Patzig (Audrey Lamont). He can’t back down or refuse the assignment. Well, actually he can but that would mean that he would be reclassified as a victim. (We learn at this point, as an aside, that killing innocent bystanders, even accidentally, carries the death penalty).

Frelaine has a ‘spotter’, Ed Morrow (Geoff Tilley), who tracks down his victims for him and the two are soon parked in a car watching Patzig drink tea at a cafe table, seemingly oblivious to her status as a victim. Unable to carry out the hit for both practical and emotional reasons, Frelaine instead approaches Patzig and the two strike up a nascent romance. But when they go back to her flat, Stanton finds out that this ‘unsuccessful actress’ is not all she says.

It’s a fairly corny plot with a twist ending that can be spotted miles away but it was probably fresh and original in 1953. Russell Devlin’s script does a good job of sticking to Sheckley’s story, embellishing it with TV clips including a show which interviews successful killers and a TV debate in which one of the pundits is played by director Andrew Kutzer (who also provide an announcer’s voice). The script's weak point is towards the end, when Frelaine is momentarily left alone and indulges in an entirely unnecessary voice-over monologue in which he voices his contradictory feelings towards Patzig. We are told about the character’s predicament instead of being shown it. Actually, we are shown it as well, in the form of a montage, and the scene would work perfectly well with just images and music. (The film’s music is variously lifted from episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits plus Holst’s Planets Suite.)

Devlin worked hard on this short, racking up credits as not only writer and producer but also DP, props, sound, lighting gaffer and title sequence. He shot the film on video and it shows, and some of the interior scenes suffer from bad sound, as so often with this level of film-making. There is not really anything by way of special effects. The acting is surprisingly good, especially from Maxwell whose character undergoes a complete transformation during the film’s short running time.

Sheckley’s works were the basis of several other films and TV shows, notably Freejack and Condorman, and towards the end of his life he wrote spin-off novels based on Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 and Aliens as well as an unpublished (allegedly unpublishable) novelisation of the computer game Starship Titanic. Back at the start of his career he wrote episodes of Captain Video! Ideas from ’The Seventh Victim’ can be seen in the excellent Series 7: The Contenders but it can be argued that the subgenre extends all the way back to The Most Dangerous Game.

Russell sent me two discs, one with the director’s version, one with the producer’s version. There is relatively little difference, just a couple of bits of dialogue and some different takes in certain shots. I slightly preferred the former but that may just be because I watched it first. Also on the discs was a trailer, a stills gallery (which include innumerable posters, one of which announces that ‘nobody will be admitted after the first 17 minutes’), a spoof music video, various out-takes and a half-hour ‘scrapbook’ of rehearsals and behind-the-scenes footage in lieu of a proper Making Of. Also included is the (public domain) X Minus One radio version, the opening announcement of which forms the start of this film.

Seventh Victim is not an authorised adaptation. It was produced shortly before Sheckley died but he was not aware of it (mind you, he probably wasn’t aware of his slippers for most of his last decade). It has been screened at a couple of festivals/conventions to considerable acclaim and the team behind it are now working on larger and more ambitious projects.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 6th July 2006

Director: Jake Shaw
Writer: James Smith
Producer: Jake Shaw
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: World premiere, Nottingham, 30th April 2005

Documentaries are hot right now. The week that Ryan for Congress received its first public screening also saw the UK terrestrial premiere of Super Size Me, one week after the UK terrestrial premiere of Spellbound. In the wake of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, actuality footage on the big screen is more popular than it has ever been since people stopped filming workers leaving factory gates and trains arriving at stations.

This first feature from Jake Shaw, who has been responsible for the featurettes on the DVD releases of several cult films, is an open, honest and wryly amusing look at an election in Ohio in 2002. The incumbent congressman, James Traficant (Democrat) had been found guilty of massive corruption and sentenced to jail, where he was still constitutionally able to contest his old seat as an independent. The Democrats chose as their replacement 29-year-old Tim Ryan, a thoroughly likeable chap but very young and relatively inexperienced. The Republicans put up a frankly scary-looking woman from out of town named Anne Benjamin.

Shaw and his camera followed Ryan and his band of helpers - many of them as fresh to big-stakes politics as the candidate himself, a few of them grizzled old veterans - while also keeping an eye on the Republican camp. Vox pops with supporters of all three candidates pepper the film along with interviews that cover subjects such as the importance of religion in US politics and the introduction in some polling stations of electronic voting systems.

Irrespective of one’s politics, it is impossible not to like Ryan, who comes across as genuinely... well, genuine, and refuses to indulge in negative campaigning, even while the Republicans are urging people to avoid him because as a student he once tried to get in somewhere using his older brother’s ID. It is also very difficult not to dislike the hatchet-faced Benjamin. Ryan’s supporters - and indeed Ryan himself - spend a large part of their campaigning simply standing on street corners (in the cold and the rain - Ohio is not a state renowned for its balmy climate) holding large ‘Ryan for Congress’ signs and waving at passing vehicles. It’s an utterly extraordinary thing to see and, like much of the movie, benefits from being viewed through British eyes. One simply could never imagine any UK politician doing such a thing.

Like many of the current crop of documentary movies, there is a lot of humour here; partly the easy jocularity of the Ryan camp but mostly the battery of eccentrics who pop up in front of Shaw’s camera to offer their honest opinions. And frankly, from a British perspective, the American electoral system just seems bewilderingly amusing. We are given just a glimpse at the 15 pages of candidates and laws that people are expected to vote on, mostly using bizarrely complex hole-punching devices, sometimes using bizarrely complex electronic devices. It would have been nice to see that aspect of the whole process in a bit more detail, contrasting it with the ‘one cross in one box, that’s yer lot’ system in the UK, and possibly speculating about whether it might contribute to the amazingly low turnouts that even well-supported US elections manage.

Though it’s not perfect, Shaw’s documentary (two and a half years in the making, edited down from 40 hours of raw footage) is a snappy, informative picture - as well-paced as it is well-constructed. Obviously we are rooting for Ryan but the film never feels like propaganda - and again that is the benefit of viewing the whole process from across a large ocean. We learn a little about American politics at grass roots level, a little about Northern Ohio (the sort of place that people come from but nobody goes to) and a whole lot about ‘real’ America, a place never shown in any Hollywood movie and rarely mentioned in international news.

Being picky, it’s a little odd that, after explaining about Traficant and his unique situation in the first five minutes, he and his supporters then disappear for more than half an hour, making the contest seem like a two-horse race. Traficant is used as a hook but barely features in the film itself and even a couple of enthusiastic vox pops from his supporters offer no insight into the man, beyond the evident fact that he is a convicted crook. Nor is there any comment on how rare a three-horse race such as this must presumably be in a country so rigidly fixed into a two-party system. It also seems odd that Ryan himself is first introduced to us in a Republican TV commercial listing his heinous teenage ‘fake ID’ occurrence. At that point we don’t know anything about Ryan and it’s not clear what message (or meta-message) we should be deriving from this commercial.

If this is pedantry it’s because I can’t otherwise fault the movie. Shaw proves himself an able interviewer, an observant fly-on-the-wall cameraman and an enthusiastic, diligent narrator, as well as a hugely talented documentarian who really needs to break out of corporate videos and ‘behind-the-scenes’ DVD supplements.

Which brings me to the most curious aspect of Ryan for Congress (apart from uncertainty over the title which may in fact be Tim Ryan for Congress) and that’s the running time. Sixty minutes is okay for BBC or PBS broadcast but too long for a one-hour slot on any commercial channel and too short for theatrical distribution - which in today’s cinematic climate is a definite possibility for a film like this. If Shaw and his team can salvage another 15-20 minutes of usable material out of all that raw footage - or even shoot some new background material about the history or geography of their subject - then Ryan for Congress becomes a film that should knock ‘em dead at festivals and stands a chance of being picked up by a distributor. This is not to suggest that the film should be padded; it is very tightly edited and all the better for that. But the construction is so tight, the editing so snappy, that another quarter-hour could be fitted in somewhere without seriously harming the pace or flow of the story at all.

MJS rating: A
Review originally published 1st May 2005

Director: Mr Fai Samang
Writers: Mr Fai Sam Ang, Mrs Mao Samnang
Producer: Mr Thunya Nilklang
Cast: Mr Vinal Kraybotr (Winai Kraibutr), Miss Pich Chan Barmey, Mr Tep Rindaro, Mrs Om Portevy
Year of release: 2001
Country: Cambodia/Thailand
Reviewed from: Hong Kong VCD (Winson Entertainment)

Now this is a film I’ve been wanting to see for a while, the first Cambodian feature film for years (even if it is a co-production with a Thai company) and a premier example of the prolific snake-woman genre.

Nhi (Om Portevy aka Ampor Tevy, star of a popular TV soap) lives in the forest with her boorish, alcoholic husband Manop and their about-twelve-year-old daughter Ed. One day Nhi and Ed encounter a giant, talking snake in the forest while looking for bamboo shoots - they have lost their spade and the snake agrees to let them have it back if Nhi will love him and be his wife. Mohap is away in the city (where he sells jewellery) so that night the giant snake crawls into Nhi’s bed and transforms into a handsome man who makes love to her. Afterwards, Nhi is frequently seen by her daughter stroking the snake and talking lovingly to it.

I tell you, folks, this thing is a Freudian’s dream!

In the city we meet rich art dealer Wiphak and his wife Buppha, who is pregnant. When their friends Pokia and Mora discover this, Mora decides to become pregnant too and goes to a local witch for a potion which will make Pokia subservient to her, and therefore compliable.

Back in the forest, Mopak returns and notices Nhi’s bump, the result of her tryst with the Snake King (he’s not actually named as such, but one of the alternative English language titles of this film is The Snake King’s Daughter). Mopak accuses his wife of being unfaithful because they haven’t had sex for months, but she points out that no-one else lives within miles of them and claims that he was drunk at the time.

Ed tells her father about the snake but begs him not to hurt her mother. He follows his daughter to where the snake lives and cuts its head off. This is very clearly a genuine shot of a live snake being cut in two with a machete, and though it’s brief it’s a bit disturbing. He also makes Nhi eat the cooked snake meat. Then he takes her to the river, ostensibly to bathe, where he kills her for being unfaithful by slicing open her swollen belly. Out pours plenty of blood and a dozen or so small snakes which Manop kills (again for real). One tiny snake escapes and as Manop goes after it he slips on a rock and falls on his own sword. Ed finds her dead parents and also slips on a rock, cracks her head open and dies.

But a passing holy man finds the surviving snakelet and sees it transform into a baby as the sun rises. He takes the child home, naming it Soraya after the sun.

Scoot forward ten years or so and Soraya is a girl, rebellious but not disrespectful, living in a cave with her ‘grandfather’. But she is not any girl, for her head is a mass of writhing snakes!

This is one of the most interesting aspects of this film. Famously, when Hammer Films made The Gorgon in 1964, actress Barbara Shelley offered to play the title role wearing a headpiece with some live grass snakes attached (provided that the RSPCA were happy with the set-up). Unfortunately, the producers decided instead to depict the transmogrified version of Shelley’s character using a different actress (Prudence Hyman) with a headpiece that looked fine in stills but was obviously a bunch of rubber snakes when seen on screen.

Snakes are supposed to move. They writhe, they wriggle. And these ones do!

Because the makers of Snaker have used that very same technique: most of the snakes are actually still rubber but there are enough live ones attached to provide sufficient movement that it genuinely does look like a writhing mass of snakes on the actress’ head. It was astounding enough when Nhi lay down with the giant snake - a huge python (I think) which must have been twelve feet long if it was an inch. And it was disturbing enough when we had that real snake-beheading shot. But here we have live snakes not just stuck on somebody’s head but stuck on the head of a thirteen-year-old girl!

The actress who plays young Soraya, it must be said, is very good anyway (so was the girl playing Ed, to be fair) but for her to be able to act while live snakes hang in front of her face is surely worthy of some sort of award. (According to a piece about this film in the New York Times, young Soraya is played by Ms Danh Monica, although there is no name like that in the credits.)

Anyway, down at the river Soraya - with her head covered - meets three children of about her age (ten or eleven). These are Veha, son of the kindly Wiphak and Buppha (who died in childbirth), and Kiri and Reena, son and daughter of the snobbish Pokia and Mora. Veha and Reena are devoted to each other, according to their parents at least. Soraya asks to join their game of hide and seek, and though Veha is welcoming, Reena is rude and asks her brother to get rid of the new girl. He pulls the wrap from Soraya’s head - and the three children understandably run away screaming, while Soraya returns, tearfully to her grandfather.

A caption tells us it’s ten years later, so of course by now all four kids are young men and women. Returning to the river, kind-hearted Veha (Vinal Kraybotr: Nang Nak, Krai Thong, Kaew Kon Lek) gets into a fight with aggressive Kiri, who pushes him over a waterfall. Kiri and his sister head back to town and tell a distraught Wiphak that his son fell accidentally and, though they searched, there was no sign of him.

But of course, Veha isn’t dead - he is found and nursed back to health by Soraya, now played by Pich Chan Barmey (aka Pich Chanboramey). He’s handsome, she’s beautiful; his name means sky, hers means sun; they both have good hearts - so of course they start to fall for each other, especially as Grandfather has given Soraya a magic ring which transforms her snakes into beautiful long hair.

Veha and Soraya return to his overjoyed father, where Reena is understandably jealous of the new arrival because she and Veha have technically been engaged since they were children. Mora and Reena go to see the old witch who gives them some more of the bewitching potion that worked twenty years earlier on Pokia; they put it in Veha’s goblet at dinner but Soraya’s magic ring warns her and she knocks it from the table.

The witch works out that Soraya is a snake - not a reincarnation of a snake but the real thing - but that her magic powers will be lost if she loses her virginity. So Kiri sneaks into Wiphak’s house and tries to rape Soraya, but her hair turns back into snakes, one of which falls off and bites Kiri, killing him instantly.

There then follows one of the most unsubtle tourism product placements you are ever likely to see, although as Snaker was the first Cambodian feature film to receive international distribution for many years, it is perhaps allowable. Veha and Soraya spend several minutes wandering around the magnificent ruins of Ankor Wat, and Veha tells her that his love for her is as strong and everlasting as the temple walls.

Eventually, the two young lovers do sleep together, and while Veha sleeps, Soraya finds patches of snake skin on her arms. She runs back to her grandfather, but Mora and Reena appear with the old witch, who battles the holy man in a pretty cool magic fight, which leaves both of them dead. Mora and Reena run away but are bitten by a snake, as Kiri was. The Snake King reappears, along with the magically revived grandfather, and they use their combined power to make Soraya fully, permanently human - just as Veha appears to sweep her off her feet and carry her home.

What a great film! It’s got romance, action, intrigue, fantasy, and even a travelogue in the middle. It does have at least one snake deliberately and unpleasantly killed in the name of entertainment, which may be okay in Cambodia but is not a terribly bright idea for a potential export. But given how out of step with global popular culture the Cambodians were during - and in the wake of - the Khmer Rouge regime, again this is sort of allowable.

Pol Pot and his secret police outlawed all forms of popular entertainment including cinemas, so making a Cambodian film was a bit of a gamble as far as domestic distribution goes. It was apparently shown drive-in style at various outside venues. It must be said that, for a country with effectively no cinema industry, this is a fine-looking film. The cinematography is excellent (Mr Saray Chat is credited as cameraman) and the production values are well above the B-movie level that one might expect given the film’s origins. There is no actual special effects credit, but Mr Chhun Achom was responsible for the make-up, which may or may not include getting actresses to wear snakes on their heads!

Translating from the Thai alphabet into English is always a matter of debate and creates different spellings, so the actor credited on screen as ‘Mr Vinal Kraybotr’ is also listed on various websites as Vinai Kraybotr, Winai Kraibutr and Winai Kraibutra. And the writer/director’s name is spelled differently in each of his on-screen credits! The packaging calls the film Snaker although the on-screen English title is Snakers. The original title is generally given as something like Kuon Pus Keng Kang which everyone seems to agree means ‘The Snake King’s Child’ although apparently it was filmed as just Pus Keng Kang (or Pos Kairng Korng or whatever) which was the title used for the first of four Cambodian versions of this much-filmed story (the second was called Neang Lavear Haik and the third was Neang Preay Sork Pos). I have also found the film listed as Snaker: Ghost Wife 2 which is a translation of the Chinese title which markets the film as a fake sequel to Ghost Wife (ie. Nang Nak). Having seen this and Ngoo Keng Kong I definitely want to see more snake-woman films - this is my new mission!

This VCD is not a terribly good transfer, though it is widescreen. Perhaps it’s just my copy, but neither disc loaded straight off and both, when cleaned enough to load properly, jammed every 10-15 seconds for the first five minutes. In addition, the sound on disc 2 was way, way quieter than on disc 1. However, reviews of the DVD (also from Winson) say that the quality is not much better on that and there are no extras, so I can’t really complain. The subtitles are full of mistakes; I’m sure whoever did them speaks much better English than my Thai (or Cambodian or Chinese), but I can never understand why they don’t check with a native English speaker before putting the subs on the disc....

The disc also includes a trailer for the Jean-Claude Van Damme SF actioner Replicant (Van Damme fighting himself - blimey, there’s an idea that has only been done about eight times before).

MJS rating: A-
Review originally posted 27th November 2007.

Director: Andrew Goth
Writers: Andrew Goth, Joanne Reay
Producers: Brandon Burrows, Courtney Lauren Penn
Cast: Wesley Snipes, Kevin Howarth, Riley Smith
Country: UK/USA
Year of release: 2013 (eventually…)
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Gallowwalkers does not come with a good reputation. Eleven per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Average 3.6/10 on IMDB. Average 2.5 stars on Amazon. Most people who have expressed an opinion on it seemed to have been pretty negative. Received opinion is that the film is a clunker.

Well, I’m here to fly in the face of received opinion. I’ve watched Gallowwalkers and while even I hesitate to say it’s great, nevertheless it has undeniable elements of greatness. It also has undeniable flaws – what those are and why they exist I’ll come to in due course – but they are more than compensated for by the film’s positive aspects. I enjoyed it enormously.

Bear in mind that I also appreciated Andrew Goth and Joanne Reay’s previous film, Cold and Dark, which I described in Urban Terrors as “a curious but not unenjoyable melding of police procedural with weird horror.” That film has also been poorly regarded by most critics and punters. Maybe I’m just in tune with what these guys are trying to do.

Gallowwalkers has been described as a ‘zombie western’ but that’s misleading. Films like Cowboys and Zombies and Devil’s Crossing simply place a standard zombie scenario into a Wild West setting. Gallowwalkers is set in something approaching the 19th century American frontier and features characters who return to life, but there any similarities end. This isn’t just a horror film, certainly not just a western. It’s a mystical film, playing on the tropes of the more extreme end of the western genre, beyond Sergio Leone, beyond the old Django movies. Where some westerns are defined simply by iconography – Stetsons, six-shooters, steers and saloons – the real heart of the western genre lies in the themes it explores. Divorced from both the urban and the rural, divorced from both history and modernity, the best westerns are about isolation, struggle, identity, a quest for something undefined, perhaps even unreachable. Great westerns use the frontier of civilisation as a metaphor for the frontiers inside the protagonist’s mind and soul. All great westerns have a mystical element to them, however low it may be in the mix.

Occasionally a western comes along which ramps up the mystical element to eleven. The most famous example of that – and the most obvious comparison for Gallowwalkers, just in terms of its startling imagery and adamant non-realism – would be El Topo. Like Jodorowsky, Andrew Goth uses the western genre and some of its tropes to explore bigger, weirder, stranger ideas – just as he used the police procedural genre in Cold and Dark.

Does it always work? We’ll come to that.

So here’s the surprisingly straightforward plot, as eventually revealed through assorted flashbacks and revelations. Yer man Wesley Snipes is Aman (“a man” = everyman?), who swore revenge on the bastards who raped and murdered the girl he loved. He tracked them down to a jail and shot them in their cells but, in escaping, was himself shot by one of the jailers. His adopted mother called on the Devil to save her son and was granted her wish. But in returning Aman to life, the Devil decreed that those he killed would also return to life.

So those particular bastards are once again walking and talking, led by the thoroughly amoral Kansa (my old mate Kevin Howarth: The Last Horror Movie, The Seasoning House). Or at least, most of them are. Kansa doesn’t know how or why he and his men were reanimated, and hence he doesn’t know why his son wasn’t. Aman is on a quest to kill Kansa and his men, aiming to make sure they stay dead by ripping their fucking heads off. Kansa meanwhile is on a quest to find some mystical nuns whom he believes will be able to restore his son to life.

That’s it in a nutshell but there are all sorts of excursions to the plot, not all of which go anywhere in particular. What matters, more than the plot, are the individual scenes and the truly extraordinary imagery within those scenes. A combination of Goth’s direction, Goth and Reay’s screenplay, Henner Hofmann’s cinematography, Laurence Borman’s production design, Pierre Viening’s costumes and a make-up department overseen by the hugely experienced Jackie Fowler (with designs by the legendary Paul Hyett) – all of this creates a film for which the phrase ‘visually stunning’ would seem a tad half-hearted. Gallowwalkers will blow your mind visually. Christ alone knows what this would be like if watched on drugs. You’d never come down.

Snipes has dreadlocks, a dab of grew in his beard, a black hat and flared trousers. Kansa, whom we initially meet bereft of skin like Hellraiser’s Uncle Frank, takes the face and hair of an albino man and then favours a long, purple coat. One of his men wears a sack on his head, another has a heavy metal helmet covered in spikes, a third prefers grafting lizards’ skins onto his head. His dead son is carried everywhere, swaddled in a wickerwork crucifix. As a child, Aman lived in an orphanage until sent out into the world aged 12, whereupon he was adopted by a lady who singlehandedly runs a slaughterhouse. That woman’s daughter was the lover who was raped and murdered. The slaughterhouse and its owner are still there, with a new child apprentice, also an albino. In fact there is a whole community of albinos…

There are a lot of extreme long-shots in this film, emphasising the emptiness of the desert within which this all takes place. There are no ‘western streets’, no saloons and undertakers. Buildings stand in isolation, and sometimes individual figures do too. In an early scene, a long, straight, single-track, narrow-gauge railway leads from nowhere to nowhere. Three static figures dressed in red (looking distractingly like any one of them could shout “No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”) approach from far, far away on a hand-trolley powered by a single Chinese coolie. They take a while to arrive, to even become identifiable for what they are. It’s very David Lean.

The closest that Gallowwalkers gets to a town is that small settlement of albinos, though it’s little more than a few randomly arranged huts and a large, newly built gallows where a row of criminals are collectively hanged with a single pull of a lever. There are tall, somewhat wobbly, horse-drawn prison carts. There are cages on the sand. Everything in this film is ‘real’ in the sense of being raw, wooden, hand-built – but equally unreal in seeming a little arch, a tad deliberate, and deliberately so. These sets, these props, these costumes, this make-up – everything has been designed and created for visual effect and the ideas it provokes, artistically designed for both reality and unreality but certainly not for realism. Therein lies much of the film’s power.

To be honest, it’s not even clear if we’re actually mean to be in the Old West; there’s certainly no reference to any real locations in the dialogue. Gallowwalkers was filmed in Namibia (specifically just outside Swakopmund) where there are great expanses of desert that don’t really look like the southern USA. Huge sweeping dunes are an African thing more than an American one and, after El Topo, the next most obvious visual reference is probably Dust Devil. The one cow we ever see in the slaughterhouse – pretty much the only animal on screen apart from horses and a few goats – is very obviously an African zebu, not a North American steer. There is even a brief cutaway shot of a sidewinder at one point, and you certainly don’t get those in Nevada! Such inclusion of anomalous fauna must be deliberate and serves, like the famous armadillo in the 1931 Dracula, to emphasise the otherworldliness of the setting. Dracula couldn’t actually be set in Europe, despite all the evidence, and Gallowwalkers can’t actually be set in North America.

There’s also maybe something of a Japanese influence in the film. Characters spend a lot of time standing still, eventually moving suddenly, like in the best samurai films. Parallels between the western genre and the samurai genre are legion, so perhaps this sort of comparison is almost inevitable in a film this stylised. While we’re at it, Kansa and his cohorts will put you in mind of the Mad Max films. So that’s an Australian influence too. All this in a British film with an American star shot in a former German colony in southern Africa. Gallowwalkers really is set everywhere and nowhere.

In respect of all the above Andrew Goth’s third feature is a truly cinematic experience. Some people, suckered in by the ‘zombie western’ idea, might understandably have been disappointed to find that this isn’t just Dawn of the Dead with spurs. That’s fair enough. But what surprised me the most when leafing through online reviews and comments was how many people complained that they couldn’t follow what was going on. Some people apparently didn’t realise that the scenes of Aman killing Kansa and his gang in jail are flashbacks. Even though Snipes looks completely different (no dreads, no beard, no hair, with tribal markings painted on his face) and the cinematography is notably different too.

This really isn’t a hard film to follow. As evidence of that: I can follow it, and I’m not renowned for grasping the intricacies of multi-level plots. Yes, there are flashbacks. Yes, the story is revealed to us piecemeal instead of in a linear, chronological fashion (or a walloping infodump). That’s cinema folks. If you can’t follow this, good luck with Memento or Pulp Fiction…

More justifiable are complaints from some who have seen this that chunks of the film don’t seem to make sense, serve a purpose or connect to anything else. It’s full of dead ends and unexplained introductions (not necessarily in that order). As criticisms go, this is entirely justified.

For example, there’s a group of prisoners whose guards are shot. Aman takes one young man on as a sidekick. But among the other prisoners are a feisty showgirl/thief and a presumably corrupt priest. These two make other appearances but don’t seem to tie in to the main narrative in any significant way. It’s like they’re meant to be major characters, but aren’t. The opening scenes with the railway, the three guys in red and a guy with a distinctive neck-brace, don’t really make much sense, even after we discover much later that the three ‘cardinals’ are part of Kansa’s gang and Neck-brace was the guard who shot Aman. Did I mention that the lead cardinal has his lips sewn together, but is somehow still able to talk? I suspect some of the ADR on this film may not match with what the characters were originally saying (or attempting to say)…

In fact, if there is one thing that is abundantly clear when watching this film, it’s that the movie has had some serious changes made in post-production. Numerous reviewers have complained that the ‘script’ doesn’t make sense but this is so obviously not what was originally written. Full disclosure: from previous correspondence with Joanne Reay I am aware that the finished film is not what Goth and Reay intended and they’re not exactly happy with what was released. But Jesus, even if I didn’t have that email, I’d be able to work it out. Even allowing for the hallucinatory, trippy nature of the story, settings and characters, there are so many anomalies here – so many things missing and so many things present but in the wrong order – that this simply can’t have been what was intended. Like Strippers vs Werewolves, like The Haunting of Ellie Rose, what you see when you sit down to watch Gallowwalkers is very definitely not the director’s cut.

Yet, while this is evident (to anyone reasonably awake who has seen more than three films in their life), it doesn’t matter as much as some reviewers (and possibly the film-makers) believe. The nature of the film, the stylish, stylistic and symbolic, the mystical, metaphorical and metaphysical, the non-realistic, non-linear but non-arbitrary nature of the artwork that pins our eyes open (and ears: music by Stephen Warbeck and Adrian Glen) is sufficiently ‘out there’ that these lacunae and non-sequiturs blend right in. We don’t really need an explanation for the albino colony any more than we need justification for the anomalous snake and cow. This is a film that wants you to free your mind.

The quality of a really good movie can shine through a lesser cut. Even the shortest edit of The Wicker Man is still a classic. The imposition of narration on Blade Runner didn’t stop it from being instantly recognised by many people as a brilliant film. Even the BBFC-trimmed version of Curse of the Werewolf can be seen for the superior Hammer chiller that it is. The fact that the censors chopped so much out of the ending doesn’t lessen the quality of what precedes that butchery, and the fact that it is externally mandated butchery of the film is screamingly obvious. One would be a fool to blame Terence Fisher or Anthony Hinds for the sudden, arbitrary ending of that cut of Werewolf, just as one would be foolish to blame Anthony Shaffer or Robin Hardy for apparently not establishing Sgt Howie’s character with some sort of prologue. (Or indeed lambasting David Peoples, Hampton Fancher or Ridley Scott – or even Philip K Dick! – for relying too much on the crutch of film noir-style narration and tacking on a happy ending.) Christopher Lee always maintained there was a much better version of The Wicker Man in landfill under a motorway somewhere. Maybe there is, but it must be bloody fantastic because what we have is pretty damn good to start with.

How far does the released version of Gallowwalkers deviate from what Goth and Reay wrote and set out to make?  We just don’t know. They have been understandably reluctant to discuss the film. Does a finished version of what we might term ‘The Director’s Cut’ actually exist? Might we ever see it and make a comparison? To be honest, that seems unlikely. People clamoured for a more artistically true, less obviously commercial version of Blade Runner and The Wicker Man, creating a market for revisions and reversions. I’d love to watch Goth’s prefered cut of Gallowwalkers but not many people have seen the film in the first place and I suspect very few of those are hankering to see it again. Which is a shame.

Gallowwalkers wasn’t always called Gallowwalkers. It started life as a script called The Wretched which was set to star Chow Yun-Fat of all people! Which is interesting because the use of a Chinese protagonist in a Wild West setting harks back to – no, not Shanghai Noon! – back to 1970s TV series Kung Fu. You recall: David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine, a shaolin warrior travelling through the Wild West, back in the days when you could cast a Caucasian actor as an Asian character and nobody batted an eyelid  (except all the Asian actors who couldn’t get decent parts). In terms of the ‘mystical western’ subgenre, Kung Fu is definitely the original text and its (indirect) influence on Gallowwalkers is clear.

On the subject of race, it’s interesting that absolutely no reference is made in the film to Aman being black. It’s immaterial. That in itself contributes to the non-realism and other-worldliness of the setting. For a more historically accurate depiction of how race was viewed in that time and place, try watching Blazing Saddles. (Aside from Snipes and the actor playing young Aman in flashbacks, there is one other black actor in the film although he is so heavily made-up that you probably won’t recognise him. Mosca, the guy working for Kansa who prefers to cover his head with lizard skin, is played by the living legend that is Derek Griffiths! He’s come a long way since Play School…)

The promotional website for The Wretched still exists, including a detailed synopsis. Chow Yun-Fat’s character is named Rellik and the sidekick he takes on (called Fabulos in the finished film, played by Riley Smith: Voodoo Academy) is named Twenty-One. (Although not stated in the synopsis, this is because he has six fingers on one hand.) Remember what I said about how difficult I find it to follow complex storylines? Well, the synopsis for The Wretched has me beat. I’ve no idea what’s going on. What is obvious, however, is that not only is it very, very different to the released version of Gallowwalkers, it’s so utterly different that it must also be very different to Andrew Goth’s intended cut of the film. There are a handful of recognisable moments/elements and one consistent character name (Skullbucket, the guy with the big metal helmet) but apart from the basic premise – gunman hunts down resurrected dead bad guys in the Old West – The Wretched and Gallowwalkers are essentially different films.

Under the shooting title Gallowwalker (singular) the film was shot in the Namib Desert in October 2006 with an announced budget of $14 million. Snipes was a big star at the time, just a couple of years on from Blade: Trinity, so it was quite a shock when he was charged with tax evasion. The production had to be put on hold for a while so that he could fly back to the States and arrange his bail. The film wrapped just before Christmas and all the props and costumes were sold off. Somebody in Namibia got Kevin Howarth’s awesome purple coat.

…which was slightly inconvenient because in May 2009 the production restarted for pick-ups and some reshoots in America (either Mexico or the southern USA). Snipes was trying to cram all his various acting commitments into a limited time before heading off to pokey for three years so there was only a couple of weeks to get everything together. Fortunately production manager Carol Muller was able to track down all the required props and costumes and either buy them back or rent them.

I would imagine that these reshoots are where the film diverged from Goth and Reay’s original vision as the press report I’ve seen doesn’t mention Goth at all. So it’s entirely possible he didn’t even direct these bits (whatever they are). Interestingly, this press story is also the only mention I’ve come across of Gallowwalker(s) being conceived as the first part of a trilogy. Although Rudolf Buttendach is the credited editor, Peter Hollywood (Elfie Hopkins) gets an 'Additional Editor' credit which looks suspiciously like an acknowledgement that he was hired to cut together the new version, especially as on his FilmandTVPro page he cites the production company as Boundless Pictures. (Boundless, headed by Brandon Burrows and Courtney Lauren Penn is credited prodco on the film, although the credit block just reads 'Jack Bowyer presents...'.)

Before these reshoots there had been talk of a 2008 release, with Tim Bradstreet allegedly creating a prequel comic-book. A trailer was released in 2008 using comic-book-style graphics to link images. I think all the trailer footage is in the finished film but the lips-sewn-together guy definitely has a different voice. Note that the credited prodcos are not Boundless or Jack Bowyer but Sheer Films (Goth and Reay's own company) and Intandem Films. The absence of Intandem's Gary Smith from the final list of executive producers on the film is quite telling.)

Eventually, six years after it was made, Gallowwalkers finally - and very suddenly - appeared. Its world premiere was on 6th October 2012 at Grimmfest in Manchester (not Frightfest as the Inaccurate Movie Database claims, although it was screened as part of a Frightfest all-nighter in October 2014). I’d like to quote the Grimmfest synopsis here because this guy hits the nail right on the head and should have been plastered all over the DVD sleeve:

The Bastard Love Child Of… BLADE and DUSTDEVIL
Achieving a degree of infamy as the film Wesley Snipes was shooting when he was busted for Tax Evasion, this startling, surreal, supernatural Spaghetti Western combines the visual panache of Sergios Leone and Corbucci with a wild, weird and woolly narrative that plays like something Garth Ennis, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Joe R. Lansdale might dream up between them over several bottles of mescal. Part violent revenge drama, part metaphysical quest, with its tongue partly in its cheek, a morbid quip on its lips and a gun always at the ready, this is destined to become a massive cult favourite. And you saw it here first.

The first home release was the US DVD from Lions Gate in August 2013, followed by discs in Germany (August 2013), the UK (May 2014), then France, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Brazil and maybe some other territories too. What looked like it might become a ‘lost film’ is now widely available.

But people look at this movie and think well gee, if it took six or seven years to get released straight to DVD then it must be terrible. Especially if the star got arrested halfway through production. So viewers are prejudiced before they even put the disc in the machine. They don’t know what to expect, they don’t know the background or the context. Hopefully this review will go a little way towards re-evaluating Gallowwalkers in the perception of horror fans.

Alongside those actors already mentioned, the cast includes Tanit Phoenix (no relation to River) as Aman’s lover, Patrick Bergin as a lawman, Steven Elder (also in Cold and Dark) as the priest, Simona Behlikova (also in werewolf-free British werewolf picture Lycanthropy) as Kansa’s woman, wrestler ‘Diamond' Dallas Page as Skullbucket and hell yeah, Derek Griffiths. DG is The Man as far as I’m concerned. Give him an honorary Bafta right now.

Goth and Reay followed this with the science fiction movie DxM (previously Deus Ex Machina) which likewise premiered at Grimmfest. After finishing his sentence for tax evasion, Snipes set about picking up his acting career including a gig on The Expendables 3.

I’ll wrap up with the only words I can find from Andrew Goth about his film, which were quoted on a poster that said the film was in post (so presumably 2007):

“With Gallowwalker [sic] we are creating a new hero in a mythic western world. Like the best of the spaghetti westerns, Aman’s story is one of blood and vengeance, but his nemesis is unlike any that we have seen before. Kansa was a bad man when he was alive and now he’s back from the dead and relishing his supernatural prowess. Their story plays out against vast desert landscapes that underscore the epic state of their battle. We shot on 2-perf, as Sergio Leone did, which gives  super-wide scope. This retro feel is being enhanced by the latest digital capabilities, which allows us to colour the film in a surreal way and creates a graphic novel feel.” – Andrew Goth, director

MJS rating: A-

Director: Harrison Wall
Writers: Harrison Wall, Mark Maltby
Producer: Mark Maltby
Cast: Shane O’Meara, Lucy-Jane Quinlan, Ripeka Templeton
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Website: www.weaverfishmovie.co.uk

Weaverfish is a pleasant surprise. It is largely unknown, probably because it has only been released as VOD, and is basic premise is hardly inspiring. A group of horny teenagers go somewhere remote to spend the night partying, drinking, smoking and perhaps getting lucky. Many, many horror films have started out that way and the vast majority of them have turned out to be awful.

The secret lies in the characters. Normally the young people in these films are just awful. Self-entitled millennials or sweary, lary chavs. In far too many films the viewer can identify with no-one on screen and basically wants them all to die as soon (and as painfully) as possible.

The six main characters in Weaverfish are all believable and mostly sympathetic. Reece (Shane O’Meara: Waterloo Road) is a sensitive, introspective guy with a camera around his neck. He takes a bit of persuading to let his hair down and party, but he’s up for a drink when offered so he’s not some stick-up-the-arse buzzkill. Matt (Josh Ockenden: The Underwater Realm, Arthur and Merlin) was his best mate at school although they’re not quite as close now. Matt can be a bit of a prick but he’s not a bad lad. He is dating the very cute Charlotte (Lucy-Jane Quinlan: The Cutting Room) for whom Reece has long carried a torch. Quinlan gives a particularly fine performance, balancing Charlotte on a fine line between vulnerability and resilience.

Abi (Jessie Morrell) is Charlotte’s blousy pal. Shannon (Ripeka Templeton) is Reece’s younger sister who is more keen on partying than her brother. Rounding up the sextet is Mike (John Doughty: The Hounds) a slightly older guy with white dreadlocks who is in a band. He could potentially be an arsehole but actually comes across, once we get to know him, like the others, as a rounded, believable, sympathetic character. All of these are people you could quite happily spend some time with. None of them ever do anything inexcusably dumb.

Do you see, other film-makers? It is possible.

The set-up is that there is an area of water, Fountainhead Creek, which has been sealed off both landwards and riverwards since a small child went missing there several years earlier. There is a disused oil refinery behind the fence. Mike and his bandmate Chris (Dusty Rhodes) – who is either bi or just uses that as a way of getting laid – have discovered a gap in the fence across the mouth of the creek through which they squeeze a small inflatable, twice. As well as those mentioned, there are four or five other teenagers, plus plenty of booze, a few pills, some tents and some music equipment.

Among a litany of strong points, Weaverfish’s big weakness is that we spend a long, long time getting to know the characters. They are well-defined, both in themselves and their relationships, but we signed up for a horror movie not a teen drama. The 95-minute film is nearly halfway through before anything unnerving happens, by which time it’s the morning after the night before and people are waking up. There’s a great deal of puking, but that can be put down to last night’s pills and Pilsner – or can it? When half the group disappear along with the boat, presumably ferried back to the town by Chris, the poorly state of Abi and Shannon persuades the remaining six to set off across land, hoping to find a stretch of fence with a road alongside which might allow them to contact someone who can alert the police and call an ambulance. (There is the traditional, brief hold-up-the-phone-got-no-signal scene.)

As it happens, these six are the most clearly developed characters from the original dozen but we didn’t know that until now so we’ve been trying to become familiar with more characters than we needed to. A shorter first act, with fewer secondary characters, would definitely have benefitted the film. It’s good that we have got to know these characters so well and can fully sympathise and empathise with them. It’s good that we can see the Matt/Charlotte relationship coming apart as he surreptitiously targets Shannon, and that we can see that Charlotte really should be with Reese (plus we can see a relationship developing between Abi and Mike). But Act One could have been tightened up without losing that, I think.

So, the problem they face is that Shannon and Abi, as well as feeling sick, have each developed a large patch of distorted skin on their torsos. An attempt to clean this results in a quite startling and disturbing effects shot which is really where the horror kicks in. Once Mike and Matt also admit to having this symptom, it becomes clear that it has been caused by yesterday afternoon’s dip in the creek, which Reece and Charlotte both passed up. Something from that old oil refinery is still floating about in the water, and it’s not good. (Someone comments that they’ve seen no fish. There is also a complete absence of ducks, swans, gulls, herons or any other sort of aquatic wildlife.)

Comparatively little actually happens in the second act, apart from the group moving forward and people feeling worse, so it is tremendously to the credit of film-makers Harrison Wall and Mark Matlby – and their talented cast – that we remain gripped as the film inches inexorably into horror territory before finally tipping over into a full-on sci-fi conspiracy thriller in the short third act. Commendably, the film ends at exactly the right point, a denouement which is both enjoyably bleak and satisfyingly vague. The (partial) revelation of what is going on is utterly startling, but in a jaw-dropping way, not a jump-out-of-your-seat way.

That’s actually another feather in the film’s cap; it never goes for a cat-scare or other cheap horror gags. Everything here is characterisation and narrative.

Wall and Maltby came out of university and went into TV post-production where they saved their salaries in order to fund this £10,000 production. Wall has done editorial gigs on the likes of Dickensian, Humans and Poirot, while Maltby has worked on The Fades, South Riding and Whitechapel. Wall previously directed two shorts on which Maltby provided special effects: sci-fi musical CyberBeat and a horror called The Snatching which has some similarities to Weaverfish. More recently, Maltby has worked as a colourist on features including Blood Moon, Howl and The Haunting of Radcliffe House. Their script was based on an idea (initially much more of an action/sci-fi story) by their friend Thomas Shawcroft who was DP on Weaverfish and whose various camera operator gigs have included Community, Doctor Who and Galavant (meaning he could potentially have worked with Weird Al!).

Shot near Southampton over 15 days in June 2011, the film premiered at the Bootleg Film Festival in Toronto in May 2012 where it picked up the Audience Award and Quinlan won Best Actor (Female). That version ran 100 minutes and although five of those have subsequently been cut, it could stand to lose another ten or so from that first act. There was a private UK screening for cast and crew the following month at the Prince Charles Cinema and the film also screened in Luxembourg in September that year as part of a 'British and Irish' season. Weaverfish was released in this country through Vimeo on Demand in October 2013 while Continuum Motion Pictures (whose other UK titles include Any Minute Now, Survivors and Bikini Girls vs Dinosaurs) handled the American VOD release in September 2014.

I was really genuinely impressed by Weaverfish. It’s not perfect but as a first feature from two young film-makers shot for tuppence ha’penny it’s a very fine piece of work indeed and a step above many comparable indie horrors. It has good casting and acting, good direction, good production values, good technical values and above all a fine script that prioritises characterisation over cheap exploitation. Well done, all involved. I hope this gets a proper DVD release so more people can discover it.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ian David Diaz
Writer: Ian David Diaz
Producers: Ian David Diaz, Angela Banfill
Cast: Oliver Young, Richard Banks, Giles Ward
Country: UK
Year of release: 1996
Reviewed from: VHS tape

In 1999, a low-budget British thriller called The Killing Zone was released straight to VHS.  Directed by Ian David Diaz, it was produced by ‘The Seventh Twelfth Collective’, which was Diaz, Julian Boote and their pals, The same gang made ultra-obscure horror anthology Dead Room (only ever released in Greece and Thailand!), Anglo-Canadian horror Fallen Angels and two American thrillers, Bad Day and Darkly Dreaming Billy Ward.

It’s a lo-o-ong, long time since I’ve seen The Killing Room, but a little digging reveals that it is about a cool, calm underworld assassin named Matthew Palmer. Viewing the world from behind large, thick-framed glasses, Palmer’s name is a tip of the hat to Harry of that ilk and there are other Michael Caine references scattered throughout the three stories which together make up the 65-minute feature.
The first story concerns a couple of small-time crooks who are believed to have stolen some cocaine. Tied to chairs in a warehouse, they are interrogated by a sadistic gangster while Palmer stands implacably by. This story is a remake of a short film which Diaz shot in 1996 called The Interrogation.

The point of all this is that, 20 years on, I found The Interrogation among a pile of VHS tapes I was taking to the skip so decided to give it one last watch before it becomes landfill. It’s a smartly-directed, tightly written, generally well-acted little thriller. Much of the film is experienced crook Fenton (Richard Banks) and first-timer Finn (Oliver Young) tied up and questioned by ‘Mad Dog’ McCann (Giles Ward), a tall, pony-tailed, dinner-jacketed sadist who wants to get this all over and done with so he can make it to a dinner party on time.

Fenton takes his impending death in his stride. Finn is scared shitless. Both are adamant that the contacts they were due to meet were already dead – and without any cocaine – when they got there. McCann doesn’t believe them. While McCann knocks the two around and reveals how much homework he has done on them – he knows their motives, their backgrounds, their needs – Palmer just stands motionless in the background in trench coat and spoddy glasses. But he’s not window dressing, he will become very relevant towards the end of the story.

The reason why all this is of interest to me is the casting. Banks, Young and Ward all reprised their roles when the film was remade as part of The Killing Zone, which starred Padraig Casey as Palmer. But in this short film, Martin Palmer is played by none other than Kevin Howarth.

Kevin’s page on the Inaccurate Movie Database lists his first film as a thriller called Cash in Hand, then relationship drama The Big Swap, both listed as ‘1998’ along with Razor Blade Smile. In fact The Big Swap was his debut, filmed in 1996, followed by RBS then Cash in Hand (filmed as The Find). So this short apparently just predates The Big Swap. By the time that Diaz was shooting the feature version, Kevin already had several films on his CV and either didn’t need to do The Killing Zone or was simply too busy.

Subsequently of course Kevin has become a familiar face to fans of British horror with roles in The Last Horror Movie, Summer Scars, Cold and Dark, Gallowwalkers and The Seasoning House.

If I hadn’t know this was Kevin Howarth, I probably wouldn’t have recognised him. Maybe it’s just the hair, glasses and make-up but he looks somewhat rounder of face, less gaunt than he appears in later films. Once he speaks, however, the voice is unmistakable. Kevin has always been particularly good at portraying largely emotionless characters (much harder than it sounds) and Palmer is about as emotionless as they come. But he’s threatening, in the same way that a gun on a table is threatening.

Although most of the cast of this film disappeared after making this and Dead Room, a few names in the credits have, like young Mr Howarth, gone on to greater things. Co-producer and editor Piotr Szkopiak is now an experienced soap editor, with many episodes of EastEnders, Emmerdale and Corrie to his name. And composer Guy (son of Cliff) Michelmore is now – how cool is this? – the regular composer for animated Marvel projects, including series based on Thor, Hulk, Avengers, Dr Strange and Iron Man.

It’s not quite true to say that there’s no record of The Interrogation anywhere as it has a page on the BFI website, but that’s all. So now it has a review too. It’s a crisply directed, enjoyable short but, unless Ian David Diaz decides to post it online, your chances of ever seeing it are effectively nil. On the other hand, a DVD of The Killing Zone can be picked up easily and cheaply so the story’s there if you want to check it out. Just not with Kevin Howarth.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Cirio H Santiago
Writer: Thomas Mckelvey Cleaver
Producer: Cirio H Santiago
Cast: Rebecca Holden, Chuck Wagner, Lynn-Holly Johnson
Year of release: 1987
Country: Philippines/USA
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS (Pearl Communications)

Cirio H Santiago - your mark of quality when it comes to Filipino movies. And I’m not being cynical - the production values here are a whole notch above many of the man’s contemporaries.

This is yet another post-holocaust adventure that would like to be Mad Max 2 but isn’t, but it does at least have an original premise. The world (well, North America) has reverted to an entirely patriarchal society and women are subjugated - except for a semi-legendary band of femme outlaws called ‘the Sisterhood’ who are said to be witches. In fact, they have various powers derived from the mutational after-effects of the bomb, which manifest themselves at puberty. Or something.

We meet two of these, Alee (Rebecca Holden: Knight Rider, Lycanthrope) and Vera (Barbara Hooper: The Wizard of Speed and Time) as they run up against the gang of thugs led by bearded Mikal (Automan himself, Chuck Wagner). One of the girls has healing powers and one has telekinetic ability, but to be honest I can’t remember which is which. Anyway, they kick Mikal’s arse and send him and his gang on their way in their crudely customised motor vehicles.

In a nearby settlement lives 18-year-old Marya (Lynn-Holly Johnson: Mutant 2, Hyper Space) and her younger brother Gil (Tom McNeeley). Marya has some form of psychic link with her hawk Lady Shri, which her master, Lord Newfield, accepts because it’s useful. But the lord is away and others in the settlement are calling her a witch. Mikal and his engine-revving mates attack the settlement and, before she escapes, Marya sees her brother cut down by Mikal himself. (For some reason, although motor vehicles still exist in this world, no guns have survived so all fighting is done with swords and bows.)

When Marya seeks shelter at a tavern, she meets and befriends Alee and Vera, who are reluctant to accept her into the Sisterhood until they discover her affinity with Lady Shri. Camped for the night, Vera is snatched by Mikal and much of the rest of the movie is Alee and Marya trying to get her back. Mikal at first joins forces with fey, hare-lipped Lord Barak (Robert Dryer: Cyborg 2, Spaceship, Revenge of the Zombie) but that ends unhappily so he teams up instead with Lord Jak (Anthony East: Bloodfist II) to journey through the Forbidden Zone to Calcara, ‘the city of ultimate pleasure.’

The Forbidden Zone, you will not be surprised to hear, is home to various unpleasant mutated folks who chase Alee and Marya into a cave network, wherein they find a whole bunch of pre-holocaust stuff - including loads and loads of rifles and some handy armoured personnel carriers which they are of course able to drive straight away. With this they head for Calcara, which is ruled by loud, jovial Lord Kragg (Kenneth Peerless: Bloodfist) but frankly for a city of ultimate pleasure it seems rather devoid of bars and whores.

Lord Kragg receives Mikal’s gift of a witch but, wouldn’t you know it, he’s already got some! A whole room full of captured Sisterhood members in manacles. When Marya and Alee break in and rescue Vera (and kill lots of guards) some sort of spectral goddess appears and all the manacles fall off the Sisterhood who magically fade away. Eh?

I’ve got a soft spot for this movie (which was just called Sisterhood for its UK DVD release, possibly to avoid confusion with the similarly titled David DeCoteau picture), mainly because it isn’t just a clone of Mad Max 2 or Escape from New York (1980s Italian producers, are you listening?). The cinematography by Ricardo Remias (She Devils in Chains, The Muthers, Vampire Hookers, Anak Ng Bulkan) is good and the fights and stunts are well-handled; Ronald Asinas (Terminal Virus), Day Guerrero (Robo Warriors) and Fred Esplana (Raw Target) are credited as stunt choreographers.

Sure, there are plenty of cliches and some silly bits but it’s more enjoyable than many other films in this genre. The mere fact that I’ve watched it twice is evidence of that. The acting is better than one would expect, and if Johnson is a little wooden occasionally she is also very good at playing up her character’s vulnerability.

Also in the cast are Henry Strzalkowski (Desert Warrior, Equalizer 2000, Angel of Destruction, also credited as casting assistant), David Light (Cobra Mission, Future Hunters), Jim Moss (Robo Warriors, Future War, Zombie Flesh Eaters 3) and Peter Shilton (Future Hunters, Equalizer 2000 but not - despite what the Inaccurate Movie Database reckons - the former goalkeeper for Nottingham Forest and England!). Composer Jun Latonio (Fast Gun, Killer Instinct) is anglicised to ‘Jim Latison’ on the sleeve. Ronnie Cruz was the art director, Teresa Mercader did the make-up and Elvia Santos was in charge of wardrobe, while special effects are credited to Juan Marbella Jr - Santiago veterans all.

It’s a Cirio H Santiago movie and, let’s face it, the man’s a cinema legend, having helmed more than fifty films from Filipino Wonder Woman series entry Darna and the Tree Monster to one-boy-and-his-pterodactyl remake Anak Ng Bulkan/Vulcan, as well as producing such WIP classics as Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. I’m not ashamed to say that I will always happily watch any movie with Santiago’s name in the credits.

MJS rating: B

Review originally posted 19th April 2008.

Director: Tony Benedict
Writer: Tony Benedict
Producer: Tony Benedict
Cast: Three bears, Santa
Country: USA
Year of release: 1970
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Inasmuch as this site has any sort of tradition, it’s that I review something Christmassy at Christmas time. This tatty old VHS had been sitting on the shelf for about 13 or 14 months, I believe, before I finally persuaded young TF, just turned three, to sit down and watch it on Christmas Eve 2006. This was preceded by a couple of weeks of: “Why don’t we watch Santa and the Three Bears?” “I don’t like it.” “How can you not like it if you’ve never watched it?” “I don’t like it.” And it was followed by TF insisting on watching the video again, later that same Christmas Eve, before he went to bed. And again on Boxing Day.

Kids, eh?

This old VHS tape is so astoundingly cheap that it doesn’t have a company name or catalogue number anywhere on the sleeve or the tape itself. On the other hand, the pictures front and back do actually match the characters on screen, which is something.

The first thing to stress is that these three bears, despite being referred to in the title as “the Three Bears” are not in fact those three bears, ie. The Three Bears. They’re just... three bears. There’s a mother bear named Nana and two bears cubs, Nikomi and Chinook (which I only know as a type of helicopter) and they live in Yellowstone National Park. (Although I have discovered that an identically titled but unrelated children’s book exists which does feature The Three Bears.)

Winter is coming so it’s time to hibernate but the two cubs are excited by the concept of Christmas, which they have heard about from a balding, rotund park ranger known only as Mr Ranger. As Nana settles down, they sneak off to Mr Ranger’s cabin, where he has put up a tree and a bunch of decorations, and he explains to them all about what Christmas involves: Santa and the elves and the reindeer and what have you (and to be fair, a brief mention of the Nativity). Then he returns them to their cave.

But the cubs are very excited and determined to wait up and see Santa. The kindly Mr Ranger, not wanting to disappoint them, puts on a beard and a Santa Claus costume and sets off with a sack of bear-suitable toys - including, somewhat oddly perhaps, teddy bears - but the weather closes in and he cannot make his way through the snow blizzard so he takes shelter for the night in a bus stop.

With no sign of Saint Nick, Nana eventually admits to her two disappointed young’uns that in fact ‘Father Christmas’ is just the Park Ranger and that’s why he’s not coming this year. So when a rotund figure appears silhouetted in the cave entrance and leaves a couple of stockings of toys, the cubs think it’s just Mr Ranger. Except of course that shortly afterwards, the blizzard having abated, Mr Ranger appears with two more stockings.

What? But then... who...? (“Ho ho ho!”) You get the picture.

Now, this cheapo-cheapo VHS release says the films run approximately 30 minutes but in fact it’s about 45 minutes or so. Santa doesn’t actually appear until more than 20 minutes in, and then only briefly in Mr Ranger’s illustrated explanation, although he does, as I say reappear at the end. Moreover, for the first ten minutes there are no bears either, as Mr Ranger potters around Yellowstone Park, accompanied by one of several instantly forgettable, sub-Snow White, choral songs, checking on all the animals. TF and I were looking at the box, wondering if we had the right tape, especially as the title card is missing from the opening credits.

And this really is a terrible copy. The sound is muffled beyond belief, making the dialogue and especially the singing borderline unintelligible. The picture quality is poor but then the animation is strictly Hanna-Barbera level so there’s not a lot of detail lost. Interestingly, there are some attempts at imaginative direction, including some POV shots when Mr Ranger looks down at the two bear cubs at his feet and some jazzy sequences when images appear and disappear in coloured rectangles of different sizes and dimensions.

Speaking of different sizes, it turns out that this anonymous looking little movie has quite a history. It was originally released theatrically in the USA in 1970 as a 76-minute feature film, the extra time being taken up with a lengthy live-action wrap-around in which another park ranger introduces his three grandchildren to the story of 'Santa and the Three Bears'. So that means that the film has a park ranger tell some kids about a park ranger who tells some bear cubs about Christmas. The whole sequence with Santa and the elves is an explanation inside an explanation. Wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Both the feature version and this animation-only version, which apparently ran for years on USA Network, are currently available on DVD.

There are some big names attached to this obscurity. Mr Ranger (and possibly Santa too) is voiced by Hal Smith who started out in westerns in the 1940s and moved into animation voices in the 1960s. He did a lot of additional voices for The Flintstones and other Hanna-Barbera shows, played Otis Campbell in The Andy Griffith Show and was the voice of Owl in Winnie the Pooh films and TV shows for Disney. Santa seems to have been a regular gig for him as he donned the metaphorical beard in Casper’s First Christmas (1979), Yogi’s First Christmas (1980), The Town That Santa Forgot (1993) and an episode of a Disney cartoon I’ve never heard of called Bonkers. Nana Bear is Wilma Flintstone herself, the legendary Jean Vander Pyl.

Writer/director/producer Tony Benedict was a frequent animation writer in the 1960s and 1970s, racking up credits on The Flintstones, The Jetsons (he created the character of Astro the dog), The Pink Panther Show, The Yogi Bear Show and various Warner Brothers holiday specials. He started out in uniform, drawing cartoons for a military newspaper, then sent some of his work to Disney where he was taken on as an apprentice animator on Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians. After three years he transferred to UPA to work on Mr Magoo then in 1969 he went to H-B, adding scriptwriting to his work as an animator. And he’s still going; some of this info came from a newspaper interview he did only last month.

Bizarrely, the live-action wrap-arounds (of which I have only seen frame grabs on various fansites) were directed by Barry Mahon, better known for nudie nonsense and exploitation fare such as Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly, Nudes on Tiger Reef and The Beast That Killed Women. Shortly before he retired from film-making in the early 1970s he did turn to kiddie fare, directing versions of Thumbelina, The Wonderful Land of Oz and Jack and the Beanstalk. He also made another Crimbo obscurity, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. Mahon and Benedict reunited the following year on a truly bizarre Christmas special, Santa’s Christmas Elf (Named Calvin), which consists entirely of still photos of posed puppets. Mahon produced and directed it while Benedict designed and built the characters for what was probably not an homage to La Jetee but, you know, it would be fun if it was.

Santa and the Three Bears is pleasant enough, with a limited number of likeable characters and a simple message that is positive and heart-warming without being cloying or overly sentimental. That it has instantly become TF Simpson’s favourite film - apparently displacing Finding Nemo - suggests that there is something magic in it that a three-year-old can determine, even through the dreadful picture and sound quality of this tape.

But it does present a slight moral dilemma in that the central story features Nana Bear telling Chinook and Nikomi that (gulp) Santa doesn’t really exist and it’s just father-figure Mr Ranger in a costume. The fact that Santa is shown to actually exist after all doesn’t detract from the problem which I’m sure you can see: it raises doubts about the reality of Father Christmas, thus making it perhaps suitable for slightly older children but of dubious recommendation for three-year-olds (unless the dialogue is hidden behind a muffled sound, as here fortunately).

You see, I’ve been thinking about this and the fact that, like most people, I don’t recall ever actually believing in Santa Claus. I must have done - and TF certainly does, bless him - but it’s not ‘belief’ in the sense that we normally use. It’s not a conscious decision or an evaluation of the available evidence. Adults believe in flying saucers or ghosts or God because they consider what they have been told - about evidence or faith or whatever - and on balance they deem the existence of such a thing likely or even certain. But even the most devout believer is aware that there are those who don’t believe, that belief is a choice.

Small children don’t ‘believe’ in Santa Claus, they simply accept that he exists, and that he has flying reindeer and brings presents and is generally magical. They believe in him the same way that they believe in policemen or bicycles: it’s part of their model of the world around them. They don’t doubt, they accept on the available evidence, and ‘Mummy and Daddy told me’ is pretty strong evidence for a three-year-old mind. So when TF discovers or realises - as he must do one distant day - that Santa is just a fiction, it won’t destroy his belief, it will simply cause him to re-evaluate his model of the world around him. At least I hope so.

In the meantime, I might need to invest in a DVD of Santa and the Three Bears before next year because this tape is starting to wear out.

MJS rating: B
TFS rating: A++
Review originally posted 23rd December 2006

Director: Mark McDermott
Writer: Mark McDermott
Producers: Mark McDermott, Paul Smith
Cast: Mark McDermott, Rosie Tratt, Christopher McAleer
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: Online

I really didn’t think I’d ever see Harmony’s Requiem. It was released online in 2011 but disappeared almost immediately, together with any trace of its creator Mark McDermott, including his Facebook page and his website. There was an IMDB page for the film, a British Council page and a trailer on YouTube but after that every mention was just those fake sites which claim to have free-to-view illegal copies of any movie you stick into Google.

The premise sounded intriguing. Here’s the British Council synopsis:


And here’s the IMDB plot summary:

A reclusive composer struggling to arrange the most poignant score of his life emerges from his home in search of inspiration. However, his naive curiosity drives him to begin preying on unsuspecting people and tormented with inner turmoil he swings between right and wrong with increasing intensity. Can he find redemption before he goes too far?

All well and good but where was the film? Here’s what I wrote in issue 37 of Scream in 2016 in Part 8 of my ‘21st Century Frights’ series of articles:

Good luck seeking out Harmony’s Requiem, a film which seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. Directed by Mark McDermott in 2010 as Silent Terror, this Oxford-set chiller involves a composer who seeks inspiration in serial murder – and more than that I cannot tell you. It was available through Amazon Prime at one point but not any longer. McDermott made no further films and is nowhere to be found. His Facebook account has been deleted. No-one ever reviewed this movie when it was available. Aside from an IMDB page and a trailer on YouTube there is no evidence that it ever existed. Yet we are talking about a movie released only five years ago! This is why it is so important to document these movies now – because in the digital world reality is fleeting. If anyone ever saw Harmony’s Requiem, or knows how I might get to see it, please please get in touch.

I didn’t really expect anything to come of this plea but a little while later I received an email from a kind-hearted, observant Scream reader named Karen Van Dahlen with a link to an online version of the film on the Amazon Studios website. I think I had actually already checked this out but thought it contained only the trailer. I hadn’t realised that by clicking on ‘Show all work’ and then on ‘Video 1 – Director’s Original’ I could access the full 90-minute movie.

That very evening I sat down to watch Harmony’s Requiem. I was probably the first person to watch this ultra-obscure feature film in the past five years and almost certainly the only person to watch it who didn’t know a member of the cast or crew personally. And here is what I found.

Harmony’s Requiem is simply brilliant. It is a powerful, disturbing, frightening, gripping, intriguing, thought-provoking, genuinely clever and original slice of modern British horror. It is a lost treasure, an undiscovered gem. The sort of discovery that makes this passion of mine all worthwhile. Bear in mind that in recent weeks, as part of the research for my next book, I have sat through a cascade of cinematic shite-ola that includes The Coven, Crying Wolf, Exorcism, Fantacide, The Hike, Knife Edge, The Quiet Ones, The Reeds, Temptation, Voodoo Lagoon and more Philip Gardiner movies than I care to name. But I would sit through all that crap again if at the end of it I could discover another unknown feature of the quality of Harmony’s Requiem.

This movie has instantly marked out for itself a place in my top ten British horror movies of the 21st century. I haven’t stopped thinking about it for 24 hours. I really, really want more people to see this movie. It may be that other people will look at Harmony’s Requiem and think, well that was crap. Simpson up to his usual hyperbolic bollocks again. You can’t win them all.

But I am genuinely excited by this film. By both the movie itself and the fact that it has finally come to light and I have a chance to share it with others.

So what is Harmony’s Requiem actually about? Well, my summation that it is an “Oxford-set chiller [which] involves a composer who seeks inspiration in serial murder” was wide of the mark. I think only two people get killed in this film, both towards the end, off-screen and almost incidentally. The main character is not a serial killer, though he is an aspiring composer and the film is set in Oxford.

We’ll call the main character K. We do eventually find out his name, though it has no special significance. The reason why I’m assigning him a code-name is because he never speaks throughout the film. He grunts and occasionally roars or screams or whimpers but even when interacting directly with other people he has no dialogue. We’re never told whether he actually can speak. We also never see his face.

K lives in a flat with modern décor that has recently gone to seed. Some of his doors have been crudely boarded up and he is reduced to eating cold baked beans directly off the kitchen counter, among rotting food. When we first meet K he is attempting to create music on his electronic keyboard but it is awful and discordant and he knows it. He smashes a small toy piano and then, still furious with himself, smashes an actual upright piano. Then he storms outside where he walks the streets and parks, watching other people from a distance.

Most (but not all) of this is shot POV but it’s only a little way in, when an angry man challenges him, that we realise K is actually carrying a camera everywhere and filming what he sees. So yes, this is found footage but it is a rare example of how to use that most over-used of filming styles in a positive, effective way. This is not some stupid, lazily-constructed, cut-price movie about putting cameras everywhere in a haunted house or going camping and filming every single moment of the trip. K’s use of his camera is intrinsic to who he is and to the story we will see unfold. Mentally challenged, painfully shy, socially inept, his camera with its zoom feature is the only way he can interact – covertly and at a distance – with the world and with other people.

Back at home, K uploads his secretly filmed videos of strangers to YouTube (here called iTubeU to avoid any copyright problems). This aspect of the story fades away as the film progresses but is nevertheless important to the plot. Produced just five years after YouTube was invented, McDermott’s film is a remarkably astute take on the idea and its potential for unpleasant or unethical usage. When K follows a young woman (Victoria Tyrrell, now Victoria Fitz-Gerald) who has left her friends and is obviously angry and upset, he thinks she is about to jump off a bridge so grabs her. His POV footage of this incident ends up on his iTubeU channel but the woman discovers the clip and uploads her own clip talking to camera about how angry she is with this weirdo.

K continues to secretly film people around him, from a distance, often from behind foliage or a fence. Though there is nothing overtly sexual about his voyeurism, he does focus mostly on young women. It’s clear that his driver is idealised, lonely romanticism rather than lust or masturbatory fantasy – although that’s not going to change the views of those women who spot him (or their boyfriends). At intermittent points in the narrative we are reminded that K is also driven by his desire to compose music. Mark McDermott himself is K but in the scenes where K actually plays the keyboard it's Olly Hamilton, a professional pianist who does music arrangements for BBC religious programmes and has accompanied the likes of Lesley Garrett and Katherine Jenkins.

After a while, K starts to concentrate on a girl he first spots jogging. Jane (Rosie Tratt) lives in a smart mews house and unwisely keeps her front door key under a plant pot. After leaving some flowers on her doorstep, K returns and enters the house. His POV exploration of Jane’s home is genuinely disturbing, an invasion of privacy that can’t help but make us wonder if anyone has been in our own homes. But when K realises – and we realise with him – that Jane is not out jogging, she’s in, she’s upstairs, she’s in the bath, she’s completely oblivious to the stranger in her house, that’s when the film really starts to unnerve.

This scene (and others) reminded me of the home invasion sequences in The Last Horror Movie, but with the tension ramped up to eleven. We at least knew what Max Parry was going to do. We at least knew who he was, what he wanted. We knew he was sane and lucid if amoral. We really don’t know anything about K except that he is mad enough (and strong enough) to smash up an entire piano and has absolutely no idea how to relate to other people. We’re genuinely afraid for what he might do in this situation.

A great strength of Harmony’s Requiem, which stems from the POV/found footage approach, is that we empathise with K. Don’t go in there. Don’t go up there. She’ll see you. She’ll hear you. We’re worried about what will happen. Worried for naïve, innocent, mentally disturbed K as much as for Jane. Other films may place us in the position of the voyeur but McDermott places us inside the voyeur’s head, to the extent that for much of the film it’s easy to forget that we’re seeing the world through a camera. K is not a bad man. He surely doesn’t even realise that what he is doing is wrong. Though he does, I think, appreciate the potential consequences of his actions, which is that Jane’s boyfriend Mike (Christopher McAleer, also in time-travel fantasy Waiting for Dawn) is going to kick seven shades of shit out of the intruder if/when he finds him. But we feel sorry for K, a lost, lonely soul who just wants some human companionship and has no idea how to go about finding it.

We certainly don’t feel sorry for Mike, a manipulative arsehole. The film’s sole, perfectly judged, audacious moment of humour comes when Mike, angling to persuade Jane to move in with him, creates evidence of a second ‘intrusion’. When K, who has understandably taken a dislike to Mike, realises what is happening he sneaks into the house and confounds the boyfriend’s plan by tidying everything up!

But a subsequent intrusion convinces K that his pathetic devotion to Jane is unfounded (of course it is, although we never expected the evidence to be quite as shocking as what he finds). This sends K off the deep end, actively chasing women. Around this time I was thinking of Harmony’s Requiem as a modern take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame: the lonely social reject, pathetically fixating on a woman unaware of his existence. Then suddenly I found myself watching a modern take on a different classic horror tale of lost love as the bridge girl from earlier and two friends (James Portway and Ashley Harvey, now Ashley Bowden) spot K and give chase, hunting down the weirdo, seeking to unmask the ‘hooded loner’. Suddenly I was watching The Phantom of the Opera…

In another audacious plot development, while K escapes injury and unmasking, his pursuers steal his camera and for the next 15 minutes or so of the movie they film each other discussing the hooded loner. K has disappeared from his own POV story but at the same time he is still present in a way because if we are K and we are the camera then the camera is K. This is still his story. We don’t know how he copes without his technological comfort blanket but he eventually regains it – and by this point the film is starting to become nasty as well as creepy.

Yet we also take a step back into mundane reality. K’s visit to his GP (Ruth Curtis: Tormented) to obtain a replacement inhaler reminds us that he is, or at least was at one time, a normal member of society. His reclusive nature is a relatively recent development – and the revelation of what has caused, or at least contributed to, that personality change is one of the film’s simplest but most shocking ideas.

In the third act, after finding himself once again a hunted quarry but fighting back, K wanders far from home, trying to make sense of his fractured, lonely life. An act of kindness leads him into a situation where, through a combination of naivety, social awkwardness and moral confusion we witness him committing a crime potentially far, far worse than what has happened so far. Fist in mouth, we scream “Don’t do that!” but he does it anyway and our genuine fear for the repercussions of K’s action, an action which places him utterly outside of acceptable society, twists our guts as we watch events unfold.

I don’t want to go into any more detail. I’ve said enough already to hopefully intrigue you without spoiling the plot. There is a lot more to the story than what I have described above, and a great deal more to the character despite his faceless, inarticulate nature. K is both simple and complex, and neither good nor bad. He is a classic horror icon unable to cope with the world around him: as innocent and naïve as Frankenstein’s monster, as cruelly mistreated and unjustly feared as King Kong.

Rare indeed is the film which grips me like Harmony’s Requiem did. At first I had my doubts: was this going to be 90 minutes of a screaming man smashing a piano? But very swiftly I fell into an understanding of what this film was trying to achieve. I was carried along by the skilfully constructed story and the razor-sharp direction (and, it has to be said, quite excellent acting from the supporting cast caught by K’s lens). I felt myself bound up in K’s life, equally horrified by his transgressions of social acceptability and by the threatened consequences of society’s reaction to his faux pas. I can’t remember the last time I genuinely enjoyed a horror film this much: the twists and turns of the plot mirroring the way my stomach was twisting and turning as each revelation came to light, as each new event diverted in unexpected, unwelcome directions.

Wow.

So here’s what I know about Mark McDermott and Harmony’s Requiem.

The film was shot in Oxford between April and June 2010 with post-production completed in August of that year. Some of the cast have no other credits but one notable name is Helen Holman (as ‘Woman walking to church’), an experienced actress whose other British horror gigs include Jacob’s Hammer, Aggressive Behaviour and Spirital Phantoma. Max Van De Banks (Soul Searcher, The Dead 1 and 2, Siren Song) provided the make-up while the visual effects were by David Laird (UFO, Kill Keith, The Scar Crow, The Crypt).

Mark McDermott became interested in film-making while studying at Lancaster University where he made his first two short horror films, No Fear and Screaming Out Silently. After a few more shorts his first feature-length work was a drama called The Jigsaw of Life. Next was a short film called Perception, shot in one day in June 2009, starring the aforementioned Helen Holman and Paul Smith, who shares producer credit on Harmony’s Requiem. (Smith also shares a 'story by' credit with Mark and Victoria McDermott.) Perception premiered at the London Independent Film Festival in 2010 and a few weeks later McDermott started work on this, his masterpiece. The shooting title was Silent Terror which is misleadingly exploitative and anyway Harmony’s Requiem makes sense at the end of the film in a totally unexpected way.

McDermott’s next project was going to be a comedy, Inspector Dackery Investigates Zetland Street (which hopefully would also have undergone a title change) but this never appeared; he was also developing something called The Human Condition. He was very active on the Oxford film-making scene, running the local branch of Shooting People – but somewhere around 2011 Mark McDermott packed it all in. Possibly because of the two great bugbears of any creative person who also has to pay the rent – day-job and family. (The fact that his wife Victoria plays 'Pregnant woman in surgery' could be a clue!)

For a short while McDermott ran his own corporate video company then in 2007 he started work at Oxford University where he has remained ever since. He now works in the University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Clinical Health, which sounds like a pretty cool place to earn a living (certainly a bit more impressive than the Leicester University Marketing Division!). There are numerous people called Mark McDermott around the UK, but a little flexing of my journalistic investigation muscles has confirmed to me that this is definitely the guy who made Harmony’s Requiem, despite the complete absence of any reference to film-making in his current digital footprint. (And not just because of the Oxford connection.)

Harmony’s Requiem had a single cinema screening for cast and crew in Oxford in October 2010. In March 2011 it was made available online through the now defunct mcdermottmovies.com website, along with a director's video diary. The version on Amazon Studios was uploaded in June 2011. And has sat there, unseen and unknown, ever since. (Despite what I said in Scream, I don't think it was on Amazon Prime. I may have been getting my Prime and Studios mixed up.)

It really looks to me like no-one outside of Mark McDermott’s social/professional circle ever saw this film. Presumably he was planning to submit it to festivals and distributors before real life overtook him, as it overtakes so many of us. Harmony’s Requiem was orphaned and forgotten.

Well no more. I’m here to rescue this brilliant, hugely enjoyable British horror film from obscurity. Please take the time to watch it, discuss it, review it. If you agree with me that this is an absolute belter of a film, let’s make it better known. Programming a festival? Maybe we can get this screened. Maybe we can find a distributor. Harmony’s Requiem deserves to be seen and appreciated by anyone with a fondness for modern British horror.

I just totally, totally dug this film. I really, really hope you will too.

MJS rating: A+

Director: Steve Barker
Writer: Steve Barker
Producers: John O’Hara, Kieran Parker
Cast: Amanda Loy Ellis, Olivia Shaw, Alex Zed Fodor
Country: UK
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: VHS

Sally Kerosene is one of a number of 20-year-old VHS tapes I recently came across and watched. The principal interest in this one being that it is an early work by Steve Barker, creator of the Outpost trilogy.

This near-future, film noir cyberthriller is about half an hour long and stars Amanda Loy-Ellis (subsequently in episodes of Cracker, Peak Practice etc) in the title role. Produced just three years or so after the web was invented, just as ‘the internet’ was becoming a thing, there is a charmingly retro feel to the film as Sally and her partner Max (Tim Poole, also in Stephen Gallagher-scripted mini-series Oktober) explore the net using VR goggles and gloves, which was kind of how we all hoped it might be.

Underneath Sally’s sprightly, cynical narration we’re told about how she and Max worked for crime boss Parry (Gregory Cox – later in X-Men: First Class!) but came a cropper when the online information they were stealing was also stolen by someone else. Sally is betrayed by Max and ends up being driven around by a couple of hitmen (Alex Zed Fodor and the always watchable Tom Wu– Ra.One, Mutant Chronicles– who around this time was doing bit parts in episodes of Cracker and Thief Takers).

Interspersed with this are scenes of Sally talking with her mother (Olivia Shaw) who would very much like her daughter to settle down, dress a bit more feminine and give some idea of what she does for a living. These scenes are in colour while the main story is in black and white, plus there is a fun spoof cop show in distorted hypercolour which Sally watches on her ‘interactive TV’. Nic Osborne was the DP and some fine work indeed is on show here. The whole thing is neatly snipped together thanks to the adroit editing of Hardeep Takhar and Andrew Ward (who later worked on Wallace and Gromit!).

Sally Kerosene is a crisp, smart 30-minute short of the sort that they don’t make them like any more. Made back in the days when there was almost no way for something like this to be seen (except at festivals), this is a calling card as much as anything. But it’s also a neat little film, a half-hour story told over half an hour, reliant on its script, acting, direction, photography and design rather than flashy gimmicks. That said, Sally is a fun character in a fun world and there’s no reason she couldn’t have returned in a feature.

This was Steve Barker’s graduation film, produced at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. It played some festivals and won a few awards, including Best Short at Houston, but its biggest exposure was on TV. Back when there were only four channels and the fourth one was actually good, there was a C4 series called Shooting Gallery which each week collected together two or three impressive short films. This slot actually ran for several years and a few episodes are available on All4 – but not the November 1995 episode ‘Images of Femininity’ which included Sally Kerosene.

It’s clear from comments that lie scattered on various forums and blogs that Steve Barker’s film made a strong impression on those who saw it (and understandably so). For example, I found a 2009 blog post by Chris Regan, director of Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw, in which he describes Sally Kerosene as, in his opinion, “the greatest short film ever made…Essentially, it's a British cyberpunk thriller that manages to be huge in scale and scope whilst never over-reaching it's meagre budget. And the title character is super cool.”

Sally Kerosene was Steve Barker’s entry into the film industry, helping him to get his foot in some doors and establish a name for himself. After a number of writing gigs including crime thriller Plato’s Breaking Point and true-life crime caper The Great Dome Robbery, Steve made his mark with 2008’s Outpost and its 2012 sequel (for the third film he handed the directorial reins to Sally/Outpost producer Kieran Parker). More recently he shot second unit for Paul Hyett on Howl and now his latest feature The Rezort (aka Generation Z) is lined up to screen at Frightfest next week (it has already played Edinburgh and had a limited theatrical release in Spain).

For some reason, Sally Kerosene has never appeared online. In fact there's almost no record of it outside of a BFI page. It's not on the IMDB and there isn't a single image anywhere on the net (apart from the VHS sleeve I've just scanned). I know a lot of people would like to see it so maybe once Steve has finished promoting The Rezort he could dig out a copy. Until then, my VHS tape and a few off-air copies held by Chris Regan and others are the only evidence of this corking sci-fi romp.

MJS rating: A

Director: Ivan Cardoso
Writer: RF Luchetti
Producer: Ivan Cardoso
Cast: Andréa Beltrão, Nuno Leal Maia, Ariel Coelho
Country: Brazil
Year of release: 1986
Reviewed from: Portuguese VHS

Back in the 1990s, I was twice invited (with my journalist’s hat on) to attend the Fantasporto Film festival in the delightful Portuguese town of Oporto. And I had a grand old time on both occasions, hanging out with film-makers and journos from around the world.

Among those people who were present on both occasions was a Brazilian fellow named Ivan Cardoso, several of whose films were released in Portugal on VHS by Mario Dorminsky, the driving force behind Fantasporto. I bought three such tapes... and they proceeded to sit on my shelf for many years, gradually becoming less and less likely to be watched as DVD became the defacto format and the number of VHS players in the Simpson household (and indeed, around the world) reduced considerably.

So now it’s 2008 and I’ve got a couple of hours access to the one remaining VHS/DVD combi when it’s not being used by either Mrs S or The Boy, so I thought what the heck, let’s watch a dodgy Brazilian horror movie. Unfortunately the first tape that I tried, O Escorpiao Escarlate, turned out to be knackered so I’ll probably never know what that’s about. However, The Seven Vampires played okay.

Now, there’s very little been written about As Sete Vampiras and most of what has been written is, naturally, in Portuguese. But I can grasp that lingo well enough to understand that this film is intended as a comedy. That’s actually quite important because my experience of popular Latin American cinema (which I will admit, pretty much stops at the Mexican border) is that is it often over-the-top, exaggerated action and that the presence of an obvious comedy character does not in and of itself indicate that the film in toto is a comedy. Actually, that’s not just Latin America; it may be a broad, sweeping generalisation but that seems to be common among indigenous popular cinemas in general once you get away from Europe/Hollywood and their obvious sphere of influence. In other words, indigenous cinemas which were destined to remain indigenous. And obviously I’m talking about all this, for the most part, in the past tense.

So, to get down to brass tacks: is this a clumsily made, naive attempt at a horror movie or is it a pastiche of clumsily made, naive attempts at horror movies? The geographical and temporal distance (As Sete Vampiras was released in 1986 so it was already a decade old when I bought a copy) robs the film of cultural reference points for this reviewer. But the Portuguese blurb includes the word ‘comedia’ so I have to take this as a pastiche. In which case I suppose it’s quite good. (Actually, I should have just checked the sleeve which proclaims, ‘Comédia, terror e... muito sexo!’)

There is also the question of the film’s historical setting. Unless Brazil in the mid-1980s still looked like this - which seems unlikely - then the film appears to be set in the 1940s, yet it gives the impression of having been made in the 1960s (or maybe early ‘70s). It’s all very confusing.

But not as confusing as the plot, which opens with two workmen discussing a very large crate, recently unloaded from a ship. Their boss doesn’t know what’s inside either: “I only know that we have to put meat in that hole every three hours,” is the first of many superb (and I suspect, accurate) subtitles. The crate belongs to Fred Rossi (Ariel Coelho, who was in John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest and is a dead ringer for HP Lovecraft), a botanist who has shipped in a large carnivorous plant.

This rather impressive, Audrey II-style prop has a large central florette with three or four leaves/petals, each equipped with numerous long, sharp teeth, plus a dozen or more snake-like appendages, each ending in a hungry mouth. Fred’s wife Silvia (Nicole Puzzi) obviously isn’t the sharpest chisel in the toolbox because she stares at this wriggling, writhing specimen for quite some time before exclaiming, “That plant just moved!” She is off to a dance class run by her friend Clarisse (Susana Matos) and is concerned about leaving Fred alone. “Don’t worry,” he assures his wife. “The plant won’t eat me.”

But while Silvia and Clarisse change into their leotards (alongside a full-frontal nude extra), Fred gets too close to the plant while he’s feeding it raw meat and it chows down on his head. When Silvia returns home, she finds the plant covered in blood and with an eyeball staring at her from one of its mouths...

Sometime later, the widowed Silvia enters into business with Rogério (Johnny Herbert - no, not the racing driver) who owns a swinging nightclub in need of a star attraction. The current show includes a fake-oriental magician who calls himself Fu Man Chu and a swinging rock’n’roll band - Bob Rider and his Crazy Rhythm. Rider is played by Leo Jaime who was a genuine Brazilian pop star, formerly with João Penca e Seus Miquinhos Amestrados. He also appeared in Cardoso’s O Escorpiao Escarlate and starred in the Brazilian version of The Rocky Horror Show! Under the Fu Man Chu make-up is veteran actor Wilson Grey, whose career from 1948 to 1996 incorporated John Hurt-starring prison drama Kiss of the Spider-Woman, a 1972 version of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and several films in the Trapalhões series, notably haunted house comedy Os Fantasmas Trapalhões, Rider Haggard knock-off O Trapalhão nas Minas do Rei Salomão and superhero spoof O Incrível Monstro Trapalhão. But the Wilson Grey picture that I most want to see is the 1977 epic Costinha e o King Mong in which popular comedian Costinha encounters a jungle tribe who worship a giant man-in-a-suit gorilla. Apparently featuring a climax in which the ape climbs the Christ the Redeemer statue, this looks like it could give Queen Kong a serious run for its money...

Anyway, Silvia recommends a dance act called ‘The Seven Vampires’, a septet of attractive young ladies who gyrate to goth-lite music amid much stage smoke. And here’s the film’s biggest disappointment: not only does As Sete Vampiras not have seven vampires in it, it doesn’t even have one vampire (as far as I can tell). It’s just the name of a dance act. What a cheesy swizz!

However, there is the possibility of a real bloodsucker as we are introduced to the long-suffering (but unnamed) Chief of Police (Bene Nunes) and comedy cop Inspector Pacheco (Colé Santana) who is less irritating than one might expect. “Two crimes in two months!” bemoans the Chief, which is either meant to be ironic or hasn’t been translated properly. Both crimes are actually murders where the body has been drained of blood and this leads the ever-alert coppers to suspect that the same person may be responsible. Pacheco is adamant that they are dealing with a vampire but the Chief poopoos this ludicrous idea.

Meanwhile Ivete (Simone Carvalho), one of the ‘vampire’ dancers, is worried for some reason and goes to see private detective ‘Raimundo Marlou’ - I kid you not - (Nuno Leal Maia) who spends his time reading detective comics but is fortunately assisted by competent secretary Maria (former children’s TV star Andréa Beltrão). Ivete is subsequently seduced by Rogério (who is supposed to be an item with Silvia now, I think) but when they return to his swanky house, he is murdered while Ivete is in the bath.

Later, Silvia is chased across a cemetery by a masked, knife-wielding maniac in a long black cloak, after which she too turns to Raimundo Marlou, who is presumably the only private dick in the area. Marlou’s assistant Maria then goes undercover at the club as a hat-check girl, working alongside female comic relief Rina (seventy-year-old Zéze Macedo). A word about Ms Macedo, who is obviously a local legend, having been in films from 1950. Her other credits, offering a tantalising insight into a world of cinefantastique that remains largely untapped even in these globally aware days, include ultra-topical 1959 sci-fi comedy O Homem do Sputnik, family-friendly adventure Robin Hood, o Trapalhão da Floresta and a number of 1970s sex comedy anthologies. Most incredibly, she also played the title role in an unauthorised blockbuster sequel called - are you ready for this? - Etéia, A Extraterrestre em Sua Aventura no Rio! Zéze Macedo made her last film in 1991 and passed away in 1999, aged 86.

Meanwhile, back at the plot, Maria somehow finds herself in a situation to overhear a telephone call which sends her and Raimundo to a particular location. Inspector Pacheco, who is still pursuing his vampire theory (the number of murders having risen to eight now, we’re told) also arrives and the masked maniac, when shot, turns out to be... well, I’m not entirely sure because most of his face is burned, but I’m assuming it’s Fred.

I’m assuming the killer is Fred for two reasons. First, because I can’t see who else it could be, and second, because if that’s not Fred then the entire prologue with the carnivorous plant is pointless. On the other hand, if the masked killer is Fred then the prologue is still largely pointless. We’re never told what happened to the killer plant. It just disappears from the film during the leap forward from Fred’s death to Silvia going into the nightclub business. Extraordinary.

Nor is there any explanation of why Fred was going around killing people or why the bodies were drained of blood. Unless being eaten by a plant not only burns one’s face but also creates haemovorous tendencies. To be fair, the synopsis on the BFI database (pretty much the only description of the film in English until now) says, “a killer vegetable transforms a scientist into a vampire, who brings horror to the chorus girls at a hotel, who are performing ‘The seven female vampires’.” But that’s really not clear from the film.

As Sete Vampiras is an oddball movie by anybody’s standards. It seems to have a fairly decent budget, certainly in terms of costumes, extras, props, sets, locations and vehicles (actually there’s only one car but it’s a nice one). I know all these things are relative but, the Brazilian film industry not being one of the most robust in the world, there are no obvious embarrassments on that score. The movie was released theatrically in Brazil in November 1986.

Several of Cardoso’s feature films and a compilation of his early shorts were released on VHS in the USA by Something Weird and the rights to his most notable pictures are now handled by a company called One Eyed Films, which seems to specialise in Brazilian popular cinema.

The only non-Brazilian festival where As Sete Vampiras definitely played was Sitges in Spain. At the Festival do Cinema Brasileiro de Gramado it won Best Screenplay and Zéze Macedo won a Special Jury Prize for her small but memorable role as comedy hat-check lady Rina. At the Rio-Cine Film Festival the picture won no fewer than four awards: Best Editing - Gilberto Santeiro; Best Art Direction - Oscar Ramos; Best Supporting Actress - Andréa Beltrão; and Best Film. Carlos Egberto also won an award (somewhere) for his cinematography; to be honest the film looks fairly ghastly but I suspect it was shot on 16mm and that this isn’t a great VHS transfer. Leo Jaime’s title song was a big hit on the Brazilian pop charts too, by all accounts.

Many of the cast and crew also worked on O Escorpiao Escarlate although as that was released four years later it’s unlikely the two films were shot back to back. A few also worked on Cardoso’s 1982 feature O Segredo da Mumia. Screenwriter RF Luchetti (credited as ‘RT Luccetti’ on the sleeve of this video) seems to have the Brazilian horror scene pretty much sewn up as he is not only Cardoso’s regular writer, he also penned several scripts for the country’s other notable fright-meister, José Mojica Marins aka Coffin Joe.

As for Ivan Cardoso himself, information about the man in English is in short supply. He started making films in 1969 and has directed more than 70 since then, ranging from documentaries to experimental, abstract pieces to hardcore porn but he is best known for comedy horror features. In fact, his brand of comedy horror became its own subgenre in Brazil where it was dubbed ‘terrir’ - terror that makes you laugh. I’ve got a whole bunch of stills, leaflets, posters and other stuff which he very kindly sent me in 1999 after we met in Oporto but there’s nothing in there that looks actually biographical.

The most complete list of his films is on the CITWF website, which is vastly more comprehensive than the Inaccurate Movie Database. However, it only goes up to 2004 and therefore omits his most recent feature, 2005’s Um Lobisomem na Amazonia which stars Paul Naschy. (Not as Waldemar Daninsky but as a lycanthropic scientist named ‘Dr Moreau’!)

Perhaps the time is right for an Ivan Cardoso revival. The chap’s still out there, still making bonkers films. Say what you like about As Sete Vampiras, it’s not boring - so let’s hope somebody puts it out on DVD soon, along with the rest of Ivan’s back catalogue.

MJS rating: B
Review originally posted 9th November 2008

Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Writers: Manfred Kakefuda, Norifumi Suzuki
Producers: Kineo Yoshimine, Kenji Takamura
Cast: Sue Shiomi, Sonny Chiba, Harry Kondo, May Hayakawa
Year of release: 1974
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Stablecane Video)

Sister Street Fighter is one of the most brilliant, most bonkers, most hugely entertaining martial arts films ever made. It is sort of a spin-off from the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter movies, in that it co-stars ‘Sonny Chiba, the Street Fighter’ but his character is different in this film.

The actual star is the phenomenally cute Etsuko ‘Sue’ Shiomi who made several other films with Chiba including The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge, The Bodyguard, Message from Space and Dragon Princess. Only eighteen when this picture was made, and dressed in either a grey and red Chinese collar-less suit or white pyjamas, she kicks and punches her way across the screen with yells and squeals and a cheeky smile. She is great, displaying the same sort of evident delight in what she (or her character) is doing that distinguishes the great martial arts stars. You always get the impression that Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan love their jobs; you never get that impression with Steven Segal or Don ‘His movies drag on and on’ Wilson.

Shiomi plays Tina Long, sister of a missing Chinese undercover cop named Lee Long, star pupil of the Shorinji School of Martial Arts. Lee has disappeared, Tina is told by a balding Hong Kong police chief, while investigating a drug-smuggling operation. It is up to his sister to save him, initially by making contact with another undercover operative, working at the Club Mandarin and named, um, Fanny Singer.

Tina flies to Yokohama where her attempt to have a quiet meal is interrupted by a bunch of young Japanese men who would like to show the Chinese cutie a good time. She demonstrates why they should not mess with her by spearing flies in flight with a toothpick, then kicks their arses anyway, joined halfway through by her cousins, Jerry and Randy. The three later join Tina’s uncle for lunch; Jerry says Tina is well-known in Japan now, “a real celebrity” although no-one at the cafe in the previous scene recognises her, nor in the next scene at the Club Mandarin.

At the club, which features topless dancers behind the bar, Fanny Singer is identified by a red rose on her thigh. Trying to leave, she is accosted by gangsters but runs out the back when Tina throws a fork into a hood’s hand. Fanny is caught in an alleyway and although Tina beats up some of the gang, others bundle the dancer into a car and drive off - only to be halted by a mysterious stranger (Chiba) who beats them up, takes the car (with Ms Singer in it) and drives off.

At Central Trading Co., the front for the drug smugglers, the guys who failed to kidnap Fanny successfully are berated by their boss's second-in-command, a beaky guy in a sharp suit who looks like he should be second from the left in the Flying Pickets. Suddenly, in bursts Hammerhead, a gang leader who dresses like an ancient swordsman and leads a squad of goons with odd, bucket-like helmets on their heads.

Meanwhile, Tina visits the Shorinji School where pupils are taught about love and zen and peace and karma and a whole load of other tree-hugging hippy crap: “Harmony between yourself and others is the basic condition of the karate fighter.” Wise old master Shorinji pledges the assistance of himself and all his pupils in tracking down and rescuing Lee Long. The odd bit of this is that the logo of the school is a reversed swastika, clearly displayed on everyone’s tunic and on the wall (in fact, the camera focusses in on it). Presumably it is being used in its ancient Sanskrit, pre-Nazi concept, but still...

Tina is introduced to star pupil Emmy Kawasaki and also recognises young Mr Chiba who is, it transpires, martial arts teacher Sonny Hibachi. He has Fanny safely hidden away at a dance school, where young ladies are practising ballet to the strains of Ponchielli’s 'Dance of the Hours' (or ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’ if you’re an Allan Sherman fan). Fanny tells Tina that her brother was captured breaking into the headquarters of chief bad guy Koki. She gives Tina a lock of Lee Long’s hair, then has a fit and starts screaming that she needs heroin.

At this point, Hammerhead’s bucket-headed goons barge into the dance school looking for Fanny (as it were) but discover that the dance teacher is none other than ‘Shinobu Kojo - karate of the Ryukyu School’. We discover this too, through the first of several similar freeze-frame captions. Miss Kojo successfully fights the bucketheads with the assistance of Miss Long, but when Tina returns to Fanny she is just in time to see her shot by a poison dart. This emanates from a guy on a rooftop opposite who has a Mohican haircut, a billowing cloak and a large African shield - ‘Tettoso - blowgun of the Takasago School’. Before making his escape, he takes a potshot at Tina but succeeds only in killing a canary in a birdcage.

By now, the film has established itself as something much more than just another chop-socky flick, oh yes.

At Koki’s bayside mansion, complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool, we see some more of his killers training”

• Tessin - the sickle user
• Neray - ancient Chinese martial arts
• Eva Parrish - karate champion of Australia
• Amazons 7 - Thailand kickboxing
• Hachigen Ma - Japanese cudgel play

Of these, Amazon 7 are the most memorable, being a septet of oriental lovelies in carefully ragged mini-dresses apparently made from the same fabric as Fred Flintstone’s suit. “I don’t like race horses so I keep killers,” explains Koki to Hammerhead. “It’s like a private zoo. It amuses me. It’s as much fun as a carload of gorillas.” He then shows his visitor close-circuit footage of a cell where Lee Long (played by Kamen Rider V3 himself, Hiroshi Miyauchi) is being held and forced to take hard drugs. Another camera shows Tina approaching the perimeter fence, which she leaps in a single bound. She fights Hammerhead atop a high cliff and onto a narrow footbridge from which he hurls her after informing her that her brother is still alive “because you’ll die soon anyway.”

Koki then shows Hammerhead how he manages to smuggle heroin without the authorities spotting it. In a laboratory deep in the bowels of the Koki mansion, scientists are hard at work saturating wigs in A-class drugs! That’s right - wigs. It may sound bonkers, but - well, no, it just is bonkers. Emmy Kawasaki is onto him and finds, on the dockside, crates of wigs being exported from Japan to Hong Kong. She fights Koki’s goons with the surprise help of Tina, who survived the fall from the bridge. As the Koki gang’s truck catches fire, one of them yells the immortal line, “Save the wigs!”

Tina’s uncle turns up at Koki’s place, trying to pass a message to Lee Long, but is forced by the rascally Koki - who makes him watch his daughter being raped - to call Tina and tell her to meet him. Of course, when she turns up it proves to be a trap and she is forced to fight first Hachigen Ma and his pole of death, then Neray and his lethal clubs.

Things are getting complicated now. Uncle Wotsit arrives back home with Randy; Jerry is already there, as is Emmy, and the four of them suddenly face Amazon 7 who are all wearing odd papier-mâché masks. Having defeated the crap girly kickboxers - with the aid of Tina, who turns up in time for a good fight as usual - Uncle is then felled by a poison dart.

Tina manages to smuggle her way into Koki’s lair by hiding in the back of a truck, but Oki has a new pet killer - Reverend Star. This fellow is a former preacher who comes equipped with dog-collar, wide-brimmed hat and that essential ecumenical accessory, an armour-piercing spear-gun. Reverend Star kills Lee Long in front of his sister, then perishes by his own spear-gun...

...whereupon Tina falls through a trapdoor and regains consciousness hanging upside-down surrounded by Koki and his chums. Koki’s mistress, previously seen being thrown into the swimming pool by Hammerhead, gives Tina a good Ilsa-style whipping and Flying Picket-man gives her another lash for good measure. Then a flame is applied to the rope which holds her and we eventually see, just before it breaks, that she is suspended over a pit of steel spikes. Fortunately, she is athletic enough to somersault out of trouble just as the rope snaps, and pushes Ilsa on to the spikes for good measure.

Finally, we get a full-scale fight between the bad guys (including Tessin the sickle user) and the heroic team of Tina, Sonny, Emmy and Randy (and possibly Jerry - the editing is a little confusing at this point). Sonny kills Hammerhead by smashing his face into a mirror while Tina chases Koki through an escape tunnel full of rubber bats to the clifftop, where the final showdown takes place.

Phew.

What a movie. The fights are mostly terrific. Sonny Chiba is always great value, but so is Miss Shiomi and the inclusion of all these oddball specialists just makes a good film great. Though one has to wonder whatever happened to Eva Parrish, karate champion of Australia, who never reappears. The whole film is populated by eccentrics and the plot makes just enough sense to follow whilst making just enough nonsense to take the film to a level rarely attained by such pictures.

Some martial arts films are worth a watch, some are unwatchable, but Sister Street Fighter (Onna Hissatsu Ken) is one that I can watch again and again. This VHS tape was released in 1986 and has a cover painting of Shiomi based on a photograph of her (seen on the back of the sleeve) in a completely different film. the back-cover blurb reckons that the story is set in Tokyo although an on-screen caption clearly identifies it as Yokohama (and it certainly looks more like the latter). More amusingly, the film apparently features Sonny Chiba as ‘a super karate master and Ninja - a fighter who can become invisible.’ Well, if Chiba’s character ever becomes invisible in this story, he only does so whilst off-screen. (Or maybe not, actually...)

Director Yamaguchi (Karate Bear Fighter, Moon Angel) lifts the film above run-of-the-mill mid-1970s Oriental action flicks, possibly because this is, to all intents and purposes, a Hong Kong film made in Japan by Japanese film-makers. The English dubbing, written and directed by the ubiquitous Peter Fernandez, is very good indeed - understandable dialogue that closely matches lip movements, spoken by well-cast actors with real talent - and it is easy to forget that one is watching a Japanese film. Two sequels followed within the next couple of years, also starring Shiomi and directed by Yamaguchi, but I haven’t yet seen either of them. (NB. Most places list the title as three words but this version makes it two words - Sister Streetfighter - both on the sleeve and on-screen.)

Just remember: save the wigs!

MJS rating: A
Review originally posted 1st March 2005

Director: Daniel Webb
Writer: Daniel Webb
Producers: Daniel Webb, Sara Jimenez Criado
Cast: Bill Thomas, Guy Barnes, Tanya Page
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Website: www.facebook.com/RiteOfRosemary
Reviewed from: Online screener

In the context of this impressive and enjoyable short, Rosemary means the herb, not the girl’s name. Dan Webb’s half-hour film is principally a two-hander between Bill Thomas as Thomas, an old guy who has moved from his large house into an adjacent lodge, and Guy Barnes as Jack, the son who returns after years away.

These two fine actors create a solid and believable relationship between the characters, a familial antagonism based on the secrets that each keeps from the other (and they both initially keep from us). Through their tense conversations – and a flashback featuring Jack Stevenson as young Jack – we find out something of their history. Initially Jack seems more of a threat, but Thomas is also a dangerous man. His reduced home has religious icons and he chides his son for taking the Lord’s name in vain. A painting of the Virgin Mary is essentially the Chekhov’s Gun of religious obsession, so we know that Thomas’ dogmatic faith will come into play later on.

Webb’s screenplay - based on a short story by Sarah Scanlan - is cleverly structured and flows well, so that the film seems to fly by. I’ve watched shorts of eight or nine minutes that seemed to drag compared to this one. To go into too much detail would be to risk spoilers; suffice to say there is a little violence, a little prosthetic gruesomeness and a good slice of obsessive wacko determination.

Bill Thomas is a veteran character actor of more than 40 years’ standing with TV credits that include Minder, Poirot, Boon, Lovejoy, Bergerac and many other classics shows. He was in The Tenth Kingdom, episodes of Merlin and Atlantis, and one episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Guy Barnes has a much shorter IMDB list but it includes Rock Band vs Vampires and an Aliens fan film, plus he sings the end credits song for this film. The cast also includes Tanya Page as a police officer and Charlotte Mount in a role that it would be a spoiler to identify.

Among the crew, one notable name with multiple British horror credits is costume designer Sallyann Short whose other gigs include Nightmare Box, FirstBorn, Let’s Be Evil, Shed of the Dead and The Devil Went Down to Islington.

Dan Webb has directed a few shorts in recent years and and has been editor on a bunch of other people’s movies. You won’t find it on the IMDB but way back in 2007, when he was but a slip of a lad, he shot a zero-budget feature called The Zombie Survival Guide.

The Rite of Rosemary is an accomplished work, with echoes of classic British folk horror. Webb uses his cast and his location well to tell an intriguing, disturbing story. If I'm being picky, some of the cinematography is a bit dark and the initial concept of a killer on the loose is not fully developed and consequently seems something of an unnecessary red herring. But neither of these factors impinged on my enjoyment and appreciation of the film.

Currently playing festivals, The Rite of Rosemary was shot in June 2004. It screened for cast and crew in September of that year and was briefly available online in summer 2015 as part of the Top Shorts Online Film Festival.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Ivan Zuccon
Writers: Ivan Zuccon, Enrico Saletti
Producer: Valerio Zuccon
Cast: Giuseppe Lorusso, Federica Quaglieri, Emanuele Cerman
Year of release: 2003
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: screener DVD

Ivan Zuccon, without a doubt the most exciting young genre director in Italy, has stuck with the works of HP Lovecraft for this, his third feature. But whereas The Darkness Beyond and Unknown Beyond were generically Lovecraftian, La Casa Sfuggita (co-scripted with Unknown Beyond writer Enrico Saletti) adapts three specific HPL short stories.

Rather than a straightforward anthology, however, Zuccon and Saletti have set all three tales in the same building, interweaving them to achieve a dreamlike sense of horror. So in the present day we have paranormal journalist Alex (Giuseppe Lorusso) and his sceptic girlfriend Rita (Federica Quaglieri) in an adaptation of ‘The Shunned House’ itself. Alex is investigating an old inn which has seen scores of mysterious, often violent deaths over the previous three centuries. Much to Rita’s displeasure, they are going to camp out in the derelict building until Alex has finished his research.

In the same building, 50-60 years earlier, Luigi Montella (Emanuele Cerman) is a young mathematician, who is investigating the non-Euclidean geometry of the inn’s plans and playing chess against his neighbour Nora (Silvia Ferreri). This part of the film is based on ‘Dreams in the Witch House.’ Finally, right back in the 1920s, a writer name Marco del Vespro (Michael Segal - not the British actor who was in I Claudius etc) becomes bewitched by the haunting violin music emanating from the next room, where lives the beautiful but mute Carlotta Zann (Cristiana Vaccaro). That’s ‘The Music of Eric Zann.’

With three stories set in different times - perhaps more: who/what/when is that mysterious masked figure? - The Shunned House is not an easy film to follow, which is entirely in keeping with the complexities of Lovecraft’s work. Zuccon (who also edited the film) doesn’t just mix smoothly between stories; the whole point of the film is that these three tales interact, as characters from one time see/hallucinate those from another. It would be pointless for me to be specific; the film must be seen as a whole.

And there’s blood. And dead people. And people get killed in awful ways. This is a horror film in the grand tradition and confirms Zuccon’s place as the natural successor to Lucio Fulci. Luigi may be a somnambulist child-killer; Rita sees dead people; there’s a mysterious girl repeatedly hitting her bleeding forehead against a wall; and when Carlotta’s last violin string breaks... Christ, it’s horrible! It all comes together in a bloody, scary conclusion.

Zuccon’s camera, often roaming around a room, brings the audience right into the world(s) of these people. There is nothing workmanlike here. Every shot is just right: the angle, the movement, the lighting, the cutting. It’s just a shame that this was shot on video and not film. Please, someone give Ivan Zuccon the budget to shoot in 35mm!

The cast all cope well with the English dialogue. Particularly notable are Cerman (also in both Beyond films, as was Segal) whose boyish good looks and sensitive-yet-unnerving performance reminded me of Brendan Fraser in The Passion of Darkly Noon, and Vaccaro, who overcomes (in fact, uses) her lack of dialogue to bring exceptional depth to her role as the troubled violinist. Massimo Storari’s make-up effects are as gruesome as ever, and kudos also to costume designer Donatella Ravagnini and set designer Roberta Romagnoli, and indeed everyone involved with this marvellous film.

Ultimately, what does it all mean? I’m not 100 per cent certain (and I’ve read the script!) but frankly the film wouldn’t be true to the Lovecraftian source material if I was. It is all (I think) connected with the mathematics of the inn’s design, thus putting The Shunned House into the tiny subgenre of mathematical fantasy horror, along with the brilliant Pi, the disappointing Solid Geometry, and a handful of other titles. I think that ultimately the building itself is ‘the monster’, much like The Fall of the House of Usher or The Shining. But I strongly suggest that you take any opportunity to see this film and decide for yourself.

MJS rating: A
(Warning: this film contains some scenes with strobe effects.)

Addendum: The Shunned House is now available on DVD in the UK from Salvation. The disc includes an ‘original trailer’ (a short teaser), an ‘international trailer’, four short deleted scenes, a stills gallery and two essays by Salvation boss Nigel Wingrove. The one about HP Lovecraft is okay but the one about Italian horror is rather a waste, saying nothing about why the genre flourished in Italy or why horror fans hold spaghetti spook-flicks in such high regard. Also, the text of the essays is small and hard to read and, on my machine at least, flickers somewhat.

The extras are rather difficult to navigate and I found myself having to go back sometimes because of the confusing and inconsistent navigation system. (I know this is picky, especially as I was given the disc for free by Ivan, but it’s irritating and would be easy to solve for future releases.)

Also on the disc are trailers for The Bunker (which was written by Clive Dawson) and The Playgirls and the Vampire (an odd pairing of films!), a Jake West-directed video for a song called ‘White Slave’ by The Nuns (all gothic lesbian fetish vampires - quelle surprise!) and Philip Ilson’s rather dull short Blood.

Review originally posted 5th December 2004

Director: Uwe Boll
Writer: Uwe Boll
Producers: Uwe Boll, Shawn Williamson, Paul Colichman
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Eric Roberts, Michael Pare, Catherine Oxenburg
Year of release: 2000
Country: Germany/Canada
Reviewed from: Festival screening (Cannes 2000) and UK rental tape (Metrodome 2001)

Seattle detectives Renart and Smith (Michael Pare - Space Fury, Lunar Cop - and Jennifer Rubin: Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Little Witches, Last Lives) are on the hunt for a serial killer dubbed the ‘Monkey Maker’ by the press. So far he has killed an impressive 15 times(!): the first six had their eyes gouged out, the next six had their ears cut off, and the most recent three had their tongues cut out. That’s one sick puppy.

Meanwhile yuppie stock trader Tom Turner (the far, far too good-looking Van Dien: Starship Troopers, Sleepy Hollow, Revenant, Dracula 3000), who works in an extraordinary, ultra-modern, darkened office with only a bank of high-tech monitors and a telephone headset, is getting bored. He visits an underground fetish club where a select few can, in a back room, watch snuff movies being made. Renart has a tip-off about the snuff studio but arrives just too late to catch anything or anyone, so he returns to his heavily pregnant wife (Oxenburg, who is of course Mrs Van Dien in real life and played Princess Diana in at least two telemovies).

The Monkey Maker claims another victim, and this time there’s a witness - Tom Turner - whose story is full of obvious holes but who has a good lawyer. Despite being warned off by their boss (Eric Roberts: The Shadow Men, that Doctor Who TV movie), Renart and Smith investigate further into Turner’s world - but who is controlling the game? Them or him? Sanctimony builds to an extraordinarily nasty third act, which sees one of the main characters hideously murdered, another almost murdered in a staggeringly sadistic trick, another murder shown live on TV and a poetically filmed two-gun rampage in a restaurant.

It would be very easy (and lazy) to see this as a lower-budget spin on American Psycho, which came out around the same time, but the only similarity is that the killer is a yuppie, and we know his identity pretty much from the start. Sanctimony is a gripping detective thriller with a side order of serial killer horror; not a whodunnit but a willtheystophimfromdoingitagain? Boll had previously made a German serial killer movie, Run Amok, and subsequently directed the zombie-packed movie of the Sega game House of the Dead.

Also in the cast are David Millbern (Slumber Party Massacre, Deep Freeze), Crystal Lowe (Children of the Corn: Revelation), Dolores Drake (who was also in that Doctor Who TV movie) and Ken Camroux who has the bizarre claim to fame of having made two movies in 1999, both called Y2K.

A minor gem, Sanctimony is exciting, scary and highly recommended.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 3rd March 2005

Director: Aman Chang
Writer: Lee Kwing Kai
Producer: Bee Chan
Cast: Sam Lee, Jerry Lam, Myolie Wu, Angela Tong
Year of release: 2001
Country: Hong Kong
Reviewed from: Hong Kong VCD (Universe)

iLoopy Hong Kong horror comedy nonsense doesn’t come much loopier than this. Skinny geek Joe (Sam Lee: Gen X Cops) is a journalist and wannabe screenwriter who shares a flat with his fat geek friend Herpes (Jerry Lam). No, honestly - the character’s called Herpes. They’re investigating a femme fatale (Angela Tong, the Canadian born actress who voices Dee Dee in Dexter’s Laboratory - I kid you not!) who is luring men to her flat and killing them in nasty, supernatural ways.

Joe seeks help from a mysterious internet source on the mainland who sends over his daughter, the gorgeous Yan (Myolie Wu). Both Joe and Herpes fall for her, the former quite sweetly, the latter more crudely, but neither stands a chance. She wants a man like her favourite romantic novelist, who clearly understands women - but oh, irony, that’s Joe under a pseudonym. How can he convince her?

Meanwhile, Herpes becomes surrogate mother to a baby spirit brought over by Yan to help out, who quickly grows to an adult, in body at least. Only Herpes can see him and, in a really gross plot twist, has to develop magical breasts so he can suckle him.

The climax of Jing Sheng Jian Jiao is a desperate fight against the witch (or whatever the hell she is) and the zombie thing she’s been feeding her murder victims to. The ‘plot’ wanders all over the shop and the whole thing is played for knockabout laughs and features comic mugging that would make Three Stooges fans say, “Goodness me, that’s a bit unsubtle.”

It’s okay in a desperately silly sort of way but there’s no aspect of it you could actually commend. Fortunately, the great thing about VCDs - this one has the usual mangled English subtitles - is that they’re dirt cheap (about five to eight quid in London) so you’re not investing much money and therefore not expecting much return. Which is handy.

MJS rating: C
Review originally posted 13th April 2009

I'm not sure of the exact date of this interview, but it was done as part of my research for Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, so probably around 2002. Terry Jones very kindly allowed me to email him some questions about his memories of Douglas and returned these fascinating insights. I feel very lucky to have interviewed 33% of the Pythons - see also my Terry Gilliam interview.

When/how did you first meet Douglas?
“I first saw him on stage doing some sketches in a Cambridge Revue that had been up in Edinburgh. I thought the sketch was funnier than Douglas's performance but I remembered him because of his size. He then started writing with Graham and started coming to Python rehearsals and read-throughs during the last series in 1974-5 (or whenever it was). Douglas and I started going off to drink real ale together and became good friends.”

How would you describe Douglas' working relationship with Graham Chapman?
“Well I don't really know - I didn't really see them working together. But I owe it to Graham for bringing Douglas along otherwise I wouldn't have become a friend.”

Did you ever see/read any of Douglas' material for Footlights or the Adams-Smith-Adams revues?
“Yes. The first time I ever saw Douglas he was performing as sketch about (I think) a meeting of the Paranoid Society.”

During Douglas''wilderness years' between leaving Cambridge and the success of Hitchhiker, how much did you stay in touch? And did you discuss any possible collaborations?
“I can't remember talking about collaborating, but he and I used to drink quite a lot of beer together and Douglas was a regular dinner party guest down here in Camberwell.”

What was Douglas' ambition in those days, and what was his confidence like?
“Good question - not sure I’ve got an answer though. He seemed reasonably confident. But as far as I can remember (which isn’t very much - probably owing to the beer) we tended to talk about life in general and beer and that rather than careers. He seemed to enjoy working for Doctor Who and the radio stuff he was doing.”

What was your initial reaction on hearing about the idea of Hitchhiker, and on hearing the show itself?
“Well, one day Douglas asked me and Mike along to hear a radio show he'd just finished. So Mike and I went along to Broadcasting House and sat in a room while Douglas and his producer played The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This was some time before it went out. I can remember we listened to about three shows and then couldn't really cope with any more. It was a bit too intense with Douglas and his producer watching our every move and waiting for us to laugh. I think I was a little critical of some of the performances. I know Mike and I both thought it was pretty funny - but we had absolutely no idea that it would become as successful as it did.”

You were one of the very first people ever cited as possible director of the Hitchhiker movie (ref. 1981 interview: "Then the whole thing reopened when Terry Jones said he'd like to think about making a film of Hitchhiker. But in the end Terry and I said, 'It'd be nice to do a film together, but let's just start from scratch and not make a Hitchhiker'."). What sort of discussions did you have with Douglas about the Hitchhiker movie, in those early days and over the ensuing years?
“Well, I think we hit on the basic problem of making a film out of Hitchhiker. That is that Arthur Dent doesn't really have much character and there really isn't a lot of character-development in the story. In fact there really isn't a story in terms of a ninety minute film. It's a wonderful wander through space with lots of interesting and funny and thought-provoking things happening – but not narrative exactly. No beginning middle and end - which I know I shouldn't be interested in as a Python, but they sort of count when it comes to ninety minutes in a cinema.”

How did you come to collaborate with Douglas on 'A Christmas Fairly Story' for the Comic Relief book? (And why has this never been reprinted?)
“I don’t know why it's never been reprinted. I think I wrote something and then Douglas improved on it - but I can't remember much about it.”

When I interviewed Douglas in June 1997 he had the idea of making the Hitchhiker film in IMAX, but only using parts of the screen to show normal sized figures, etc. Shortly afterwards, you used this idea in the short film you made for the London IMAX screen. Did the two of you discuss this at all or was it just coincidence?
“Ah - coincidence I think. This is the first I've heard of Douglas's IMAX thoughts.”

In all the 150 or so interviews with Douglas that I have on file, I can't find a single reference to Graham Chapman's passing. Douglas talked about working with Graham, but never even alluded to the tragic early death of his mentor. Can you recall how Graham's death affected Douglas, or offer any clues as to why he never mentioned it?
“No, I can't remember seeing Douglas around the time of Graham's death. Graham was a strange absent sort of figure. He was a lovely man but there was always a feeling that he wasn't really there. When we were filming you always felt Graham's spirit was somewhere else. For a some of the years his spirit was in the spirit (gin) and maybe that's where his soul was too. But when he came out of that he still seemed to be elsewhere much of the time. When I read some of the stuff in A Liar's Autobiography that he wrote about filming the Grail, for example, it seemed to me that Graham really hadn't understood what was going on at all - or how the films or the TV shows got made.”

How did the success of Hitchhiker affect Douglas?
 “I remember Douglas arriving late at a dinner party down here in Camberwell and saying how sorry he was but he'd been at his first book-signing - it was for the paperback of Hitchhiker and he'd signed a thousand books! He looked absolutely stunned. I think it was the first time he had any real indication of just how popular he was going to become. The worst effect success had on him was that it seemed to make it more and more difficult for him to write. He'd always had problems with writing, but the more they paid him up front, the less he felt he could possibly justify what they'd paid him.”

What about his burgeoning interest in computers?
“This did indeed become an obsession - I remember him showing me his first Apple - and it was almost as if we'd lost Douglas. He'd become a convert - a zealot - and somehow everything was related to the possibilities of the computer.”

Do you recall when he was researching and writing Last Chance to See?
“He loved doing that. He always said it was his best book and also the thing he'd mostenjoyed  making.”

Douglas' legendary parties - what were they like?
“They got too grand for me. I enjoyed being with Douglas most when we used to go off for a beer together in the early days. There was a sense in which Douglas seemed to get stuck in star-worship. He seemed to become very impressed with the incredibly famous people he'd got to know - and that was a little disappointing, since it somehow diminished himself. When Douglas was narrating a Bill Gates party or whatever it was as if he'd lost himself amongst the stars. Odd really for the author of a Guide to the Galaxy.”

What memories do you have of your Starship Titanic US signing tour with Douglas? (Is there any truth in the legend that the British edition was delayed because the publishers couldn't catch up with you to get the corrected proof back?)
“That might be true - rings a bell. I'd agreed to do the signing tour because I really hadn't had the chance to spend time with Douglas for - I don't know - ten or fifteen years. It was like returning to the early days of our friendship. We'd forgotten how well we got on together and what fun we had. I don’t think we stopped talking for the duration of the tour and we never ran out of subjects for discussion. It was a magic time and one of my very best recollections of Douglas.”

What was the Starship Titanic film treatment like on which you based your novel? Did you ever see the earlier (rejected) novel by Robert Sheckley?
“The treatment was about twenty pages. It had all the characters - or at least all the character names, and it had most of the plot. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever had to write. Douglas asked me if I'd do it because he owed Simon & Schuster a book and they were going to publish the Robert Sheckley version with Douglas' name on it if he didn't come up with an alternative by 5th June. I'd read the treatment and made some comments on it – and Douglas rang up and asked if I'd be prepared to write the book. Well, there were then five weeks before 5th June. I loved the idea of just stopping everything else I was doing and concentrating on that. It was great fun to do because as far as I was concerned all the really hard work had been done. Douglas had the whole structure and world and ideas there - all I had to do was fill it in. It's like you imagine writing but like writing never is. Every time I got stuck I just had to refer back to the treatment and off I’d go again. In the end I finished it in three weeks. Douglas said well this is perfect - we must do more - he liked writing the outlines and I liked writing the details.”

Did you and Douglas have any plans for collaboration beyond Starship Titanic?
“So yes, there was some talk of doing more books. But I think the initial negative responses to the book put a damper on the idea. I personally blame the publishers. I think it was a stupid idea to call it ‘Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic a novel by Terry Jones.’ They were so anxious to push it as a Douglas Adams book that some of his fans felt they’d been cheated. If they simply put ‘Starship Titanic by Douglas Adams and Terry Jones’ there wouldn't have been the problem."

Finally, I have been told by someone else researching Douglas' life that John Cleese politely declined to be interviewed, saying he didn't really know Douglas that well. Which is odd, given that they worked together several times (Video Arts, Doctor Who, Starship Titanic). Can you offer me any insight into why John might feel this way?
“John I think didn’t have any opinion about Douglas - I suspect he never read the books - maybe he even didn’t like Douglas filling the vacant place he’d left working with Graham - I’ve only just thought of that and have no idea if it's true. Probably not, because John was very relieved not to be working with Graham.”

Director: Richard Mansfield
Writer: Richard Mansfield
Producers: Daniel Mansfield, Richard Mansfield
Cast: Victoria Falls, Darren Munn, Michael Lieber
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.mansfielddark.com

The latest feature from the director of The Secret Path, The Mothman Curse and Wolfskin is as idiosyncratic, distinctive and downright creepy as one would expect. An actress named Victoria Falls (really?!) stars as Amy, a young woman living alone who receives an anonymous gift of a manky old VHS tape. She gets her old VCR out of the loft (by standing on a Workmate adjustable bench, which you are explicitly not supposed to do!) and watches this.

It turns out to contain simply animated child-like drawings (think Charlie and Lola, but a bit rougher) which show a boy dying horribly when his kite hits power lines – after he is distracted by a dark figure with bleeding eyes).

Amy receives further tapes with similar unpleasant animations and also starts to glimpse an unnerving figure – who may be the one depicted in the cartoons – on the periphery of her vision. More disturbing still is that the tapes include brief live action clips which seem to show someone being killed.

We also meet Michael (Darren Munn: The Mothman Curse, Paranormal Sex Tape and vampire feature Drink Me, produced by Richard but directed by his husband, Daniel), who has evidently been receiving these tapes for some time and believes that the answers lie in a local country park (the same one where The Secret Path was filmed). Both Amy and Michael record their thoughts on their iPhones although this is thankfully not found footage. Mansfield adroitly cuts between the characters’ video selfies and more conventional camera-work.

By uploading her videos onto the web, Amy establishes contact with Michael. We have also met some other people who are similarly haunted by this dark figure, also filming themselves. Gradually our understanding of what is happening in these people’s lives deepens until Amy and Michael meet – briefly – and he gives her a bag of tapes, leading to a powerfully ambiguous (if slightly predictable) conclusion.

Our glimpses of the figure throughout (or perhaps there’s more than one) just show us a hooded anorak or parka and a creepy mask. (It’s actually a face for a Resusci-Anne CPR training mannequin. Richard reckons that the cost of this mask, plus a can of spray paint, constituted the film’s entire budget.) There are also a couple of very effective dream sequences in which someone is attacked by a big bundle of loose video tape, crawling across the floor like a giant amoeba then wrapping itself around the victim, smothering them. This effect has of course been achieved by pulling the tape away then reversing the footage but it is amazing how good it looks, even with that knowledge at the back of one’s head.

Mansfield hasn’t skimped on genuine film-making techniques, with plenty of establishing shots, different angles and cuts, the sort of camera-work and editing that distinguishes a real film from something lazily cobbled together. Care has been taken to tell a story, albeit one that raises as many questions as it answers. The result is genuinely creepy, a fascinatingly unnerving tale of justified paranoia (helped by an absolutely cracking performance by 'Falls', full of credibly wide-eyed terror). You may occasionally wonder: well, why doesn’t she go to the police, but what is there to report? “Someone rang my doorbell and left a VHS tape of strange cartoons on my doorstep, and now I think I am catching glimpses of some sort of supernatural entity.” Not much to go on, is it?

There’s something of an unavoidable J-horror influence in Video Killer but there’s much more at work here. If forced to sum this up as a high concept ‘X meets Y’ idea, I’d say it’s a four-way mash-up between Ringu, The Last Horror Movie, The Blair Witch Project and Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Richard Mansfield is of course a huge MR James fan and the monstrous entity here is definitely James-ian, while the scene of Michael giving Amy his bag of tapes has a certain ‘passing the runes’ quality to it.

The cast also includes Henry Regan (Theo in The Secret Path and narrator of some of Mansfield’s animated shorts), Michael Lieber (Rancour), Jennie Fox (The Scared of Death Society, The Sickhouse) and Jenny Lee (whose scenes were shot by Mansfield’s husband Daniel). The three actresses were also all in Daniel Mansfield’s drag queen comedy You Crazy Bitch!

Wild Eye Releasing put out a US DVD of Video Killer in September 2016 and it is also available through Google Play. Richard’s next feature, in among his continuing work on animated shorts, should be Scare Bear while Daniel is in post on a thriller called Watch Me (not to be confused with this 2006 Australian film).

MJS rating: A-