I interviewed prolific indie film-maker Phil Herman by e-mail in April 2008.

How would you describe your films to someone (like me) who has never seen them?
“I make movies for the fans. Horror fans. They are original horror and suspense type films. They are of low budget nature but a lot of ambition and time goes into making them. I have been making movies for over a decade and have received cult status. We are very big in the underground and many of our actors and actresses have moved on to do other things.

“People know when they get our movies they’re in for a good time. They are the type of movies you get for a weekend night and watch with some popcorn and beer with your friends. They do not disappoint and have plenty of blood and T/A. While we have never gone Hollywood, thousands of people have seen our movies through small and self distributors. How would I describe my films? A good buy for your buck!”

How have your skills as writer, director and producer developed over the years?
“My skills as writer, director and producer has developed through input from my peers and associates. I started out making movies in my backyard with friends and family. I thought of ways to kill them and just shot that. I also noticed those little films that I shot in a day or two were generating interest in my neighbourhood and people were lining up to die for me.

“After dozens of those type of family slasher movies I ventured off the block and found a whole new world. But my simple movies became complicated. We needed scripts, locations and actors. It happened so fast that all of a sudden I was having screenings at halls and being interviewed and they were starting to sell.

“By wearing so many hats when making these movies, things move faster and there are not a lot of roadblocks - because I am in charge of everything. While it is tiring, things do go fast cause there is no waiting or decision making. I call the shots and thank God I have been working with great people all these years and things always go smooth during my shoots.”

Of all the technical developments in film-making (and film marketing) in recent years, which ones do you think are most beneficial to a small-scale B-movie maker like yourself?
“When I first stating making movies I had a Hitachi camera that weighed about 20 pounds and the portable tape deck that you had to carry that weighed another 20 pounds. Which was half my weight when I started making movies at 17! But we did it and edited from deck to deck and had a feature called sound-on-sound that we used to put music and effects over the original track. It was primitive but that was the way we did it back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.

“Then things got better and super VHS came out and the decks were about $1,000 each then in the mid ‘80s. We used to go with our credit cards and buy them and return them after 30 days and got great results. The picture quality was far superior than regular VHS and there were no rainbows - they cut clear and accurate. Still primitive but we were making movies and they looked good.

“The biggest step up was the wide spread of the web. We started getting big when the web became a household name. Also the trade magazines like Draculina were a real big plus that got attention for our scream queens all over the world. Now the biggest achievement is computer editing. While I don't do editing anymore, things are moving so quickly with computer editing. Things can be corrected and assembled with a push of a button and movies can be done in a fraction of the time. Plus no generation is lost and what we shoot is what you see. It has helped and also brought the cost down on these features significantly.”

It is evident that your films feature plenty of female nudity - how integral/important is that to the horror stories?
“While we are never explicit with the nudity, I feel at this level of filming it is nice to see the naked form in its glory. The body should be seen and not hidden. When at home alone you’re naked and walking around usually - so why not in the movies? It is nothing to be ashamed of and people love nudity in the movies. How many times have you rented or seen a movie just because you heard your favourite star is in it naked?

“Plus, being low budget and not having big names or big explosions, I figure seeing nude girls replaces that. Plus fans of horror are big fans of scream queens, the driving force of these movies. A pretty girl on the cover will sell more movies than a handsome guy.

“All the big underground movies have nudity and push the envelope on what they can get away with. We’re tame compared to many of these other companies on how we display our nudity but fans love it and the girls get plenty of exposure through magazine layouts and offers to do other things. So everyone is happy! Including me who has to film them!

“It is important because, while we try not to exploit, we do show the natural form any chance we get to make things interesting and not shy away but show the whole body to stimulate the viewer!”

What does Into the Woods have to offer viewers?
“Into the Woods is our first feature in about six years. We have been making anthologies but I always feel that is more of a compilation of people’s work and I act as a producer on them. With Into the Woods I am back as full time everything. The movie is about a young lady called Danielle. She is stuck in a dead-end relationship with a married man. It takes a turn for the worse when he leaves her and then comes back and brutality rapes her.

“She is an avid runner and has always run away from her fears and lack of a happy successful life. Her life, which has turned upside down, has just got worse. On one of her runs, she mysteriously turns up in a place unfamiliar to her: on a lonely stretch of beach near an equally desolate, unrecognisable forrest. Stripped of everything she wakes, remembering nothing. With a few clues and constant torments, she runs from an unseen character that little by little reveals his intention and who he is. When she returns to reality, an explosive climax ties up all loose ends and conflicts.

“The movie was planned to be shot in six weeks back in April of 2007. The movie is 90 per cent outdoors which makes it a challenge. Plus for a few of the scenes the lead actress has to be nude in the woods. We were filming in a national park so that created a problem, ducking bird watchers and the park police. But we shot off hours and had little problems.

“But disaster struck on the second week of shooting when our actress Nancy Feliciano cracked her ankle in a chase scene. We had to shut down production. There was no shooting around it. She is an avid runner and was in crutches and cast for eight weeks. Then almost double that to get use of her foot again, it was so messed up. But thanks to her running before that and stamina that was developed over the years from that she was able to recuperate about 99 per cent.

“We were ready to shoot again in March 2008. We planned another six-week shoot and it went well except for the weather. It was supposed to be spring in NY but it felt like winter was never going to leave. The temps were in the high 30s, low 40s but she was a trooper and shot everything as planned. It is funny; the day after the last shoot, the weather was in the 70s - oh well!

“But this movie has great eerie scenery and is out in the woods with a very impressive cast: Nancy Feliciano, Joel D Wynkoop, Cathey Wynkoop, Dave Castigleone, Lilith Stabs, Tiffany Sinclair, Joe Scott, Darla Doom and Phil Herman.”

Which aspect of the film are you proudest of?
“I am proud of the star, Nancy Feliciano. She usually is not a star but just has a co-star cameo role in our features. She took the star role and ran way with it. She was great and proved herself as a real actress. Her wide range of emotion and agility for the part were really shown in her role.

“It was under gruelling and sometimes dangerous situations and she never once complained or threatened to leave. Her part was demanding because she is in almost every scene of the movie so she had to appear on the set 90 per cent of the time. She is a pleasure to watch and very nice to look at in this movie. We have been waiting a long time to feature her but the part never came up that she was interested in. Through all the terror she went through, she came out smelling like a rose and people will notice her performance as a standout role in the genre!”

What would you need to step your productions up to the next level (whatever that may be)?
“I think this movie will be the last for Falcon Video. We have reached our peak at this level of filming and need to reach the next level. I am shopping around a few scripts and getting a few bites. I really would love to see our next few features be produced by a bigger production company with financial backing to get these movies and stars the recognition they deserve. I have an impressive track record and resume with these features and hope that is enough for the big boys to look over few ideas I have. I feel the market is so dry that they need to start looking to the real indies and underground market for product and stop putting out remakes and sequels and give the horror fan what they want! Real horror!”

interview originally posted 25th April 2008

I did an e-mail interview with writer Marc Hershon in September 2003 about a TV movie called Monster Makers, shown a few weeks later on Halloween, which starred Linda Blair (The Exorcist, Hell Night), George Kennedy (The Naked Gun, Demonwarp, The Uninvited) and Adam Baldwin (Predator 2, Independence Day and, um,Mind Breakers). This was Marc’s third holiday-related fantasy comedy after Santa Jr. and Miss Cupid’s Beau. Marc was incredibly generous in his answers and I was only able to use a tiny amount of this in the piece which I wrote for fangoria.com, so here is the full interview.

How did Santa Jr. come to be made, and how instrumental was that in getting Monster Makers made?
“I was introduced to Wendy Winks, an independent producer, who had read Santa Jr. and liked it enough to option it to try to get it set up somewhere. (I had written Santa Jr. about five years before and there had been some interest at the time, but nothing ever happened with it.) Our original intention was to try to get a feature film deal, but when all was said and done, both The Hallmark Channel and Larry Levinson Productions (who produced the film) both liked it - a pretty rare occurence! Once they agreed that they wanted to buy it, the deal moved pretty fast, because they were coming up against the wall in terms of having a Christmas movie ready in time. They bought the script in May of last year (2002) and we were in production by August.

“When the executives at the Hallmark Channel saw a rough cut of Santa Jr. it suddenly struck them that they were missing the boat on an entire range of movies: comedies. Most made-for-TV and cable movies are heavy dramas, ‘disease-of-the-week’, romances, adapted from historic novels, etc. You just don't see a lot of long form comedies being made these days. Based on the excitement of that realization, I pitched them a Valentine's Day comedy with a similar theme, called Miss Cupid's Beau, about the college-age daughter of Cupid.

(Originally, I had pitched the concept as a sequel for Santa Jr., with the son of Santa falling in love with the daughter of Cupid. That was pushing the envelope too far for the folks at Hallmark - they're not keen on mixing their holidays.)

“I wrote Miss Cupid's Beau in about six weeks and then last November (this was still before Santa Jr. had aired), one of the producers at Larry Levinson Productions, Steven Squillante, asked if I had any ideas for a Halloween movie while I was sitting around in his office. This was my chance to put my 20 years of performing improvisational comedy to use and I literally cobbled together the main concept for Monster Makers on the spot: a kid finds an old black and white monster movie that was produced on experimental film stock. When he watches it on Halloween, the monsters in the movie and the hero sheriff from the film get out when there's a power surge. The kid teams up with the sheriff to track down the monsters.

“(Lesson to starting screenwriters: be ready to think on your feet! Sometimes you only get one shot.)”

From what I've seen and read, this seems to be a family movie, aimed at what I would call '14-year-olds of all ages'. Who is your actual target audience?
“The final version of the script ended up losing several layers of richness, mostly due to budgetary considerations. As a result it ended up losing some of the older demographic appeal, I think. Nonetheless, there's still a lot of ‘inside’ jokes and references for those fans of '50s monster movies. While the main character is a 12-year-old kid, it's really the 12-year-old kid that I remember being, who couldn't get enough of monster movies. So, in that regard, I think the movie has tremendous appeal for those who remember those old movies fondly. In fact, my favorite parts of the movie are the glimpses of Monsters on the Loose, the 1951 black and white movie - it was fun to write the really stilted dialogue from back then, where the characters use each other's names every other sentence and so forth.

“I really tried to steer clear of what had gone before - when you sit down and consider the amount of spoofage eaten up by comedy classics like Young Frankenstein and even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, it gets tricky to find the gags that haven't been used.”

You've obviously had fun with the character names, with homages to Lon Chaney Jr., Forry Ackerman, Bram Stoker and others. Are there other in-jokes in the movie that monster fans will spot? And is there a danger of getting too self-indulgent with this sort of thing?
“Good question. I think there's a fine line. While you can go on and do it throughout the movie, it has to be clever and not terribly obvious to any but real aficionados. I think the director at one point named an offscreen character ‘Dr Karloff’, which isn't keeping in the spirit of what I'd established. Slightly more subtle but still spottable was the name of the street that George Kennedy's character lives on: Oarlock Street. Intentionally misspelled, it isn't until you hear it that you realize that Count Orlok was the name of the vampire in Nosferatu. And the Lon Chaney reference you mention is that one of the monsters, Verman, is actually a guy named Creighton Talbot, who turns into a vicious ‘rat-man’ whenever he smells garbage. ‘Creighton’ was Lon Chaney Jr.'s given first name and, of course, Lyle Talbot was the name of the tortured soul he played who turned into The Wolf Man.

“I really enjoy burying those little things in the script. I did the same thing in Santa Jr. At one point when the son of Santa isn't sure what he wants to do with his life, he laments that maybe he ought to just become a dentist, which was reference to Hermy the elf in the animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And we found a street sign on the block we were shooting at where someone had spray-painted a black circle and a slash over the ‘L’ in ‘L Street’, making it ‘No L'. I pointed it out to Kevin and it ended up in the final cut of the movie.

“Then there's a whole realm of audience members who have no idea what the nods are all about. The actors playing our two main kids generally had no clue about most of the references and had no idea why Linda Blair was such a great casting decision - until they got to see The Exorcist while we were filming! Again, it was very cool, in that Linda was about the same age as our kids when she made that movie!

“There's more little hidden references (or there should be - I haven't seen the final edit yet ) but I'd prefer to let the fans of the genre pick them out.”

I'm guessing you're a big monster fan yourself. What movies inspired you when you were young, and what are your favourites now?
“I was a huge monster movie fan. All the classics, of course, were inspirational with this project, along with all of the really terrible ones. Back when I was a kid, the monsters were often people who had unleashed some horrible hidden side of themselves or else creatures exposed to radiation, the big mystery catalyst. (I use that hoary old device in Monster Makers, as we learn the original print of Monsters on the Loose was developed on something called ‘Radium Acetate’.)

“Nowadays I'd be hard pressed to point at monster movies per se and choose a favorite. Part of the problem is what constitutes a monster these days? Alien is a terrific monster movie with science fiction trappings. So is the Terminator series. But what about the Nightmare on Elm Street movies? Are Freddy and Jason monsters? I guess so, but the principles that guide those movies feel different to me. The monster in Frankenstein is this poor soul who is truly not responsible for his predicament. Freddy, on the other hand, seems to delight in the pain and torment he brings people.”

Your three monsters are all completely original. Was any thought given to using generic monsters like Dracula or the Mummy?
“Well, I steered away from the ‘classic’ monsters for two practical reasons: one is that most are trademarked characters, with Universal Studios holding the rights to them. The second reason is that they've been used to death. But even in coming up with the idea, the fun challenge to me was to create three completely new monsters that still had to feel as if they could have come from the ‘50s. And each of the monsters is, in and of itself, both an homage to some the greats and a reflection of the main character in the movie (a technique they used on Buffy the Vampire Slayer all the time.

“For example, Manikin, being made up of mismatched mannequin parts, was my attempt to get into the mindset of a ‘50s movie-maker who wanted to create his own Frankenstein's monster. I was able to shortcut a lot of detail in that the trailer for Monsters on the Loose explains that Manikin was created by ‘an accident of science.’ In addition, Manikin is trying to replace his mannequin parts with human parts, kind of a hideous take on Pinocchio. Regarding the main character of Tim, Manikin represents the awkwardness of the physicality of entering one's teen years - gawky, awkward, etc. This wasn't played up as much as I'd like in the execution, so I'm glad I got a chance to talk about it!

“Verman, of course, is an analog for the Wolfman, while Revenant, ‘The Living Ghost’ is part nod to both Dracula and the Invisible Man. He's also a nod to a low budget - the producers were delighted that I could deliver a ‘three-monster’ movie with only two monsters we actually see on screen. Revenant possesses the bodies of the living, so it's all through acting, camera angles, a special lens and a voice harmonizer that he appears.”

How did you approach writing the scenes from the 1950s movie Monsters on the Loose? Are you spoofing 1950s monster flicks or paying homage to them? And where does Monsters on the Loose fit on a scale from, say, Them! to The Giant Claw?
“I mentioned this earlier but these were my favorite scenes to write. They are both spoof and homage. From the cliches that the characters spout to the wooden acting (most of it intentional), these play really well. The first two days of production is when we shot these scenes, because we needed the footage during the course of the rest of the movie. When the footage came back to the set, everyone kept watching it over and over because it was so funny. In particular, Larry Minetti (Magnum PI) who plays ‘Spats’ Lonnegan, a gangster; and great character actor Tracy Walters as Morley Todd, an undertaker, were terrific.

“As far as where on the scale Monsters on the Loose falls, I'd have to say somewhere between Dracula vs Billy the Kid and The Crawling Eye.”

How close is the finished movie to what you originally envisioned? Is there anything that you wanted to include but couldn't because of budget, schedule, or family viewing considerations?
“I think I may have mentioned some elements earlier. I lost a lot of locations because of the budget, as well as a big fire scene I wanted to do. There were also a bunch of sight gags with the monsters that had to be cut, mainly for time. Since I was purposely aiming this at the Hallmark Channel audience and it was my third script for them, I don't think I ever had anything objectionable from a ‘family viewing’ perspective. The monsters are too inept to create anything grotesque, visually - Manikin, for instance, keeps tugging on people's arms in his ongoing attempt to replace his mannequin parts. Only problem is that he was never actually given the facility to accomplish this. And since Verman was never alive until the moment he stepped out of the movie, he's not used to the fact he has a 12-foot long tail - it keeps getting caught in everything. The scary parts that I hope will linger will be things like Manikin's grinning head and the neck and knuckle cracking that Revenant does whenever he steps into a new host.”

What are your thoughts on the cast and director?
“I wish we'd had more time for casting. One of the pitfalls of the speed at which these projects get done is that the cart is frequently ahead of the horse. The production team was assembled and locations were being scouted without a single casting choice being made, nor with a director onboard. (Actually, Kevin Connor was slated to direct then got pulled off my project and put on directing Just Desserts, a romantic comedy which has just knocked my Miss Cupid's Beau out of the 2004 Valentine's slot.)

“I love the fact we got Linda Blair. (Ironically, she's one of the only characters in the movie not to get possessed by Revenant!) And George Kennedy, a real last minute pick to play Dexter Brisbane, the director of the Monsters on the Loose movie-within-the-movie, was a joy to hang around. I thought one of the best casting choices was Adam Baldwin as Sheriff Jay Forrest. I've always loved his work, from My Bodyguard and Full Metal Jacket to last TV season's Firefly. The guy has never played a comedic role, always getting cast as heavies and thugs. But Adam is hilarious, and completely nails both the confusion and stereotype movie hero persona of the hero from the black and white film.”

Were you on set for a reason or just hanging around to see your movie made? Did you get to play a cameo like you did in Santa Jr.?
“The producers, with Kevin Connor's permission, let me be on the set of Santa Jr. the whole time, although I had to pay my own way. It was worth it - to me there's nothing as exciting as watching your words on paper come to life.

“I really did lend some help, in terms of offering opinions about characters and scenes when asked and so when Monster Makers came up, the folks at Larry Levinson Productions offered to foot the bill this time. Because of last-minute location changes and such, I ended up tweaking the script a bit as we went. One of the problems with the timetable the movie was on was that I had to rush my first and final drafts so I was glad for the time to fix some things. The last three days of shooting, we discovered we might be a little short, time-wise, so I had to write four additional scenes utilizing just the sets we still had up and the actors we still had on call. A couple of those scenes might be some of the funniest in the film, from what I've seen so far.

“I got to play an alarm technician in Santa Jr., who installs the alarm system in the house where Santa's son is under arrest. I sort of finagled my way into it, but then they discovered I actually knew how to act. So when I made a bid for a role in Monster Makers, it was just a matter of choosing which role. I almost ended up with a pretty beefy part, thanks to director David Cass Sr., but instead I still have fun as a bank janitor who gets possessed by Revenant and robs a bank. Now I'm in the Screen Actors Guild in addition to the Writers Guild of America! (Playing service roles seems to be my lot in life - I just shot a small scene as an electrician in a feature film, The Californians, starring Noah ‘ER’ Wyle and Ileana Douglas.)”

What was your involvement with Frankenstein: The College Years? And how pleased were you with it?
“While my involvement was fun - I was doing ‘speed rewrites’ with director Tom Shadyac (pre Ace Ventura), which meant I was rewriting the script based on notes we'd do together, then I'd shunt the pages over to his computer for polishing while I stayed about 10 pages ahead of him - it was ultimately aggravating. We had managed to craft a fairly decent spoof of Frankenstein movies while avoiding all of the jokes that Mel Brooks had used in Young Frankenstein - no easy task. But the executives at Fox TV didn't appreciate it and Tom ended up pretty much doing the lame script he'd been handed when the project was still My Friend Frank, about two college kids who inherit a dead professor's belongings, including a freezer containing the body of Frankenstein's monster.”

Just as a personal aside: F:TCY has a superficially similar plot to Encino Man (which we called California Man over here) which would have been in production around the same time. I know sometimes TV movies are made to take advantage of similarly themed theatrical movies. Was this any sort of consideration, or am I misjudging the situation?
“Sometimes it works the other way - I just read in the trades yesterday that David Spade is slated to start in a Christmas movie about Santa's son in a movie that Adam Sandler's comedy is producing. But in terms of F:TCY, I don't recall having any sense of that. You might be correct, but it certainly wasn't part of the directives we had in doing the rewrite we embarked on.”

What are you working on at the moment, and what is likely to be the next script of yours that gets made?
“ I am collaborating on a feature film comedy with Dana Carvey which we are hoping to take out soon. In addition, I have two features I wrote solo, both high concept comedies. One already has keen interest from a major production company and the other is just starting to make the rounds. As far as what gets made next, your guess is as good as mine!”

interview originally posted 11th January 2005

James (DR) Hickox was born into a film-making family. His father Douglas Hickox directed Behemoth the Sea Monster, Theatre of Blood and Zulu Dawn. His mother is Oscar-winning editor Anne Coates, whose credits include Lawrence of Arabia, The Eagle Has Landed, Erin Brockovich and The Golden Compass. Brother Anthony Hickox directed Waxwork I and II, Hellraiser III, Prince Valiant and Jill the Ripper, while sister Emma Hickox followed her mother into the cutting room, editing Blue Crush, Kinky Boots and The Boat that Rocked.

I interviewed editor-turned director James Hickox at the American Film Market (AFM) in Santa Monica in 1998 where he was promoting Death Do Us Part and The Gardener. Since then he has gone on to helm the likes of Sabretooth, Krocodylus aka Blood Surf and Girls Gone Psycho. The Gardener was released as Garden of Evil. Death Do Us Part never got made, as far as I can tell.

With being part of this film-making family, was it automatic that you would work in movies?
"Actually, no. Well, yes of course it was totally natural - since I was this high. But my parents tried to talk us out of it always: ‘Why can’t we have a lawyer or a nice doctor in the family or something?’ But we all got hooked. My elder brother actually didn’t do anything in the business till he was 28, and then just went off and did Waxwork which was his first movie. And my sister, inbetween my brother and me, is an editor. She’s taking a leave of absence in Vienna at the moment with her boyfriend, but she’s an up-and-coming young editor. So yes, all of us."

Is editor a natural step up towards being a director?
"I think so, yes. My mom actually said she wanted to be a director but she found when she started having children she got into editing. But yes, I worked with great directors like Larry Kasdan and Frank Oz. Watching them work… and especially on the budget movies I’m doing at the moment, it’s really useful to have the editing experience because then you know what to shoot and what you don’t have to shoot. So I kind of cut in the camera a lot. I’m actually shooting something at the moment. I’m doing the first ever internet television series."

Can you explain that a bit more?
"Well, I’m not too technical. I’m working with these two guys who, when they were 20 years old, brought the internet into people’s homes and became multi-billionaires. [Marc Collins-Rector and Brock Pierce, founders of Digital Entertainment Network - MJS] They’re now about 30 and they’re bored so they’ve spent the last two years coming up with technology that can basically shoot on digital film, and then you put it straight into the computer. You can manipulate the frame any way you want. We’re doing the experiment, we’re doing the pilot. I’m shooting at the moment; it’s called Chad’s World."

So you’ll get this over the internet?
"Yes, you just sit there and you download it for half an hour on your little computer, and if you’re in class and you’re bored - these kids can watch it at school. Or anywhere; it’s incredible the technology now."

Is that a sitcom or a drama?
"It’s a drama series and I’ve added a little bit of comedy, I like to think. It’s amazing. What they’re talking about, in the next few years, they’re going to start building their own studios, these guys, and making their own movies: $3-5 million movies within ten years or even less. It’ll take over from videos because you can download them on your computer and then you have a little bit rather than a big tape. That’s really interesting."

We’d better get on to this film, Death Do Us Part.
"I’ve actually been on for three years; I’d only made one movie then. Julia Vernon I’ve known for years, just out here. It’s been through various rewrites and changes and various people and it hasn’t gone and hasn’t gone. I don’t know if you know the story exactly, but it’s basically a Green Card gone wrong. Angie Everhart plays the old friend of Sammi Davis and she accidentally meets C Thomas Howell who charms her and she gets married for a green card, because she’s run away from home.

“Of course Angie is the bad girl because she’s got lots of money and basically they’re planning to scam her out of her money. So it’s a very Hitchcock-ian tale and that’s why I’m interested in it. It really plays on your head and you really feel for this poor girl as she’s taken through hell by these two."

How did you become attached to this project?
"Just through Julia Vernon, who’s producing it. We always wanted to work together and she gave me the script to read. Like I say, since then it’s been through many rewrites over the last three years. But it’s actually come back: the latest write of it has come back to how it was originally. I’m looking forward to doing it actually. We’re going to have to shoot it pretty fast; it’s not that big a budget."

So it’s not been shot yet.
"No, this is in the future. The Gardener which I just did, that’s the one that I’ve just finished. They’re selling that now."

What’s that about?
"A quick run-down on The Gardener. Again, a psychological thriller. Malcolm McDowell plays a guy who is actually only 36 years old but has an ageing disorder -which obviously made his childhood hell at school - and he decides that he’s going to love plants and flowers and spend his time in the garden. He also has a little bit of vengeance in him.

“I don’t know if you know that they use cattle for soil to grow plants. So he decides to use women instead and grow them ‘more pure than they were before’ as he puts it. So he’s a serial killer and he uses women; he basically chops them up and uses them as soil and grows them into beautiful, special plants of his own. And each of them has the name of the woman he killed, etcetera. And Angie Everhart’s partner disappears."

She’s in that as well?
"Yes, she is. I can’t get away from her. Not that I want to. So she’s in it, and also Richard Grieco, who we didn’t have until we were two weeks into shooting. We were trying to write this part out but then he got hold of the script and said he’d love to come and play the chief of police, Angie’s boss, throughout it. So we then built it up in the last two weeks. It was a great shoot. I think it’s a fun movie. It’s a weird movie."

Destined to be a cult film?
"Yes. definitely. Much more of a culty film but it’s not for everybody. It’s very subtly done, but basically what he does is cut them up and eat them then shit them out. We don’t go into that at all, but you do see him eating these women. But it’s not done like a horror movie, they’ve done it more like a mystery thriller. There’s a lot of dialogue. We actually like Malcolm McDowell throughout the movie, which is great. We actually like the guy then he suddenly turns on us. That’s the most interesting part of it for me; getting into the mind of this guy. Malcolm McDowell can pull it off so well."

With The Gardener, Children of the Corn III and going right back to being a PA on Little Shop of Horrors, there seems to be a death/plant theme to your work.
"Yes, I know. And this: Death Do Us Part. It’s something to do with my dad’s sense of humour. He did Theatre Of Blood, which I have a poster of in my house, the original poster with this great, great old English cast. Ever since then, we’ve always had a sense of humour for black comedy, and I always try to put a little bit of comedy in my movies. Because when you’re trying to scare people, you have to make them laugh first, and then they relax - and then you grab ‘em!"

When you were a kid and your dad was making films, did you go on set?
"Oh, completely. I was so lucky. I met John Wayne as a kid, I met Richard Burton, I met Vincent Price. I had a great childhood actually, it was great fun."

Is there any rivalry between you and your brother?
"Tony’s been incredibly helpful, actually. There always was, growing up. I always just used to try and be like my older brother. But Tony’s really supportive and I love him. We always put each other in our movies. And actually I worked with him, shooting second unit on Prince Valiant which he’s just made last year in Wales. So we work together, and we like different subjects actually. So we’re okay. Even though we both have done horror, we’re now moving in two different directions, I’m moving in a different one."

Would you like to get away from horror?
"You know what? I like to do both: I like scaring people and I like getting into people’s hearts as well. So yes, I’d like to do everything in a Kubrick kind of way: a space movie and…"

One film every ten years?
"Well, no. I’d like to do at least one film every year but on different subjects. But I love horror, I always have. My brother used to wake me up on Saturday nights, after Mum had gone to bed, and drag me down to watch two o’clock Hammer horror movies, which we loved. I was six and he was 13 or whatever. So he’d go to bed and he’d be fine, and I’d be lying there, awake in my bed, terrified. And he always used to tell horror stories: he’d always come round my door with a hairy hand glove or something like that. It was a nightmare growing up with my brother!"

Gerry Lively was here yesterday.
"Yes, I spoke with him yesterday. He worked on a lot of my brother’s films and he DPed Children of the Corn. I love Gerry, he’s a great guy. I heard his movie’s really good."

Have you got any pet projects?
"Yeti, but keep it quiet. I have got the best script. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, whatever you want to call it. This one’s called Yeti. We’re talking like a Jaws script, an incredible script, and we’re looking to make that this year. We’ve got a lot of interest, but I don’t want a lot of people to know about it. But this is a great script and there I can really have fun. It’s a much bigger budget."

Do you tend to write your own scripts?
"No. I’ve written some. Which Way to Oz I wrote. I get very much involved with the writing but I don’t normally take a credit. On Children of the Corn I did a lot of that, but I couldn’t have done it without the writer. But yes, I do. Another project I’ve got is Lord Byron which we’re scheduled to shoot in January next year and that is an incredible script. That is where I do want to be heading with my career. I don’t know if you know the story of his life. I thought I did, until I read the script. He died at my age, 32, but he’d lived a whole life that we’d all want to have done: travelling around the world, getting involved in wars, writing poetry, having love affairs. An incredible life, and it’s a great script and we’ve got a really good cast."

That interests me because I’m a Mary Shelley obsessive.
"It’s not like Gothic, but there is that weekend where Shelley actually went off and disappeared on the boat. There’s a great scene where they all wave goodbye and it’s a bit rough, but everyone’s having fun. That and another one called Villa de Rizzi. I love to make movies in England, although I’ve been eleven years now. This is a kind of English Leaving Las Vegas, about a British ex-spy drinking himself to death because he lives in sin with his sister, written by Piers Paul Read who wrote the book Alive and also the script for the movie. A very British man: I went and had tea with him.”

interview originally posted 2nd January 2010

Director: Christian James
Writer: Dan Palmer
Producer: Richard Kerrigan
Cast: Dan Palmer, Tamaryn Payne, Mark Holden
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: festival screening (Day of the Undead)
Website: http://stalledmovie.com

Stalled is the eagerly awaited (and long awaited!) second feature from the Freak Out team of Christian James and Dan Palmer. Palmer wrote this script solo and stars in the film, which James directs. It’s a zombie comedy. It’s very clever and very, very, very funny. It’s also slicker, more mature and more professional than Freak Out, although I appreciate the irony of using the term ‘mature’ to describe a film with this many toilet jokes.

Where their first feature succeeded despite its microscopic budget, for their sophomore effort Palmer and James have cannily embraced and even utilised their limitations, so that almost all the film takes place on one set and large parts of it consist of nothing but Dan Palmer on his own in one self-contained part of that set.

And that set is a toilet.

It is Christmas Eve - oh yes, you should also know that this is a very festive horror film - and the office party is in full swing on the seventh floor of an unspecified office block. Palmer is a never-named maintenance technician (his character is listed in the credits as ‘WC’!) called to fix a problem in the ladies loo, which has three stalls. He is forced to hide when a couple of scantily clad lovelies enter, who indulge in a little lipstick lesbianism before one of them bites a chunk out of the other’s neck. You saw this bit in the trailer.

Before long, the room is filling up with undead office workers, some of them in festive fancy dress, and our hero is trapped in his stall. He’s safe as long as he stays there, but he can’t get out. And he doesn’t even have his toolbox with him, which he has left over on the sinks. Not that it has many tools in it tonight, because this is his last day on the job and the toolbox is stuffed with money which he really, really wants to take with him if and when he affects an escape.

Of course, none of the zombies have any dialogue so in order to have some sort of character interplay the script introduces Evie, a lady trapped in the stall at the other end of the row (the middle one contains a dead zombie). We never see Evie, but in a clever conceit the film has ‘WC’ draw a picture of her in marker pen on the toilet wall and this allows Christian James to direct the conversations in a (slightly) more conventional way.

The plot of the film is our hero’s various attempts to reach his toolbox and escape, and it is here where Palmer’s script really shines. On paper, this could have just been a feature-length Road Runner cartoon with Wile E Coyote (hey: WC!) hatching a series of plans, each of which fails miserably and knocks him back to square one. But actually what we get is a well-plotted film with narrative development throughout the three acts. This is a film of cause and effect as each of the various schemes - to hit the fire alarm, to distract the zombies, to reach the toolbox and so on - is based around the current situation and available resources as they stand after the failure (or incomplete success) of the previous effort. Particularly hilarious is a possible rescue which is derailed due to a terrible miscalculation, and I’ll say no more than that.

Stalled is a movie of constant surprises which make it a delight to watch (as long as you’re not averse to crude gags, cleverly delivered). Palmer is absolutely terrific in the lead role, bringing real pathos and depth to the character, and his dialogues with Evie (Hollyoaks' Tamaryn Payne, also in Small Town Folk) open up both their characters, yet leave more to be discovered. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that near the end of the film the action finally moves out of the ladies loo; as indeed it does briefly earlier during a very funny musical fantasy sequence. The whole thing builds to a climax which is moving, ironic, clever and satisfying.

‘Moving’ is another odd word to use here, where one would expect to see more uses of ‘movement’. But this is a heart-warming film which never forgets that it’s set at Christmas. Stalled could well become a staple of horror fans’ festive parties, a sort of zombie It’s a Wonderful Life. Freak Out also had a real sense of warmth and compassion in its central relationship and this second film confirms that Palmer and James have the skill to hit all three targets: good horror films which are not only also good comedy films but actually just ‘good films’ in the purest sense.

The supporting cast (which does include a few non-zombie characters) features several notable names: Giles Alderson (Night Junkies, The Harsh Light of Day, Till Sunset), Victoria Broom (Zombie Women of Satan, Three’s a Shroud, Umbrage: The First Vampire), Canadian actor Mark Holden (Final Destination 1 and 5, World War Z, Nightmare Street), Chris R Wright and Peter Stanley-Ward (Small Town Folk), Steve McCarten (Season of the Witch, Harsh Light of Day), TV presenter Rick Edwards and comedian Dave Fulton. Stanley-Ward was associate producer on the film (which reminds me of an old joke: What’s the definition of an associate producer? The only person who’ll associate with a producer. Thank you, remember to tip the waitresses.)

Cinematographer Sashi Kissoon , making his feature debut after a number of shorts (including some for Dave Fulton) does an absolutely stonking job of keeping the camera-work fluid and natural within this small set - and often just within the one stall - without ever becoming staid or repetitive. He has previously been part of the camera crew on features including Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and something called Alien Uprising which turns out to be Dominic Burns’ UFO under a new title. Credit for the look and feel of the film must also go to the fine work of editor Mark Gilleece and production designer Antony Haylock. The special effects make-up is credited to ‘Snowy Ramone’ whom I suspect to be a pseudonym. And of course, Christian James’ adroit direction holds the whole thing together, creating what is instantly one of the best zombie comedies ever made.

More than that, what I really dug about Stalled was its very British parochialism and the way that it put a comedy spin on the ‘corporate horror’ subgenre which has been explored previously in films like Fired and London Voodoo. Severance put a blackly comic spin on corporate horror but Stalled is much less subtle and works absolutely bloody brilliantly. If you like zombies, if you like horror-comedies, if you like films where characters try to fish mobile phones out of toilets full of mashed zombie brain, you owe it to yourself to watch Stalled at the earliest opportunity, whether or not it’s actually Christmas.

MJS rating: A-

Pat Higgins is a major player in the British horror revival of the 21st century. As of this interview in summer 2010 he had directed 4.33 movies: TrashHouse, KillerKiller, HellBride, The Devil’s Musicand one third of the anthologyBordello Death Tales, with James Eaves and Al Ronald helming the other two segments.

How did the Bordello Death Tales project come about and what appealed to you about it?
“Jim and I were sitting having a beer after the cast and crew screening of Bane, and he suggested that an anthology might be a fun project. We chatted for a while about it and resolved to get a proper plan together at a later date. I suggested the addition of Al Ronald, and frankly the whole thing fell together ridiculously easily. I'm still amazed by how smooth it was. It fit perfectly into everyone's schedules, and we were up and running within a few months. I already had the germ of the idea for my segment lurking in the back of my head (except at that point the story was called 'Wanking the Id') and this seemed the perfect vehicle for it.”

How much contact was there between the three of you during the process?
“An awful lot of e-mails, a fair amount of phone calls and surprisingly little time when we were all actually in the same room together. We all saw each other's shooting scripts before any footage was shot, and we had one day in Southampton when we all filmed on the same set.”

Tell me honestly what you think about the other two segments.
“Jim's has a shine and a polish that I've never been able to quite manage, and it moves like lightning. It's a beautiful, slick, sick piece of indie cinema. Al's is pure artistry, with its own little world where the look of every object fits the design scheme. It's also absolutely nuts. The first time I saw the music sequence I think my jaw actually dropped. I love both of the other segments and I'm extremely proud to have been able to add my own one to the project.”

What was the origin of the fake trailers, and where do you think they might end up?
“God, I can't remember who mentioned it first. After we'd actually locked the movie, someone said something like ‘people keep asking if we're going to do fake trailers’ and we all coughed and snorted and said how derivative that would be. Then we thought how much fun it would be as well, and eventually just thought 'screw it, we'll do them anyway' and work out where they'll end up at a later date. My gut feeling is that they'll end up on the DVD somewhere, but probably not before the film starts. Or maybe we'll just put them online. We'll see.”

What is your own favourite anthology film and why?
“Oh, good question. I remember my mum, who has no interest in horror whatsoever, watching Dead of Night on TV when I was a kid. I only saw glimpses of the movie from peeking round the corner, and that was definitely the first seed. I also used to read the reprints of EC comics when I was a teenager, which of course tied into Creepshow rather wonderfully. They came out in an omnibus comic every month and I loved them. Hell, I even have a soft spot for Twilight Zone: The Movie, particularly the intro and the final two stories. I haven't seen any of the Amicus movies since my teens, but they all went into the mix too. You'll notice that I've failed to state a favourite!”

How did you get involved with producer Jonathan Sothcott and what can we expect from your next project Strippers vs Werewolves?
“I think that Jonathan and Black & Blue Films been achieving fantastic things over the last few years. It was actually the brilliant and talented Eleanor James who suggested that Jonathan and I should talk to each other about potential projects; we met up and chatted for a while, and were evidently very much on the same page as far as influences and the direction in which we might take a project. Jonathan has a real love of the genre, and instantly 'got' the Strippers vs Werewolves screenplay.

“I'm really delighted with the screenplay, which has hopefully got the knockabout vibe of stuff like the original Fright Night and The Lost Boys. We're determined to make the movie fun; I'm pretty tired of the whole 'watch people suffer slowly' vibe that seems to have dominated horror over the last few years. I want to get back to horrible monsters, gorgeous girls, good jokes, thrills, chills and unbridled entertainment. The cast is falling into place brilliantly; we've already announced that the wonderful Adele Silva will be one of our leads, and there are more announcements just around the corner. Can't wait to start shooting.”

website: www.jinx.co.uk
interview originally posted 10th September 2010

I first met Simon Hunter at Fantasporto in 2000 where he was introducing his first feature, the enjoyable serial killer movie Lighthouse (released in the USA as Dead of Night). Six years later, and with only two weeks to go before the start of principal photography on his second feature Mutant Chronicles, Simon very kindly answered some e-mail questions for me.

I remember writing about The Mutant Chronicles back in the 1990s when I was working on SFX. Why has it taken so many years to get to this point?
“I never really know with projects. A combination of things but the stars seem to have come together for us this year. We have really worked hard on the script and have a distinct vision for the film which I hope people will find fresh and exciting.”

Apart from obvious technical advances in special effects and the contribution of your good self, how will the 2006 film differ from the version that was in development in the 1990s?
“The title is the same! I wanted to try and take the movie in a radically different direction. There is nothing left of the original draft, it's just my vision and I hope people will like that.”

What have you learned from your experiences with Lighthouse that you can apply to this film?
“Lighthouse was not a pleasant experience for me. It has some good moments but I think the story wasn't fresh enough. I have been directing commercials since then and learned so much. We are trying to make Mutant a war picture rather than a horror picture.”

What are you most worried about as the start date looms?
“It's a massive undertaking. Millions of elements. Most of all I want to focus on telling a tight story and getting good performances. That's what I want to do most of all. We should have had a lot more rehearsal time on Lighthouse and I really regret that. It's not good for the movie and unfair to the actors. In Neil Marshall’s The Descent you really care for the characters - that, combined with the danger of the creatures and the set pieces, made it an excellent film. But you have to care!”

And what are you most confident about?
“Technically we are breaking a lot of new ground. It's something I know quite a bit about and I am very confident we can make everything work. The film is an almost virtual shoot and we are recording everything onto huge data drives. It’s a totally tapeless digital workflow. Editing, sound and visual effects will be totally integrated. We have a great crew, Tim Dennison is a superb producer and Ed Pressman has been 100 per cent supportive all the way along. So we are in good hands.”

What one piece of information can you tell me about the film which has not yet been made public?
“Ummmm. Not sure I can help on this. But head to Mutantchroniclesthemovie.com and I'll try and post some stuff up soon! It's a smaller movie than people might imagine but all the better for it. A tough ‘men on a mission’ film, not a sprawling sci-fi and ten thousand Mutants versus ten thousand humans! The Mutants will be prosthetic not CG. Paul Hyett is in charge. He did The Descent but he also did Lighthouse for me years earlier!”

website: SimonHunter.com
interview originally posted 15th May 2006

I interviewed Simon Hunter just before he started shooting Mutant Chronicles and I interviewed him on the set so it seemed a good idea to do another interview after the film was complete. This e-mail interview was done in early February 2009, a few months after after the film’s rather sudden and underpromoted UK theatrical release and just before the film’s UK DVD release and US cinema release.

It's fair to say that Mutant Chronicles had mixed reviews: some people loved it, some hated it. How surprised (or not) were you by that?
“Mutant Chronicles was a grand experiment! I desperately tried to do something no-one else has done before. I went for a very extreme look and feel for the film. I always felt that if I didn't do that, the movie would look very generic and cheap. We would have literally been running around on a back lot somewhere trying to make a sci-fi movie without the proper resources. No-one has made a movie that, almost end-to-end, uses so many models, miniatures and traditional matte paintings - it was a very extreme look, one I like.

“I am always surprised that people hate movies so much, especially these types of movies. It’s just a bit of popcorn fun. The entire style was meant to be fun, rough, quick and energetic - I am glad some people got that. If you enjoy Thomas Jane saying, ‘I'm not paid to believe, I'm paid to fuck shit up,’ then you will enjoy the movie; if you think that's very theatrical and cheesy then you won't like the rest of the movie because we made it in that style.”

What's the deal with the date? A lot of reviews, presumably working from publicity material, said it takes place in the 23rd century but the year is clearly shown on screen as 2707, and yet the DVD sleeve says 'Welcome to the 23rd century'. Who's right?
“I had decided on a date and we had a title card made, then a few months later I see a poster with '23rd century' written on it. I think some marketing people perhaps did not check the movie. These things happen so I am not going to get upset about it, But Philip the writer, myself and Ed Pressman had all agreed on the date. It was just a mistake so let's leave it at that. The US poster says the 28th century which is correct. It should not have happened.”

How happy are you with the way that the film has been treated by the various distributors?
“Once a film leaves the cutting room on the last day you have very little connection with it. That’s where the date issue came from, which was way beyond my control. It makes movie fans mad because it looks like you don't care to figure out stuff like that: well, we did figure it out but what can you do? I removed the date from my director’s cut. I hope that doesn't distract for too many people.”

In retrospect, what do you think works best about the film and what aspects do you think maybe don't work as well as they should?
“Works best: I think the whole look was incredibly bold and interesting. It had not been done before. I would have liked to have pushed the coal-powered feel further. I love the sequence of the ship being stacked with coal before the take-off on the mission. I know it would never fly(!) but it's fun. We could have gone further with a bit more cash: you know, wind-up torches, steam-powered lighting... that kind of thing! We had just eight weeks’ prep on this movie so it gave the production designer Caroline Greville-Morris very, very little time to get stuff together - but she did an amazing job.

“No-one has ever made a low-ish budget, UK, sci-fi movie in this way before. We went for a painterly, highly stylised look and feel: not a photo-real look, more like an impressionist look, more like early German cinema in the twenties. I am very proud of that. Some people I have read say, ‘Oh it tries to be like 300.’ Well, if they check their dates they will see that we were deep into post production well before 300 came out. So I like the look and feel very much. I know it's not to everyone’s taste - I appreciate that - but I think we should get high marks for being both original and bold which we were unquestionably.

“The set pieces in the movie are good fun: the lift shaft sequence, the pod escape, the final fight in the machine. These sequences were really hard to do - everything was virtual including the entire lift shaft. They were very complicated sequences to stage and involved an enormous amount of logistics. I am really happy with these sections of the movie. I also like the opening battle, its feel and look.

“The worse aspects: I wonder if the film has too much narrative, ie. too much story. It has the corporation story, the stone seal story, the mission story: perhaps too much. If we didn't have to set up the world so much then we could have got the mission aspect going earlier. The internal logic to the machine could have been better and we needed a mutant figure head, a baddy behind the curtain.

“Also there is too much religious talk in the movie; I have cut that from the director’s cut. One of the worse things was the voice-over. Not that it's bad, it’s that the movie doesn't need it. I have cut almost all of that from the director’s cut. Voice-over (in this case) just makes the audience think they are being treated like children.”

What are the differences between the various edits shown at previews, in cinemas or on DVD?
“There are only two cuts. We finished one cut just before a tax deadline (it was a UK tax break movie) and we had literally just got all the footage in, the visual effects shots, so we had no chance to have a short break and preview it. The movie had no voice-over halfway during post production then it was added to help explain things - but I was never wholly happy about that. So I asked the US distributor Magnolia to go back and change a few things and they gave me permission and the resources to do so - so good on them!

“So now there is a director’s cut of the movie. Basically it is about eleven minutes shorter, which is a lot. I have got the mission moving off faster and removed tons of explanation which the audience does not need, in my humble opinion. It was very cathartic to be able to just cut where I wanted without worrying about anyone’s opinion. I would urge people to go and check that cut out - it's way better.”

You must have been working on the film, from the promo short through to release, for about four years: what effect did that have on your life and how hard or easy was it (or will it be!) to finally let go?
“I think I enjoyed the promo most of all in the process. It was a really fun experience and I have very fond memories of the summer of 2005. We worked really hard and did everything in-house. The movie became my life and we worked round the clock for far too long on it. So many people put so much into this movie; it was made as a labour of love with very little resources. I am letting the movie go, day by day, and that makes me happy. It's time to move on and I have a big desire to go and make a live action movie without green screen on 16mm!”

website: SimonHunter.com
interview originally posted 6th February 2009

I first encountered Andy Hurst way back in the mid-1990s when a tape of Project: Assassinarrived at the SFX offices. He followed this up with a thriller, You’re Dead and now has a set of writing and second unit credits that includes several DTV sequels. He returned to directing withAre You Scaredand very kindly answered a few questions that I e-mailed him.

How did you get involved with Are You Scared and what attracted you to the project?
“The company behind Are You Scared was also responsible for many of the DTV sequels I've written so I had a really good working relationship with them. Marc Bienstock and Rich Goldberg produced a series of lower budget horror movies and my brother and I were involved with coming up with ideas. The initial spark of Are You Scared came from a spec script they'd bought a while back, the idea of a reality game show that turns deadly. Obviously it has more than a little similarity to the Saw movies, but when you're making low budget movies without stars you kind of have to make the concept the star. So the logic goes that if you're into Saw, then you'll be into other kinds of stuff that's in that same world. (It's a catch 22: the movies can't be wholly original because to sell them you need a recognisable hook, but because they're not wholly original people compare them unfavourably to the 'source material'. Such is life.)

“I was intrigued by the idea of directing again for a few reasons, some artistic, some practical. The script was lean and mean, it had some opportunities for twisted scenes and it was contained (a must for these lower budget movies). On a practical level I was excited to work with Robin Hill again, my co-director on Project: Assassin. He'd been working for a few years as an editor and after-effects artist and the work he'd been doing was mind-blowingly good. If we'd had that kind of technology and expertise when we were doing P:A, the film certainly wouldn't have taken us so long to complete!

“So, with Rob on board, I felt that we had an opportunity to do something in a similar to vein to P:A, but with all the money in place upfront, meaning we could get in done in a matter of months. It was a tough shoot, but the editing was a blast, and Rob came through big time with all his work in post production.”

Am I right in thinking that your brother Mike wrote the script, and if so, what is the significance of the ‘Ellis Walker’ pseudonym?
“Mike did write the script, but because he's writing and directing bigger movies too he didn't want to use his real name and let his current and future employers know that he'll work for cheap! Ellis Walker is his character's name from P:A. Simple as that.”

What are the pros and cons of having one brother directing and the other shooting second unit?
“The pros of having Mike directing second unit (and I assume of having me shooting second unit for him) are that there's a complete trust between us. We also have similar styles and we have a shorthand for understanding what we want from the scenes that we shoot. I've recently shot second unit for a director I hadn't met before and it's much more stressful; you shoot a lot more to cover yourself, and you don't take risks. With my brother I know he'll be cool with what I do and I've always been really pleased with what he's shot for me.

“The cons are that no-one in the world can make me angry the way my brother can. He's such an ass.”

What’s the story behind Project: Assassin’s German release and how did you get from this ultra-low budget British indie to working in Hollywood?
“The story behind P:A's German release is a long, convoluted, twisted tale, one that involves a fair share of regret and sadness. Ultimately the film is what the film is, and the experience is somewhat of a distant memory, but for all the joy, passion and hard work that we put into the film, it's tinged with a regret about the way things went down once this opportunity for a European release came about.

“Robin and Mike went down to Cannes with a rough cut of the film, showed it to anyone who would watch, and they happened to meet a guy named Marco Weber. He liked the movie, thought it needed a few reshoots, some new music and offered us the chance to remix the sound properly and then transfer the film to 35mm (it had been shot on Betacam video).

“At the time Marco was setting up a company with Roland Emmerich (the director of Independence Day), and he offered me the chance to come to Hollywood and work with him. It was an amazing opportunity, but the same offer wasn't extended to Mike and Rob. It was a very difficult time and I think that I made the best choice I could by coming out to LA, working hard to get things going and then bringing the guys out as soon as possible.

“We got together a year or so ago and did a DVD commentary, and in a way laid some of those ghosts to rest. It was also great to see the film again, cringing at how young and naive we were, but also revelling in the achievement of making a feature film on our own by the time we were 21.”

With ‘sequels’ like Single White Female 2, Wild Things 2 and 3 and Vampires: The Turning, what sort of instructions are you given about connecting to (or being distinct from) the originals?
“The DTV sequels business has taken off in the last few years and I've been lucky to ride that wave. Again it's kind of a catch 22 situation where you're making a cheaper version of the original film, without the original stars, so the backlash is inevitable. I do think that we've always tried our best to make something cool out of the movies, try something new, but there's a definite formula for these movies and that's the reason they're so successful.”

Are you planning to direct more films in the near future or will you be concentrating on writing?
“I'd love to direct again, it's just a matter of time. I have a young son, so being away from home for a long time isn't that appealing right now, but I'm sure the day will come (maybe soon) when he wants his father out of the house, away from the computer, so there's a good chance I'll get back to work directing one of these days.”

In the mid-1990s, Mike Hurst (brother of Andy) sent me a tape of Project: Assassinwhich I enthusiastically plugged in SFX and raved about to anyone who would listen. Since then, he has moved to the USA and built up a solid catalogue of movies including House of the Dead 2 and Room 6 and the screenplays forThe Graveyardand The Butcher. I finally had the chance to meet Mike in Romania in April 2006, where he was preparing to shoot Pumpkinhead: Love Hurts back to back withJake West’s Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes.

How did you get this job?
“I saw on a horror website they were making Pumpkinhead III and IV. They were making them in England so I called my manager, asked her to get me a meeting with Brad Krevoy’s company. She got me the meeting but in the interim I found out that Jake West was doing III and IV so I went to the meeting very much as a kind of meet-and-greet. I told them: Jake is great, I met Jake years ago, he’s a lovely guy, good luck with the movies. Then I was showing my showreel to the Head of Development when Brad Krevoy himself poked his head through the door and just saw a moment from New Blood with John Hurt on screen.

“He watched about two seconds of the reel and he was like: ‘Did you direct this?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He went, ‘Are you from England?’ ‘Yeah, I am.’ ‘Do you want to do Pumpkinhead IV?’ And it was that easy! I said, ‘Oh, okay...’ Then he told me that they didn’t have any script or any story and I had to come up with both in seven days for the Sci-Fi Channel. So I’ve basically written a Romeo and Juliet archetypal story.

“So that groundwork was already done by Shakespeare and I basically put Pumpkinhead into Romeo and Juliet and set it against the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which apparently is a real American feud in the South. I’ve never heard of it but a lot of Americans have heard of this feud. So I sort of spliced Pumpkinhead into that story. The Romeo character gets beaten up by Juliet’s family and then calls Pumpkinhead to wipe out the entire family so that he and Juliet can be together, and that’s the motivation for it all.”

What’s the appeal of Pumpkinhead?
“Pumpkinhead’s a cool, archetypal horror character. I like the first movie a lot; I’m not such a huge fan of the second one. I actually know the director of the second one a little bit: Jeff Burr, he’s a really nice guy and I think he’s a good director. I just don’t think that’s a good film.”

What is it about Pumpkinhead that makes him more than just a generic monster?
“There’s a very elaborate mythology around him. I think the first film’s an excellent morality play and I like the complication involved with the summoner feeling like he’s in the right then realising that revenge is not the best option and violence begets violence and all that stuff. That makes it somewhat deeper than your standard stalk-and-slash movie. Plus it’s a great monster, a great design. Stan Winston designed it in the first place. If you’re making a monster movie, you want to make a monster movie with a good monster - and I think it is a good monster.”

interview originally posted 5th July 2006

Emil Hyde, director/writer/producer of the very enjoyable horror-comedy The Landlord, kindly answered a few e-mail questions for me in March 2010.

What is your film-making background?
“Prior to making The Landlord, my only film-making experience was shooting some no-budget music videos for my band, where we basically took a camcorder and filmed ourselves running around in ridiculous barbarian and robot costumes. The Landlord was the first time we actually wrote a script and tried to tell a coherent story about an average guy who inherits a demon-infested apartment building from his devil-worshiping parents.”

How did you assemble your cast and crew?
“My good friend Rom Barkhordar, who plays the flesh-eating, late-night-television-watching, Hawaiian-shirt wearing demon Rabisu, is a fairly accomplished stage and television actor. Readers in the United States may have seen him in car commercials or playing terrorists on police dramas, and video gamers worldwide know his voice acting as Subzero from the Mortal Kombat series. Anyhow, Rom was able to convince several of his comparably accomplished friends to appear in The Landlord for no pay, hence we wound up with a far better cast than most zero-budget indies.

“On the crew side, we know several professionals here in Chicago who worked on movies like The Dark Knight and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. And while we couldn't afford to hire them, even at a heavily discounted rate, we did bring them over to my apartment to give our unpaid art-school volunteers a crash course in lighting, sound, etc. Some of the volunteers absorbed the lessons better than others, and a few members of The Landlord's crew have gone on to score ‘real’ jobs in the industry.

“Whenever you have a situation where no one's getting paid, there's bound to be chaos. People have conflicts with their day jobs, or some just say ‘fuck it’ and don't show up, leaving everyone else to scramble for a solution. More than one of the actors in The Landlord didn't realise they'd be appearing in a film when they woke up that morning - we called them over as a last-second replacement for someone who didn't show. But, despite the turmoil, there's also magic and camaraderie.”

What sort of balance between horror and comedy were you aiming for (and how well do you think you achieved that)?
“We followed the ‘Will Ferrell rule’, where you take an absurd situation - in the case of The Landlord, a guy owning an apartment building where demons eat the tenants - and play it completely straight. From there, the horror/comedy balance pretty much took care of itself, in that the situations were often funny to the audience, but always deadly serious for the characters. As for how well we achieved it... that's for each viewer to decide.”

What problems did the make-up and effects present for a low-budget indie production like this?
“Make-up was a huge challenge for the actors playing the demons, in that they were both acting in The Landlord during the mornings and on stage in the afternoons. So they'd show up on set at the crack of dawn, spend two hours in the make-up chair, an hour and a half in front of the camera, then another forty-five minutes in the make-up chair scrubbing all the make-up off, after which they'd have to race across town to get dressed and made up for whatever play they were in. It was tense, racing every day to cram in all the shots we needed, and left little time to improvise and experiment with those scenes like we normally would, but I think it all turned out wonderfully, considering.

“As for visual effects, there are over 270 visual FX shots in The Landlord. In every case, we'd ‘rehearse’ the effect beforehand - for instance, if a demon was going to teleport in a flash of light, I'd make a short film of myself teleporting in a flash of light. That way, we'd know exactly what we needed to get on video when the shooting day arrived.”

How has the film been received by audiences and critics?
“Well enough. About a third of critics have said, ‘This is a fantastic story for any movie, regardless of budget!’, while a third have said, ‘It's not bad for a low-budget effort’, and the last third said, ‘It's shit’. Still, we've had more than a few people approach us at horror conventions and film festivals, telling us it's one of their favourite recent movies and how they've watched it several times over. If we can make a few people's favourite movie for $20,000, my guess is we can make a lot of people's favourite movie for $2 million.”

What are you working on now?
“Our next project is called The Dog Cage, and it's about a monster-hunting cop who, after getting bitten by a werewolf during a raid, is locked up in a state-run asylum for monsters. We hope to produce a graphic novel adaptation sometime this year, and a movie whenever we can scrape the cash together. Speaking of which, your readers can buy copies of The Landlord at www.thelandlordmovie.com.”

interview originally published 2nd April 2010

Director: Norman England
Writer: Norman England
Producer: Norman England
Cast: Jin Sasaki, Erina Hayase, Takako Fuji
Country: Japan
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Website: www.theidol-movie.com

Norman England, Fangoria’s Japanese correspondent, is not the first film journalist to start making his own movies, nor will he be the last. It’s almost a natural progression. You hang around on enough sets, you start to think, “Hmm, I could do this.” That’s not presumptuous or arrogant, it makes sense. What better apprenticeship could there be in any trade than to watch other people doing it and then get to ask them questions?

It is massively to Norman’s credit that his first film is not some cheesy kaiju spoof or knockabout sci-fi comedy but a gentle, imaginative, amusing look at the Japanese culture in which he has lived for 14 years - with a sci-fi twist of course.

The iDol of the title is a retro-looking green plastic alien toy and the first part of the film follows its progress from one character to another. We know that it is extraterrestrial in origin because a bug-eyed alien beastie lands in a flying saucer and presses it into the hands of a terrified homeless guy (Yukijiro Hotaru: Pyrokinesis, Zeram, Cure, Stacy and all three 1990s Gamera pictures). The figure is swiftly stolen by greedy, unscrupulous Tanaka (Bobby Nakanishi), proprietor of a sci-fi/toy shop who recognises that it might be valuable, especially when he can’t find it in any catalogue. (Nakanishi played Akira Kurosawa(!) in a Blair Witch spoof called The Penny Marshall Project in which the three campers are replaced by Kurosawa, Marshall and Francis Ford Coppola. I find this extraordinary - a Blair Witch spoof which actually sounds worth watching.)

Tanaka sells it to our hero Ken (Jin Sasaki) who collects these things but by now we know that the iDol itself is influencing what happens, as it shines light beams into people’s heads. Ken has a girlfriend Rika (Takako Fuji: the spooky Kayako in the Japanese and US versions of Ju-on/The Grudge and their sequels) whose birthday he is in imminent danger of forgetting, a geeky best friend Taki (Hiro Miyama) and a sharp-suited office rival Yamada (Mitsu Katahira). And like every young Japanese male, he has a crush on babe du jour Mayuka (Erina Hayase, who was in a TV series based on the early life of Takeshi Kitano).

The iDol’s extraterrestrial powers give Ken the best day of his life and then the worst, a Twilight Zone-like existence as someone else entirely. Finally he realises that he must pass on the iDol to someone - or something - else.

Running just under an hour, this is a delightful film which presents us with a view of Japan which is at once an insider’s and an outsider’s. This is a nation where too many people fritter their lives away obsessing over pop culture and short-term celebrity instead of worrying about the realities of life. England directs with an assured, lightly comic touch. The acting is top-notch and the limited special effects are great, especially the alien which first brings the iDol to Earth (created by Kakusei Fujiwara: Pyrokinesis, Zatoichi, Godzilla Final Wars).

The screenplay was written in English by, erm, England (who is, of course, American) although Jiro Kaneko (Ultraman Max, Zero Woman) gets a ‘script’ credit for helping to translate it and transfer it into Japanese script format (he also designed some fake magazines and adverts seen in the film). The cinematographer was Hiroo Takaoka and the editor was Rob Moreno. Bill Gudmundson, a big name in kaiju model kits, sculpted the iDol itself, Hajime Matsumoto (Another Heaven, Ju-On, Ringu, GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) handled visual effects and Takashi Yamazaki (director of Juvenile) was responsible for the computer graphics. No less an artist than Bob Eggleton painted a matte for the final scene; he also receives a ‘concept artist’ credit along with England, Fujiwara, Yamazaki and German actor/model Daniel Zoehrer.

Original music is Koh Otani (Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Pyrokinesis) and Norman scores extra points for including a great song by Jane Wiedlin which I haven’t heard in a dog’s age (and no, it’s not ‘Rush Hour’). Tomoo Haraguchi (director of Sakuya: Slayer of Demons, special effects on Uzumaki) appears briefly as Ken and Yamada’s boss and there are lots of background references to other films and TV shows including a Dawn of the Dead poster and a toy SHADO Interceptor in Ken’s apartment (surely not filmed in Norman’s own flat?).

Although Norman is fluent in Japanese, nevertheless it takes guts to produce one’s first film in one’s second language. Despite this, The iDol is an accomplished and thoroughly enjoyable movie of which the writer/director/producer can be justly proud. It hits the right notes, it’s funny when it needs to be funny and serious when it needs to be serious, it’s beautifully observed and it’s professional on every level and in every sense. Yoku yatta, Norman-san!

MJS rating: A-

Director: Paul Burton
Writer: Paul Burton
Producer: Paul Burton
Cast: Gary Roberts, Emma-Jane Redman, Clare Hanson
Year of release: 2002
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK theatrical screening

This little oddity was shown at Phoenix Arts in Leicester on 1st June 2003 along with four other shorts made over an 18-month period by local film-maker Paul Burton. This title stood out by being a supernatural romance whereas the other four were all fairly violent thrillers.

Philip Weston (Roberts) is the manager of a local cinema which has posters for The Two Towers, 8 Mile and Jackass: The Movie, although Weston prefers old black and white films and has programmed a mini-festival of movies starring Fiona Brent, a British actress who died in 1945.

Assistant manager Heather Keen (the incomparably cute Clare Hanson) has a crush on Weston but he only has eyes for the flickering black and white images of Fiona Brent. After a screening of 1943 Ealing classic With the Searchlights to Guide Us, Weston is astounded to find Fiona (Redman) in the auditorium - in the flesh, in colour even. On her instructions he drives out to the countryside where she meets him in an old church and explains to him about Heather and, after some initial hesitation, he decides that he probably loves her in return. Later, the two get together. The End.

The three leads are all good actors and form something of a rep company for the prolific director (Mark Jardine also features in the fake 1940s footage as Brent’s husband and co-star). Burton’s shot-on-video work is technically competent although it suffers from the usual low-budget problem on inadequate sound mixing. The biggest problem with this film, and indeed with the others shown with it, was the script, which is simplistic in the extreme. The terrific possibilities of this situation, which is basically Somewhere in Time meets The Purple Rose of Cairo, simply aren’t explored and there is plenty of room to do that, even in twenty minutes.

For the record, the other Paul Burton films shown as part of ‘The Big Screen Project’ were: The Country Murders (2003, 20m) in which a man (Roberts) brutally kills women; Run for the Shadows (2002, 25m) in which a man (Roberts), um, brutally kills women; The Passenger (2002, 7m) in which, for a change, a woman (Hanson) brutally kills a man (Roberts); and the most original of the batch, Watching Over You (2003, 25m), in which a nurse (Hanson) thinks she’s being stalked by Roberts but it turns out to be her lesbian colleague (Redman). All suffer the same problem of poor scripts, sometimes hampered by awful info-dump closing monologues, which rather detract from the obvious hard work and dedication of Burton and his cast and crew.

Burton was a prolific maker of programmes for a now defunct Leicester community TV channel and good luck to him. But one can’t help feeling that he should put more effort into the quality of his scripts and less into the quantity of his output.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Tristan Versluis
Writer: Tristan Versluis
Producer: Tristan Versluis
Cast: Leslie Simpson (no relation), Axelle Carolyn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

There are several paths one can take to being a film director. Some people just plunge straight into directing low-budget, independent movies. Some go to film school with the express intention of emerging as a director like a moth from a cocoon. Within the industry, the two most common career paths are probably editing and cinematography and you can often spot these in the film-maker’s work. An editor-turned-director like Jake West makes films which depend on construction: flashbacks and fantasy sequences and jump-cuts and points of view. A DP-turned-director like Alan Ronald makes films where what is shown takes precedence over how it is arranged. Cinematographers’ films tend to be more visually poetic and languid; editor’s films are often more frenetic and intricate. Neither approach is better or worse than the other - that depends on the individual director - and both of course rely on understanding something of the other skill.

Occasionally one encounters directors who started as writers, producers or 1st ADs but these are rare and I don’t know of any directors who started as production designers or composers although I suppose there might be one or two. However, another route to the top of the crew has fairly recently become viable and that’s via special effects. Robert Kurtzman, Robert Hall and Chris Walas are examples of FX-guys who moved into the director’s chair and I think what distinguishes ex-FX directors is a propensity to really incorporate effects into the story. You might think that someone experienced in effects would want to cram their films with effects but, apart from the fact that they’re obviously moving into directing to make a change from doing effects all the time, it is very evident that effects artists use effects sparingly and integrally precisely because they are so experienced. It’s the directors with no background in special effects who often feel the need to cram them into every corner of a film, whether they’re needed or not.

Which is where my old mate Tristan Versluis comes in (declaration of interest there!).

Tristan has done special effects for a load of recent British indie flicks including Evil Aliens, Cradle of Fear, Broken, LD50 and Frank Scantori’s when-will-we-ever-see-it fantasy epic Warrior Sisters as well as being part of the crew on stuff like Sweeney Todd and Doctor Who. He has also moved into directing his own short films, starting with Plastic Reality. He followed this with Pixel but while that whirrs away in post-production he has made this little gem - short on dialogue, high on concept.

Reviewing a film where basically a bloke sits at a table and does something then a woman does something the end - is tricky. If I tell you even one little thing, I’m telling you everything. Look, it’s called I Love You, it literalises the concept of the heart as the seat of romance and passion, it’s made by a guy who specialises in prosthetic effects for horror films. The film is icky without being gross, shocking without being unpleasant. Probably it’s greatest accomplishment is that it is both gory and sexy without any violence or nudity. Exploitation film-makers may think they’re being ‘sexy’ by cramming their movies full of topless busty bimbos - and let me stress, I am as big a fan of topless busty bimbos as the next bloke - but frankly you haven’t seen sexy until you’ve seen Axelle Carolyn, a woman composed of at least fifty per cent cheekbone, blink slowly.

Nor, for that matter, have you seen self-inflicted pain until you’ve seen Leslie Simpson (no relation) do things to his bare chest with a range of household cutlery. It’s to Tristan’s credit - and it is indicative of a good horror film - that we come away from I Love You thinking we’ve seen more and worse than we actually have.

Simpson (honestly, no relation) is something of a Neil Marshall regular, having appeared as a squaddie in Dog Soldiers, a crawler in The Descent and ‘Carpenter’ in Doomsday (or possibly ‘a carpenter’ - I haven’t seen it yet). Axelle Carolyn (as she is credited on screen) is, in full, Axelle Carolyn Marshall (as she is credited on the poster). She’s in her hubby's latest feature Doomsday too, writes for Fangoria and was PR girl on nouveau Hammer episodic malarkey Beyond the Rave - which starred Leslie Simpson (definitely no relation) and had effects by young Mr Versluis.

For this picture, Tristan designed the prosthetics (while he was supposed to be working on Book of Blood) but left the application to Duncan Jarman, whose CV goes right back to Alex Chandon’s Bad Karma in 1991 and also takes in Funny Man, Proteus, Pervirella, The Killer Tongue and a bunch of big budget stuff.

Stuart Nicholas White was DP on I Love You, assisted by Trevor Speed (who knows Tristan from The Devil’s Chair and was DP on The Scar Crow) and Simon Pinfield. White and groovy-named 1st AD Tiernan Hanby previously worked together on Psychic Cat Productions’ film noir spoof Detective Story. Art director Mel Light is another Beyond the Rave alumnus. Justyna Dobrowolska handled make-up.

Although one might expect a film directed by an effects guy to be very visual - and one would not be disappointed here - I Love You also benefits from some noticeably terrific sound design. Let’s face it, the mere fact that it’s noticeable means that it’s either very good or rubbish, and it ain’t rubbish. Paul Yarrow is credited as ‘sound designer and recordist’ and I feel confident in saying it’s probably not the Paul Yarrow who used to be 33 per cent of Peter, Paul and Mary. Mind, I also feel fairly confident in saying that either the IMDB or Wikipedia will think it is at some point. Ian Morse composed the score - there’s an effects guy called Ian Morse, maybe he’s branching out.

The other credited crew are stills photographer Owen Billcliffe and boom op Alan Leer. Tristan gives himself ‘directed, edited and produced by’ and it’s noticeable that there’s no script credit. But then, there wasn’t really a script per se. There’s only seven words of dialogue!

I Love You is as brilliant in its execution as it is simple in its premise. Only two things stop it from getting an A+ and neither is a problem, just something that distracted me momentarily. The first is that, yes I know it’s fantasy and allegorical and whatnot, but just like the victims in Heartstopper, Leslie Simpson* appears to have no sternum. And the second is that the collection of implements on the table includes not only knives, forks and scissors but also spoons and at least one ladle. I just keep thinking: what was he planning to do with a ladle?

MJS rating: A

Director: Alex Chandon
Writers: Alex Chandon, Paul Shrimpton
Producers: Yazid Benfeghoul, Michael Kraetzer, Margaret Milner
Cast: Seamus O’Neill, Jo Hartley, James Doherty
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.inbredmovie.com

Inbred is Alex Chandon’s first feature since Cradle of Fear, a film which was released on video in April 2002. Let’s just consider what has happened in the intervening decade.

Back in 2002, there was no YouTube (invented in 2005), no Facebook (2004), no Twitter (2006), not even MySpace (invented in 2003) - the only way to spread the word about a film was through magazines and fanzines (of which there were still a few). No-one was going to see your trailer. Cradle of Fear had a website, crude and simple though it was, and thought it was at the cutting edge of indie film marketing for having this. And it was, it really was.

There were DVDs in existence ten years ago but most people still watched things on VHS, usually rented from Blockbuster or a corner shop. There was certainly no Blu-Ray or any of that HD nonsense. According to Wikipedia, 2002 was the year that the last Betamax VCR was manufactured!

Most films were still shot on 35mm or super-16, and most cinemas/festivals required a 35mm or 16mm print. Also, we were all a lot younger, slimmer, fitter. Jason Impey was doing his A-levels and Liam Hooper, director of Darkwood Manor which screens in a few weeks at the 2012 British Horror Film Festival, was still at primary school. I was doing a Masters Degree in Scriptwriting and working on a biography of a certain recently deceased comedy sci-fi author for a major publisher. TF Simpson was just a twinkle in my eye (and a stern look of admonition in his mother’s).

Jeezus, when did we all get so old?

Until 2002, there was an average of three British horror films released each year, but that year saw the first blip in this low production rate. In the space of 12 months, a dozen UK horror features were released including four which made a significant splash: Dog Soldiers, 28 Days Later, My Little Eye and Cradle of Fear. Fangoria ran a ‘British Invasion Special’ issue and in an issue of Scriptwriter magazine the phrase ‘British horror revival’ was coined (not by me).

In my book (did I mention I’m writing a book?) I single out Cradle as being very important in the burgeoning BHR, moving away from the bleak miserablism of (nevertheless great) films like I, Zombie and Urban Ghost Story to a much punchier, entertaining, but still set-your-watch-by-it ultra-contemporary style of film-making. Cradle of Fear was produced about the same time as Channel 5’s groundbreaking anthology series Urban Gothic and the two have much in common. They were startling then and they still stand up really well today.

Ah, today. September 2012. Ten long years we’ve waited for a new Alex Chandon movie, while the world, and film-making, moved on at a reckless pace. Was it worth it? Remember, we waited a long time for the Star Wars prequels, Indiana Jones IV and the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide. So was Inbred worth the wait?

Freaking A, yes! Inbred rocks big time.

Inbred is riotously funny, insanely gory, jaw-droppingly horrific, arm-grippingly exciting and so intrinsically British it should have a Union Jack sticking out of its arse.

Thematically, this is another in a fairly long line of you-ain’t-from-round-here-boy horror films in which townies venture into the countryside and find that the locals are, shall we say, special. Films like Small Town Folk, Gnaw and The Cottage fall into this category and variants on the idea have surfaced in everything from Doghouse to Eldorado. But Inbred really shows how to do it right.

Jo Hartley (When the Lights Went Out, Dead Man’s Shoes) and James Doherty (Deviation) are Kate and Jeff, the adults taking four young offenders away in a minibus for a weekend of work and fun in the countryside. They park themselves in a semi-derelict cottage and head down to the local pub for a round of soft drinks.

Impressively, the script by Chandon and Paul Shrimpton gives each adult and each youth a clear, believable character, establishing the relationships between them clearly but unobtrusively. It would be very easy for Jeff to just be an officious, stick-to-the-rules, stick-up-his-arse figure of fun. And while he is sort of one of those, he’s a lot more besides. None of the six are simplistic and all of them will change and develop once we lurch into horror territory.

But first there’s the evening in the pub where we meet the scraggly-toothed, vacant-eyed locals and the film’s most memorable character - Jim, landlord of ‘The Dirty Hole’. Seamus O’Neill (Dead Man’s Shoes, Curse of the Were-Rabbit) gives one of the great British horror performances of recent years as Jim, who pretty much runs the village. He is happy to serve suspicious fresh lemonade and even more suspicious home-made pork scratchings to the visitors, on the house, but later, when things kick off, Jim will be the ringleader. Indeed, the ringmaster, quite literally.

The next day, the townies set to work: recovering salvageable metals (such as copper wiring) from a fleet of abandoned railway carriages in a field. I assume that Alex and Paul either knew about these carriages already or wrote them into the script when they found them. I can’t believe they sent some hapless location scout around Yorkshire on the off chance that there might be some derelict rolling stock on a hillside somewhere.

Among the carriages, the townies run afoul of three locals and things escalate, rapidly but believably (and comically too, in a sick way). One of the party is accidentally injured, ferried back to the pub and - well, that’s when we start to find out what makes Mortlake such a special village, so rarely visited by outsiders. The locals have, ah, entertainments which are a little stronger than you might see on Saturday night telly.

The really great thing about Inbred is that it’s a solid horror film as well as a comedy. It’s actually scary and tense and frightening. We really feel for these people - we want them to escape, or at least survive, and we genuinely (perhaps justifiably) fear that they won’t. But at the same time, it’s extremely funny. You could take the comedy out - and you would still have a good horror film. You could take the horror out and you’d still have a good (if probably very short and incomprehensible) comedy. This combination of scary horror and funny comedy is something which very few horror-comedies pull off, most plumping for (whether intentionally or not) either scary comedy or (supposedly) funny horror.

Inbred is also marvellously imaginative in the manner of its violence and gore, which not only adds to the entertainment value but is also entirely credible within the context of the story and the locals’ theatricality. Far too often in horror films the more extravagant manners of demise seem to be there to serve the purposes of the special effects unit, rather than the other way round.

Among an excellent cast, all of whom hit the horror/comedy interface at just the right angle, are James Burrows (Eden Lake, uwantme2killhim?), Neil Leiper, Chris Waller and Nadine Rose Mulkerrin as the youngsters. Emmerdale’s Dominic Brunt, whose own horror film Before Dawn follows hard on the heels of Inbred, clearly has fun as a chainsaw-wielding lunk; Mat Fraser (Kung Fu Flid) appears without explanation in one scene to hammer some nails in; and Emily Booth is in a fun but completely irrelevant prologue. Also in the cast are Mark Rathbone (Cradle of Fear), George Newton (The Eschatrilogy, Dead Man’s Shoes), Lee Jerrum (Dead End) and Neil Keenan (who has been in all previous Alex Chandon films - even Siamese Cop!).

Cinematographer Ollie Downey (Deviation) does a bang-up job with both interiors and exteriors; editor Oliver Griffin has lots of TV credits including assistant editor on Urban Gothic, and he also performs commendably. Dave Andrews (A Day of Violence, Aggressive Behaviour) provides the music, of which the most notable piece is of course the ‘Ee bah gum’ song. In the film, this is an incomplete, interrupted performance, but on YouTube you can find both the full song and a version performed live on stage by Alex at Frightfest.

Inbred looks fabulous due to the terrific production design and art direction of Melanie Light (Psychosis, The Scar Crow, Beyond the Rave, Omni). Tris Versluis, Graham Taylor and Duncan Jarman all contributed to the special effects make-up.

Going into to much detail about who does what to whom with which tool, weapon or device would just spoil the fun. Inbred succeeds magnificently on every level and really doesn’t put a foot wrong. Was it worth waiting ten years for Alex Chandon’s new film? Yes, it was worth the wait. Let’s hope there’s not another decade before the next one. But if there is, you could alternate nightly screenings of Cradle of Fear (which still holds up well) and Inbred, and keep yourself entertained until 2022.

MJS rating: A

Director: Norman J Warren
Writer: Norman J Warren
Producers: Norman J Warren, Brian Tufano
Cast: Carol Isted, Bob Mallon
Country: UK
Year of release: 1959, no wait, 2007
Reviewed from: screener DVD

A silent, black and white short film about a young couple who meet at a fairground, Incident is thoroughly French in every way apart from one, which is that it’s not actually French. It is, nevertheless and without a doubt, the most Gallic motion picture ever filmed in Battersea. It has even got an accordion on the soundtrack, for Heaven’s sake.

If it looks like it was shot in the 1950s, there’s a good reason for that. It was. Norman J Warren directed and edited this footage in 1959 when he was a callow youth of seventeen and then, for some reason, stuck it on a shelf. Around the same time he got his first film job as a runner on Peter Sellers comedy The Millionairess and one thing lead to another yada yada sex films yada yada Satan’s Slave yada yada Inseminoid yada yada Bloody New Year...

So Norman never actually got round to finishing Incident (meaning that his directorial debut was technically the 1965 short Fragment) and the film just sat there as the decades passed. In 2007, Norman decided to finish the picture, which is why it has two copyright dates 48 years apart. It was first screened at the 2007 Festival of Fantastic Films and must surely hold the record for the longest period of post-production of any motion picture ever. Has anybody actually tried contacting Guinness World Records to see whether they will accept this for the next edition of their book?

There’s precious little story to Incident - the narrative is as brief and open to interpretation as the title - but it’s a beautifully shot little film, using the fairground setting to full effect. Our teenage heroine wanders around the funfair on her own, soaking up the atmosphere and generally revelling in being a teenager during the first period in history when there actually were teenagers. It’s all very hey-there-Georgy-Girl but in a Jean-Luc Goddard sort of way. Cinematographer Brian Tufano does a grand job of capturing the exuberance of the fairground and indeed using it for his own devices, most notably in what appears to be an expensive crane shot but turns out to be filmed from the big wheel.

The girl (Carol Isted, who was in fact only thirteen) meets a boy (Bob Mallon, who now lives in South Africa), they have a lovely time - but perhaps she’s a little naïve about his intentions and hopes. When she runs away from him, the fairground becomes a scary place, full of noise and strangers and disorienting lights - though it should be firmly stressed that this not in any way, shape or form a horror film.

The story behind Incident is that Norman and Brian met in their early teens at the West London Film Unit, a club for budding 8mm auteurs. Norman was working on a ridiculously over-ambitious war feature called The Bridge for which Brian offered to handle photography. Though The Bridge was never completed, Warren-Tufano productions went into business filming weddings and parties before shooting Incident on 16mm.

This is the film exactly as it was edited together back in 1959, the only new parts being the music and the titles. All the sound effects are from a BBC recording made at Battersea funfair in 1953, Norman of course went on to great things in the 1970s and has in recent years been working on DVDs of his and other people’s films. Brian Tufano is now one of Britain’s leading cinematographers with more than forty years of film and TV credits including Quadrophenia, Billy Elliot, Virtual Sexuality, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. He also shot some second unit stuff on Blade Runner!

Incident is a lovely little curio. Brian and Norman are planning a DVD release that will include an interview with the two of them discussing the film. In the meantime, festival programmers looking for a short to play as support to a late 1950s feature would do well to see if Norman can lend them a copy. [Incident was subsequently released as an extra on the BFI DVD of Norman's feature Her Private Hell. - MJS]

MJS rating: A

Director: Anya Camilleri
Writer: Gary Humphreys
Producers: Donald Kushner, Adam Shapiro
Cast: Tara Reid, Christian Brassington, Alice O’Connell
Country: UK/Romania
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Sony)

Even by my standards, Incubus is shite. I have a notoriously high tolerance for crap. I’m very forgiving, very understanding, I will give credit where it’s due and I will try to appreciate what the film-makers are trying to do.

But dear God this is bollocks.

A very long, completely pointless prologue has two characters in white coats (or it might be three - it’s too dark to tell) chasing each other along dimly lit corridors. Why are corridors in these places always dimly lit? I mean, either the lights are working or they’re not.

The movie proper starts with a car-crash - only the budget wouldn’t stretch to a stunt so we actually start with our six characters emerging from a van on its side with a dented roof that suggests it has done at least one and a half rolls. Yet none of the sextet are injured or even shaken, in fact they don’t have a hair out of place. They’re in the Bitterroot Mountains, Montana (according to a caption which isn’t even centred properly) and there’s no mobile reception so they’ll have to walk. You or I would set off along the road because, well, it must lead somewhere, you can’t get lost, it won’t get muddy or impassible and there’s a chance of encountering another vehicle. But these idiots decide to yomp across the Montana hillside and head into the woods.

This opening scene suffers by apparently having dialogue that was not rewritten to match the available props and scenery, so in discussing the damaged van they talk about “getting it out of there” even though it’s just lying on the grass, not ‘in’ anything. They make no attempt to right it even though I’m sure six fit young adults could move a van if they emptied their luggage out of it. Someone says they can’t even shelter in it - why not? And someone else refers to it as a truck.

Heading off without their luggage (although they will later turn out to have about thirty feet of rope, an ice axe and six large torches) they find, just as it’s getting dark, an isolated building that is “not on the map” - which suggests that, despite being in the middle of nowhere they know exactly where they are. They break in through a fence then climb onto the roof, prise open a skylight and discover a deep, octagonal shaft. It’s about ten feet across and goes thirty or so feet down to ... well, just the corner of a corridor, frankly. (The building is actually quite small so we have to assume that most of it is underground.) A girl named Jay (Tara Reid: American Pie, Alone in the Dark) goes down the rope - very easily, like she’s just rappelling down a cliff - and starts exploring. When she doesn’t return, her brother Peter (Christian Brassington, who played the title role in the Channel 4 drama-doc Tony Blair: Rock Star!) follows her.

One brief exchange establishes these two as siblings, otherwise we get no character information whatsoever. I mean: none at all, not on anyone. We don’t even know if the other four are two couples or just friends. We have no background on these kids; we don’t know who they are, where they’re from, what they think. I have never seen a film with less characterisation. The one and only comment that anybody makes which does not relate to their situation is when a girl called Karen initially refuses to leave the van because she doesn’t want to walk in $500 boots (what, she’s going on a camping trip with no other footwear?). (Karen is played by Monica Dean who sounds British but is actually from Romania - her real name is Monica Barladeanu - where this crap was shot. She was voted the sexiest woman in Romania by various local magazines and TV shows and has since gone on to have bit parts in Lost and Nip/Tuck.)

But Karen, after the other five have gone down the rope, climbs off the building and in fact is the only one who does set out walking - though we’re never told why. Josh (Russell Carter, fresh from drama school), whom we presume is her boyfriend, gets stuck on the end of the rope because it has caught on something up top, then it snaps and he falls to the floor but is not injured. So the rope is now considerably too short to reach the top of the shaft. Remember that.

Exploring, they find two bodies in lab coats, in a pool of blood, and can immediately deduce that they killed each other. Okay. They also find the centrepiece of the movie: in a large hall (about the size of, oh, a movie soundstage, which even has sound baffles lining the walls) they find an octagonal cell within which is a man. He’s bald, almost naked, sitting in a chair and has various tubes and wires attached to him including a tube going into his stomach, just above his navel, which they think (not unreasonably) is feeding him. However, as he seems to be wearing ordinary pants, you have to wonder where the waste goes after it has passed through his alimentary canal. (He’s played by Mihai Stanescu whose normal job is as make-up artist on movies such as Lurking Fear, Kraa! The Sea Monster, Totem, Voodoo Academy, The Brotherhood, Leeches etc.)

No, actually you don’t have to wonder about where his poo goes. There are far too many other things to wonder about in this inept production of a hopelessly clicheed script. For example, the power supply to the building. The outside lights come on as the group approach the fence, then once inside it’s dark(-ish) till they find the light switch that controls the whole building. This is later turned off, without noticeably affecting the general lighting situation. The octagonal cell is never less than fully illuminated and it has lots of computers and other equipment so presumably has its own permanent power supply. And they later find an office which is very brightly lit indeed. Basically, the sets are dimly lit when they want to be spooky, brightly lit when they want to be otherwise. The point is: it’s all done to suit the story, rather than with any logic. (There is also some business later with torch batteries starting to run out which is frankly these idiots’ own stupid fault for having all their torches on all the time, even when the lights are working.)

I should also note that the publicity consistently refers to the octagonal cell as a ‘cube’ which suggests that either the publicity was written before the production designer got to work, or someone doesn’t understand basic three-dimensional geometry.

So anyway, the nearly naked bald guy is instantly - instantly! - identified as a murderer who was supposedly executed ten years earlier. I mean, there’s no labels or notices or anything, it’s just: “Hey, this is that guy...” To be able to recognise a person you’ve never met from newspaper photos you saw ten years ago, despite him being now naked and bald and, well, ten years older - wow, that’s some feat. Bizarrely (or at least, it would be bizarre in a competent movie) we are never actually told what this guy’s crimes were apart from a passing reference to him having killed some members of his family. (Once again we have to turn to the publicity, which calls him a ‘serial killer’, something which is never alluded to in the film itself. Mind you, the publicity also calls the young people ‘teenagers’ whereas, in accordance with international cinematic law, they are all played by actors in their mid-twenties. In fact token name value Tara Reid was thirty when she filmed this - and looks it.)

A flashback, narrated by one of the group, explains to us that when this guy (called Kiefer, I think) was seven, his mother used to punish him for singing. We see a skinny kid in a filthy bathroom, cleaning his teeth and humming a tuneless melody. An evil-looking woman comes in with a small washing-up brush and scrubs his tongue - which is probably uncomfortable but hardly major-league child abuse. In response to this, the boy bites his own tongue off.

Biting tongues off is something of a recurring feature in this film and is pretty much the only interesting or scary thing on show.

We are never told how long after this the boy killed his mother, or whether he ever killed anyone else, or how our gang are so extraordinarily clued up on the life of this one guy. They subsequently find an office (as mentioned) where there is lots of easily readable information on the cell’s inhabitant that explains everything that is going on, plus a stack of VHS tapes because, yes, this is one of the many scientific research facilities where people, instead of writing things down, record them by speaking to a video camera. Despite there being dozens of tapes, Jay easily finds the ones she wants and even though she fast forwards through bits, each time she presses play, we get a nice, complete sentence that explains a bit more of what is going on.

So what exactly is going on? Well, first, let’s bring ourselves up to speed. The team find a lab-coated individual in one of the rooms (who may or may not be someone from the prologue) who repeatedly stabs Peter. The other four manage to drag Peter from the room and close the door before the other person reaches it, which suggests he/she wasn’t really serious about chasing them. Peter then dies and Jay is so upset about this that Tara Reid comes perilously close to acting. Later, they re-enter the room and we have the immortal line, “It’s all right, the psycho’s gone.” We never find out who this person was - I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman because it was so dark - and frankly I don’t think it matters.

After all the nonsense in the office where these experts on Kiefer are brought up to speed with what has been going on, Josh turns into a psycho and chases the other three (Jay and Holly and Bug the Token Black Guy). We are assured that he went psycho after he fell asleep but since none of the others were with him when he fell asleep or woke up, in fact there was no hint to the viewer that he was ever asleep, this leaves us all scratching our heads. Oh, and when he chases them, Jay, Holly and Bug all simultaneously decide that in this big facility the only place to hide is the octagonal cell, despite the fact that it has glass windows on all eight sides.

Holly (Alice O’Connell, who has been in Silent Witness and Casualty) reaches it first, goes inside and locks the door (why?). Bug (Akemnji Ndifernyan, who was a regular in cut-price daytime soap opera Doctors) and Jay run up and bang on the door, shouting for her to open it, which she decides to do just before Josh reaches them. Since there is no other suggestion that Holly really hates the other two, we can assume that this was added to increase the tension despite it making no sense. Fortunately for the trio, possessed Josh hasn’t got enough enough sense of his own to smash a window, despite having eight to choose from, so he bites his own tongue off at them.

Oh, and how did they get the key? Let me take you back to the first discovery of the octagonal cell, when the door was locked. One of the gang (I think it was Josh) announced that he knew where the key was, led them all back down the various corridors to the two bodies and pulled a small chain from the mouth of one of them, on the end of which was the key to the cell. Just try to get your head round the sort of thinking that has gone into writing a script like this, devoid of common sense, motivation or cause and effect. Someone on this planet (in fact several people) find it perfectly believable that someone would notice a chain sticking out of a corpse’s mouth, not mention it at the time, then find a locked door elsewhere in the building and, putting nothing and nothing together get four, working out that the key must be on the end of the half-swallowed chain. I mean, where else could it be?

Jesus, this movie is stupid.

Oh yes, I did promise to explain what is happening. As far as I can tell, through the terrible dialogue and hamfisted direction, the CIA (or somesuch) were experimenting in remote viewing (a phrase that the writer presumably heard somewhere but didn’t bother to find out what it means), a project they claimed to have cancelled in the mid-1990s around the time that Kiefer was executed. But in reality they bribed the doctor at the execution to claim he was dead before his heart stopped so that they could ferret him away and experiment on him. This is all explained by Bug (I think) who has the most fantastically detailed knowledge of modern execution techniques, which he suddenly decides to share with his friends for no good reason. (Whenever people are inside the cell, we get distorted shots of them from Kiefer’s point of view, although his REM-shifting eyes remain closed.)

Quite why experiments in remote viewing would require a convicted psychopath with no tongue is something that concerns us as little as it concerns the idiot who wrote this. But the upshot of all this, not that there is any hint of cause and effect or any other sort of connection, is that Kiefer projects himself into people when they sleep and possesses them, turning them into psychos like himself, with a taste for tongue. Quite how Bug, Jay and Holly work this out is completely unfathomable, but not as mysterious as the question of how the audience is supposed to work this out or accept it when they are told it in one of many cack-handed infodump scenes. It’s like an off-the-peg horror movie plot has just been stapled to the existing script.

To test this, Bug and Jay tie up and gag Holly - on account of her being the smallest and weakest - and somehow send her to sleep (possibly by forcing her to watch a tedious movie called Incubus). She then becomes possessed so they very sensibly remove the gag from her mouth and she bites Bug who I think then kills her. Bug then rips all the tubes and wires from Kiefer in order to kill him but of course when he and Jay are walking away, Kiefer (now resplendent in white lab coat) leaps down from a walkway and breaks Bug’s neck.

Gee, it’s a good job that ten years of sitting in the same chair didn’t cause his muscles to atrophy. Mind you, his tongue muscle is particularly strong, having apparently grown back since he bit it off all those years ago, as he speaks quite clearly while chasing Jay (we also heard Peter speak clearly only five minutes after biting off his own tongue). Martin Sherman, voice artist on such games as Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad and Pac-Man World 3, provides Kiefer’s voice.

I mean, for Christ’s sake, the one and only thing that this film has going for it is a couple of gruesome scenes of people biting off their own tongues. Without the tongue stuff there would be nothing here at all. And yet the morons who made this film either didn’t know or didn’t care that we use our tongues to speak. This is the best (but far from the only) example of how monstrously inept this pile of crap is.

So Kiefer chases Jay through the corridors, nice and slowly, and she makes it back to the octagonal shaft. She attaches a G-clamp (which is presumably just lying around) to the end of the rope and throws it up the shaft where, on the third attempt it catches on a grill in the roof. Apart from the sheer unlikelihood of the G-clamp landing anywhere where it would hold a person’s weight, you have to admire the strength of this thirty-year-old teenager who can repeatedly throw a heavy, cast-iron tool more than thirty feet above her head.

Oh, and don’t forget that the rope snapped when Josh was coming down and was, when last seen, about ten feet shorter than the shaft, yet it now reaches easily to the floor, even with a knot tied in the end round a G-clamp.

Now here’s the clever bit. Well, not really clever, it’s actually as insultingly stupid as the rest of the film. When Kiefer finally reaches the rope, he climbs up it, calling Jay’s name. But then she appears from round the corner. She tricked him! He’s about ten feet up the rope and he could just jump down (as he did five minutes ago when he landed with great agility behind Bug and killed him) but instead he holds on while Jay yanks on the rope until the G-clamp slips off the grill and Kiefer plummets to the ground, sustaining inexplicably massive injuries. Lying immobile, he begs Jay to kill him which she does by holding a bit of rope over his throat and pressing down. I told you she was strong.

At this point, a Sheriff turns up and without asking anything about what has happened, or whether anyone else is around, pops some cuffs on Jay and leads her outside to his car, passing another police car with Karen (remember her?) sitting in the back. The final ‘twist’ is that, as the car drives off, Jay’s eyes glow - exactly like, erm, no-one else’s eyes have glowed, even when they were possessed.

Holy crap, I’ve seen some shit in my time but Incubus comes perilously close to setting a new level. Let’s rank this one up there (or down there) with Star Crystal, The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical and Hellgate. There’s just nothing to recommend here. As if the crap script, crap acting, crap design and crap direction weren’t enough, the whole thing is full of flashy jump-cuts that do nothing except piss off the viewer. It’s like someone is saying, “Look, look, they’ve let me have a play on the Avid and I want to know what all these buttons do!”

Let’s name the guilty parties. Incubus was directed by Anya Camilleri who directed episodes of Boon and The Bill before helping to create Samantha Janus-starring cop show Liverpool 1 and trendy transatlantic drama NY-LON. This is her first and, thankfully, to date only feature film. I never saw Liverpool 1 or NY-LON so I don’t know this woman’s work from anything but the DVD I have to hand. Maybe she knows how to direct TV drama but she hasn’t got a clue how to direct a horror film. Not that anybody could have made a half-decent movie out of this terrible, terrible, unbelievably terrible script. But a more experienced director might have actually requested some changes, like a plot that makes sense or any characterisation whatsoever.

Gary Humphreys is the man who wrote this pile of tripe (or, to be fair, may have written something that got turned into this pile of tripe then not had enough sense to take his name off it). He graduated from Oxford in 1981, spent 1986-1992 working as a journalist in London and Paris then produced a series of novels, some of them written/co-written under the pseudonyms ‘Patrick Lynch’ and ‘Joseph Geary’. One of these, Carriers, was filmed as a TV movie in 1998 starring, erm, nobody I have ever heard of. To judge from on-line synopses, this tale of a killer virus outbreak has thematic similarities to Incubus such as Government conspiracy paranoia, bollocks pseudo-science, a nonsensical plot and a token black guy. Humphreys is now, apparently, a professional ghost-writer. Hmm, yes I would trust my book to the man who wrote the script for Incubus.

Evidently Humphreys makes a steady living out of writing although one must wonder how much of that is talent and how much is because he went to Oxford and met the right people. Did he really write a script with zero characterisation? Does he not know what characterisation is, or is his understanding of horror films so limited that he thinks it’s not necessary as long as you have young(-ish) people and the occasional bitten-off tongue? Is he so dumb that he thinks people with no tongue can speak clearly, or does he believe that his audience are so dumb we will accept that? Is he an idiot or just condescending?

Gary Humphreys seems to have one other produced screenplay to his credit, a Romanian-shot thriller called True True Lie starring, erm, nope, nobody I have ever heard of. I would rather cut my thumbs off than watch it.

Although filmed at Castel Studio in Romania (a fun place where I visited the set of Pumpkinhead 3) and actually described in the credits as ‘a UK-Romanian co-production’ (like the Pumpkinhead sequels, Seed of Chucky etc), Incubus is to all intents and purposes an American film. Yes it has a British director and writer and a largely British cast, but it was produced by Americans taking advantage of tax breaks and cost-effective production facilities in London and Bucharest. Donald Kushner is one credited producer, formerly half of Kushner-Locke, with a B-movie CV as long as your arm. His most recent credits include the aforementioned True True Lie, the equally aforementioned Pumpkinhead sequels, Bernard Rose’s Snuff-Movie and the non-Charlie Band sequel Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys. The other producer is Adam Shapiro whose work includes disability sports documentary Murderball and the 1999 version of Tom’s Midnight Garden.

Simon Boswell (Octane, Dr Sleep, Lord of Illusions and - crikey - Black Sunday) provided the music which I didn’t really notice so must have been okay I guess. The hyperactive editing is credited to Adam McGraw (NY-LON) and John Wilson (Billy Elliot). Cinematographer John Lynch worked on the marvellous Wordsworthsploitation movie Pandeamonium as well as pop videos for Bjork and Blur. Gary J Tunnicliffe gets a credit as ‘Special make-up effects designer’ - although it’s difficult to see what effects needed designing apart from a couple of bloody tongues - and Blake Bolger (whose e-mail address I managed to lose after she gave it to me in Romania) was the technician responsible for tongue-wrangling. Pretty much everyone else is Romanian and has credits that include most American B-movies shot at Castel.

Whenever the subject of crappy films comes up in conversation, people want to offer their own ‘worst film ever’ - and much of the time it turns out to be a perfectly reasonable B-movie. I love B-movies me. I don’t expect everything to be some star-studded, big-budget, big-screen blockbuster. I positively thrive on cheap and cheerful movies with plenty of faults. You have to go a long, long way into Awfultown for me to completely hate a picture. But Incubus is so egregiously bad that it beggars belief. The production is crappy but I’ve seen crappier. The script however is something else. And sorry, Gary Humphrey, but your name’s in the credits so you have to take the rap.

Incubus doesn’t have the tuneless songs of The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical nor does it have the cavalier attitude to comprehension of Hellgate nor the jawdroppingly bad acting of Kannibal. But it does have the worst script of any film that I have ever seen - and that’s saying a lot. Anyone who read that script and thought it was even remotely passable needs to seriously rethink their career.

Now here’s an interesting thing. Incubus was the first film offered for download on AOL. A website called AOL Red made the movie available to download (for a fee) from Halloween 2006. The film was shot in summer 2005 and Adam Shapiro allegedly told the LA Times that they went with the straight-to-download option because they were “unable to find an attractive deal for theatrical release” which is unbelievably bogus because something like this wouldn’t go theatrical even if it was good. What he means, I suspect, is that the film wasn't even good enough to go straight to DVD. (I don’t think anything shot at Castel has gone theatrical except Cold Mountain, to be honest.) Whether anybody did download it, I have no idea - but I bet they were pissed off when they did.

Finally, a note on the title. According to the Inaccurate Movie Database the original script was called Nightmares (not to be confused with this 1992 anthology, this 2004 short or at least two other films) and the working titles were Heart Stopper (not to be confused with this 2006 feature) and Pulse (not to be confused with the Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie or its US remake, which also had Gary J Tunnicliffe effects). And of course Incubus is not to be confused with the legendary Bill Shatner-starring Esperanto movie of that name. Were the producers desperate to find the most overused title they could?

So anyway it ended up as Incubus. Now, remember how I mentioned that the writer clearly didn’t know/care what ‘remote viewing’ means? Well, he also was clearly ignorant of what an incubus is. At one point someone (Bug, I think) explains what an incubus is - but he gets it wrong. He says it’s a demon that gets inside you while you’re asleep, but in fact an incubus is a male demon who has sex with a woman (as any fule kno), the opposite being a succubus. In a half-hearted attempt to make up for this, there is a brief dream sequence near the end when Jay imagines she is in bed, something starts moving under the sheets - and it’s Kiefer! But that doesn’t alter the fact that what Kiefer does is nothing like what an incubus does. Plus, of course, he’s not any kind of demon. His powers are paranormal, not supernatural.

The fact that the makers of this film gave it a one-word title without bothering to check in the dictionary that it means what they think it means tells you everything you need to know about this sad waste of everybody’s time. Avoid this film as one would avoid a rabid dog.

MJS rating: D-

Director: Jamin Winans
Writer: Jamin Winans
Producers: Jamin Winans, Kiowa Winans
Cast: Chris Kelly, Quinn Hunchar, Jennifer Batter
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener (4Digital)
Website: www.doubleedgefilms.com

The trailer for Ink promises much but the film does not cash in those cheques. What could and should have been an enigmatic and thought-provoking urban fantasy that challenges our conceptions of reality has ended up as a confused, pretentious, overblown (and way overlong) mess.

This is a film made by someone raised on pop videos, commercials and YouTube, someone who believes that there’s no point having access to a digital post-production technique unless you’re going to use it. Repeatedly. All the time. Watching Ink is like looking at a really terrible website full of different fonts and colours with endless flash animations and rows of dancing hamsters. This is chuck-it-all-in-because-we-can film-making which completely obscures the simple story at its heart.

And the story is unbelievably simple. It concerns a guy called John Sullivan (Chris Kelly) who is some sort of financial executive manager something. It’s completely impossible to work out what he actually does but I can’t tell if that’s because the dialogue in the office scenes is realistic (hence offering no clue to those of us not involved in multi-million dollar whatever-these-are) or whether it’s because writer-director Jamin Winans has simply made up a bunch of corporate-sounding shouty technobabble: “Harrison’s going to close on Apollo!” “What? That’s a disaster! Let’s make up some numbers!” “How about $18.50?” “Yes, that’ll work!”

I should stress that Ink is not a comedy. Although it might have been marginally better if it had been played as one.

John has a young daughter, Emma and we ... eventually ... discover that custody of Emma was awarded to her maternal grandparents when her mother was killed in a car-crash. That might have been useful to know early on. Actually, anything at all would have been useful to know early on as the first 25 minutes(!) of this film is an unexplained and inexplicable melange of dream sequences and things that look like dream sequences, mostly featuring people we will never see again.

In one of the few actual bits of plot, which consequently sticks out like a sore thumb, Emma’s grandad (Steve Sealy) tells John that the little girl has had some sort of non-specific seizure and is in a coma in hospital and - for some reason - the only thing that might help her is a visit from her estranged daddy. Much later we have a flashback to the custody proceedings where the judge talks about John’s errant behaviour and drug-taking, which again might have been more useful to know about earlier on.

So the plot is this: girl has seizure (off-screen); grandad tells father to visit her; father refuses (for no apparent reason); father has car-crash and finds himself in same hospital as daughter so goes to her and she wakes up. Now imagine that stretched out to 105 mind-numbing, arse-numbing minutes of over-the-top editing and over-exposed cinematography.

John’s story jumps backwards and forwards in an endless stream of flashbacks and repeated scenes although thankfully he has a beard in all the ‘current’ sequences and is clean-shaven in the flashbacks (apart from when he wanders into his own flashbacks to talk to his younger self). But mixed with this is a story about four completely unexplained young people who have some sort of magic abilities and inhabit the dreamworld. Or something.

Actual character names are rarely used in the film, a crass mistake since audiences need to know this one simple thing to keep track of - and care about - who’s who. Working from the IMDB, the brunette with a samurai sword seems to be called Allel (Jennifer Batter) and the tall guy with crosses of masking tape over his eyes seems to be called Jacob (Jeremy Make). He is a ‘pathfinder’ we are told, though this is never explained. There’s also a black guy called Gabe (Eme Ikwuakor) and a blonde woman called Sarah (Shelby Malone) but they seem to be there merely to make up the numbers and don’t do anything, as far as I can tell, except follow the other two around then join in with the climactic fight.

These four start trailing John ... eventually ... although neither he nor anyone else can see them. They’re trying to get him to visit his daughter which they eventually achieve by Jacob setting up a hugely complex sequence of events: one person bumps into someone else who spills a drink which makes someone else slip, which distracts someone else and so on and so on and so on until eventually John crashes his car (which was actually the first thing we saw at the start of the film so it has already happened anyway). This is all very clever and all that but entirely unnecessary and completely unexplained. It’s just flashy, fancy effects instead of a coherent plot - which is really a description that could apply to any part of Ink or indeed the film as a whole.

‘Ink’ turns out to be the (meaningless) name of a character in the third story strand, a shambling mutant with a ridiculously huge prosthetic nose who has kidnapped Emma from her bed in one of the could-be-a-dream sequences in those chaotic, confused first 25 minutes. Throughout the subsequent chaotic, confused 80 minutes he drags Emma along through some sort of alternate reality which may be dreamland or may be the afterlife or may be Leighton Buzzard for all that we’re told anything. Along the way he meets a woman called Liev (Jessica Duffy) who says she is a ‘storyteller’ though she never tells any stories in this film. Liev initially fights Ink but then for no apparent reason agrees to become his prisoner.

These three strands of plot are interwoven. Well no, that suggests a pattern. It’s more that they have been put into a sack and given a good jumble before being tipped onto the floor, stapled together and called a film. Honestly, the whole thing is utterly incomprehensible, not because it’s clever but because it thinks it’s clever. Randomly inserted into all this are the completely unexplained bad guys, called Incubi, who wear squeaking leather suits and have glass screens in front of their faces (except in the final fight where these are removed for no apparent reason and all the Incubi get big, glowing eyes).

No attempt is ever made to tell us who/what the Incubi are, what they want or what threat they present. Ink’s motivation for kidnapping Emma is so that he can present her to something called ‘The Assembly’ (which may be the same as the Incubi) but why he picked this particular little girl is never hinted at, nor how Allel and her friends knew to try and stop him in the initial fight sequence in Emma’s bedroom. All the (vastly over-edited) fight scenes are long and boring and there are occasional unexplained voice-overs telling characters things they already know.

We do eventually find out who/what Ink is but this revelation completely contradicts much of what has gone before and fails to explain why he looks like a caricature of Jimmy Durante. (I kept expecting him to break into “Siddin ad my pee-yano!”)

This mishmash of half-formed ideas (and that’s being generous, only because there’s no such term as ‘quarter-formed’) is not helped by appallingly frenetic editing. Every single scene is hacked to bits, with people jumping about everywhere as one-man band Winans shows us that he’s so clever he doesn’t need to edit coherently. And every single scene is also shot in varying degrees of soft-focus with washed-out cinematography that is then tinted sepia or blue or green or whatever (as the stills here ably demonstrate). Even the supposedly real-world scenes in John’s office are subjected to these staggeringly inappropriate and hugely obtrusive post-production effects. Used sparingly, this could have been effective - but slathered on like too much peanut butter it’s just overpowering and pointless.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film in which style so comprehensively sought to replace substance. At the end of the movie we have learned nothing about this fantasy afterlife-dreamworld-thing and we have learned nothing about any of our characters, apart from the fact that John was a bad daddy because he was obsessed with his work and neglected his kid. You know, that’s not exactly an original concept and it’s been done a million times before, almost all of which films were more enjoyable than Ink and less hard work to sit through.

Only a commitment to writing this review prevented me from switching this off partway through because it really is unwatchable. It’s clear that Winans knows a vast number of flashy techniques but has absolutely no idea how to employ them to tell a story. It’s all just effects for effects’ sake, which leaves the viewer saying something to the TV that sounds very much like “Effects’ sake!”

There’s a germ of a good idea here, but that’s all it is. It could be that Winans has got this whole dreamworld-afterlife-thing worked out but has utterly failed to convey his ideas, simply because he has forgotten one of the most basic rules of fantasy. Which is that we need an outsider to identify with, a touchstone of reality, so that we can learn about this world as he/she learns. Somebody has to go into Narnia, someone has to travel to Oz. Ink reminded me very much of Dark City, a film which was complex and initially confusing but which gave us the Rufus Sewell character as a touchstone. (Of course, it’s also possible that Winans hasn’t got this whole dreamworld-afterlife-thing worked out and is just making the damn thing up as he goes along.)

Our only touchstone with reality here is Emma (an absolutely stunning performance by Quinn Hunchar which is the film’s saving grace) but she is a frightened little girl and says little and never really learns what’s going on. Children have been used as touchstones in fantasy films before - Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Pan’s Labyrinth spring to mind as Gilliam and del Toro are clearly strong influences on Ink - but they were slightly older and were inquisitively investigating the fantasy world, not just being dragged through it by a supernatural Noseybonk.

I was really looking forward to Ink and it let me down massively. Winans has just gone completely out of control in post-production - more of this, turn this up to 11 - but has skimped severely on an important part of pre-production which is, you know, actually having a coherent script. There’s just nothing here, once you strip away all the digital sound and fury signifying nothing. This is an hour and three-quarters of ‘look what I can do with my edit package’, a shambolic, unfocussed (often literally), pretentious piece of cinematic twaddle. Just awful.

Winans wrote, directed, produced, edited and composed the music (mostly ambient synth stuff). His wife Kiowa was the other producer, the art director and the costume designer. Cinematographer Jeff Pointer has also photographed documentaries about Trekkies (Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water) and the Dalai Lama (When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun). Most of the actors have other credits but nothing that anyone has ever heard of. The unreadable end credit roll knocks a merciful five minutes off the actual running time.

MJS rating: D

Director: Amanda Gusack
Writer: Amanda Gusack
Producers: Lydia Cedrone, Meredith Freeman
Cast: Erik McDowell, Johanna Watts, Levi Powell
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener DVD

Jesus Christ. Oh sweet Mary, Joseph and Jesus. You watch a lot of horror movies, you get desensitised to them. It gets harder to find genuinely scary films and when you do, it gets harder to be genuinely scared by them.

But dear sweet Jesus, this one scared me. As I type this, it’s not quite 10.00pm, Mrs S is downstairs watching TV, I should feel calm. I’m a rational, sceptical guy who loves ghost stories in books and films precisely because I don’t believe that these things are real. But I’m glancing at every shadow because In Memorium has really, really unnerved me.

It’s a ghost story. No special effects, just story, characters and effective use of every cinematic trick available.

I always say: judge a film on how well it does what it sets out to achieve with what it has available. Writer-director (and executive producer) Amanda Gusack does an amazing job with comparatively little. One location, four actors. The whole film ostensibly compiled from security camera footage, putting it in the same subgenre as My Little Eye and Under Surveillance but, more importantly, justifying the shot-on-video look of the movie. A potential disadvantage, turned to an advantage. The film is a tight 73 minutes with not a second wasted.

Did I mention that it scared the crap out of me?

The set-up is that Dennis Wade (Erik McDowell: Wide Awake in Nothing) is a young man with terminal cancer and only a very short time left to live. Rather than extensive surgery and chemotherapy which would only increase his slim chances marginally, he has decided to move into a rented house with his girlfriend Lily (Johanna Watts, who was in two episodes of Enterprise) and cover the place in motion-activated security cameras and microphones. He’s a film-maker and will sort the footage daily on his computer; he has hired an editor to compile it into a feature after he dies. It will be a document of his final days.

What Dennis and Lily don’t expect is that the cameras and microphones will pick up something else, something indistinct which is only briefly visible because the camera images fuzz up into static when it’s around.

The house has been rented to various people over the past forty years. Could one of them still be there?

Counterpointed with this, and ultimately intrinsic to it, is Dennis’ relationship with his younger brother Frank (Levvi Powell). Dennis is the sensible, stable one, Frank is a wastrel with an attitude. The brothers get on, but there’s a frosty dislike between Frank and Lily. Ironically, unreliable Frank was the one who was with their mother when she died of cancer only a year or so earlier while Dennis, the older, estranged son refused to visit her bedside. We quickly learn that their mother was a dreadful, evil woman - but does that justify her eldest son abandoning her as she lay dying in hospital?

In this carefully, brilliantly paced film, the tension mounts as Dennis and Lily - and the audience - catch glimpses of something unnatural in the house. Dennis’ condition worsens, but in a way which doesn’t seem to make sense. False trails lead nowhere, truths are told, lies are revealed.

I don’t feel it’s an exaggeration to say that, at least in terms of the effect it had on this viewer, In Memorium can be mentioned in the same breath as The Haunting and Ring (original versions, of course). We see and hear virtually nothing and that is precisely what makes the little that we do experience so terrifying.

At the core of the film are three superb performances, thoroughly believable in both their interpersonal relationships and their reactions to the gathering horror. Mary Portser (Ed Wood, The Italian Job) provides excellent support as Mrs Sporec, the landlady. Cinematographer Mike Testin (who directed a version of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist) does an extraordinary job with the video, much of which was shot in low light. Some shots are washed out almost to monochrome, highlighting the red blood. (Yes, there’s blood.)

There’s no music but sound designer Gregory Hainer makes up for that with an eerie and effective soundtrack, especially the odd noises caaptured on tape; his CV includes Darkman III, Tales from the Crypt and an X-Men game. The excellent editing, credited to Diane Bruce and Jeff Rubin, is also a major contributing factor to this film’s success. (Producer Lydia Cedrone, incidentally, has an eclectic collection of credits which includes ‘costume accountant’ on Pearl Harbour and ‘post production auditor’ on Sometimes They Come Back... Again.)

In Memorium is amazingly good in pretty much every respect. And Gusack’s superb direction never cheats. Every camera angle is locked off (except one sequence where Dennis unhitches a camera from its stand) and the same angles are returned to again and again. Yet the film never feels constrained by this self-imposed restriction.

This is an exceptionally well-produced, marvellously acted, brilliantly directed film - and if you watch it alone, you will be sleeping with the light on, if you can sleep at all.

MJS rating: A+

Directors: Steve Lawson, Simon Wyndham
Writer: Steve Lawson
Producers: Steve Lawson, Simon Wyndham
Cast: Steve Lawson, Clive Ward, Chris Jones, Me!
Country: UK
Year of release: 2002
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Official site: www.steve-lawson.net

Insiders holds the honour of being the first independent full-length martial arts feature film produced in the UK - and I'm in it!

Yes, this indie feature marks my acting debut as a policeman called 'Sergeant Moore' but let's skip over that and address the film itself. Insiders is a thriller about retired hitman John Carter (Steve Lawson) who worked for a shadowy organisation called, um, The Organisation, but has now been given a new identity and is trying to live a peaceful life with his wife and baby.

His past catches up with him when he returns home to find said wife and baby murdered. The police question him as the prime suspect and even though he is entirely innocent he is unable to provide an alibi because he was actually down the gym working out with a former colleague named Karl Loveberg (Clive Ward) - which he shouldn't have been doing because former Organisation agents are supposed to cut themselves off entirely from their previous lives.

Loveberg springs Carter from the cops but who can they turn to when other former Organisation agents start turning up dead? Someone is bumping off anyone who might know anything about The Organisation: could it be a former colleague or The Organisation itself? Can Carter and Loveberg even trust each other?

In amongst all this intrigue are a series of well-choreographed fights. Organisation agents are trained to use their fists and their feet before pulling a gun and all those involved in these action sequences are trained martial artists. Fortunately, my scene was a bit more sedate... that's me, standing behind Inspector Travis (Roger Jones) during the police interrogation. (I'm also a radio newsreader and doubled for another character in the final scene - that's my hand holding the baseball bat in close-up.)

Steve Lawson has been making increasingly professional shorts and features for a few years now and this is his best yet, showing a distinct maturity over earlier movies such as Thunderstrike. Working on video with a tiny budget, but with an intelligent script that refrains from becoming overly complicated, Lawson and co-director Simon Wyndham have crafted an enjoyable, exciting, action-packed and intelligent thriller that never tries to outreach itself. If there's a downside it's that Lawson, who is actually in his late twenties (I think), looks like he has barely started shaving. Youthful good looks can be a boon for an actor - but he seems awfully young to be a professional hitman, let alone a retired one!

Wyndham and Lawson, who both make guest appearances in fight scenes in Left for Dead, are now in post-production on the second film from their Phoenix-i production company, The Silencer. Unfortunately - or fortunately, perhaps - I wasn't able to snag a bit part in that one.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Andrew Coats
Writer: Andrew Coats
Producers: Hilary Evans, Vicky Konieczny
Cast: Steven Wren, James Bryce, Kulu
Country: UK
Year of release: 1999
Reviewed from: screener VHS

Fu Manchu was once a stock character of literature and, to some extent, cinema. Boris Karloff played the oriental mastermind and so did Christopher Lee, but in recent decades he has faded from sight. Scheming oriental masterminds determined to enslave the white race are not exactly politically correct. The last Fu Manchu feature was a Peter Sellers spoof in 1980 (directed by Piers Haggard). Since then there has been a Spanish comedy short in 1990 and this unjustifiably obscure gem.

Evocatively shot in black and white by cinematographer Martin Radich and featuring smashing Edwardian set design by Radich, producer Konieczny, Tom Gauld (who now draws comics) and Martin Sorensen, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu is both a loving homage to - and a cruel satire on - the novels of Sax Rohmer.

Sub-Holmesian Commissioner Nayland Smith (a terrific performance from Steven Wren), with his Watson-lite assistant Dr Petrie (James Bryce: Cry for Bobo) in tow, is on the trail of Fu Manchu, evil megalomaniac leader of the oriental cult known as Si-Fan. Only three other men, besides Smith, know the identity of Fu Manchu. One by one, Sir Crichton Davey (Jimmy Barbour), Sir Lionel Barton (Alan Jefferies) and Sir Gregory Hale (Michael Coats) are found dead by the duo. Nayland Smith concocts outlandish - but not silly - explanations for each death and tracks the culprit down to Limehouse.

Intercut with these scenes are meetings between three Whitehall mandarins (John Shedden - who was in The Mad Death and an episode of Z Cars - Alex Purves and John Somerville), discussing what they can do about Nayland Smith who, we gradually see, is in fact a paranoid racist. “It’s not just the Chinese,” he tells Petrie at one point. “It’s the Arabs, Gypsies, Negroes and Jews.” ‘Fu Manchu’ himself (Kulu) and his daughter (Linda Wan) are the innocent proprietors of a Limehouse laundry, represented by a magical set full of billowing white banners emblazoned with Chinese characters.

Where Andrew Coats’ script works so brilliantly is that he knows Sax Rohmer’s work and quotes liberally - and directly - from it, not least in Petrie’s narration. The film does not spoof, parody or lampoon Nayland Smith but cleverly hangs him by his own petard. It’s a marvellous conceit which is brilliantly carried out. Which leaves me puzzled as to why this short is not better known. There are a handful of references on the web but no actual reviews or discussion. Let me change that now!

Andrew Coats now mostly works with community groups, making short films with young people. His only other credit as director seems to be his graduation film, which I believe was called Twelve. His collaborator Martin Radich actually won a BAFTA the year that this was made for a short documentary/drama, In the Memory of Dorothy Bennett. His other films include Such is Life, Sara, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Eric Redrobe.

Steven Wren has worked on stage in productions of Little Shop of Horrors, The Beggar’s Opera etc, was a baddie in an episode of Taggart, does voice-overs for BBC Scotland and is also a singer and choreographer. Much as I would like it to be the same guy, I suspect the 1st AD on Project: Shadowchaser 3 was a different Steven Wren - but you never know.

The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, meanwhile remains one of my favourite ever short films.

MJS rating: A+