Cult films and the people who make them

Director: Ray Brady
Writer: Ray Brady
Producer: Ray Brady
Cast: Gordon Alexander, Elizabeth Tan, Tom Wu
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: festival screening (FFF 2006)

There’s plenty of combat in Intergalactic Combat - you can’t fault it on that. Well over half the 92-minute running time of this low-budget British indie feature consists of people kicking, punching or otherwise fighting each other. They barely pause for breath. Unfortunately, precisely none of this combat is intergalactic. Ah well.

I will admit to missing the first minute or so of the prologue so I don’t know exactly how the aliens arrive on Earth or how they are received, but the message they bring is that Earth must assemble a crack squad of warriors to take part in some sort of, well, intergalactic combat. I think participation in this interspecies fight club is mandatory for any sentient race which wishes to join in galactic society. Or something.

The problem is that, although there are occasional references to this set-up in the film, including a few shots of aliens and CGI alien worlds, the truth is that the entire sci-fi aspect could be removed from this film without affecting the storyline one iota. You wouldn’t even need to rewrite or shoot any pick-ups, you could just take out the sci-fi bits in the edit suite. The resulting film would make as much sense, possibly more, and it would still be feature-length too.

For reasons that are not explained (unless it’s in the first minute of the prologue), rather than some world martial arts federation simply assembling the current champions, there will be a series of trials, pitching various combatants against each other and the victors will face the aliens. Except they won’t because the trials are being held at a national level, with an international contest to follow and only then will any ETs be confronted. So this isn’t even a film about selecting a world squad, it’s a film about selecting a British squad (or English - the script is rather confused on that point).

The closest thing we have to a central character is ‘Alexander the Great’ (Gordon Alexander: Sucker Punch, The Purifiers, Underground), a former champion who retired after breaking his leg in a road accident. He is given the task of assembling the squad by Andromeda, a beautiful alien who has ‘morphing technology’ and takes the form of Asian actress Elizabeth Tan (Dirty Sanchez: The Movie). This ‘morphing’ is limited to some CGI-work on her hair in two scenes near the start and one right at the end. For most of the film, Andromeda’s extraterrestrial origins are never explained. Andromeda and Alexander later fall in love and end up shagging without either commenting on the ethics of inter-species relationships.

I say ‘closest thing’ because one of this film’s biggest faults is the enormous cast of characters, which means that even Alexander gets very little actual screen time. Andromeda and sharp-shirted smoothie Ryk Barbados (New Zealander Nigel Wilson) pop up frequently as presenters of ‘Combat TV’ to commentate on the fights and the fighters; Barbados also seems to be organising the whole thing and presumably runs somewhere called ‘Barbados Bar’ where we meet barman Kenny Mac (Kevin McCurdy), a good-looking black guy who kicks some trouble-makers' arses. McCurdy is easily the best actor in the movie and also one of the best fighters - or at least, screen-fighters. He actually looks as if he is really fighting rather than just going through a series of predetermined moves.

I’m not qualified to say how well most of these people can fight in genuine combat, but when performing for the camera they are as wooden on the mat as they are when they open their mouths.

We also meet an Asian businessman called Paul (I think - can’t find him on the IMDB cast list), saving a homeless guy from being beaten up. Next thing we know, Paul and Kenny Mac are on a rooftop sipping cocktails when a gang of goons arrive, line-up and fight them. There is no indication of how the two good guys know each other as they have no other scenes together, either before or after. And when the last goon falls down, it is revealed that this is all a scene being shot for a movie. This is doubly curious, because not only is there no explanation of this ‘film within a film’ - I mean, none; the scene is just stuck in there - but it also contradicts how action movies are shot. The fans who might watch this are savvy enough to know that it’s all done in bits with close-ups and two-shots and whatnot, but this ‘film’ is one of those impossible ones which has lots of action shot from every angle which all stops when the director yells ‘Cut!’

It doesn’t make any sense and is entirely removed from anything else in the movie, just like the scene in the Barbados Bar and the scene with the homeless guy. In fact, like just about every non-fighting scene throughout the film. We also meet a blonde girl, Nadine (Katie Cecil), who is groped on a tube train and then learns self-confidence in a martial arts class run by Zulu (Tom Wu: Mutant Chronicles, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers). Then there’s Trojan (Troy Titus-Adams, who was in EastEnders a few years ago), a single mother who manages a lap-dancing club (or is she a single mum - a scene at the end suggests that Kenny Mac is her other half). Then there are two twins, George and Lewis Long, (Neil and Adrian Rayment, who were in The Matrix Reloaded) who fall out over a woman, or something, and one of them is evil, or turns evil, or something. Oh, and there are some racists conspiring to keep the British team entirely white, and they get supplied (by aliens, I think) with some sort of goop they can put on their hands that will weaken their opponents muscles. There’s someone called Billy Boy too (Silvio Simac: Black Mask 2) but he doesn’t seem to do anything except the fighty bits. Oh, and a girl with braided hair called ‘The Bitch’ (Cathy Brown). And probably one or two others that I have forgotten.

There is just way, way too much here. Too many subplots with too many characters all crammed into the 30-40 minutes of the film that isn’t fighting. Literally, you get a few minutes of one subplot - twins or racists or whatever - and then it disappears for an hour while we get clips of other subplots and lots and lots of fighting before re-emerging briefly when we have forgotten about it. This also makes keeping track of who’s who difficult; interestingly, in defiance of accepted beliefs, it’s possible to distinguish the black and Asian characters but all the white blokes look the same, as do all the white birds. Maybe if one of them ever smiled, that might make them stand out. Or if any of them could act.

Oh, and a bloke in a military uniform pops up on screen occasionally to talk to camera but I have no idea who or what he is - I guess that was in the prologue too. He is credited as ‘Commander X’ and played by Michael Chomiak, who is a regular in Ray Brady movies and also gets a ‘casting' credit here. (The prologue, incidentally, has a guy with a machine gun being chased by two cars, one of which does a pretty spectacular crash before bursting into flames, leading to a pretty well-done man-on-fire stunt. This all appears to be from a different movie and is explained as the first attempt to find combatants before it was realised that they had to be unarmed.)

Despite the vast number of characters, there’s no characterisation on show here. Nothing ever gets resolved, or even developed. Anything which isn’t two or three folks kicking the shit out of each other is rushed past like some sort of formality, which wouldn’t be so bad if the fights were interesting or entertaining. I love a good martial arts film as much as anyone but this isn’t a good martial arts film. In fact it’s a terrible martial arts film though it is still a better martial arts film than a science fiction film. Indistinguishable ‘main characters’ square off against indistinguishable, nameless opponents and there’s something wrong when we only know slightly more about our main characters than we do about the non-speaking parts who are there merely to be beaten, because we don’t care a jot about who wins in any fight.

However many opponents are lined up, there is never any sense of danger or threat as they calmly step up to pretend to slam their face into someone’s foot or fist. Green screens on the walls (the director can’t decide whether they really are green screens used as an effect for Combat TV or whether they’re an effect for him to matte in cheering audiences) fail to distract us from the ‘action’ which is a shame as the fights, for the most part, are as thrilling and exciting as an exercise video. There’s not even any shouting or yelling or foley work or anything, just people taking it in turns to strike martial arts poses until one of them falls over.

It’s difficult to know who this is aimed at. There is a sort of genre of indie martial arts film-making in Britain, something which rarely gets written about outside of specialist websites and Impact magazine. Through my association with Steve Lawson and his films, I have glimpsed a little of it, but for the most part it remains a mystery, an insular subculture with its own heroes and villains. It’s a curious thing that you never meet people who do kickboxing in the real world, yet there are all these kickboxers - they are among us! - who make kickboxing movies about kickboxers for other kickboxers to enjoy. But I can say with all honesty that I have never met anyone who kickboxes and wasn’t involved in some way in indie film-making. (To be fair, as this is a film about kickboxers, it’s not unreasonable that that’s what the characters do.)

That’s not to say this is a kickboxing movie, or even a KCM. It’s a sign of a bad film when you find yourself wishing, “Christ, I really hope one of these people turns out to be a cyborg” - but no such luck here. There are various martial arts on display and occasionally Andromeda even pops up on Combat TV to explain the history of ju-jitsu (or whatever), thereby eating still further into running time which could be used for plot or characterisation.

Instead we have three ‘zones’ of varying stupidity. The first is a straight fight in a gym against two (or three - difficult to tell) opponents. There is some guff about treading on different parts of the mat determines who can fight, but it’s not clear and makes no difference anyway.

Then the really dumb ‘second zone’ requires the competitors to run across London, occasionally being waylaid by costumed groups of two or three opponents: the Ninjas, the Masked Maniacs, the Heavy Brigade, the Ninjettes and the Schoolies (two girls in Britney Spears get-up who backflip endlessly across a tennis court before Zulu knocks them out with one slap). Despite the complete absence of camera crews in the alleys where these fights take place, this is all somehow broadcast on Combat TV. Finally, each of the combatants must face off against two guys in stupid make-up. The make-up varies, so are they the same two each time? Who knows...

The more I think about Intergalactic Combat, the more I wonder about how and why this film was made. There’s just no plot. You expect to have a hero who overcomes adversity and the injured Alexander would seem to fit that role, except that, like everyone else, he is off-screen for most of the film. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is resolved, apart from a list of seven names which appear at the end as the selected British team. The racists? Who knows? The twins? Not sure. The film-within-a-film? Completely forgotten. At one point, Andromeda finds a morphing device (a spiky pink ball) and muses that she’s not the only alien in town. So we wait to find out which of the other characters is secretly a morphed alien - but guess what? It’s never mentioned again.

This whole inept shambles just flipflops back and forth between the badly acted ‘character/subplot’ scenes and the staggeringly badly acted and deeply dull fight scenes, neither aspect capturing our attention. Adding to the problem is the never-ending use of captioned flashbacks. Every ten minutes we get ‘one month earlier’ or ‘eighteen years earlier’ or ‘yesterday’ or ‘next week’ or ‘eighteen years later’. Enough already, tell your damn story! Oh, I forgot: you don’t have one.

Now here’s the irony. It may seem (actually it does seem) like this movie was cobbled together without any actual script. And guess what? According to the film’s website, that’s what happened! And I quote:

‘INTERGALACTIC COMBAT’ is reversing the usual process of scripting and casting for a Martial Arts movie in that we have cast several highly talented leads that each have the chance to deploy their own personal best moves. We have asked the leads to really show us what they can do, including other talents unrelated to combat and we've attempted to include them within the framework of the film's treatment and structure.

This organic process has meant that the full narrative has only emerged as the film is being produced. But each of our leads has the unique opportunity to shine and let a wide international audience see how talented they are.

Which is not only plain wrong (guys, write a damn script, you can’t make a decent movie without a script) but also bizarre because what are these “talents unrelated to combat” around which the film has been based? Tom Wu does an impressive series of cartwheels just before punching the backflipping Schoolies and Gordon Alexander spends one hilarious scene identifying and ‘preparing’ tropical fruit(!), but apart from that...? Nobody sings, nobody dances, nobody does any magic tricks - and very few of them bother acting.

Ray Brady, the writer, director and producer of this sorry mess, first came to attention with the controversial horror flick Boy Meets Girl in the mid-1990s. Since then, according to the Inaccurate Movie Database, he has made about seven other films but none of them seem to have had a proper release and some of them, such as the 2003(!) vampire picture Cold Dark (not to be confused with the Kevin Howarth/Luke Goss film Cold and Dark) have clearly never got past development hell.

Intergalactic Combat isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen but most of the ones that beat this do so by being as bad despite huge budgets. This shot-on-video cheapie, which was variously known during its four years or so of production as First Intergalactic Strike Team, F.I.S.T. and Team One, was clearly shot for about twenty quid, but unfortunately Brady only got a tenner’s worth of film for that.

A non sequitur to finish. Jerry Seinfeld has a routine about the emotions you feel when you get most of the way through a TV episode and realise that there’s not enough time to wrap up the story so you’re going to get a ‘to be continued’ caption and have to wait a whole damn week to find out how it ends. I felt something very similar about two thirds of the way into Intergalactic Combat when I realised that we wouldn’t even see any international combat, let alone any intergalactic stuff. I realised that I was watching the first part of a trilogy and I oscillated between two conflicting emotions: annoyance at having to wait for the film after next before any actual alien fighting would appear (something which has, of course, already been done perfectly well in Arena) and relief that Intergalactic Combat is so poor that there is next to no chance of Ray Brady and his pals ever making the other two films.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted 4th September 2006

Addendum: After I originally posted this review, I had a very curious e-mail from Ray Brady claiming that the film had never been shown in public, despite the fact that somebody had clearly submitted the completed movie to the Festival of Fantastic Films. Brady thought that a negative review like this would damage his chances of finding a distributor so, for a quiet life (and despite my personal doubt that anyone would touch a movie this bad with a bargepole) I took the review down. A couple of years later, with the film available to download from Amazon or to watch for free, in segments, on YouTube, I think it’s safe to put the review back up. One thing I must point out is this ‘poster design’, used on the Amazon download page, with its unique spelling of ‘Intergalactic’ which I think ably sums up the care and attention that went into making this tripe.

Director: JK Burgess
Writer: Joe Daniels
Producer: Joe Daniels
Cast: Blake Norton, Elizabeth Mollison, Joe Daniels
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Internal Evil starts out as an impressive and enjoyable crime caper, gradually mutates into a quite reasonable supernatural thriller and then falls apart at the end when it turns into a silly action film, to the extent of actually having a character firing a gun while leaping sideways. This is a shame, because the first half of this little indie is a corker.

A millionaire businessman’s daughter, Danielle Sheridan (Sarah Rees - not the TV presenter), has run away from home just days before her 18th birthday (the screener sleeve says ‘16th birthday’ which is a curious mistake to make). Three small-time crooks know where she is and plan to kidnap her then get a £300,000 ransom from her father. American extortionist Josh (Irish-American actor/wrestler Blake Norton) has the idea and the insider knowledge and he recruits two acquaintances who don’t otherwise know each other: businesslike prostitute Sara (Elizabeth Mollison: Twisted, Embargo) and impetuous hitman Max (writer/producer Joe Daniels with a shaved head and an impressive ‘tache).

The runaway teenager has ordered a fake ID from one of Josh’s contacts so the trio wait in a multi-storey car-park with the intention of grabbing the girl when she collects the item. But before they can move in, two hefty blokes named Mr Stokes (Simon Wakeford: Risen) and Mr Weatherby (Andy Race), whom we saw chasing Danielle under the opening titles - and all credit to the film-makers for not making us sit through an interminable list of names before the action starts - appear and grab the girl, shooting the surprised ID-supplier in the head.

In the ensuing fracas, both henchmen are shot, as is Max. Stokes is knocked out and bundled into a car boot but Weatherby, who took two bullets in the chest at close range, disappears. When Josh and Max look around, the body has gone. Meanwhile Sara corners the frightened Danielle, knocks her out and brings her back.

The disappearance of Weatherby is the first hint that we’re dealing with the supernatural here. Josh receives a warning from local fixer Crazy Nick (James Lawrence) that Danielle’s father Jeffrey Sheridan (Ian Draper, who was in a stage production of Cannibal! The Musical!) hides some dark secrets but when Josh goes round to Crazy Nick’s flat he finds Nick dead at the hands of the very much alive Weatherby. He also finds two photos of Sheridan, one recent and one apparently dating from the 19th century.

Long story short, Sheridan cut a deal with a demon named Luthos, granting him immortality in return for the use of his first-born daughter as a vehicle for Luthos to take on human form when she turns eighteen (or something - it’s not clear why a male demon wants to take the form of a female human). Luthos must be a very patient demon because Sheridan apparently waited more than a hundred years before having a daughter. He is divorced from Danielle’s mother (Gabrielle Amies: Call Me a Psycho, Roswell 1847) who secretly keeps in touch with her daughter by disguising her letters in envelopes claiming to come from a book club (although I don’t know of any book club which sends out communications in hand-addressed envelopes).

The talkative Stokes and the taciturn Weatherby (who I think has one line of dialogue in the whole film) are minor demons of some sort, assigned by Luthos to ensure that Sheridan keeps his side of the bargain.

I was frankly disappointed when what was shaping up to be a decent little crime flick developed this convoluted and largely unexplained supernatural back-story. The characters seem to rather easily accept that demons are involved; there is no mention of any religious context; and most surprisingly of all, no-one ever wonders whether Sheridan, Stokes and Weatherby are vampires. No-one except the audience that is. In fact in one scene Stokes tears someone’s throat open with his teeth which really, really makes the audience assume that we’re dealing with vampires here.

It all culminates in a ceremony overseen by Stokes in which anonymous victims have their throats slit and their blood daubed on Danielle’s forehead, while Max fights Weatherby somewhere else, having somehow survived being killed and having somehow escaped from shackles in a dungeon. (If any of that is explained, then I missed it.) For these last scenes, Sheridan (who turns out to be trying to save his daughter, even though the best way would surely have been to let her run away and not send two demonic henchmen after her) acquires several previously unmentioned, presumably human guards. So the ceremony consists largely of people we’re never seen before and know nothing about being ritually slaughtered by other people we’ve never seen before and know nothing about. Call me picky, but that’s not what I call a tension-filled climax.

Sheridan also turns out to own something called (I think) a vorpal blade which, in an utterly arbitrary bit of deus ex machina plotting, is (we are told) the only thing which can kill a demon. It looks just like a letter-opener and he keeps it in his sock drawer, as far as I can tell.

The whole film ends with Max and Sara arguing over whether or not Danielle should be allowed to live, which is just one of many great moments of character conflict in the script. Unfortunately it’s let down by an abrupt and bizarre ending which I’ve rewatched twice and still don’t fully understand. Something to do with Luthos possessing Sara instead of Danielle but it really doesn’t make much sense. In any case, by this point we’ve sat through a whole load of cheap and silly action clichés that completely spoil the atmosphere and intrigue that was set up in the first half of the picture.

It’s all a shame because Internal Evil has some good characters and some fine acting. The three leads are all excellent (and perfectly cast) while the supporting players are mostly very good, working well with credible and well-crafted dialogue. The camerawork varies enormously, sometimes excellent but towards the end so heavily contrasted that it looks like the scenes were intended to be shown in 3D. The editing, shared between director JK Burgess and producer Joe Daniels, is very good and the story is commendably trimmed to the bone rather than dragging on for ever like some indie films of recent vintage. The sleeve of this screener disc says the film runs “approx. 80 mins” but that’s stretching the concept of approximation somewhat as it actually clocks in at sixty nine minutes.

Joe Daniels, who wrote and produced Internal Evil, is a young man who started as an actor in the films of Neil Jones, including The Bond and The Lost. His directorial debut was a thriller called Give and Take on which the cinematographer was Simeon B Davies - who is executive producer of Internal Evil. The DP on this picture was John Terry. Sian E Booth handled the make-up which includes some impressive gore effects.

The music is credited to Neil Durkin, David Llewellyn and Nick Oxlade - and here lies the film’s biggest problem (well, second biggest as the biggie is its uncertainty over what type of movie it wants to be). Now, I’m not qualified to criticise music. I know nothing about music, me, and regular readers may have noticed that I rarely give it more than a passing mention. I can’t honestly tell the difference between good film music and bad film music - but I can spot loud film music.

The score on the soundtrack of Internal Evil barely lets up for a moment. It’s constantly there and far too high in the mix. I have often commented on how low budget films are very often let down by their sound but usually it’s the sound recording that’s the problem. Internal Evil’s fault lies in the sound mixing with this endless, intrusive music sometimes drowning out the quieter dialogue patches. Background music should stay in the background - if indeed it’s needed at all.

There are some other sound problems which could similarly be fixed in post. For example there are two phone conversation where the person on the other end of the line is given no voice treatment at all, momentarily confusing the viewer into thinking that the character is actually just off-screen. Some sort of voice treatment facility was available because it is used for Luthos at the very end although that voice is so distorted that it’s difficult to make out what he is saying.

Also the many gun-shots seem (ironically) too quiet - and can someone explain to me when it became standard practice to put computer-animated flashes on screen whenever a handgun is fired? Do people not notice, when watching the news, that handguns do not make any sort of bright flash, they just go bang? This just looks like the various characters are shining loud torches at each other. Indie film-makers of the world, listen to me. Handguns make noise, not light. You are spending time and effort on a visual effect which makes your film look worse, not better.

Anyway, that’s Internal Evil, which began life as The Touch, was retitled Internal Evil: The Crossing, then became Bleeding the Damned (the title on this screener’s main menu) and finally just Internal Evil (which is on the scene selection menu). None of these titles actually mean anything or have any direct connection to the film, so far as I can see.

There are few things more frustrating for a film journo than watching a picture which starts great and then loses its way. If Internal Evil had stayed like its first segment it would have been great; if the whole film had been done like the middle, supernatural-themed part then it would have been okay. But the daft action finale spoils the whole thing. On the one hand, Joe Daniels and JK Burgess have done some terrific work here in terms of actors and characters. But on the other hand, the script falls apart as it descends into nonsensical fights and chases while the demonic back-story just doesn’t seem to fit together adequately. I would like to see more films from these people, but I would prefer them to work in one genre at a time.

(Incidentally, Joe Daniels has used solarised photo images to create two short, on-line ‘graphic novels’ which give some background to the characters and actually work surprisingly well.)

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 2nd December 2008

Director: Phil Herman
Writer: Phil Herman
Producer: Chip Lucas
Cast: Nancy Feliciano, Phil Herman, Joel D Wynkoop
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

At first, Into the Woods looks like it will be another unpleasant ‘psycho abuses woman in isolated spot’ study in sadism, like Adam Mason’s Broken but without the production values. However, it turns out to be considerably more than that (though it is still quite unpleasant).

Phil Herman regular Nancy Feliciano stars as Danielle, initially seen taking a dip in the sea, wearing bikini bottoms and T-shirt. By the time she steps inside her house, her hair is completely dry and beautifully frizzy. She changes from her (equally dry) T-shirt into a diaphanous shortie nightie for no apparent reason as she only wears it for five minutes, while watching a cheap horror film (apparently also made by Herman, although I don’t know whether it’s specially-shot footage or from one of his other features). Then she strips off the nightie and the bikini and goes to sleep naked, without even a blanket or sheet. Must be hot where she is.

An unidentified naked man enters her room. She wakes up, recognises him and cowers in terror…

…and then comes to, naked, lying on a towel in some sort of abandoned concrete building. In, as the title correctly points out, the woods. Danielle finds a skirt, a top and a deeply impractical pair of high heels and goes exploring along a path until she comes across a set of wooden steps rising to the top of a steep hill. Wherever she is, she’s clearly not in the middle of nowhere. These are well-maintained steps with a viewing platform at the top and although the information board thereon has been vandalised, one would expect her to examine it for some clue as to her location. But she doesn’t. On the viewing platform is a bag with some more practical clothing including shorts and sneakers, into which she changes, plus a very long, detailed, anonymous threatening note which Danielle reads out aloud, in full, in one of the least subtle infodumps I have ever seen. The note informs her (and us) that she has been drugged and must now solve a series of puzzles. This raises the prospect of some sort of Saw-like tricks but in fact these puzzles never materialise.

Meanwhile, the viewer thinks how fortunate it is that Danielle decided to laboriously climb those hundred or so steps - in heels! - even though she makes no attempt to look for suitable landmarks once she’s at the top of the hill. Of course, if she had just continued along the path, she wouldn’t have found the note and the whole scheme would have collapsed. (Reminds me a bit of the flaw in Die Hard 3 where the bad guys’ complex scheme is entirely dependent on Bruce Willis being unexpectedly rescued by a stranger before being killed by enraged inhabitants of Harlem.)

What is really confusing is that next time we see Danielle she’s waking up again, in a different part of ‘the woods’, wearing a jogging suit and with her frizzy hair suddenly straight. A plastic carrier bag on a tree branch contains a much shorter note than the previous one, but with the same sort of stuff about drugs wearing off etc. This bugged the hell out of me and for quite some time I assumed that this was a different woman, perhaps Danielle’s sister.

When Danielle finds herself again at the foot of those wooden steps, she realises that she has been walking in circles for two days so she climbs the steps again. This confuses the viewer still further as there is no indication that she has been in the woods for that long. She doesn’t seem tired or hungry or bedraggled; in fact it looks like she’s been to the hairdresser. A few yards from the hilltop viewing platform she takes a pee in the bushes and then hears a mobile phone ringing. She tries to tell the caller about her situation but he turns out to be someone watching her from the undergrowth, who informs her that not only is the phone’s actual owner dead – but she just peed on him. Oh, come on! You’d notice that, however desperate you were. (And let’s face it, she could have peed anywhere.)

Even more annoyingly, Danielle simply leaves the phone where it is and runs off down the wooden steps. “What are you doing, woman?” screams the viewer, “You’ve got a working cellphone! You’ve got a connection! Call 911!”

Good grief, this is one dumb fictional character.

As the film progresses, we get a series of largely unconnected scenes of Danielle waking up in various locations. She’s naked and hanging from a shower; she’s topless and hanging from a tree branch; she’s naked in the bath. Inbetween these are flashbacks to her relationship with Charlie (writer-director Phil Herman), the man who is apparently behind her abduction as there was a damn big photo of him in one of the bags. Married with kids, Charlie kept Danielle as his bit on the side, providing her with an allowance. When he left her, she phoned his wife just to say that he could “pick up his underwear any time he wants.” Charlie was furious at this treachery – although of course he’s hardly a paragon of honesty himself, the two-timing bastard. There are also scenes of Danielle’s best friend Cindy (Tiffany Sinclair: Spiderbabe, Lord of the G-Strings), worried that she can’t contact her, and Cindy’s boyfriend who promises to check on Danielle when he’s in the area.

Charlie actually appears in at least two of Danielle’s wake-up scenes. Tied to a bed, she is rescued by Charlie who assures her he has been looking for her for two weeks before collapsing for some reason. Back in her apartment, she finds Charlie naked in the shower washing blood from himself, after which he blows his brains out with an automatic pistol. There is also a scene where Cindy phones Danielle but has somehow transformed into a rapacious lesbian hoping for some sexy fun.

What the jiminy is going on?

Gradually it becomes evident that what Danielle is experiencing is not real but all in her head, possibly as a result of a self-inflicted injury. So… it’s all a dream. While this has the advantage of retrospectively explaining all the inconsistencies, continuity errors and implausible character actions, it’s a bit of a cheat of the viewer. What is worse, once we realise that nothing she is experiencing is real, we immediately cease to care about the character or anything around her.

To Phil Herman’s credit, he doesn’t take the easy option but continues the story, giving a clever spin towards the end of the 65-minute feature which reveals that it is actually all in Charlie’s head. However, this is ultimately just as much of a cheat and I’m not convinced that the plot makes sense in this respect because so much of it was from Danielle’s point of view. Probably the biggest problem with the film is the constantly changing setting and time as the story jumps back and forth between Danielle’s confusing, unconnected adventures – most of which are not in fact ‘in the woods’ – and equally confusing, unconnected flashbacks, occasionally segueing to scenes of Cindy or her boyfriend or indeed Charlie (and towards the end, Charlie’s brother) which may be flashbacks too, may be reality or may be in Danielle’s head. How much of this is in Charlie’s head? Are the flashbacks real or not? Is Cindy real or not? Danielle’s clothing (or lack thereof) and hairstyle change constantly while Cindy looks identical in almost every scene, even the obviously unreal one where she’s is a lezza.

I can see what Phil Herman is trying to do and I’m certainly glad that he took this tack rather than the expected one of a lone psycho mistreating a woman in a leafy glade for an hour and a bit. Give me mystery over misogyny any day. But I’m not convinced that this all works, except in a disappointing, catch-all ‘none of this was real’ sort of way.

A final scene has Charlie, straitjacketed and ranting in a mental institution (what century does Herman think we’re living in?), viewed on a monitor by two employees who recount his story – and they use flashbacks as well! But are these flashbacks reliable? Like the boy who cried wolf, once a film has deceived its audience to this extent, can we trust anything it tells us or shows us?

The acting is generally good including a commendably frightened performance from Feliciano. The sound is mostly clear but the visual presentation of the shot-on-video movie can’t help but look cheap, despite some decent editing. Ultimately I think that Phil Herman has overstretched himself with a narrative structure that would only have worked fully if (a) we had spent more time on each scene, rather than jumping to a different time/place/character/reality every couple of minutes, and (b) the strangeness had built gradually so that we could share Danielle’s feelings as her initial fear turns to confusion. As it stands, the moment that we see her wake up that second time with different clothes and hairstyle, we know that either something strange is happening or we’re watching a totally crap movie. With the realisation that the former is true, we go from not knowing what is going on to not caring what is going on.

Also in the small cast are Dave Castiglione (Vampire Brides, Psycho Sisters), Darla Doom, editor Christopher Kahler, Owen Keehnen (The Small Assassin), Joe Scott, Lilith Stabs (Exterminator City, Bad Movie Police wrap-arounds, Zombiegeddon) plus the ever-busy Joel D Wynkoop (Dirty Cop No Donut) and his Mrs, M Catherine Wynkoop (Raising the Stakes, Day of the Ax). Joe Sherlock, director of Werewolf Tales and Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires, provides the music.

Sherlock, Sinclair, Kahler and Day of the Ax director Ryan Cavalline are credited with ‘additional camerawork’ which presumably ties in to the extraordinary geographical area over which this was filmed: ‘on location in New York, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington and Illinois.’ I think this is partly to blame for the fragmented nature of the film. The Wynkoops, for example, who play the two loony bin workers at the end, were evidently shot completely separately to everybody and everything else and I think the same must go for the scenes of Cindy, Charlie’s wife and brother etc. There are no other credits so presumably things like sound, make-up etc were all handled by young Mr Herman.

The screener disk includes trailers for Herman’s vampire sequel After Midnight and horror anthology Before I Die, both of which look inexplicably rough, like nth generation VHS dupes, for some reason.

Into the Woods is a valiant attempt to do something different, taking the low-budget sector beyond its usual parade of psychos, zombies and vampires into something more metaphysical and thought-provoking. That it doesn’t quite succeed due to the limitations of the production is less important than the fact that the film at least aims for something original and makes the most of what limited resources it had available.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 1st January 2009

Director: John King
Writer: Stephen To
Producer: Tomas Tang
Cast: Elton Chong, Michael Wong, Robert Chan
Country of origin: Hong Kong
Year: 1983
Reviewed from: UK DVD

The chop-socky genre - though we love it to death - does not have a reputation for coherent storylines. Maybe that has changed nowadays (the day after watching this DVD, I saw House of Flying Daggers at my local cinema and was blown away by it) but it certainly held true twenty years ago - especially on any film where Tomas Tang was credited as producer.

The main character in this movie is played by Elton John. Actually the actor's name is Elton Chong but the amusement value of that monicker pales into insignificance when we learn that he is seeking revenge for his murdered father - named 'Fat Ho'! In doing so, he adopts a range of disguises and has, unsurprisingly, plenty of fights using the 'eight chopper fist' technique which his father taught him. There are frequent references to someone named General Ching who is searching for a treasure which is never actually identified, but that was about as far as my understanding of the plot went.

Among the bad guys sent to despatch Chong is a chap with very short hair and foot-long sideburns - he looks ridiculous but you wouldn't want to tell him that because he's a mean piece of work with a nasty kick. There is also an old guy in multi-coloured robes who we will come to later.

The fights are surprisingly good and have a nice comic touch to them; several times people get kicked by their own legs and there's one great sequence where somebody is pulled around by a pair of chopsticks jabbed up his nose. In fact the whole movie is played for laughs although any humour in the dialogue or situation is lost by the typically atrocious dubbing. Fortunately, there's enough energetic physical humour to make the film genuinely entertaining, as well as fun with the various disguises.

Now - the old man with his coat of many colours. "If you wear that," Chong tells him playfully during an early encounter, "people will think that you're an exorcist." And indeed when they fight again later in the film the old chap (subsequently referred to as 'the ghostfighter') raises a zombie from... somewhere... to make it two against one. Fortunately this particular member of the undead, played by a bloke with his face painted brown, isn't much cop at martial arts, whereas the ghostfighter is obviously adept, albeit using an extraordinary stiff style incorporating lots of straight arms and legs. Fortunately Elton John manages to rip the zombie's arm off which makes him even worse at kung fu than before. And that's not a sentence I ever expected to write!

Tomas Tang, making his third appearance on this site after his work on Firefist of Incredible Dragon and Death Code: Ninja, turns out to be a pseudonym of ex-Shaw Brothers staffer Godfrey Ho Jeung Keung according to the excellent Kung Fu Cinema site although the Inaccurate Movie Database reckons that it was some sort of house pseudonym. Whatever, he certainly knew how to come up with titles and Invincible Obsessed Fighter is a definite step up from those two other films.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 19th January 2005

Directors: Adrian Pinsent, Tim Hunt
Writer: Adrian Pinsent
Producers: Tim Hunt, Adrian Pinsent, Nichola MacEvilly
Cast: Nichola MacEvilly, Daniel Fine, Stephen Carlile
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.zombiesalive.com

Sometimes it can take me days to write one of these reviews. I’m hoping this won’t take so long. In general, there is an inverse relationship between quality and review length. Most of my really epic reviews have been either awful or fascinatingly weird in a way that most people would find awful. My only really long reviews of films that I loved, off the top of my head, are Ultraman: The Next and Best Worst Movie.

This one might be quite short because The Invisible Atomic Monsters from Mars is, in a word, superb. Quite, quite excellent. A marvellously inventive take on the zombie genre (they’re not zombies and no-one calls them zombies but, to all intents and purposes, they’re zombies) filmed with sensitivity and skill featuring a uniformly brilliant cast.

Yes, it’s got a cheesy and inappropriate title. I’ll explain that at the end.

A prologue features a young professional (Beth Bainbridge: Zombie Cops from Hell, newlydeceased.com) out jogging in the countryside who is surrounded and attacked by a bunch of savage men. They’re called ‘bleeders’ in this film and are distinguished not by rotting flesh but by copious bleeding from their faces and elsewhere. The schtick is that a self-replicating nanodroid has been brought back to Earth from Mars and is spreading across the population. Victims’ constant loss of blood drives them to refresh their supply by killing people, who then become infected and rise up after death to join the bleeders.

Zombies, effectively, but in a clever way.

This is a future time when human exploration has reached the outer Solar System but because we never see any towns, cars etc the world looks very much the same as now. There’s just the occasional clever line like a throwaway dialogue reference to “the last remaining Maldive” to remind us we’re in the future. In that sense, it has a sort of retro, European feel to it.

The far-too-good-looking Daniel Fine is a famous astronaut, an interplanetary explorer credited only as ‘The Pilot’, who has returned to our planet and somehow descended from his crashing spaceship into the countryside, away from the chaos of collapsing civilisation. He is literally the man who fell to Earth and is carried to safety by feisty, Irish Mary (Nichola MacEvilly, who also produced) and posh, English Sam (Stephen Carlile: Brideshead Revisited redux). They are not a couple, just sheltering in the same isolated house. Mary calls Sam ‘porno’ because, for reasons which become clearer later on, he has a dirty mag which he never goes anywhere without.

With the food running out, Sam sets off on his own but Mary stays and tends to the Pilot who eventually regains consciousness. Together they set off for the coast, hoping to find a boat to get them out of England, though it’s not clear where to. On the way, they meet up with Sam again who is now sharing a different isolated house with two women, Daisy (Naomi Hill, who played Mary Shelley in a stage production of Frankenstein) and Beth (Laura Main: Murder City) plus a silent, brooding chap nicknamed Chitchat (Simeon Willis: Stagknight) who sits in the corner all day working on a Rubik’s cube.

The middle act finds these six people sharing their thoughts about what has happened and how it affects them personally. There are four big speeches here: really, really long monologues, each of which is wholly or mostly filmed as a single, continuous take. No music, no editing, no action, just several minutes of head-and-shoulders close-up: one actor, one character recounting their recent, life-changing experience. Then the same thing but a different actor, a different character, a different story.

Each one of these monologues is a bravura piece of writing and acting. And they have been cleverly arranged in increasing order of horror. Each story is worse than the last, not because anyone is trying to best their comrades or win any sort of competition, but because each tale prompts someone else to finally open up with their own dark secret. And by the time we get to monologue number four it’s pretty dark indeed.

Everyone knows ‘show don’t tell’ so just having a character talk about what they did shouldn’t work - but it does, because of immensely powerful, yet incredibly restrained, performances beautifully polished by amazingly confident direction. If we were shown the described events in flashback, the film would be gorier, maybe even more horrific, but wouldn’t be anywhere near as frightening. These are scary, unnerving stories. The whole sequence is simply stunning. The denouement appalling.

And so to a final act as our group set off together for the coast. Interspersed in the action is a studio TV interview with a Government scientist dove (Gemma Layton) and a military top brass hawk (Gil Sutherland). The interviewer is Meridian Tonight’s Phil Hornby, who joins Alan Towers from Midlands Today (Demagogue, 1998) in the select group of regional TV presenters who have played themselves in horror films.

The scientist is named as ‘Vanessa Helsing’ and the soldier as ‘Colonel G Romero’, cheap gags which seem unnecessary and out of place in what is otherwise a very serious and often quite intense film. The interview takes place early on in the outbreak when the authorities are still unsure what they’re dealing with; there are also talking head snippets of Helsing and Romero speaking after the fact.

And that’s about it, to be honest. This is a film about characters. It doesn’t shy away from the dangerous cannibalistic violence of the bleeders, especially in act three, but that is far from being the focus of the film. This is not just another zombie flick and I suspect that hardcore zombie fans won’t enjoy it very much for that reason. But for the rest of us, this is simply wonderful.

Here’s what is even more amazing, and explains the cheesy, B-movie-style title. This film was made as part of the 28 Days Later film challenge (like The Horror of the Dolls). The whole thing was written, shot and produced within four weeks. (Well, strictly speaking it was done in 30 days because the version I was sent was a slight tweak that benefited from a couple of extra days’ post-production. Just sound-mixing and that sort of stuff.)

To make a film this good under normal circumstances would be worth applauding. To do so on a tight schedule, with a minimalist budget and from an absolute standing start is simply magnificent. Adrian Pinsent wrote the script in two weeks, from a story which he devised with Tim Hunt, then the two shot for a week, with Michael Carney shooting the TV studio stuff (which is included unedited as an extra on the DVD). Then a week of post-production and bingo. And the fact that twice as long was spent on getting the script right as was spent filming the thing really, really shows.

Pinsent is credited as DP while Hunt shared sound duties with Andy Gaze. Alex Yeoman and Matt Rimmer wrote and produced the sympathetic score. Luke Batney and Daniel Greenaway play featured bleeders while others are Melanie Tiernan, Ian Tansey, Sara Tweddle, Ashlie Lane, Ed McClaran, Rebecca Jones, Adam Rezazadeh and Jeffrey Cake.

In the 28 Days Later challenge, film-makers were given a title and sent off to make a 70-minute feature film in four weeks. I love how Pinsent and Hunt took what they were given - the cheesiest of 1950s B-movie titles - and came up with an idea that makes sense but has enormously more dignity. These nanodroids are indeed invisible, they are indeed atomic (in the sense that they are basically the size of a few atoms) and they do indeed come from Mars.

The film is available to view online at DailyMotion and elsewhere but realistically this could justify a release, at least straight to DVD. Movies much worse than this, movies that with the best will in the world are semi-amateur affairs and look it, somehow get released. With a change of title, this one could be a goer.

Anyway, you know my system by now: how well have the film-makers managed to achieve what they set out to do with what they had available? A film that is as good as it could possibly, conceivably be merits an A. And I save those oh-so-rare A+s for films which are actually better than they could conceivably, possibly be.

And there you go: 1,500 words. I told you it wouldn’t take long.

MJS rating A+

10th March 2011

Director: Fred Olen Ray
Writer: William C Martell
Producer: Fred Olen Ray
Cast: Dee Wallace Stone, Barry Livingston, Stella Stevens
Country: USA
Year of release: 1997
Reviewed from: UK disc (Boulevard Ent)

Often compared to Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Fred Olen Ray’s Invisible Mom certainly fits into the subgenre which that Disney film defined - the scientist dad whose invention causes problems when it affects his family. But given that this was made six years later in 1995 (and not released until two years after that) it can hardly be accused of cashing in on Honey. In any case this subgenre goes back at least as far as Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World, possibly earlier.

More to the point, the biggest influence on Ray’s film is very obviously the 1933 Invisible Man, including an explicit and respectful homage when the mom in question takes a cab ride dressed exactly like Claude Rains in the James Whale classic. Fred (who cameos as the cab driver) also throws in a line or two of dialogue from the original film. In that respect, and taking into account also the deliberately Universal-esque black and white opening titles and a not entirely successful attempt to give the film’s production design a sort of Norman Rockwell-lite timelessness, this stands comparison with Tim Burton’s short film Frankenweenie as a film-maker who is also a film fan having tremendous fun when he is given the chance to put his own spin on a classic tale.

As well as Ray - whose eclectic, busy career means he made this around the same time as Masseuse 2 and Hybrid - there is a star-studded cast and crew list here: Brinke Stevens! Gary Graver! Russ Tamblyn! Bill Martell! Stella Stevens! And of course Dee Wallace Stone, one of the great movie mothers. There must be something you have to sign when you start making films in Hollywood which says: ‘I solemnly swear that I will do my best to cast Dee Wallace Stone as the mom in at least some of my films. Unless it’s a serious drama, in which case I’ll use Dianne Wiest.’ Stone’s busy genre career started with the original Stepford Wives and progressed through ET (of course), Cujo, Critters, I’m Dangerous Tonight, Temptress, Boo, Abominable, Bone Dry, the Halloween remake and a 2005 short film about the Loch Ness monster.

Fifteen year-old Trenton Knight already had an interesting collection of family fantasy films on his CV including Munchie Strikes Back, Charlie’s Ghost: The Story of Coronado and Andrew Stevens’ The Skateboard Kid 2 (where his mother was played by... Dee Wallace Stone!). Here he is Josh Griffin, put-upon son of government scientist Karl Griffin, played by Barry Livingston (Tremors 3) somewhere inbetween Rick Moranis and Chevy Chase.

While Josh suffers the low-level bullying of local hotshot Johnny Thomas (Giuseppe Andrews: 12:01, Prehysteria 2, Independence Day, 2001 Maniacs), his father is equally belittled by his boss Dr Woorter (Russ Tamblyn: West Side Story, War of the Gargantuas) who is in the habit of taking Karl’s inventions and claiming credit for them to military liaison Colonel Cutter (Christopher Stone: Cujo, The Howling - who died before the film was released). Mum (sorry: mom) Laura is exasperated with the pair of them. She tells Josh that if he is in the wrong he should back down but when he is in the right he must stand up for himself. It is obvious that she just wishes that his father would set an example.

Karl explains to Laura that whatever he invents at work belongs to the organisation that runs the lab so she suggests he works on something at home where he has a lab in the basement (complete with a skeleton wearing a hat). This he does and after some experimentation he comes up with a formula which he feeds to family pet Cosmo. The dog (played by director Ray’s own pooch) promptly turns invisible and has to be kept locked in the basement, leaving Josh to worry that the animal has run away.

Josh is an aspiring inventor himself and has rigged a bunch of ropes and pullies to automatically make his bed when he tugs a single cord. This leaves him time to do his homework while watching an old movie on TV (it’s Beast of the Yellow Night, starring John Ashley - who has a funny bit part as the long suffering husband of a nosy neighbour). But invisible dog Cosmo untidies the bed again and Josh is unfairly grounded for apparently lying to his mother.

After Karl demonstrates that Cosmo is transparent - the dog is represented by a stiffened harness on wires - Josh and his friend Skeeter (Phillip Van Dyke: Halloweentown) decide for some reason that they want to use the invisibility potion on Billy’s pet lizard. Sneaking into the basement lab, they extract some potion from the bottle in a glass pipette but, when Laura discovers them, hastily dispose of the evidence into a half-empty bottle of cola - which Laura subsequently drinks. It’s a pretty contrived way of getting the character to actually ingest the stuff - and you do have to wonder (a) why there was a bottle of cola with no lid left lying around on a bench and (b) wouldn’t it be kind of flat and unpleasant?

Once invisible, Laura has to find ways to disguise herself, including a heavy face-pack smeared on her invisible skin when curtain-twitching Mrs Pringle, the previously mentioned neighbour (Stella Stevens - mother of producer Andrew - whose innumerable other genre films include Wacko, Glass Trap, The Matriarch and Monster in the Closet) comes round to investigate what is going on. But there is a positive side to Laura’s predicament as when Josh is once again hassled by Johnny Thomas who finds that an invisible force grabs his wrist and makes him slap himself.

Nevertheless, Karl heads into the government lab to attempt to find an antidote, using the lizard as his test subject, but that rotten old Dr Woorter has him fired, determined to claim the glory for himself. Just think of it: an army of invisible soldiers! But he has to demonstrate to Colonel Cutter that the invisibility formula is real and a cage with a little hamster wheel that rotates by itself isn’t sufficient proof. It could just be a trick (as, technically, it is).

When Karl and Josh sneak back into the lab at the weekend, Woorter calls security. Karl is raving about invisibility so he is sent to a mental institution where the staff consists of The Aftermath director Steve Barkett and make-up artist Pam Phillips and the other patients include legendary cinematographer Gary Graver, briefly stepping out from behind the camera. (I say ‘include’ but the low budget nature of Invisible Mom means we don’t actually see anyone else.)

With his father locked up in a loony bin and his mother nowhere to be seen (as it were), Josh is sent to an orphanage where Beth Ulrich (Fugitive Rage) is the stern matriarch (all pinned back hair, thick-rimmed glasses and tweed two-piece). There is a really touching scene between Josh and an unnamed orphan girl (Vanessa Koman: Little Miss Magic, Boogie with the Undead) which manages the rare balancing trick of pathos without bathos. Laura visits Karl’s lab but is captured by Woorter and imprisoned in a wooden crate to be used as evidence.

The story culminates at a hearing to decide Karl’s sanity, overseen by none other than Brinke Stevens (The Naked Monster, Witchouse 3, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots etc). Naturally, Dr Woorter and Mrs Pringle give evidence against but Laura, who has escaped, sneaks into the courtroom and makes Woorter look ridiculous by tickling him and making him slap himself. She also gives rotten old Mrs Pringle a kick up the arse on the way out. Karl, who has given the expected impassioned speech about how much he loves his family, is declared compos mentis and, with Woorter off to the loony bin in his stead, is offered the senior lab position by Colonel Cutter.

That just leaves the tricky problem of Laura’s invisibility which is solved when Cosmo turns up, fully opaque. After trying all the possible things that the dog may have eaten - including dog food of course - it is eventually discovered that a potion in the basement lab has been knocked onto a plate of food, which the dog has consumed. Tastefully arranging herself under a blanket, Laura is restored to normal (an early line of dialogue acknowledged Josh’s disquiet that his mum is walking around nude).

Running a full 90 minutes, Invisible Mom is both better and better value than the comparable kidflicks of Charlie Band’s Moonstone Entertainment. The script by the ever-reliable William C Martell (who has a cameo as a workman) is coherent, amusing and accessible, with characters that are simple without being simplistic. It’s a real family film, not just in terms of audience but also in terms of actually being about a family: mum, dad and son all carry equal weight. Though the morality is never laid on with a trowel, there is a lovely scene where Josh persuades his father to stand up against Woorter using the same arguments that he himself had been told by Laura. The supporting cast of characters all work well and the low budget rarely shows (one of the few exceptions being Mrs Pringle’s complaint about “that huge thing in your yard” which we never see).

The special effects are sometimes mechanical and sometimes managed through an effective blue screen technique designed specially for the film by Ray. No, they’re not as good as you would see in a big studio picture but that’s because this isn’t a big studio picture, it’s a straight-to-video B-movie. The effects are, in all honesty, considerably better than one would expect in a film of this scale.

Fred Olen Ray, who had nearly fifty films on his CV already, brings to the film a joy that is missing from some of the more cynically directed fantasy kidflicks out there and the cast all look like they’re having fun. Where the film disappoints slightly is in exploring its central premise. TF Simpson loved the slapstick scenes but they’re far too few and far between. Invisibility movies are a great opportunity for comedy but that’s largely absent in this film which is more of a light-hearted thriller. It’s enjoyable but it spends far too long before Laura becomes invisible and the comic potential of both an invisible mom and an invisible dog (not to mention an invisible lizard) is largely wasted.

That said, Ray did go on to helm three more films in this specific subgenre which I haven’t seen and those may have more of the potential for slapstick silliness which Invisible Mom merely dabbles in. The situation is, however, quite complicated...

Invisible Mom is one of a handful of family features directed by Ray for Stevens’ Royal Oaks Entertainment in the late 1990s, which also included Mom Can I Keep Her?, The Kid with X-Ray Eyes and Billy Frankenstein. This film was shot in ten days in 1995 for just under a quarter of a million dollars and was distributed domestically in 1997 through a deal that Royal Oaks had with Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons. It was a big hit, topping the rental charts and it was also successful in foreign markets.

Stevens and Ray reteamed for a second movie about an invisible mother, written by Sean O’Bannon and with a cast including Ariauna Albright and Robert Quarry. Since this was not part of the Corman deal, it couldn’t be marketed as a sequel so it was called Mom’s Outta Sight (and Fred took the pseudonym ‘Peter Stewart’). In Europe however there was no problem with opportunistic distributors retitling the new film Invisible Mom II. After all, the Ray/Martell collaboration variously known as Cyberzone or Droid Gunner has always been called Phoenix 2 on this side of the Atlantic. (Other notable examples of this practise include Steve Balderson’s Pep Squad which became I’ve Been Watching You 2, an ersatz sequel to David DeCoteau’s retitled The Brotherhood, and DeCoteau’s own Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy which became Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy 2.)

Shortly after this however, Roger Corman checked his receipts and ordered up a genuine sequel from Royal Oaks. Ray and Stevens got all three lead actors back together for a new story (written by O’Bannon) and this was released domestically by Corman as Invisible Mom II. Mary Woronov and Mickey Dolenz were thrown into the mix too. Of course, when Stevens cane to sell the picture abroad the title had to be changed because there was already a film called Invisible Mom II, so the new picture was retitled... Mom’s Outta Sight! (Except it is now called Invisible Mom II again, with the ad copy 'Mom's outta sight'...). Filmography compilers have been trying to get their heads around this conundrum ever since.

Somewhere in the middle of all this came Invisible Dad, from a Steve Latshaw script and starring Karen Black (not as the dad, obviously). I’m not sure whether this has any direct connection with any of the other three films.

As well as a terrific name cast, Invisible Mom also boasts some legends behind the camera, not least the extraordinarily prolific and diverse Graver. Editor Peter Miller also cut Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold, Cyberzone, Sorceress and Adventures in Dinosaur City while production designer Helen Harwell worked on Night Shade, Mystery Monsters, Hybrid, Totem and Planet Patrol. Jeffrey Walton (The Brotherhood I and II, Curse of the Puppet Master, The Werewolf Reborn!) provides a marvellously effective score.

‘Main title design and optical EFX’ are credited to David L Hewitt of Hollywood Optical Systems Inc (surely not the David L Hewitt who directed The Mighty Gorga?). Mark Rappaport of the Creature FX Shop is credited with ‘special effects’; he also worked on classics such as Tremors, Puppet Master I, II and III, Subspecies and Prehysteria but more recently has been forced to slum it on dodgy low-budget stuff like 300 and I am Legend.

The Inaccurate Movie Database (and many sites deriving information therefrom) list someone named Rennie Piccolo as co-writer but there’s no such credit on screen. Fred’s son Christopher Olen-Ray is listed as ‘assistant co-ordinator’ although it’s not clear whether he assisted with co-ordinating or co-ordinated the assistants.

The sleeve of the R2 DVD released by Boulevard Entertainment in 2007 lists Fred Olen Ray and Andrew Stevens as joint directors and includes Justin Berfield, star of Invisible Mom II, among the cast. Good grief.

Invisible Mom is a superior (and relatively late) example of the family fantasy pictures that proved so profitable when VHS was king. It’s entertaining without being stupid, it’s moral without being patronising and it’s well-crafted without being overblown.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 12th April 2008

Director: Fred Olen Ray
Writer: Sean O’Bannon
Producer: Andrew Stevens
Cast: Dee Wallace Stone, Mary Woronov, Mickey Dolenz
Country: USA
Year of release: 1998
Reviewed from: UK DVD

I explained in my review of Invisible Mom the rather convoluted and confusing nature of its two sequels, Invisible Mom 2 (aka Mom’s Outta Sight) and Mom’s Outta Sight (aka Invisible Mom 2).

This particular film is a direct sequel to the first and the on-screen title is Invisible Mom II, but since this is a still frame in a different front jarringly inserted into an otherwise continuous title sequence that plays over storm clouds, we can deduce that this is the film that was shot as Mom’s Outta Sight, presumably because of some contractual problem with the title, but retitled as a direct sequel (which, as mentioned, it is).

This is the one listed on the Inaccurate Movie Database as a 1999 film called Invisible Mom II rather than a 1998 film called Mom’s Outta Sight (although the copyright date here is 1998). I don’t know whether this was ever actually released as Mom’s Outta Sight - I can’t find any video sleeve images under that title - although the phrase is used as a copy-line on the original US sleeve.

This 2007 UK release from Boulevard Entertainment goes instead with ‘There she goes again!’ The sleeve image used - invisible woman in exercise gear and surprised little girl looking through window - is entirely unrelated to the film.

The action takes place a couple of years after the original Invisible Mom, with Barry Livingston (Tremors 3) and perpetual cinematic mother Dee Wallace Stone (Skateboard Kid 2, Alligator 2 and some crap about an alien) returning as Karl and Laura Griffin and a noticeably more grown up Trenton Knight (Munchie Strikes Back, Charlie’s Ghost Story) capping his six-year, nine-film acting career with a second stint as their son Josh. There is even a couple of minutes of flashbacks to the first movie and a summary of the plot, which explains to new viewers the reason why Laura occasionally turns invisible. It seems that the antidote administered at the end of the last film isn’t 100 per cent effective so she now becomes transparent at times of great stress.

But before we get anywhere near the Griffins, we first of all meet Bernard and Olivia St John, conniving, grasping nephew and niece of billionaire Randolph St John. Bernard (who gets annoyed whenever his name is mispronounced BerNARD) is played by former Monkee Mickey Dolenz with an awful mullet and Olivia by genre stalwart Mary Woronov as a malevolent Morticia Adams. Bedridden Randolph St John (it’s pronounced ‘saint john’ rather than ‘sinjun’) was the last ever film role for Robert Quarry, credited here as ‘Uncle Bob’ Quarry. The onetime Count Yorga was attached to projects until his passing in 2009 but none of them ever came through.

Randolph is close to death here; Olivia and Bernard are his only surviving relatives and have been attending him in his palatial mansion in the confident expectation of inheriting the fortune, although he despises them and the feeling is mutual. Randolph had a son but he died in a car accident some years ago. Except that good-hearted family lawyer Preston (Eric Lawson: King Cobra, Rattlers, Skeeter) has discovered that there is a grandson, whereabouts unknown. If the twelve-year-old boy can be located before Randolph pops his clogs, the money goes to the kid.

This turns out to be Eddie Brown, played by a pre-Malcolm in the Middle Justin Berfield, completing a three-picture run of starring roles in Fred Olen Ray kidflicks which also included gorilla comedy Mom, Can I Keep Her? and the self-explanatory The Kid with X-Ray Eyes. His mother, correctly deducing that the failed brakes on her late husband’s car were deliberately cut by the scheming, immoral Olivia and Bernard, placed the baby (under her maiden name) into an orphanage then went into hiding herself.

So Eddie St John became Eddie Brown, long-term resident of the, ahem, New Horizons Orphanage (with a familiar logo). He is portrayed as essentially a good kid but determined never to leave the place because he is sure his mum will come back for him one day. Also, he is bright enough to construct elaborate inventions but not bright enough to see the trouble they could cause. To this end, and in this manner, he fashions an insanely complicated trap, involving a bow and arrow and a toy Styracosaurus, which empties a bucket of goop onto the head of an officious woman who has come to adopt him (played by Fred’s wife Kim, who was also line producer). This is evidently the fourth time such a thing has occurred.

Ray regular Marc Vahanian (also in the original Amityville Horror and Exterminator II) plays the put-upon husband and Kathy Garver (who did voices for both the early 1980s Spider-Man cartoon and the late 1990s Spider-Man cartoon) plays frumpily attractive orphanage director Ms Mason who explains that, having achieved the age of twelve, he must go into foster care - which is how he ends up with the Griffins.

Lawyer Preston confirms Eddie’s existence and location only an hour or so before old man St John shuffles off but that’s enough for the will to stand. However, Bernard and Olivia make the case that, as the boy’s only (known) living relatives, they cannot be denied the option to adopt him. So they turn up at the Griffins’ house, accompanied by Ms Mason, and take a disconsolate Eddie away.

Laura is unhappy about this, turns invisible in the bathroom and then uses this situation to make Olivia spill coffee (which is rather obviously represented by water) down herself and then slap herself about. Josh, who has swiftly befriended the younger boy, is also not keen on the idea of Eddie leaving. (The two read EC Comics and watch wrestling together, the footage showing Freddy Valentine aka Fred Olen Ray!)

Josh hides in the back of the siblings’ car and thus accompanies Eddie surreptitiously to the St John mansion where Olivia and Bernard plan to cause an unfortunate accident by scaring young Edward. They hope the shock of seeing a ghost will cause him to fall downstairs and break his neck or possibly fall into a pool of piranhas which is (inexplicably) in the grounds.

They have a white sheet with a skull mask, a suit of armour, an LP of spooky sound effects and also a selection of secret passages, paintings with removable eyes etc. Quite why Randolph St John had such things in his mansion is not explained. And you can probably see where all this is heading. Invisible Mom 2 is basically a riff on Scooby-Doo - although Sean O’Bannon’s script, which makes several references to horror movies real and fake, cites a different inspiration. “I’ve never seen a horror movie like this,” says Josh, to which the more genre-savvy Eddie replies, “Well then, I guess you’ve never seen Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

The two boys react in full-on Shaggy-and-Scooby style on finding that a suit of armour is moving: “It’s a g-g-g-ghost!” they stammer, carefully enunciating every ‘g-’ in the script. Having defeated the armour by the simple trick of pushing it over, they run off rather than see who might be inside (it’s Bernard). They are equally terrified when they see a piano apparently playing itself.

Meanwhile, Karl and Laura Griffin have discovered that Josh is missing so Karl drives over to the mansion to see if his son is there, but all he gets for his troubles is a clonk on the head with a very soft-looking short length of lead piping (accompanying by a suitably hard-sounding foley noise). Josh manages to telephone his mum who also drives over there, having turned invisible and donned HG Wells-style trench coat, white head-cover and dark glasses.

Before leaving, Laura tries to alert the police, ineffectually, but fortunately they have also been approached by a dog-walking, inquisitive neighbour (Diane McBain: Puppet Master 5) so two cops have gone to stake out the St John place. They are grizzled veteran Ski (Jonathan Haze, the original Seymour Krelboin) and bearded rookie Dane (Rick Montana: Search for the Beast, Bikini Hoe-Down). On arrival at the St John manor, Laura disrobes - watched by the disbelieving Dane - and then uses her invisibility to convince Olivia and Bernard that the place really is haunted. They see the sheet and skull mask apparently floating in mid-air and also scream with terror at the self-playing piano.

So when the cops turn up at the front door, the siblings are begging to be taken into custody. Preston also arrives, with Eddie’s real mum in tow - and everyone lives happily ever after. (Eddie and his mother each have half of a torn photo but, in defiance of expectations, these are not produced and combined at the denouement.) A final gag about that haunted piano leaves Eddie doing an impression of either Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

If there is a problem with Invisible Mom 2, it’s simply that the actual invisibility is barely featured - or indeed relevant - until the climactic return-fake-haunting. This isn’t actually a movie about an invisible mom (or a mom who is outta sight), it’s a movie about a modern-day Pip in an episode of Scooby-Doo and the conniving relatives who seek to rob him of his inheritance, with a largely incidental subplot about somebody else’s invisible mom grafted on. You could rewrite this only slightly and remove the invisibility aspect because, while it’s an amusing way for Laura to frighten Olivia and Bernard, there are other ways to pretend to be a ghost. And, apart from the brief scene of the two schemers visiting the Griffin household with the clear coffee, there is no other use of invisibility anywhere in the film. Which is disappointing, because the green-screen effects are very well done.

Karl Griffin’s status as an amateur scientist is only referenced briefly in an introductory scene where he shows Josh a super-nutrient drink he has invented. There is also, to be fair, a good moment later on when it is revealed that the lab where he works his day-job is owned by St John Industries so technically Olivia and Bernard are his bosses.

Eddie’s own personality is rather sketchy to say the least with the script apparently uncertain whether to portray him as a good-hearted kid whose plans don’t quite work or a frustratingly anarchic troublemaker full of dangerously ill-conceived schemes. He puts washing up liquid onto the dinner plates before they’re used, claiming that this will somehow negate any need to clean them afterwards but only causing his foster parents to vomit up soap. And he tries to clean a stain from Josh’s jacket using an electric sander, resulting in mild garment destruction. Ultimately he comes across a bit like the American Dennis the Menace. You know, that awful smiling blonde cartoon kid who tries to help people but his ideas just don’t quite work? And that’s probably the aspect of the film that travels least well across the Atlantic.

In this country, we hate clean-cut, happy kids whose plans don’t quite work. They’re not menaces, they’re saccharine robo-children. We prefer kids like the real (British) Dennis the Menace - anarchists who set out to cause trouble. (Of course, this dissatisfaction with clean-cut good kid Eddie is probably compounded, at this remove, by the awareness that this is the gloriously amoral Reese from Malcolm...). By making Eddie Brown likeable, the script also makes him bland, even blander than his foster-brother who here displays no character beyond friendliness. Which means it’s up to the villains of the piece, Olivia and Bernard, to carry the film - which they do with relish, absolutely chewing up the scenery at every opportunity and apparently having a whale of a time.

It is a measure of Fred Olen Ray’s extraordinary productivity that, although the two Invisible Mom films were made only two years apart, no fewer than 24 films separate them on Fred’s IMDB page. While the Inaccurate Movie Database can never be relied on to list work in the correct order, nevertheless it’s clear that in the late 1990s Fred was pumping out about a film a month. Listed in those two dozen titles which separate IM1 and IM2 (or possibly just precede IM1 or maybe just follow IM2) are Caged Fear, Masseuse 2, Hybrid, Billy Frankenstein and the unrelated (as far as I know) Invisible Dad.

Sean O’Bannon has written at least 14 of Fred’s films including both Invisible Mom sequels, the other two Justin Berfield starrers and several other titles mentioned elsewhere in this review. Non-FOR titles include Black Widow Escort directed by Gary Graver, Jim Wynorski’s The Escort 3 and Michael Su’s Doomed. He can also be seen on screen as various small roles in The Naked Monster.

DP Jesse Weathington also photographed Mom, Can I Keep Her? for Fred as well as such interesting-looking obscurities as Morella, Moonbase and The Stalker. Editor Jeffrey Schwarz cut The Kid with X-ray Eyes for Fred and David DeCoteau’s atypically non-genre Leather Jacket Love Story and now makes a living producing DVD extras, lots of ‘em. Production designer Naython Vane has an enviable CV consisting largely of Playboy Centerfold videos; who the hell looks at the production design on something like that? He also worked on Mom, Can I Keep Her? and Phantasm Oblivion.

Invisible Mom 2 doesn’t really do what it says on the tin and it never really cuts loose and gets spooky enough to entertain as kid-horror because of the need to concentrate on the Griffins and their (now very normal) family life. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable romp for little’uns and TF Simpson enjoyed it without his father getting bored. And that, really, is what counts.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 23rd June 2010

Director: Alfonso Brescia as “Al Bradley”
Writer: Steven Luotti, Al Bradley
Producer: Sam Sill
Cast: Miles O’Keefe, Savina Gersak, Elisabeth Kaza, Iris Peynado
Year of release: 1987
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: UK rental video (Rank)

More bonkers Italian sword and sorcery - I can’t get enough of this crap and yet I’ve no idea why. As usual, Miles O’Keefe is a warrior named Ator, and as usual this one (Ator il Guerrireo di Ferro) has nothing to do with any of the other Ators in other movies. Much like Maciste and Samson in peplum films, and Django and Sartana in spaghetti westerns, Ator was a handy, generic name. Sometime Tarzan O’Keefe also ‘played him’ in Ator the Fighting Eagle (1983) and The Blade Master (1984).

The battle between good and evil is personified by two witches: beautiful, olive-skinned Deeva (Iris Peynado: The New Barbarians) and wizened, flame-haired old crone Phaedra (Elisabeth Kaza: Castle Freak). The brothers Ator and Trogar are destined to do great things so Phaedra steals Trogar and for this is banished for 18 years. Deeva mentions in passing that she has granted the king a daughter.

Fast forward to the eighteenth birthday of Princess Janna (Savina Gersak from, erm, Curse II: The Bite), which is interrupted by the arrival of Phaedra, followed by her warrior Trogar. As it says on the video sleeve, he is: ‘Born of evil sorcery. Half man, half spirit. Total exterminator.’ What he actually is - is a total Darth Vader rip-off. The boots, the gauntlets, the cloak, the shoulder-pads, the sword - right down to the asthmatic breathing! But instead of Vader’s black helmet, Trogar wears a shiny chrome skull and a red neck-scarf. (The man behind the mask in this instance is Franco Daddi who was second unit stunt co-ordinator on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure!)

The bulk of the film has, as one might expect if one has seen plenty of these things (and I have!) no discernible plot. Ator and Janna do a lot of journeying, occasionally defeating some nameless, faceless soldiers, presumably under the command of Phaedra, and occasionally facing off against Trogar himself. There are a few attempts at a story, with Phaedra transforming herself into a young woman, and an impostor claiming to be Janna’s royal father. Eventually Ator and Janna track down Deeva, who sends them to an island that has risen from the waves (a decent model, to be fair). There they must locate a gold chest, but Phaedra tricks, imprisons and impersonates Deeva.

It all ends up with the good guys winning, sort of, somehow. But it’s all complete nonsense. The film makes full use of its locations on Malta and Gozo and gives good views of those islands’ cliffs, caves and ruins - even if one of the ‘ancient castles’ has metal steps and railings for tourists! Very disappointingly, although the video sleeve painting is mostly accurate, nothing even faintly resembling the dragon depicted ever appears. Boo.

Bradley/Brescia’s gloriously psychotronic career stretched from latter-day pepla such as Revolt of the Praetorians (1964) through westerns (The Colt is My Law, 1966) and war movies (Kill Rommel!, 1969) to sci-fi hoopla like Battle of the Stars (1977) and Reactor (1978) - plus bona fide trash classic Amazons Against Supermen aka Superuomini, Superdonne, Superbotte (1975). He died in 2001.

But Iron Warrior is most notable for being (apparently) the only narrative feature film cinematography credit for the charmingly named special effects cameraman Wally Gentleman. Born in Britain in 1926, Gentleman started work as a camera assistant in 1943 and later emigrated to Canada where he died in 2001. And 2001 is his most famous work: he collaborated closely with both Clarke and Kubrick, who sought him out after being impressed with his work on a 1960 National Film Board of Canada documentary called Universe.

Gentleman is regarded by cinematographers as the father of special effects photography, his other credits including Black Narcissus, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and The Red Shoes. Quite how he ended up behind the camera on a piece of tat like this, God only knows. His only other Italian credit is Chi Sei?/Behind the Door in 1974.

Iron Warrior is utterly disposable rubbish, but with a certain naive charm. Truly it is written: they don’t make them like this any more.

MJS rating: C-

review originally posted 30th May 2005

Director: Mike Kehoe
Writer: Mike Kehoe
Producer: Mike Kehoe
Cast: Matthew Lockwood, Somerled Mackay. Andy McQuade
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.ironwerkz.com

Ironwerkz was a big hit at the 2007 Leeds Film Festival and you can see why. It’s a skilfully crafted, imaginative fantasy tale that’s not a moment too long or too short.

On an island in an industrial fantasy world, three men sort scrap. The two older ones - who are credited as ‘Pa’ (Somerled Mackay, who played the title role in British superhero indie Night-Wolf) and ‘Grampa’ (Andy McQuade: Meat Me) - are both quasi-cyborgs, with heavy, mechanical arm extensions and other body modifications. The youngest man, credited as ‘The Boy’ (Matthew Lockwood), is a dreamer, his hopes intact and his heart secretly touching that of the boss’ daughter.

This is a superbly realised setting, mixing props, prosthetics, sets and CGI to create a believable but utterly fantastic world which reminded me of the work of China Mieville. Watching Ironwerkz I was inexorably drawn to the question of whether this is the first film that can be defined by the to-now solely literary genre of ‘new weird’. Not that I’m sure anyone’s certain what constitutes ‘new weird’ anyway, but this is certainly something beyond steampunk.

The story, told through a series of wordless scenes, concerns the young man’s discovery of a companion among the rubbish - a shop window dummy which he smuggles into his room in defiance of the rules. When the other two men discover this, they can only destroy it because such things are apparently not allowed. But then, in a positively Gilliamesque scene, they give the young man a birthday party at which initial bemusement and uncertainty turns to joy which then turns inexorably to horror.

While the actual plot points, including the shock ending, are sometimes predictable, the production as a whole is knockout with good cinematography, direction and acting and superb design. An opening scene with a well-dressed couple who I’m assuming our the boss and his daughter - they’re credited as ‘The Caller’ (Lindsey Mack) and ‘The Girl’ (Anna-Marie Wayne: Stupid Teenagers Must Die!) - gives the story a founding and a perspective, not least in the visitors’ quasi-Victorian costumes. This leads into a terrific CGI shot of the island as the couple leave by cable car, which is worth the price of admission by itself.

If I’m being picky, the only fault here is that the film does not establish the scrapyard as a family business. I assumed that the three men were colleagues, the youngest being maybe an apprentice. It’s not immediately apparent that the bald man (Grampa) is a generation older than the one with sideburns (Pa) because the former is more heavily modified and mechanised - but I suppose the additional modification points to a longer life. This isn’t really a criticism because the film works equally well whether the three men are viewed as family or co-workers.

Ironwerkz was funded by the Yorkshire Media Production Agency, who have been behind a lot of fantasy and horror pictures over the years, as part of the UK Film Council’s ‘Digital Shorts’ scheme. Among those helping to create writer/director/producer Mike Kehoe’s vision were cinematographer Liam Sanderson, editor Ian Jackson, art directors Julie Anderson and Philip Lewis (both also on Night-Wolf), composer Ethan Lewis Maltby and model-maker Paul Lewis. The special effects make-up is credited to Mark Kilburn who previously worked on Creep and Minotaur and among half a dozen credited visual effects artists is Arif Majothi from Dark Raven Digital who worked on Warrior Sisters and Kingdom. And a special tip of the hat to Michael Walters, the chap who lent the production a fabulous 1926 Garrett Undertype Steam Lorry that doesn’t look at all out of place in the industrial fantasy world of Ironwerkz.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 15th December 2007

Director: Dave Fleischer
Producer: Max Fleischer
Cast: Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Bimbo
Country: USA
Year of release: 1933
Reviewed from: UK DVD

I recently picked up a DVD (volume one of two) of original Betty Boop cartoons, released in the UK by Delta. And what a delight to reacquaint myself with the little minx. Betty is one of those characters who is sufficiently iconic that everyone recognises her, but when did you last actually sit down and watch an original 1930s Betty Boop cartoon?

Produced by Fleischer Studios, who were serious rivals to Disney in those pre-Snow White days, the Betty Boop cartoons were usually deeply surreal, with inanimate objects coming to life temporarily and people and things changing shape and context almost on a whim. As well as the sheer sexuality and sassiness of the main character, there’s a joy in the possibilities of animation as a medium and, inherent in that (I feel) is a hint of darkness and danger. And sometimes, as in this instance, these little films are just plain weird.

Is My Palm Read, apart from being a corking title, is a great little early sound cartoon. It co-stars, as do many Betty Boop cartoons, two other Fleischer characters, an anthropomorphic pup named Bimbo (of course, Betty was a canine herself in her earliest appearances) and the redoubtable Koko the Clown. We see these two, in the opening sequence, bowing down before some unidentifiable shadows on a curtain. They are inside a building with a huge neon sign outside advertising the mysterious psychic powers of ‘Professor Bimbo: sees past, present, future’.

Betty arrives, looking surprisingly demure for this stage in her career, in a long dress and wide-brimmed hat. The doorbell consists of a cat with his tail through a hole in the wall who yells when his tail is pulled. Koko checks the visitor through a peephole which he has to move around the wall several times before finding her. He sticks his head through his legs and announces “Miss Betty Boop!” This is the cue for Bimbo to don a turban and fake beard.

Outside, an entrance hall unfurls down the front of the featureless wall and when Betty steps inside it turns into an elevator (although, as we have seen, Bimbo and Koko are also on the ground floor). She then enters by means of a Betty-shaped hole in the wall which is torn open by the doorbell cat.

We are about 45 seconds in and already this is bonkers.

Bimbo has a crystal ball in which we see an ocean liner being tossed and thrown at sea, eventually turned upside down by two waves-as-hands. All the passengers fall out and one becomes separated, adrift in a lifebelt. We zoom in to see that it is Betty. She makes it to an island where she quickly dons a halter top and hula skirt and sings ‘All by Myself in the Moonlight’.

There is a straw hut on the island, with two palm trees which lean over to grab our heroine and throw her into the hut, which is home to a bunch of ghosts (one has a bone in his hair, one wears a top hat, several have buck teeth). A spider spins bars across the window so Betty writes ‘help’ on a piece of wood, but one of the ghosts grabs it and throws it onto the log fire. (Why would you have a blazing log fire on a tropical island?)

Fortunately, this causes the smoke rising from the chimney to spell out ‘help’ which is seen by Bimbo, passing by on a mule (with the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’ on the soundtrack). He rescues Betty and they race off through the jungle, eventually making their escape in a small, squirrel-powered paddle-boat.

Back in what passes for reality, Betty says, “My hero!” Bimbo throws off his beard and turban and says, “Betty!” and with delight and surprise she responds “Bimbo!” (so I guess she missed that huge neon sign). A ghost promptly appears from under the crystal ball and chimes in “Bunko!”(?). He rips off Betty’s hat and dress, and underneath she has the hula skirt ensemble.

Bimbo and Betty race off as more ghosts swarm out from where the crystal ball was. Koko is entirely forgotten by this point as they are back in the jungle, making one wonder whether these scenes were originally intended to follow on directly from the previous chase. The ghosts get pelted with cocoanuts from a rebounding palm tree (the flexibility of palm trees seems to be the basis for quite a few gags, in fact) and eventually they all pile through a hollow log which leads out over a chasm, with Bimbo and Betty scrambling to safety and the ghosts all plummeting out of harm’s way. The end.

Absolutely insane. Had this been made 30 years later, people would be hailing it as a drugged out classic. (Mind you, there was an awful lot of drugs going around Hollywood in the 1930s...) The five minutes of Is My Palm Read (like I say, a great title, although come to think of it, no palm-reading actually occurs) are jam-packed with inventive visual gags which leave one in no doubt that this isn’t the real world. A fair amount of these gags involve violence inflicted by non-living or inanimate objects such as trees and waves. And thinking about it a bit more, although Bimbo never reads Betty’s palm, their adventures on the tropical island certainly do involve a lot of palm trees.

According to a synopsis on the Big Cartoon Database (which cites an alternative title of Professor Bimbo) there are three risqué gags missing from this print - although curiously this runs to the exact 5’12” quoted by the BCDB. And indeed there do, on closer inspection, seem to be three slight jumps in the action where the following things should be: when Betty first enters the room, the lights are arranged so that her silhouette shows through her (atypically demure) dress, marking out Bimbo as a sly rogue; before the crystal ball reveals the ship, it shows Betty as a young girl, naked in the bath; and when Betty arrives at the island, she removes her soaking dress before constructing her own hula skirt.

Even with these snips, this is a wildly entertaining short and I will certainly be adding some more of Betty’s more fantastical adventures to the site in the future.

Apart from the Fleischer brothers, the only other credits are for animators David Tendlar and William Henning.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 26th November 2005

Director: Chris Hartwill
Writers: Sven Hughes, Malachi Smyth
Producers: Simon Bosanquet, Mark Huffam
Cast: Sean Faris, Rachael Taylor, Luke Ford
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Not Ghost in the Machine, just Ghost Machine. Shot in the old Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast at the end of 2008 with funding from Northern Ireland Screen, this odd little cyber-horror isn’t particularly terrible but nor is it particularly good. It’s competently made with an attractive and talented young cast and makes good use of CGI effects, but there is not a single ‘wow’ moment in the entire movie. It‘s difficult to react to Ghost Machine with anything except a big shrug.

The worst aspect of this film is undoubtedly the premise which is utterly nonsensical. Tom (Sean Faris: The Brotherhood 2) is some sort of techno wizard who has developed a highly realistic VR simulator thing which is being used by British squaddies for combat simulations. After hours, he and his likeable squaddie mate Vic (Luke Ford: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor) head off base to a disused prison to set up this self-same VR simulator for some games. Along the way they pick up Benny (Jonathan Harden: Ditching) and at the prison they meet up with ex-warder Iain (Sam Corry: Killing Bono).

Apparently this simulator works by placing a small number of electronic doohickeys around the building which then somehow recreate the entire structure within the computer. With VR helmets on their heads, the lads can run around the building they're in, blasting simulated enemy, without shifting from their armchairs.

But the prison is haunted by the ghost of a female terrorist who died there while being tortured in the wake of 9/11 (seen in a 'nine years earlier' prologue under the opening titles). She somehow gets into the computer too and starts attacking the blokes, who suffer real injuries. Meanwhile Vic’s squaddetta girlfriend Jess (Rachael Taylor: Transformers, Charlie’s Angels redux), having gone for a solo run around the compound, then decides to jump on a motorbike and head over to the prison. For some reason. And she is followed by abusive Sergeant Taggart (Richard Dormer: Dark Touch, Puckoon - as a sort of low-rent Sean Pertwee). Also for some unclear reason.

It turns out that Tom has set this whole thing up to try and capture the ghost which he knew to be there and is unconcerned about his friends’ deaths. But really, the plot is bollocks of the highest order just designed to set up scenes of the spooky ghost lady, supernaturally armed with a long chain, stalking and attacking the main characters. Motives and motivations are in short supply and although Jess and Vic do start demanding answers from Tom towards the end, that doesn’t cut it because this is the sort of convolutedly bizarre set-up that anyone with any brains would have questioned beforehand.

It’s quite an international cast for a small British production. Faris is the token Yank, Ford is Canadian but adopts an Aussie accent, Taylor actually is Australian but hides her accent, and Hatla Williams, who plays the ghost, is an Icelandic actress (real name Halla Vilhjálmsdóttir) who presents that country’s version of The X-Factor! Token other Yank Josh Dallas (The Descent Part 2, Thor) is the voice of Tom’s accomplice. For some reason.

Director Chris Hartwill mostly makes adverts; he has helmed episodes of The Hunger and Numb3rs but this is his only feature. The script is credited to Sven Hughes (from Oxford) and Malachi Smyth (from Derry), each of whom has written various shorts. Hughes works as a ‘strategic communications consultant’ (ie. speech-writer) for “international clients including Prime Ministers, major multinationals and various militaries.”

This was the second BHR feature from producer Simon Bosanquet and Mark Huffam who also produced Freakdog aka Red Mist; their solo credits include Nuns on the Run, The Revengers’ Comedies, Thunderbirds, Johnny English and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. DP George Richmond has camera credits on Quantum of Solace, Children of Men, Seed of Chucky and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. The sparse but gory prosthetic make-up was provided by Clare Ramsey (Doctor Who, Mutant Chronicles, WAZ, Game of Thrones) while costume designer Hazel Webb-Crozier worked on BHR entry Wilderness and IHR entry Grabbers.

The daft premise of this daft film is the sort of thing that Fred Olen Ray might have got away with in the 1980s but simply doesn’t pass water in the late noughties (Ghost Machine was released on US disc in December 2009 and in the UK the following April). This is a thoroughly middling, instantly forgettable, frankly bland film which passes the time for an hour and a half if you’re undemanding, but it makes no attempt to do anything interesting, new, different or memorable so it’s really difficult to see what purpose it serves except to give a commercials director and a speechwriter a feature credit.

MJS rating: C

Director: Simon Phillips, Bob Komar
Writers: Paul Tanter, Alan Ronald
Producers: Lots of folks
Cast: Simon Phillips, Mike Reid, Rula Lenska
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: UK DVD (4 Digital Media)

Jack Says is a commendably slick and well-produced British noir thriller that doesn’t quite work, which is a shame.

Co-director Simon Phillips (Jesus vs the Messiah, The Rapture, Idol of Evil) stars as Jack, introduced in a black and white prologue, tied to a chair and being threatened by ‘the Guv’nor’ (professional Londoner Mike Read in his final performance). When Jack comes to, he is battered, bloody and next to the Guv’nor’s dead body, in a different location (and in colour). He has no idea how he got there but worse than that, he has no idea who he is - nor who the dead body is that’s next to him.

All he has to go on is a credit card and a polaroid of a woman’s breasts which has an address in Paris written on the back. So he heads to the French capital, although it does occur to me now to wonder how he is able to use the card since he would need to remember a PIN (or a signature). Also, they don’t actually make Polaroid cameras any more, although I suppose it might be an old photo.

Jack’s lack of memory means he has no idea whether he killed the dead bloke but on the assumption that people might think he did - and he clearly has no alibi - he goes on, effectively, the run. Except that the British police find a driving license or some similar ID at the scene and subsequently track his credit card usage to Paris. Apparently they know Jack of old and although the circumstantial evidence points to him, Detective Edwards (James Frail: Dial H for Housekeeping) is not convinced. Charlie Palmer (Andrew, Chasing Emily) appears to have lots of fun playing Dr Matt Poulton, a surprisingly realistic forensic expert who demonstrates that the Guv’nor was shot somewhere else and the body transported afterwards by at least two strong people (Mike Read being not exactly a small bloke). Edwards sets off to Paris in search of Jack.

Meanwhile our hero makes his way to the address on the photo, unsure what he will find but assuming it to be a woman. It turns out to be Erin (Rita Ramnani, who was Arwen in lavish LOTR fanfilm The Hunt for Gollum), an ex-girlfriend who still carries a torch for him but who points out that the tits in the photo aren’t hers (it’s not explained why her address is written on a snap of someone else’s jubblies).

There is some initial discomfort, largely due to Erin’s doubt over Jack’s claim to have no memory although the fact that he is filthy and blood-caked doesn’t help (in fact he is still bleeding, which seems a tad unlikely if enough time has passed for him to get to St Pancras, buy a Eurostar ticket - without a passport? - travel to Gare du Nord and then somehow track down a specific address in a city he doesn’t know). But gradually the two settle into a happy, comfortable relationship, with Jack realising that, whatever he is running away from, he is better off in Paris with Erin.

While Erin goes out to her (unspecified) work, Jack wanders into a bar and watches a singer known only as Girl X (Aurelie Amblard, the only French person in the principal cast). She has her own problems, primarily the unwanted attentions of an unctuous, lesbian gangster, Garvey (Rula Lenska), whose two cronies are an unnamed, sharp-suited, white chap (Daniel Roberts) and a beefy, black fellow called Twinkle (Danny Idollor: Jesus vs the Messiah).

Lenska’s genre credits include one Doctor Who story, an episode of Space:1999, as-yet-unreleased puppet Bond spoof Agent Crush, 1990s kidcom Kappatoo, the radio series of Hitchhiker’s Guide - and Queen Kong of course. (Interestingly, the part was originally given to James Kavaz (HellBride, KillerKiller) but was recast when he passed away suddenly in February 2007. The only other film I can think of where a supporting role was recast from male to female like this is 24 Hours in London where the Lorelei King role was originally intended for Antonio Fargas.)

Jacks’ sense of honour leads him to become involved with this malarkey which proves fatal for Erin, leading Jack to accept Girl X’s request to murder the odious Garvey. But as with all the best thrillers, not everyone is telling the truth and more fatalities occur along the way before a ‘twist’ revelation in an epilogue and the revelation of who did kill the Guv’nor.

Jack Says is well-made: most of the cast are excellent, it’s smartly directed and cinematographer/co-director Bob Komar (director of the 2006 contemporary Measure for Measure which shares various cast and crew with this film) does a smashing job with both the colour and monochrome photography, which has been neatly spliced together by editor Paula Baker (whose TV work includes Demons, the Minder remake and Masterchef!). There is some neat dialogue and some interesting visuals (especially a death scene near the end) plus a cameo by a bearded Eric Cantona as a Parisian bar-room philosopher.

But one word that sadly can’t be applied to Jack Says is ‘satisfying’. It just doesn’t fit together in a neat way. Most egregiously, there is no connection whatsoever between the events in London and those in Paris. One watches the film expecting that someone has set Jack up, that in helping Girl X he is falling into a trap orchestrated by someone connected with the Guv’nor - but he’s not. The London plot resurfaces regularly as Jack has monochrome flashbacks to what happened, most of them involving a woman who was present when the Guv’nor was pointing a pistol at him, but it never integrates in any way with the events in Paris.

This woman is Natalie (Ashley Walker) who will prove to be significant... but only in the sense that Jack eventually remembers her significance. The actual revelation of who killed the Guv’nor is, again, not satisfying. Even the aforementioned twist fails to satisfy because, while it is unexpected, it doesn’t illuminate in any way what has gone before except to explain why Jack was tied to a chair with a gun pointing at his head back in the prologue.

This film is interesting, exciting, often stylish - but it’s not clever. Thrillers should be clever; it’s what distinguishes the genre from run-of-the-mill crime movies. The lack of revelatory intrigue in Jack Says is, at one and the same time, superficial and fundamental. And its effect on the film as a whole can be viewed either way.

Also, halfway through the film there is, it must be said, the biggest editing flub that I have seen since Haunted Prison. Jack goes out to buy something for breakfast, walks back through the bright sunshine of a Paris morning, finds Erin dying, leaps out the window when the gendarmes come knocking on the apartment door... and runs away into the night. It’s one of those cock-ups so staggeringly basic that you can’t help rewinding and checking it to make sure you haven’t missed something. I don’t know what happened there.

Various ‘heavies’ are played by Forbes KB (A Day of Violence, Kung Fu Flid), Christopher Fosh (A Day of Violence, Mutant Chronicles), Rob Talbot (Call Me a Psycho, The Butterfly Tattoo) and Robert Stone (who seems to have built up an impressive CV by playing bouncers, prisoners and bodyguards). A veritable army of producers includes twelve associate producers, eight executive producers, a solitary co-producer and seven common or garden producers. Directors Simon Phillips and Bob Komar merge into a sort of gestalt entity in the credits which call this ‘a Bob Phillips film’.

There is a rather bizarre writing credit of ‘written by Alan Ronald, screenplay by Paul Tanter’. Al wrote several drafts of the script and was even attached to direct at one point but various changes meant that Phillips and Komar took over direction while further drafts of the script were written by Tanter - hence the odd credit. Derbyshire-based composer David Beard (The Opening, Catharsis, Claw) wrote the score although Wikipedia is convinced that it was written by the Australian volleyball player of the same name.

Jack Says was released on DVD in 2008 by 4 Digital Media, the disc including some deleted/extended scenes, a Making Of, a report on the premier and an ‘Eric Cantona gag reel’. A graphic novel prequel called Jack Said was published and is allegedly in development as a film with a possible third instalment, Jack Falls, also misleadingly listed on the Inaccurate Movie Database.

MJS rating: B
24th April 2009

Director: Artemio Marquez
Writer: Artemio Marquez
Producer: Mrs Jose O Vera
Cast: Dolphy, Shirley Moreno, Boy Alano, Bella Flores
Year of release: 1966
Country: Philippines
Reviewed from: Filipino VHS

Holy discovery, Batman! Here’s conclusive proof that, no matter how many extraordinary films are catalogued, described and eventually released on DVD, there are always plenty more that nobody has ever heard of.

I thought that I knew about all the famous, copyright-skirting Asian takes on western culture: the legendary Turkish Star Trek movie, the Indian versions of Superman and Star Wars. Batman, Spider-Man and El Santo rampaging through Ankara... But here’s something new. Could it be (I wondered, as I e-mailed my credit card details halfway round the world) that James Batman is some sort of unholy cross between Batman and James Bond?

Indeed it could!

The representations of Batman and Robin are based on the 1960s TV series, which must have been as popular in Manila as it was in Manchester and Manhattan. The Caped Crusader’s costume is reasonably accurate, except for a striped cape and an odd symbol on his chest in place of the usual bat. It’s either some weird Chinese pictogram or a silhouette of a stripper - I honestly can’t tell! The bat symbol is correct however on the tailfins of the (pretty good) Batmobile. And the Boy Wonder’s costume seems to be completely accurate.

James Bond meanwhile looks as much like Sean Connery as I do and has an awful taste in jackets and hats.

Oh, and they are both played by the same actor. Because obviously the film wasn't weird enough already.

The movie kicks off with a meeting of some sort of council or government (did I mention: it’s in Tagalog and therefore completely incomprehensible?), which is visited by an evil, Fu Manchu-style warlord. He threatens to detonate an atom bomb - somewhere - and evidently can also fire some sort of stun-ray from his fingertips. Bizarrely, we never see him again after this prologue.

Batman and Bond are both summoned, leading to one of several genuinely funny scenes, which transcend the language barrier. “This is a very important mission,” (or something) says the Council Leader. “I’ll do it!” cries Batman. “No, I’ll do it!” responds James Bond. “I’ll do it!” “No, I’ll do it!”

“It is a mission which will bring great glory and fame to whoever succeeds.” (Or something). “I’ll do it!” “No, I’ll do it!” “I’ll do it!” “No, I’ll do it!”

“It is a very, very dangerous mission.” “He’ll do it!” “No, he’ll do it!” “He’ll do it!” “No, he’ll do it!”

Let’s make it clear. This is not a serious attempt to dupe Filipino audiences into thinking that the stars of Batman and Dr No have suddenly been transplanted to the Philippines. It’s a comedy, a spoof. The Batman TV series was already a spoof, so that’s all right, and although this is meant to be James Bond, the character is more like the self-parodic James Coburn in Our Man Flint.

The actual plot? Goodness knows. Find me someone who speaks Tagalog. Actually, the film contains two sorts of scenes: talky scenes and fights, with the latter predominating. And they’re not bad fights either. Batman and Robin versus the bad guys; James Bond vs the bad guys, then everyone pitching in (as you’d expect). There are some decent martial arts moves on show here and imaginative (for the time) use of buildings and furniture. These are properly choreographed fights and are properly shot too, with reasonably long takes so that we can see what’s actually going on. Clearly the action is more influenced by Hong Kong than Hollywood.

The villains are an odd bloke in a hooded cloak with metal plates on his head (surely he’s not meant to be Doctor Doom from The Fantastic Four, is he?) plus a young chap with sunglasses who has a spiked ball instead of his left hand, and carries a heavy machine gun around with him at all times. Oh, and the Penguin! (And one of the minor characters turns out to be Catwoman later on.) Metalplate, Spikeballhand and the Penguin command their masked minions from a stage dominated by a giant hand - which we later see flex its fingers and shoot a ray, a bit like Fu Manchu did in the prologue. One of the oddest things is that, towards the end, when the Dynamic Duo and 007 (and his Bond babe) are held captive by the Penguin and his cohorts, they are rescued by a good-looking young man with a machine gun. I don’t know who he is - but we’ve never seen him before! Perhaps it all makes sense if you can understand the dialogue.

Has anybody seen this before? Several sources list a 1967 Filipino film called Batman Fights Dracula, although I can’t locate anyone who has actually seen it. Stephen Jones’ Essential Monster Movie Guide gives cast and production company and it’s clearly unrelated to this film. Pete Tombs’ Mondo Macabro mentions something called Alyas Batman and Robin in its Filipino chapter, but that’s a 1990s film. Looks like I’ve stumbled across something new.

So where did I find this rarity, which has remained uncatalogued these 37 years? I found it at Kabayan Central, a company which has an archive of old Tagalog movies. For a quite reasonable fee, they will make you up a VHS copy from the only surviving master. The print quality isn’t great - James Batman is very scratchy and the sound is all over the place - but when something is this rare, that’s a quibble. The simple matter is that James Batman turns out to be a genuinely entertaining collision between two icons of global popular culture, with lots of entertaining if slightly silly fights, and some amusing visual gags (see Batman dispense his lunch from his utility belt!).

With a title like this, it was a reasonably good bet what sort of film this would be. But what undiscovered gems lie behind those other enigmatic titles: Espada ng Rubitanya Mga, Magic Bilao, Nagkita si Kerubin at Tulisang Pugot, Tansan vs. Tarsan? (The only one I have identified so far is Dugo ng Vampira, which is the original Tagalog version of Creatures of Evil.)

There’s a lot to discover here, if my credit card can stand it.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 31st March 2006

Director: Chris Regan
Writer: Chris Regan
Producer: Andrea Regan
Cast: Rosie Duncan, Lukas Habberton, Simon Messingham
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.jennyringo.com

This is one of those films which you have to think about for quite a bit afterwards to work out what works, what doesn’t - and why.

There were a few obvious points that occurred to me while watching it. The opening is a spot-on spoof of pretentious French art films. I liked that and the way it segued into the main film. That goes immediately into the ‘credit’ column.

On the other hand, an obvious debit is that the film is too long at 25 minutes. It outstays its welcome. The whole thing could be a lot tighter and probably wrap up at 15 minutes. Then again, there’s a plus point for acknowledging WW Jacobs in the credits. There are also a couple of fun little animations and an enjoyable willingness to play with form and structure.

We all know the story of the monkey’s paw which grants three wishes. While this isn’t a spoof of the actual Jacobs story, it does use the same basic set-up in that the wishes are not thought through and create unforeseen problems.

Jenny Ringo (Rosie Duncan, who was in an episode of The Inbetweeners) is a gothette living in a Brighton flat with her best friend Gavin (Lukas Habberton aka Luke Sibston: Spring Heeled Jack). They’re both straight but not an item and there’s a deliberate, explicit lack of sexual tension between them. I applaud that. I’ve always liked the non-sexual, non-romantic M/F chemistry. Mind, it will never last. I once co-wrote a sitcom called Zoe’s Room about a separated man and a divorced woman who were lifelong best friends. We were very careful to make sure their relationship was as platonic as Bob Ferris and Terry Collier. Yet all the comments we got back were ‘I love the sexual tension between the characters.’ People just expect any straight, unattached man and straight, unattached woman to end up as a couple. It must be a tradition or an old charter or something.

But I digress. Jenny goes out to work each day (though we’re not shown this or told where) while unemployed Gavin slouches around the flat doing nothing. One day he meets a stage magician with an extravagant false moustache on the sea-front and accepts from him the paw of a cuddly monkey, which will grant him three wishes. Unfortunately he wishes for two friends who then won’t leave him alone (Scott Haney and Dominique Bull) and, when stoned, for a fabulous pizza, thereby wasting the third wish which could have got rid of the ‘friends’.

There’s an ambitious original song and dance number featuring four painted-face ‘ghost dancers’ which works and then a curious sequence in a small theatre which doesn’t really work although I liked the magician (played by Doctor Who audiobook writer Simon Messingham). He was an interesting and nicely ambiguous character.

But I think here is where the film falls down, because Jenny and Gavin aren’t particularly interesting characters. Jenny shows her spunky, cynical side occasionally and this could have been played up, but Gavin just seems completely wishy-washy. Not even pathetic, just a bit, well, bland. And I really didn’t feel that there was a close relationship between them.

In any comedy team, of however many characters, there have to be equal and opposing forces keeping the relationship(s) in stasis. Whatever is pulling or pushing them together has to be balanced by something pushing or pulling them apart.

Bob and Terry, for example, were pulled together by being best mates but pushed apart by the clash between Bob’s middle class aspirations and Terry’s working class contentment. Harold and Albert Steptoe were pulled together by deep-rooted family loyalty but also pushed together by their circumstances; neither could survive without the other. But mutual apathy pushed them apart. Same with everyone from Laurel and Hardy to Bill and Ted. There’s got to be something there.

Despite his slovenliness and untidiness, Jenny never seems exasperated with Gavin, nor does he seem bothered by her. A good comedy relationship is like a marriage: bickering and arguing because of love and loyalty. I just don’t get that with Jenny and Gavin.

What it boils down to is this: a missing ingredient. The one thing this film needed, which it lacks, but which hopefully the film-makers can inject into the proposed sequel. And that missing ingredient is... zing.

Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw lacks zing. Zing isn’t essential for comedy, but it is essential for a surreal short comedy about an increasingly problematic situation. Zing isn’t the same as pace but pace is, I believe, an essential aspect of zing. Monkey’s Paw (written and directed by Chris Regan: Ten Dead Men) seems stuck in a low gear when really it needs to start accelerating early on and then build its speed as things get worse and worse and - just when it looks like the problem is solved - even worse. Then the zing needs a final pow as disaster is narrowly averted and everyone - characters and audience - can breathe a sigh of relief.

I’m not suggesting that the film-makers should have turned this into some sort of farce, but more zing would make the film shorter too. And tighter and punchier. It’s an old rule of screenwriting that you should enter every scene as late as possible and leave as soon as possible, to which one could add a corollary that between entrance and exit should be only what is needed for the scene, in terms of plot and character development. More zing would have given Jenny and Gavin more character and their relationship more spark.

Monkey’s Paw just seems laconic, unfortunately: the direction, acting and editing all feel like they’re holding back. Which is frustrating because there’s a good, funny 15-minute film in here. But instead of struggling to get out, it’s just lounging around inside the actual 25-minute film with plenty of leg-room and a comfortable pillow.

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 11th December 2011

Director: Alan Ronald
Writer: Alan Ronald
Producer: Debbie Attwell
Cast: Simon Phillips, Gemma Deerfield, Danny Idollor Jr
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener

When you’re watching a film, certainly when you’re watching it for review purposes, a phrase will often pop into your head. Some pithy combination of words will suggest itself, usually about 30-40 minutes in, which perfectly sums up what the film is or does or wants to be. As I watched Alan Ronald’s debut feature Jesus vs the Messiah, having started from a point of knowing nothing whatsoever about the picture, not even whether it was a drama or comedy, three words aligned themselves along my neurons and I realised that I was viewing an existential British western.

British westerns are few and far between; ones about the Son of God are even rarer.

There is little actual western iconography here. One character refers to another several times as “a cowboy” but that’s just because he’s wearing a broad-brimmed leather hat (the director’s own). It’s not really a Stetson, in fact with his long leather coat it makes him look more like a big, black Van Helsing (without the crossbow) than John Wayne or Gene Autry. The excellent score, mostly based around a strummed guitar, manages to evoke vaguely western feelings without ever being an Ennio Morricone pastiche. But the real clue to the genre here is the characters and their situation.

This is a three-hander - two men and one woman - and all three people are lone drifters. She lives in a car, one man has a flat and another home whose location he has forgotten and the other fellow we’re never told anything about, except that he spends his time chasing the first chap. Apart from these three and one barfly featured at the start, the only ‘characters’ are a barman and a waitress, the sort of human furniture that fills the mise-en-scene of a western without having anything approaching a personality. Our three protagonists (well, two protagonists and one antagonist, I suppose) move through a largely empty world, rarely interacting with the rest of humanity. The first half of the story is set in an urban locale, the second half is more rural but everywhere seems empty, the widescreen cinematography turning Paisley car parks and Loch Lomond hillsides into dusty plains.

There are just enough clues to show that this isn’t just my interpretation, this is an intention on the part of Alan Ronald to turn Scotland into Arizona, a sort of Wild West Lothian.

The aforementioned barfly is a hulking Glaswegian bastard whose hobby is forcing strangers into drinking contests. When he makes a move on a woman in a bar and is rebuffed, he doesn’t take kindly to the situation and takes even less kindly to the bearded bloke along the bar who asks him to leave the lady alone. Forced by the thug’s associates to sit down and knock back shots of something which probably tastes like furniture polish, the mild fellow protests feebly but nevertheless emerges triumphant (as the fat bloke brings up his lunch) only to collapse shortly afterwards.

Awakening in the back of the woman’s car, the two introduce themselves warily. She is Sally (Gemma Deerfield: Dawn of the Zombies, Violet, Caped Fear), he eventually admits that his name is Jesus (Simon Phillips: Idol of Evil, Jack Says). It’s pronounced the Biblical way – he’s not Spanish. “You must have had some fucked-up parents,” says Sally. Of course, when a character is named Jesus (he asks her to just call him J) the audience immediately starts wondering whether he really is The Jesus. Especially when he’s in a film with an obviously religious (if apparently contradictory) title like Jesus vs the Messiah. And especially when he has a beard. If there’s one thing that everyone agrees on about the Son of Our Lord, one thing which unites all the different factions and denominations in peaceful unanimity, it’s the universally accepted fact that Jesus had a beard. And was white.

Sally warily accepts J’s offer to crash at his flat but in the morning he finds that his wallet is missing. Being more astute than J, Sally realises that the fat bastard at the bar has it and returns there to retrieve it, which she does. But into this otherwise-deserted-at-this-time establishment comes a heavily built, stoney-faced fellow (Danny Idollor Jr, adopting an American accent, who claims to have been in Buffy the Vampire Slayer although I can’t find any trace of this online) who is searching for J and has no qualms about killing people - with fists or pistol - who get in his way. We have already seen him inexplicably kill some unnamed extras in other situations.

This is ‘The Messiah’ although he is only identified as such in the end credits (and by dint of being the antagonist who is ‘vs’ Jesus). The character is never named on screen although it is surely significant that he addresses J, when they meet as “Brother.”

J turns up at the bar, tries to rescue Sally and has to be rescued in turn from this seemingly unstoppable black behemoth, who is left out cold on the floor. There is a fair amount of people being smacked on the head with objects in this film, usually hard enough to knock them unconscious and, to be fair, a few situations where further blows were required would have been more realistic (but that’s a petty and irrelevant complaint about what is otherwise an absolutely cracking film).

Sally and J, who still don’t trust each other, retreat to a cafe for breakfast and hatch plans to get away from the city but the Messiah tracks them there and persuades J to go with him. This is the magic of the relationship here, into which Sally intrudes: Jesus and the Messiah are in opposition but they both know that Jesus has a destiny and it is the Messiah’s duty to see that this destiny is fulfilled. Just like the Terminator, ‘he can’t be reasoned with, he can’t be bargained with and he absolutely will not stop.’

Over the course of 100 minutes or so we see how Jesus and the Messiah give meaning to each other’s lives, and how Jesus and Sally can give meaning to each other’s lives (there is not even a hint of romance, which is refreshing). Sally never twigs that J is actually the Son of God until J confesses the truth near the end so the audience always has an advantage over her.

But is he? That’s the marvellous thing about this film. We’re dummied into thinking that we’re watching a religious film but then Alan Ronald throws in just enough doubt to make us realise that these two men could just be a couple of fucked-up loners. They’re certainly fucked up, as indeed is Sally, but are they fucked up enough to believe that they’re the Son of God and his Nemesis? Or are they fucked up because they are the Son of God and his Nemesis? Like the best existential movies, JVTM doesn’t provide answers but it does raise some fascinating questions.

This is a thought-provoking film but it’s far from heavy. There’s a bit of action, plenty of tension and a vein of dark humour running through the whole thing, best exemplified by probably the greatest walrus scene in the history of British cinema. I can see this film being a hit at festivals and provoking plenty of internet discussion once people have had a chance to see it. There’s always something fascinating about religious authority figures unafraid to indulge in righteous violence, whether it’s Garth Ennis’ Preacher or the gun-toting priest in Bram Stoker’s Shadow Builder (or indeed my own unproduced TV pilot Padre - ask me about it sometime).

This is also a beautiful film, very much a cinematographer’s film, not surprising as Ronald is a DP by trade whose credits include Pat Higgins’ TrashHouse, HellBride and KillerKiller (plus camera op on The Devil’s Music, in which he was so memorable in front of the camera as stoned drummer ZC). Ronald uses the widescreen image not just as a window but as a frame, always aware of the shape of the things that make up the picture, whether its an extreme close-up of a character’s eyes or a panoramic landscape with a single figure.

As well as being a terrific movie - a masterful combination of great photography and fascinating characters trapped in an intriguing situation - JVTM is also a triumph of minimalist production in having only five crew. Al Ronald himself wrote, directed and edited and handled the camera. Producer Debbie Attwell was also 1st AD, script supervisor, line producer and stills photographer and also also found time to produce and edit the forty-minute Making Of (which can be found in four chunks on YouTube). Attwell is also an actress who had small roles in TrashHouse and The Devil’s Music. She and Ronald have a long history of working together which includes the short films Sabbat, The Gloop and Blood Bank plus a music video which was included on the German DVD of Suspiria(!) although Ronald’s apparent ambition to star Attwell in a feature based on the Marvel Comics character the Black Cat is pure wish fulfilment I suspect... Attwell’s other genre credits include the atmospheric short film The Train Now Arriving and the spoof Bikini Zombies from the Moon, both for Shock! Horror! Probe! Productions.

The other three crew members were all in the ‘sound department’, which might explain why the sound production and mixing - so often the thing that lets low-budget movies down - is top-notch here. Andrew ‘Biscuit’ Byars was sound recordist (and stunt driver - not a common combination in the industry!) while Craig Woods and Ben McNeill shared duties as sound assistants, production assistants and boom ops. The only other people credited on the film are Al’s brother Gordon Ronald who was ‘pre/post-production assistant’ and shares a foley credit with Al; composer Eli Stone (Al Ronald and Andrew Byars are credited with additional music); executive producer Lee Thacker; and David Smith who made a rather important wooden prop. Gordon Ronald also has the distinction of having originated the long-coated, leather-hated title character in Ronald and Attwell’s short film Messiah, included in the Making Of.

All three leads are excellent in their respective roles, creating believable characters within a barely believable scenario from nothing but hints and suggestions. Ronald, Byars and Woods all make cameos as headbanging victims of the Messiah in an early shot unconnected to the main story while Attwell plays the waitress in the cafe. Alistair Rodger is the guy in the bar and John Lavelle plays the barman.

Technically and artistically a triumph, Jesus vs the Messiah benefits above all from an excellent script which makes us care about these characters and think about them too. It never establishes for certain whether the two men are in fact supernatural entities or just two guys with mental health problems. More than that, it makes it clear that it doesn’t matter which scenario is true. The film works equally well if you believe they are or they aren’t, or indeed if they both are and aren’t at the same time. It doesn’t matter - and that’s the whole point.

The film premiered at a festival in Leith in June 2007. In an example of the coming trend, it is not available on DVD yet but can be purchased as a download from Film Annex for a very reasonable six dollars.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 23rd April 2008

Director: Don Adams, Harry James Picardi
Writer: Don Adams, Harry James Picardi
Producer: Don Adams, Harry James Picardi
Cast: Barret Walz, Aimee Bravo, Zia Mifkin
Year of release: 2002
Country: USA
Reviewed from: US DVD (Shadow Entertainment)

This latest collaboration between Charlie Band's Full Moon and JR Bookwalter's Tempe is a beautifully shot, technically perfect, reasonably entertaining horror film, which suffers by having almost no story whatsoever.

Colin (Barret Walz: Pickman's Muse) is a college art teacher with five students: slightly geeky Eddie (Arthur Simone); his friend Val (Mia Zifkin), on whom Colin has designs; slutty Tawny (the astoundingly pneumatic Aimee Bravo) who hides a tragic secret; Todd (James Palmer); and aspirational white trash Louise (Marren Lindow). For their final project, the students are each given a piece of a mannequin and asked to decorate it. The plan is to reassemble the mannequin (dubbed ‘Jigsaw’) in a bar - because the college is being fumigated... - and then burn it.

Now herein lies a major problem: all the principal characters are art students, which for this reviewer at least means that I really didn’t care if they lived or died, although Colin is clearly delineated as the biggest asshole, getting massively drunk at the bar and making passes at two of the girls. The only other characters are old bartender Pete and Louise’s abusive trucker husband, ironically named Art.

Another problem is that we are 45 minutes into this 72-minute movie before Jigsaw is burnt (on a cross!). To nobody’s surprise, he somehow comes to life, somehow gets himself down off the cross, and sets off to murder those who created him (who are very conveniently having an after-hours drink at the bar). Oh, did I mention that they have very conveniently supplied him with a camcorder in his head, a shotgun on one arm and a buzzsaw on the other. Actually ‘nobody’s surprise’ is about right. Jigsaw kills two people unseen by the rest (who never wonder whether they’re alive or not) and then picks off the rest one by one. Not only is there no suggestion of what might have animated this monster (a magic charm, an ancient curse - give us something here) but those who remain alive never question his existence. Nor do they call the cops.

The attacks are brutal and very well filmed, skilfully showing very little and thereby appearing much worse than they would if the camera lingered on prosthetics and fake blood. However, in the grand tradition of the Mummy, the Frankenstein Monster, etc, Jigsaw cannot walk at anything above a slow plod and could therefore be very, very easily avoided by simply jogging. There is some talk about him collecting bits from the bodies to build a jigsaw man like himself, but we don’t see this and it’s never followed up.

I feel guilty about criticising this film because it is extremely well made. The Jigsaw suit is scary and effective; the acting (by a largely neophyte cast) and direction are top notch; the cinematography (by Carlo Besasie) is superb, especially as most of the film is shot at night; and even the sound mixing is terrific; it’s not often you notice that, so a tip of the hat to Supervising Sound Editor Maui Holcomb (Hell Asylum). The characters are interesting, the dialogue credible and sparky. All credit to Picardi and Adams, who previously brought us Vengeance of the Dead and worked as editors on Frankenstein Reborn. But the story is simply way, way too top heavy. We spend far too long waiting for Jigsaw to be built, burnt and reanimated (which is after all what we’ve been promised on the box) after which we’re given neither explanation nor exploration, and it’s all over far too quickly.

Jigsaw has been released on R1 DVD by Shadow Entertainment as a double bill with David DeCoteau’s film Totem. It has a 15-minute ‘making of’ which is one of the very best I’ve ever seen, and a trailer which shows all the important events in the film, plus a directors’ commentary.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 8th June 2005

Director: Richard Slapczynski
Writer: John Palmer
Producer: Walter J Hucker
Cast: Ron Haddrick, Alastair Duncan, Bevan Wilson
Country: Australia
Year of release: 1977
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Pegasus)

This is the third animated version of Jules Verne’s subterranean classic that I’ve watched in the past two months. Like the 1996 Canadian version and the 2001 Franco-Belgian version, this runs about three quarters of an hour and consequently has to rather skim through the story.

In actual fact, this version takes a long time to actually get underground. Set in Hamburg in what seems to be the late 19th century (though no specific date is given), we are introduced to Professor Lindenbrock and his nephew Alex (described in the sleeve blurb as his “friend”) as the Prof conducts a dangerous experiment. In his coach-house he has constructed a large metal globe, marked out with the continents, into which he pours a quantity of molten metal. The idea is that, if the globe breaks, it will prove that theories about the centre of the Earth being extremely hot must be false and so there is a chance that life exists down there.

Hm, yes. Not sure about that, to be honest.

The globe explodes slightly more violently than expected but Lindenbrock manages to save an old book by Icelandic explorer Arne Saknussem which has has been studying. While the Prof goes to a meeting of the Scientific Society to explain his theory, which is roundly poohpoohed by snide Professor Kippner and his slimy compatriot Professor Benz, Alex is set the job of scouring Saknussem’s manuscript for clues. He eventually finds two pages stuck together with a loose leaf between the two which reveals in invisible ink, when held near a candle, the name of a place in Iceland where Saknussem was on the last day of June.

The two explorers bid farewell to Lindenbrock’s long-suffering housekeeper Martha (who gets a bigger role here than in other versions, or indeed in the book) and to Alex’s fiancee, and they set sail for Iceland. Kippner and Benz follow them in secret for some reason.

Landing in Iceland, Lindenbrock finds that no-one dares climb the extinct volcano which is his goal, believing it to be haunted because of a legend of an expedition centuries earlier which climbed the mountain and vanished. Fortunately, a strong young fellow named Hans agrees to guide the German. On the last day of June, a particular shadow point to a particular hole, down which the three men clamber. then a rock fall seals the hole, Kippner and Benz assume that the expedition is lost and return to Hamburg, where they break the bad news to the ladies.

But of course Lindenbrock, Alex and Hans are safe in an underground system of caves. However, with only about 20 minutes of this 46-minute cartoon left, they had better get a hurry on if they’re going to reach the centre of the Earth.

They soon start to run out of water, but discover an underground stream behind a rock wall and then follow the trickle of H2O into the depths. At one point they reach a chasm and spot skeletons on the other side, evidently the remains of the legendary expedition which disappeared. Fortunately Lindenbrock has a rocket-propelled grappling hook - which we earlier saw him testing up the stairs in his home - and this enables the party to get across.

They find a vast underground sea, which they resist naming, and Arne Saknussem’s raft, still intact, on which they set sail. From the raft they see all manner of dinosaurs on land, at sea and flying through the air, but they crash over a waterfall and the raft is wrecked. (This is a rather odd sequence as about a minute of footage of the trio watching dinosaurs and hurtling towards the waterfall precedes the opening title, acting as a teaser/prologue. Some, but not all, of the prologue footage is missing from this sequence in the film proper, making the action seem slightly truncated. How odd.)

Anyway, they find a pterodactyl nest and Alex helps himself to one of the large eggs. Then, avoiding the mother pterodactyl, they find themselves threatened by a number of giant arthropods (which have eight legs but look more like ants or beetles than spiders). Fortunately a wall breaks, the sea floods in and the explorers are carried aloft on a jet of water which ejects them through the Italian volcano Stromboli. Back in Hamburg, Kippner dismisses their adventure as nonsense and says the ‘egg’ is a fake, whereupon the thing hatches and a baby pterodactyl emerges, clamping its beak on the scientist’s nose, to general amusement.

So a very truncated version of the story which takes a long time to get going but is nevertheless reasonably faithful, albeit with some unnecessary additions. The simple but fluid animation, occasionally artistic use of silhouettes and sketchy design style instantly marks this out as coming from Air Programmes International (API) who also produced the 1969 animated version of A Christmas Carol. Walter J Hucker produced both films and Ron Haddrick once again supplies the lead voice.

Ex-pat Pole Richard Slapczynski is a prolific director of animated classics. His CV includes versions of: The Adventures of Sinbad, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The First Christmas, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Hansel and Gretel, Anastasia, Camelot, Prince of the Nile: The Story of Moses, The Three Little Pigs and Ali Baba. In 2001 he directed a series of ‘Animated Classics’ for Burbank Animation Studios including Silent Night: The Story of the First Christmas, Joseph and the Coat of Many Colours, Easter in Bunnyland, The Canterville Ghost, Anna and the King and something called D4: The Trojan Dog. Slapczynski made one other Verne-ian adaptation, Off On a Comet, in 1979. (Burbank Animation Studios list a version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth on their website but that is a different cartoon, with animal characters, not Slapczynski’s API one.)

Writer John Palmer wrote some of Slapczynski’s cartoons as well as the very successful Australian series of semi-animated features (drawn characters on live-action backgrounds) about a little girl named Dot, beginning with Dot and the Kangaroo in 1977. He also scripted the 1992 Blinky Bill movie and episodes of API’s 1966 TV series King Arthur and the Square Knights of the Round Table.

In addition to the ubiquitous Ron Haddrick, the cast includes Barbara Frawley (the voice of Dot in at least some of the above-mentioned movies), Alastair Duncan (also in the API versions of A Christmas Carol, Mysterious Island and Around the World in 80 Days, he is now the voice of Alfred the butler in The Batman and its feature-length spin-off The Batman vs Dracula), Bevan Wilson (Peter Bedford in Home and Away) and Lynette Curran (who starred with Kylie in The Delinquents).

This 2002 DVD from Pegasus, who have a lot of 45-minute animated classics in their catalogue, has an abominably amateurish picture on the front which bears no relation whatsoever to the designs in the actual film (and a sort of slimy mud-man-monster on the back which has no connection with anything).

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 1st October 2005

Director: Mark Shekter
Writers: Mark Shekter, Robert Sandler
Producer: Garry Blye
Cast: Clara Blye, Don Francks, Jennifer Martini
Country: Canada
Year of release: 1996
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Channel 5)

What the hell?

That was my reaction at the start of this 45-minute animated version of the Jules Verne classic which is very different in both approach and execution to the slightly later Franco-Belgian animated version. We start, according to an English-accented female narrator, in London in 1897 where 13-year-old Alexa Lindebruck (who has a very American accent), has entered the annual science fair.

What the hell?

Her demonstration involves showing that her pet guinea pig Hercules can find his way through a maze to a plate of ice cream before it melts.

What the hell?

Hercules sets off but is grabbed by a bat (what the hell?) which tries to carry him off, but Alexa uses the judge’s monocle to shine sunlight into the bat’s eyes (what the hell?), causing him to drop Hercules into the ice cream. Alexa is promptly awarded first prize.

Oh and Hercules can talk.

What the bloody hell is all this?

Apart from the girl’s surname, which is reasonably close to ‘Lidenbrock’, this has absolutely nothing to do with Jules Verne. My hopes for the rest of the story were low.

Alexa’s father, Professor Lindebruck, wants ‘the Academy’ to back his expedition to follow in the footsteps of Arne Saknussemm, an explorer who may have discovered a way to reach the centre of the Earth. The professor has a rock which was discovered in Italy but has been shown to have originated in Iceland and he believes this proves that there is a vast network of tunnels and caverns beneath the Earth. The president of the Academy, Doctor Greed, pours scorn on Lindebruck’s suggestion and sends him packing.

So now we’re getting a bit more like the book. I mean, talking guinea pigs - what the hell was that about? Okay, we’re in London in 1897 instead of Hamburg in 1863 and instead of a nephew named Axel the Prof has a daughter named Alexa. But at least we have references to Arne Saknussemm and there are even passing references to a housekeeper named Martha so these people have actually read the book. The difference between the book’s Axel and the cartoon’s Alexa - apart from sex, name and relationship to Prof. Lindebruck - is that where Axel was a bit of a harmless idler, uninterested in science, Alexa is a keen amateur scientist. As we have seen.

Back home with his daughter, Professor Lindebruck tosses the rock onto the fire where it breaks, revealing inside a message from Saknussemm, explaining where and when in Iceland the entrance to the caves can be located. The Prof is off, leaving Alexa at home, but she decides to pack a bag, grab Hercules, saddle a horse and catch up with her father. Unfortunately she bumps into Dr Greed who is in a carriage with his pet, the bat from the opening scene. Oh, and the bat, whose name is Ivan, also talks. The carriage is driven by an orphan teenager named Gower who works for Greed and who is sent to spy on Lindebruck. He stows away on a steamship chartered by the Professor and finds that Alexa and Hercules are already aboard. Dr Greed follows on a faster ship, gets to Iceland first and hires a hulking thug named Crunch to assist him.

Prof. Lindebruck, still unaware that the two youngsters are aboard, reaches Iceland, follows Saknussemm’s instructions and begins his journey underground where he finds that the explorer has thoughtfully marked the way with arrows. The kids follow him, and Greed follows the kids.

When Alexa and Gower fall into a deep pool of water, Hercules races ahead to find their father who returns and rescues them. But that night Gower is whisked away by Crunch to Dr Greed, who forces him to run ahead and change a Saknussemm marking, which sends the Lindebruck expedition down the wrong tunnel. When, having escaped a Raiders-style rolling boulder, they find themselves trapped on a shelf above a precipice, Gower confesses and apologises.

The team parachute down to the shores of what is swiftly named the Lindebruck Sea and for a short while we’re back in the book. They spot phosphorescent lighting illuminating the vast cavern and a subterranean forest from which they construct a raft and they put to sea swiftly when they are attacked by a mastodon. Out on the water, they are picked up by a giant turtle and then watch a fight between a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur (neither of them terribly anatomically correct). Alexa falls overboard; Gower rescues her but he is then sucked down into a whirlpool.

On the far side of the Lindebruck Sea, Hercules finds a key marked ‘AS’ in the sand and this unlocks a set of large doors which lead into another vast cavern. (Though we have departed from the book once again, it is at least in keeping with the book that one of the problems with a story like this, if it is not to take place in a network of narrow caves, is the required presence of enormous caverns with their own illumination system.) Inside this particular cavern is a lost city - “possibly Atlantis” suggests the Prof - and inside a temple at the centre of the city is a circular, dishlike altar with a large emerald at its centre.

“The absolute centre of the Earth!” gasps Prof. Lindebruck, which is rather a literal and impractical interpretation of the book’s title. If that really is the centre - assuming that all the theories about fiery balls of magma are incorrect - isn’t there some problem with the gravity which is keeping these people standing around the altar?

Anyway, Greed and Crunch are there too, having crossed the sea on Saknussemm’s own boat, and they tie up Lindebruck and Alexa and put Hercules in a handy birdcage. But Gower arrives and quietly unties them. Just as they free themselves, the ground shakes and a geyser of volcanic lava bursts up underneath the altar dish, lifting it up. Our four heroes scramble aboard but Greed won’t leave the piles of emeralds which litter the temple. The dish shoots up and bursts out of the top of a volcano, riding down the slope on a lava flow and delivering the quartet safely into the European countryside. They ask a passing urchin where they are in English, French, German and finally Italian, which works because the volcano from which they emerged was Stromboli.

Unfortunately they have no proof of their adventure - except they have because Gower thought to stick one of the emeralds in his jacket. Prof. Lindebruck gives a successful lecture to ‘the Academy’, takes on Gower as his new lab assistant and ponders his next project - a voyage to the Moon.

Hmmm. The bare bones of Verne’s book are here, with Alexa substituting for Axel, with Gower sort of substituting for both Axel’s fiancee Grauben as the love interest and the Icelandic guide Hans as the extra pair of legs on the journey, and with Prof. Lindebruck being decidedly kinder and less driven than the novel’s Prof. Lidenbrock. The whole subplot with Dr Greed racing them to the glory of discovering the subterranean world is entirely new, but it does give the story some narrative structure, as does the forced duplicity of Gower. The original novel is very episodic, as Verne was wont to be, and largely relied on impressive set pieces, but with only 45 minutes to tell the whole story there’s really no room for such set pieces, the Lindebruck Sea sequence aside.

The cartoon features three songs: when Alexa nearly collides with Greed’s carriage, he sings about how the only things that he cares about are fortune and fame; Hercules performs a Broadway-style song, explaining that most scientific advancements were actually made by guinea pigs (which is a clever and amusing idea); and there is a very sweet duet between the two teenagers as each wonders what the other thinks about them. Each of the songs is accompanied by fantasy sequences, placing the characters into other times and places, and they don’t feel intrusive, occurring naturally at suitable points in the story.

For all its undoubted liberties, this version of Journey to the Center of the Earth has a distinctly Verne-ian feel and never gets distracted or anachronistic (once we get past the ‘science fair’ scene). Even the talking animal sidekicks aren’t too bad, played for genuine comedy rather than the usual misdirected attitude that assumes that cartoon animals are inherently funny.

So where did this version come from? The tape starts with a bewildering succession of animated logos - for Channel 5 (the video label, not the TV channel), Macrovision Quality Protection, Abbey Home Entertainment/Tempo Video and Goodtimes Home Video Platinum Series - before launching into the title sequence for Goodtimes Family Classics, a generic animation of characters and books with insert shots from this particular story. After the end credits there are further idents for Blye Migicovsky Productions Inc., Phoenix Animation Studios Inc. and Bedtime Primetime Classics, with a copyright notice reading ‘Jaffa Road Liv Ltd Partnership.’

Even more complicated than the various logos is the battery of credited producers. Garry Blye (of, presumably, Blye Migicovsky Productions Inc.) is actually credited as ‘producer’, Mark Shekter is the ‘senior producer’ and Michael B Hefferon is the ‘supervising producer’; Shekter, Blye and John Migicovsky are ‘executive producers’ with Charles Falzon as ‘co-executive producer’. There is a ‘production executive’ with the great name of Tammy Litwack Brown who presumably has a different role from the executive producers and indeed from the ‘executives in charge of production’ who are Tony Stevens-Fleischmann from Phoenix Animation Studios Inc. and Nancy Chappelle from Catalyst Entertainment Inc. (who somehow missed out on including their animated logo on the tape). There’s a ‘line producer’ too, but by that point my hand was getting tired so I gave up taking notes. Good grief. How many people does it take to make one cartoon?

Shekter and Blye are still working together for a company named Microtainment Plus and between them have a very impressive roster of people and shows that they have written for or produced, including Steve Martin, Bob Hope, the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Their most recent production is the rather self-explanatory teen series Vampire High. John Migicovsky went on to become President of the Columbia Tristar Media Group while Charles Falzon became President of Gullane Entertainment (who own Thomas the Tank Engine, among other things).

Although this is a Canadian production there is nevertheless a credit for an animation studio in Seoul, which seems odd as none of the many names in the credits are Korean. There are also, bizarrely, credits for ‘live action sequences’ of which there are, um, none at all. My guess is that when the series of which this was part, Bedtime Primetime Classics, was originally aired on Canadian TV it had some sort of wraparound live-action framing story. The video release was then probably renamed Goodtimes Video Classics, with a purely animated title sequence - but with the original end credits. That’s my guess, at least.

Glenn Morley and Marvin Dolgay are credited with the music although Mark Shekter is credited (at least on the sleeve) with the songs. The animation and character design are actually pretty good, of a standard that one might expect to see on Cartoon Network or Saturday morning shows. Alexa could almost be an ancestor of Kim Possible.

The interesting cast, whose roles are not identified, are: Clara Blye (probably the narrator), venerable Canadian institution Don Francks (My Bloody Valentine, Johnny Mnemonic and every TV show under the sun), Jennifer Martini (Babar, Goosebumps), James Rankin (Super Mario Brothers cartoon), Ron Rubin (Angela Anaconda, Sailor Moon), Stuart Stone (Voodoo Dawn, Serial Killing 101, Donnie Darko) and Colette Stevenson (Rats, Replikator - I think this is a different actress to the one who was in Corrie in the early 1990s).

Despite my initial trepidation, I ended up actually enjoying this version of JTTCOTE. I think its intended pre-teen audience would lap it up - and might be encouraged to perhaps try one of Verne’s books for themselves. In contrast, the 2001 Franco-Belgian version, in staying truer to Verne, is more suitable for an older audience who don’t expect songs or animal sidekicks in their cartoons. As far as I can tell, there are four other animated versions of the story: an accurate-looking Spanish one, a less acurate one called A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (which features a Dr Greed-like rival named Professor Kippner), an episode of a pre-school series called The Triplets and the second Willy Fog TV serial.

MJS rating: B
review originally posted 8th August 2005

Director: Zoltan Szilagyi Varga
Writer: Brian Finch
Producers: Patrick Maine, Philippe Alessandri
Cast: Geoffrey Bayldon, Rupert Degas, Leslie Clack
Country: France/Belgium
Year of release: 2001
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Created as part of a TV series called Jules Verne’s Amazing Journeys, this very faithful adaptation kicks off with a generic title sequence which features not only the expected Nautilus and balloon but also Robur’s flying machine - something I never thought I would see in animated format.

Unlike the 1996 Canadian animated version of the tale, which took many liberties with the story, this is Verne’s novel pretty much as he wrote it (except in English, of course). The downside of this arrangement is that it is not as much fun as that other version, though it is undeniably more exciting.

The story starts with Professor Lidenbrock’s nephew, Axel, proposing to the Professor’s ward, Grauben. Like Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, this is a proto-sexual relationship between two siblings who are unrelated by blood. Axel visits his uncle to ask permission for the union but finds him pouring over a scrap of ancient Icelandic parchment which, when translated, reveals the way to the centre of the Earth.

The two men travel to Iceland where they hire muscular, taciturn guide Hans who leads them to the top of an extinct volcano, from where they descend into a series of caves. The expected (by those familiar with Verne’s work) adventures follow: their water runs out but Hans is able to tap into an underground stream; they descend to the shore of a vast, underground sea; while Hans builds a raft, Axel and the Prof explore a forest of giant mushrooms where they encounter a living mastodon.

But it’s not just a mastodon, it is being ridden by a ten-foot tall, loincloth-clad hominid! They escape on the raft and witness a battle between an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaur then, returned to where they began their sea voyage, they find another cave but their descent is blocked. They set a gunpowder charge but the hominid returns. Axel escapes the giant and scrambles onto the raft with the other two but the force of the explosion creates a crack under the sea. The remarkably resilient raft takes them down, down, down but then up, up, up on a column of boiling water and out of the volcano Stromboli in Italy. We conclude with the marriage of Axel and Grauben.

So this is a good and faithful adaptation of the novel. It is French after all - and one thing the Frogs are never going to do is bugger about with the work of their greatest novelists. It would be like colourising a Jacques Tati movie.

The design work is less cartoony than the earlier animated version with the prehistoric animals presented accurately and some excellent background work. Of particular note is the animation of shadows on the cave walls as the three men pass along, each holding a lantern. I can’t believe that some computer assistance wasn't used there but it’s still an absolutely terrific bit of animation.

The series was executive produced by Marie-France Han, Dr Sylvia Rothblum (who now works for Warner Brothers) and Pierre Levie (who also produced Harry Kumel’s extraordinary fantasy film Malpertuis!). The extraordinarily complex production credit reads as follows:

La Fabrique/Tele Images Creation/France 3/EM.TV & Merchandise AG

co-production with

Tele Images International/Sofidoc/RTBF Televisia Belge

Brian Finch receives sole writing credit so presumably this wasn’t just a translation of a French script. The production may be entirely Franco-Belgian but this seems to have been aimed squarely at the English-speaking market. Finch started out as a writer on Corrie and has also penned such televisual gems as The Bill, All Creatures Great and Small, Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, Heartbeat, Bergerac and The Gentle Touch. His other SF credentials are episodes of the original 1970s version of The Tomorrow People and, interestingly, the 1999 live-action series The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne which starred Michael Praed as Phileas Fogg.

Catweazle himself, Geoffrey Bayldon, provides the voice of Professor Lidenbrock; the rest of the cast consists of Leslie Clack (Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry), Rupert Degas (narrator of the His Dark Materials audiobooks, who also played various roles in the later Hitchhiker’s Guide radio shows), John Mickey and Rachel Preece (who played Princess Diana in a 2002 biopic). Apart from the Prof, Axel and Hans, the only two other speaking characters are Grauben and the housekeeper Martha - although the giant apeman has some vocal moments too.

Hungarian director Zoltan Szilagyi Varga recently received acclaim for his short animated film Koan. He and designer Richard Mithouard both worked on A Monkey’s Tale. That film’s director, Jean-Francois Laguionie, is credited here as ‘artistic director’ while Robin Lyons (producer of The Princess and the Goblin and Under Milk Wood - and a former Super Ted scripter!) is ‘recording director’ and ‘story editor.’

For compressing the whole novel effectively into 45 minutes and retaining the spirit of Verne alongside his story and characters, this animated version of Journey... certainly beats the other although both are worth watching. This budget-price disc was released by Abbey Home Entertainment; a DVD which combines this film with its companion piece, Around the World in 80 Days, is available as Jules Verne's Amazing Journeys.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 8th August 2005

Director: Atsushi Muroga
Writers: Atsushi Muroga, JB Baker, Kuzuki Youko, Terao Emiko
Producer: Kurosu Isao
Cast: Nobuyuki Asano, Osamu Ebara, Kaori Shimamura
Year of release: 1999
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

Junk is a slice of low-budget zombie nonsense which is fast-paced and fun and contains some of the worst acting you’ll ever see. It has some clever bits, some clicheed bits and some very cheesy zombie make-up, but it all whizzes along at such a rate that it’s impossible to dislike.

Our opening scene sees Dr Kinderman (Richard Jones) and his assistant Sharon (credited on-screen as Debolar Joy Vinall, listed in most sources as Debra J Binarl) testing a drug called DBX that can reanimate the dead. Dr K injects the goop into a nude, female corpse, who to nobody’s surprise sits up and bites a lump out of his neck.

Our main protagonists are a quartet of aspiring crooks whom we meet as they rob a jewellery store. They are brash leader Jun (Nobuyuki Asano), man-hating Saki (Kaori Shimamura: Moon Angel), cowardly Akira (Osamu Ebara: Score) who gets stabbed in the foot, and making-up-the-numbers Kabu (Keishi Shigemura). With their haul of necklaces, they head for an empty factory to rendezvous with their employer, yakuza Ramon (a cracking performance by Tate Gouta).

But of course, this ‘empty factory’ is actually the industrial complex where Kinderman and his Japanese colleagues, in collaboration with the US military, were carrying out secret reanimation experiments, and it isn’t long before our gang run into a bunch of zombies (including Kinderman) and Jun is rather messily killed. Outside, they find Ramon and three goons who laugh at their tales of zombies, take the jewels without paying and then shoot Kabu. At which point a zombified Jun appears and chows down on one of the goons. After this, we’re into a free-for-all gangsters-vs-zombies chase’n’fight with Ramon and his other two goons eventually succumbing, but not before their automatic weaponry has shattered containers of DBX, spilling the contents all over some neatly stored corpses...

Into this mess come Sgt Davis (Patric/Patrick Jones) and Dr Takashi Nikada (Yuuji Kishimoto: Mechanical Violator Hikaida) who have been assigned to deal with the situation by Col. McGriff (Mark C Morehouse, not Moorehouse as credited on many sources). An attempt to remotely set the factory’s self-destruct system(!) failed when the three-minute countdown was replaced by the message ‘I Love You - K’ and a tinny, electronic rendering of ‘My Darling Clementine’, which strangely unnerves Dr Nikada.

The countdown was stopped by Nude Dead Girl Zombie from scene one, who looks very much alive, unlike the pasty-faced, rapidly decomposing, shambling hulks that now populate the building (including of course Jun, Ramon and the others). She turns out to be especially troublesome, togged up in a rubber mini-dress and thigh boots (which I guess she just, um, found somewhere). She has superhuman strength and agility, a tendency to turn her hair white to look scarier, and even chopping her in half doesn’t stop her. None of which makes a lot of sense but at least imparts some originality to a film which otherwise could have been made in Italy 20 years ago.

The Japanese acting is okay, but the American acting is truly terrible; in particular, Morehouse is staggeringly, hilariously bad. That’s because these aren’t actors at all, not even amateur ones: Morehouse, Jones and all the other Americans, including several of the zombies, actually are US marines stationed in Okinawa. And whereas Jones (who looks a bit like Ryan Stiles) is just a poor actor, speaking his lines in a flat monotone as he stares blankly ahead, Morehouse is that most awful thing - a bad actor who thinks he can act. Every word is misemphasised, every sentence broken halfway through, as he recites by rote what is frankly piss-poor dialogue anyway. Jesus, he’s bad!

Despite the presence of three Japanese writers and one American, the script here really isn’t up to much, though that doesn’t really matter with undead hoopla of this calibre. The zombie make-up and gore effects are cheap and cheerful, the photography and direction not bad.

Curiously, despite the fact that about a third of this film’s dialogue is in English (subtitled in Japanese), Artsmagic have chosen to subtitle the whole thing, laying English subs over the Japanese ones for these scenes. While that might be useful sometimes for Kishimoto, who speaks English with a very thick accent, it’s just puzzling for the American ‘actors’.

The film is the expected nice, widescreen transfer and includes some of the best extras so far on an Artsmagic release. There are trailers for this film, Evil Dead Trap and Uzumaki; the Junk trailer is in much worse shape than the film, but does include different dialogue and a shot from at least one unused scene. There are also a couple of dozen or so stills, Japanese video sleeves for a couple of Muroga’s other, very obscure films (his best known movie is Score) and the Japanese video sleeve for Junk with - very nice idea, this - translation of all the various text thereon. Oh, and bio-filmographies for the director and principal cast, courtesy of Yours Truly.

Junk is cheap, trashy, undemanding, very silly zombie/yakuza fun - I mean, who puts a self-destruct system in a factory? - and Mark C Morehouse has no idea how entertaining he really is...

MJS rating: C+

13th October 2006

Intergalactic Combat

Internal Evil

Into the Woods

Invincible Obsessed Fighter

The Invisible Atomic Monsters from Mars

Invisible Mom

Invisible Mom 2

Iron Warrior

Ironwerkz

Is My Palm Read

Ghost Machine

Jack Says

James Batman

Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw

Jesus vs the Messiah

Jigsaw

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1996)

Journey to the Center of the Earth (2001)

Junk