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The Reverend

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Director: Neil Jones
Writer: Neil Jones
Producers: Neil Jones, Stuart Brennan
Cast: Stuart Brennan, Emily Booth, Tamer Hassan
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.thereverendfilm.com

Making your action hero a priest is always interesting. There is, by definition, an intriguing moral complexity to someone who preaches the word of God while taking violent revenge on sinners. The central character of one of my favourite movies, Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder (no, honestly) is a gun-toting priest battling the forces of evil. One of the very few comic-books I’ve ever collected was Garth Ennis’ superb Preacher. And several years back, when I was studying for my Masters in Scriptwriting, I wrote a pilot for a proposed drama called Padre, about a defrocked priest in the 1920s who travels the land as a vigilante because he believes that World War 1 proved God was dead. I still think that was a corker.

So along comes Neil Jones’ The Reverend. That’s the Neil Jones who directed The Lost, produced The Feral Generation and executive produced Masterpiece, not the one who made Stag Night of the Dead. Jones wrote, directed and edited this and shared the producer job with Stuart Brennan, who stars as a never-named young vicar. Brennan and Tamer Hassan (The Hike, Beyond the Rave, The Ferryman) have their names above the title but Rutger Hauer is the main selling point and the focus of the sleeve design.

But don’t be fooled. Hauer only appears in a brief prologue with Giovanni Lombardo Radice (thankfully without the silly fake beard he wore in A Day of Violence) and the indefatigable Doug Bradley (last seen in Umbrage: The First Vampire). Hauer’s black-clad character (credited as ‘Withstander’) and Radice’s white-clad pseudo-Pontif (‘Almighty’) have some sort of bet over the soul of a good man. Or something. Neither is ever seen or mentioned again although Bradley, who is some sort of Bishop, pops up in a couple of later scenes.

The problem with this prologue is, unfortunately, the sound. Actually, there are sound problems elsewhere, to the extent that I stopped the disc and checked it hadn’t defaulted to 5.1 or some similar nonsense. The large room here is echoey and, let’s be honest, Hauer’s whispered Dutch-American voice is just not clear. About half his (brief) dialogue is inaudible. But what was director Jones to do? How do you tell Rutger Hauer - Rutger freaking Hauer! - that he needs to adjust his acting? “Excuse me, Mr Hauer sir, but could you perhaps do it with less of a mumble?”

And so we are introduced to ‘the Reverend’, newly installed in “a small, low-maintenance chapel based in the idyllic setting of a quiet country village”. What the synopsis doesn’t mention is that this is one of those quiet country villages which is right next door to an inner city sink estate. And although the film is set in Wales (there’s a Welsh map on the vicarage wall), motherly organist Mrs Jenkins is the only person with a Welsh accent and all the other characters talks like East End geezers. Helen Griffin, who was in a couple of Doctor Who cybermen episodes, gives a nice performance as Mrs Jenkins whose constant “Excuse my French” mild swearing is the closest the film comes to comic relief.

The Reverend’s first sermon in what is variously referred to as a church or a chapel (we never see the exterior) plays to a handful of people but while you might assume it’s Sunday morning, the parishioners exit into a dark and stormy night, and a few minutes later the Reverend finds a young woman in a skimpy dress standing, distressed, on the church doorstep as the rain lashes down from the pitch black sky. While not even a vicar has enough cache to change the weather, one has to ask: why is he giving his first service so late at night? No wonder he’s got no congregation! A later pub scene displays a similarly curious attitude to diurnal continuity with Brennan entering in bright daylight and leaving about 20 minutes later into the Bible-black night.

Anyway, the young woman (Marcia Do Vales, writer-producer of Jones’ follow-up feature Deranged) bites the Rev’s neck and turns him into a vampire, which sets up the main plot in which he uses his new-found strength, invulnerability and thirst for blood to despatch the various pimps, pushers and other lowlifes who bedevil ‘the Estate’.

There are no pointed teeth here and there’s no aversion to sunlight. The Rev visits an internet cafe (do they even still have those?) to research vampires and, while the fake websites seen on screen at least look real, this would have played better in a library with a stack of books. You might think that a character who was both priest and vampire (it’s been done before, in High Stakes) would create fascinating contradictions but, despite this research, nothing is made of the potential problems. A brief scene of the Rev using this research to test his new state - experimenting with garlic, crucifixes and Holy water - is sorely missing. He also seems unfazed by the atypical way that everyone he bites promptly disappears in a flash of spontaneous combustion, leaving neither remains nor scorch marks.

The lack of scorch marks is one of those things that betrays the production’s low budget, just as the Rev’s initial recovery from the girls’ attack sees him coated with blood but not a drop on the floor. Like so many other movies at this level, The Reverend has spent its money elsewhere leaving odd lacunae in the production design. Other examples include a ‘bus stop’ with no pole, sign or timetable, and a pub described as being an appallingly rough dive but which actually looks quite charming.

In this pub, the Rev meets Tracy, a goth prostitute played by the always delightful Emily Booth (who was four months pregnant at the time). It’s nice to see Bouff given a serious character with a bit more meat than she normally gets although there’s sadly little complexity to Tracy, a fairly standard ‘tart with a heart’. Rather bizarrely, the Rev meets her when he calls in towards the end of a weekly meeting of the local film club, who gather every Saturday in the aforementioned ‘rough’ pub to watch 16mm prints of old horror movies in the back room, introduced by Tracy.

There is no indication of why the Rev would have any interest in this, and he turns up just in time for the credits anyway, then he asks Tracy for a drink. But hang on: really? Are there really crack whores out there who have extensive collections of old cine film and enough spare time to organise film clubs? This whole sequence smacks of self-indulgence, playing on Emily’s cult status, rather than making any sense. Especially as her pimp then turns up, furious with her for spending ten minutes talking with a vicar when she should be out giving blow-jobs. But apparently not minding her taking a couple of hours off the game every weekend to show Bela Lugosi features to nerds.

The pimp is played by Shane Richie; as someone who doesn’t watch EastEnders, I can judge his performance without the weight of prejudice - and I can say that he is terrific. He is utterly believable, genuinely frightening, thoroughly unpleasant, switching almost mid-sentence between smooth-talking creep and violent bully as he forces Tracy onto another trick. Richie and Booth have a terrific, disturbing chemistry in their scenes together.

Richie is one of two highlights in the film, the other being everyone’s favourite Scandinavian psycho Mads Koudal. Regular readers will know that I’m a fully paid-up member of the Mads Koudal Appreciation Society. He was great in Footsteps, great in No Right Turn, great in The Feral Generation, great in Merantau, he’s great here. Koudal plays a dodgy Euro-creep named ‘The Viking’ who turns up to do business with local gangsters but can’t resist a bit of unlicensed bare-knuckle fighting first, just to get himself in the mood for a shady business deal.

The screen comes alive during Richie’s and Koudal’s scene as they inject some much-needed oomph into what is otherwise sometimes disappointingly pedestrian. Despite the whole ‘inner city troubles’ thing, there’s no social realism here and no moral dilemmas. The story is ostensibly based on the Book of Job and there are numerous references to ‘temptation’ but the morality is all skewed. The Reverend does give in to temptation, and pretty quickly at that. As soon as he realises he can get away with it, he starts offing people left, right and centre, merely on the basis that they are wrong’uns: a ridiculously simplistic idea that apparently divides everyone into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Where is the anguish? Where is the torment? The Bible is pretty unambiguous on the whole ‘Thou shalt not kill’ thing so why doesn’t this bother the Rev? No-one here is offered a chance of redemption. No-one is forgiven their sins. He just attacks then watches them self-combust: “Oi!” munch! woomf! - sorted.

There is inner turmoil of a sort, or at least something vaguely shaped like inner turmoil. But where we should have a pious soul wrestling with his faith, we have instead the most pointless, obtrusive and blatantly unnecessary voice-over I’ve ever heard. In Brennan’s solo scenes, there’s an utterly superfluous present-tense description of what the character is thinking. But in every single scene we could get that from the context and from Brennan’s acting. He’s a good actor. He won a Welsh Bafta for his boxing biopic Risen (Griffin and Richie were both in that too). We can see what’s going on; we don’t need to hear the thoughts of the character.

The Reverend claims to be based on a graphic novel but no such publication exists. There may be an unpublished comic-book version, perhaps the story even started life that way, and the opening titles play over comic-frames (drawn by Jaeson Finn, who worked on Evil Calls and then complained when I linked to his blog about it) but there’s no actual graphic novel of this story. However, if there was, then these solo scenes would require just such an internal monologue to play out in captions or thinks-bubbles. But that’s because in a comic all we have is a handful of still pictures. We don’t have an actor, doing that acting thing. Really, honestly, I cannot see why these voice-overs are there. I guess that’s the problem when your two producers are the writer-director and the lead actor: who is there with an independent view to make suggestions about this sort of thing?

The voice-over loses The Reverend a couple of points but not enough to make it a bad movie; it only spoils scenes, not the overall film. Overall, the overall film is okay. Overall. Not great but far from bad. Its strength lies mainly in the all-star cast. As well as those mentioned, we have Tamer Hassan as the well-to-do but dodgy proprietor of everything around (including pubs and internet cafes), the ubiquitous Simon Phillips (Jack Says) as a CID copper and Cut/Airborne director Dominic Burns as a sadistic scrapyard owner, plus professional fireman Dave Sommer (Eldorado) as the Viking’s hulking opponent, Richie Woodhall as the local bobby, Lyndon Baldock (exec producer of this, Airborne, The Seasoning House and Devil’s Tower) as the sullen barman of the rough pub, Rebekka Raynor (Evil Calls) as Tracy’s dominatrix neighbour, and boxing promoter Kevin Hayde as a postman who gives the Reverend a load of useful information for no apparent reason in his one, brief infodump scene.

The film’s two main faults are firstly, the script which just doesn't explore the situations it creates or ask the questions that these situations should prompt, and secondly Brennan himself who never convinces, either as the idealistic young vicar or the bloodthirsty vampire. It’s the casting rather than the acting that’s the problem. Brennan stars in this because he’s the producer and a frequent collaborator with Jones, not because he’s the right actor for the part. He’s much too placid. He never rages, not at himself, not at others, even when he’s tearing their throats out. Despite plenty of great supporting characters, the Reverend is actually the least interesting person in The Reverend. And that’s not good.

I also felt throughout the film that it could have benefited from a religious advisor (I didn’t spot one in the credits). I wasn’t convinced by the church aspects. I’ve certainly never been in a church service where the congregation has politely applauded the vicar’s sermon. Maybe they do things differently in Wales.

Behind the scenes, Paul Hyett designed the various gore prosthetics, the application of which was supervised by Stuart Conran; both men are British Horror Revival regulars (Conran’s name is spelled wrong in the credits). Felix Coles (UFO, The Warning) was production designer; Gemma Bedeau (The Scar Crow, Eldorado) designed the costumes; DP Alessio Valori shot on digital, including a couple of nice monochrome dream sequences; and regular Brennan composer Alan Deacon provided the score.

The project has been around for a while. It was shot in early 2011 but was originally announced for production in 2009 as The Reverend: Vigilante Vampire with Tom Savini in the cast (presumably in Hauer’s role). A rough cut was screened at the 2011 Grimmfest and the film eventually appeared on DVD in August 2012 a few days after its brief dalliance with theatres.

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 7th August 2012

Three's a Shroud

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Directors: Dan Brownlie, David VG Davies, Andy Edwards
Writers: Dan Brownlie, David VG Davies, Andy Edwards
Producers: Dan Brownlie, David VG Davies, Andy Edwards
Cast: Eleanor James, Emily Booth, Suzi Lorraine
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: festival screening (BHFF 2012)
Website: www.threesashroud.com

Three’s a Shroud is part of the British Horror Anthology Revival, a wholly owned subsidiary of the BHR. Dan Brownlie exec-produced the feature and shot one segment plus the framing story, bringing in Andy Edwards and David VG Davies for the other two bits.

It’s cheap, it’s cheerful, it’s fun. Can’t ask for much more than that. Plus it has - though I am one of the few people who would consider it such - an All Star Cast.

In the framing story (called ‘Two’s Company’ although there are no title captions anywhere in the film), a young boy asks his baby-sitter to tell him and Teddy some scary stories before he goes to sleep. Which is all well and good - I do like a framing story in my anthologies - but the baby-sitter is Suzi Lorraine (receiving co-credit with Brownlie for this part of the script). Now, she undoubtedly adds name value to the production, but I don’t buy her as a babysitter: way too old and way too glam. Baby-sitters are teenagers, and Suzi Lorraine is not in a position to play a teenager any more.

Lorraine is one of those ‘scream queens’ who seems to have fashioned an extensive career without ever being in anything that anyone has ever actually seen (or heard of). According to the IMDB she’s made about 60 films in the past ten years, starting out in Sinister Cinema crap opposite Misty Mundae, under various names. From where I sit her career seems to have consisted largely of writing columns for Gorezone - and latterly Shock Horror - while posing in various stages of blood-spattered undress.

I’m pleased to report that on this evidence she can actually act, and hopefully her role in Ivan Zuccon’s Wrath of the Crows will give her some stature. Nevertheless, I just don’t believe her for one minute as a baby sitter. Nor do I believe that any small boy, if he had a baby sitter that hot, would demand bedtime stories when he could be spying on her through the bannister then nipping back to bed for a quick pubescent one off the wrist.

Ooh, that’s not a good start for a review is it? Ick.

Anyway, Suzi tells the lad (the director’s son, Louie Russo Brownlie, far from the worst child actor I’ve seen) and his ted three stories. The first, ‘Don’t Open the Door’, is directed by Brownlie and concerns a couple who lived at the same address previously. Brad Moore (The Nephilim, House Party of the Dead V and VI) is the bloke and Amber Erlandson is his missus, who very considerately dresses to cook him breakfast. Tight white blouse, pencil skirt, stockings and suspenders (I’m guessing), hair all done fab and plenty of liner and lippy. All that just to fry up some bacon and eggs. But Erlandson looks at home in such stiffly formal get-up because she is aka fetish model Morigan Hel - last spotted several years ago in Nature Morte!

Anyway, the nub of this tale is that, later that evening the Wife comes back from wherever she’s been and calls the Hubby from her mobile, instructing him in no uncertain terms that he must not open the door to her. He is understandably confused by this, even more so when he can see her through the frosted glass, standing outside on the doorstep, ringing the bell.

There’s a really nice disconnect, well-handled by Brownlie, between the two versions of the Wife, apparently existing simultaneously: the fuzzy figure seen through the door panel who wants to get inside, and the one on the phone, seen only as an extreme close-up of a bloodied mouth and nose, who endlessly repeats - but never explains - her mantra: “Don’t open the door.” The Husband, who clearly loves the Wife despite their minor domestic over the breakfast table, goes through a barrage of emotions, well-handled by both Moore’s acting and Brownlie’s script. The denouement, when it comes, is satisfying, horrific and apt - exactly what we all want from an anthology segment.

The one area where it could have been improved would have been a bit more variation in the wife’s instructions because just repeating “Don’t open the door” gets a bit boring. I was hoping that she might branch out a bit: “Look, I’m begging you, if you love me, whatever you do, do not open that door.” Sort of thing.

Nevertheless, a good start. But Teddy still isn’t tired so onto the next story ‘Over-Developed’ (it’s about a photographer, see, and there are also some busty women, get it - oh please yourselves). There’s a lot of recognisability here. It amused me that the in very first shot of Eleanor James, the actress is instantly recognisable, even though all we see of her is her feet. Knowing that she was in the cast (and hadn’t been in the first tale) I was watching out for her - and suddenly there they are: a pair of strappy heels that no-one - no-one! - in British indie films could get away with except Ella James.

Also, it was very obvious that this was David VG Davies’ segment. Bear in mind that I haven’t seen either of Davies’ features - Animal Soup and Monitor - but I’ve read enough about them to realise that the fragmentary, post-Lynchian style of direction here has got to be the work of DVGD - and indeed it is.

So there you are: I recognised the directorial style of a film-maker whose work I’ve never previously seen, and I recognised an actress from her shoes. A bloody genius, me.

Michael Gyekye makes his feature debut as Mickey, a photographer who is obsessed with model Sarah (the photogenic Ms James). But, as so often with attractive, intelligent women, Sarah prefers the company of some tattooed bozo who chats up barmaids behind her back (ably portrayed by this segment’s director). Mickey is tormented by the voice in his head, telling him that he can have Sarah. Then, and this is where it gets really trippy, that voice is somehow personified as a little clown demon thing.

Effects guy Mike Peel created this puppet, which is stiff and inflexible but not more so than the stars of latter-day Puppet Master sequels. It looks, in all honesty, like a cross between Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Mr Men. If one of the Killer Klowns anally raped Mr Happy, the resulting offspring would be this creature, known to the film-makers as 'Flowers'. Actually, that raises the question of: how would you go about anally raping a Mr Man? I mean, if the front of their body is one huge face, does that mean that the other side is just one giant arse, separated by the world’s shortest (or possibly most circular) alimentary canal? Ick again! How do I get onto these subjects?

‘Over-Developed’ also features the legendary Emily Booth as a woman complaining about her photos (Bouff’s having a bit of a run this year, what with this, The Reverend, Inbred and Death), plus Sophia Disgrace (The Shadow of Death, Spidarlings and Paul TT Easter’s Thumb N It) and Emma Lock, who was in Andy Edwards’ marvellous short Six Ghosts (watch it on Vimeo) and, erm, The Human Centipede II. Can I get another ick?

Writing this a few days later, I can’t actually remember how ‘Over-Developed’ ends, which is perhaps a good sign. What does stick in my mind is a scene where Mickey spies on Sarah in a dingy bar while a punk band (Dan Brownlie’s beat combo brand-B) slam away on a tiny stage. One has to wonder how come she doesn’t spot him as there’s only about three other people in the place. But that’s a quibble. Some good use of digital, as well as practical, effects make this segment interesting as well as horrific, but it’s let down by poor sound with numerous points where the soundtrack disappears altogether for a second or two.

So anyway, with Teddy still not yawning, Suzi L tries one last story. This is ‘The Time-Traveller’s Knife’ an enormously enjoyable sci-fi/slasher romp directed with skill and panache by Andy Edwards.

It’s Halloween and goth barmaid Amelia (Hannah Wilder) is shutting up her pub, only to discover that three of her friends have hidden in the toilets in the hope that all four can enjoy a private lock-in - to which Amelia reluctantly agrees. Much booze is drunk, and very quickly so are the girls. But a mysterious text message claims there is a killer in the pub with them. And indeed there is: a figure in a black costume and scary white mask (another Mike Peel creation, I believe, based on designs by Mr Brownlie). Who could that be, if it’s not one of the girls? Is it one of the girls? Is it more than one of them?

The driving force behind the plot is an antique watch, recently given to Amelia by her boss, which jumps her backwards and forwards in time throughout the evening. I love time travel stories, me, and this is a corker. It gets very complicated and I would need to watch it again to see whether it actually makes narrative sense and whether all the causes and effects happen in the right order, from various people’s point of view. There’s certainly no obvious problems. I would like to think that Edwards has a flow-chart somewhere showing where and when each girl is at any given point. I know I’d have something like that if I was attempting a script like this.

‘The Time-Traveller’s Knife’ was my favourite segment, though all three have their merits. Wilder is excellent in the challenging lead role, perfectly balancing the humour and horror of the situation and helped by Edwards’ smart script which, unusually for a time travel tale, lets Amelia ponder out loud what’s going on and why. The other three actresses are also very good: Aisling Knight (Exorcism), Kate Soulsby (Zombie Women of Satan, Blood Army) and Victoria Broom, also credited as Associate Producer, whose many horror credits include Umbrage: The First Vampire, Dead Cert, Forest of the Damned 2,Monitor, Stalled and Deranged.

Finally the film wraps up with the (somewhat predictable) conclusion of the framing story. The boy’s mother is played by Dani Thompson (Just for the Record, Forest of the Damned 2, Zombie Women of Satan 2 - yes, there’s a sequel!). Thompson is actually a bit younger than Suzi Lorraine, though just about old enough to have a son this age - but again, way too glam for the part. While Thompson and Lorraine may bring in the drooling fanboys, ‘Two’s Company’ would have worked better with a more mumsy mother and a teenage baby-sitter. And you know, it’s not like there aren’t already plenty of hot chicks in the cast.

In fact, probably the biggest failing of Three’s a Shroud - and it’s only a minor one, but it bugs me - is that, Master LR Brownlie aside, pretty much the entire cast are about the same age: mid-20s to mid-30s. It’s a common failing of low-budget horror films. Most of the people who make these things and want to appear in these things are of the same generation. Which can be fine within a limited story but seems artificial and restrictive when there are characters like Suzi’s and Dani’s that would work better outside of that age group. One to bear in mind there, casting directors.

Binding all four stories together, in a particularly nice touch, is a fifth: a spoof feature about deadly make-up (or something) called Night of the Pouting Dead. The babysitter is watching this on TV; the husband in ‘Don’t Open the Door’ does likewise; there are posters for it in ‘Over-Developed’ (plus a very visible copy of Shock Horror with Bouff on the front); and Amelia in ‘The Time-Traveller’s Knife’ wears a Night of the Pouting Dead T-shirt.

I enjoyed Three’s a Shroud very much and heartily recommend it to you. It wears its tiny budget on its sleeve but it wears its enthusiasm and commitment on its other sleeve. This is what modern horror anthologies should be like: creepy and fun and gory and clever and nasty.

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted 18th October 2012

Psychosomatic

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Director: Andrew C Tanner
Writer: Andrew C Tanner
Producer: Andrew C Tanner
Cast: Dawn Harper, Alan Wren, Rhys Hills
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: http://shineproductions.110mb.com

Psychosomatic is very low-budget, completely original and unpleasantly creepy. It’s slow-moving and overly stylised and, to be honest, there were a few times when I started muttering to myself and thinking of negative things to write about it. But the film won me round. It’s not perfect but it’s a damn fine attempt to do something different which succeeds in its basic ambitions.

And it leaves one wanting a shower.

Here’s the set-up. David Giles (Alan Wren) is a frustrated, unemployed artist who spends his time stuck in the attic of his house painting and sketching, occasionally yelling obscenities downstairs to his wife as she goes out to work. Next door, Ruth Hayes (Dawn Harper) is a lifeless, blank-eyed housewife, scrubbing and cleaning her home to the point of OCD while her husband is working. The two are on nodding acquaintance but have never spoken and don’t even know each other’s names.

Just up the road is a chemical plant.

One day, when David is knocking on Ruth’s door to hand over a parcel which the postman delivered to his house, a massive explosion rips open the chemical factory, releasing a cloud of gas. Ruth opens the door, David lurches inside coughing and gagging, then follows the emergency instructions supplied to all local residents by the chemical company: sealing doors and windows and suchlike.

So now Ruth and David are trapped together, for an indeterminate amount of time, in a sealed, candle-lit house with nothing but a radio for company.

Which could make for an interesting drama or even a delightful romance, if it wasn’t for two things. Ruth’s glassy stare and general apathy are the result of massive amounts of prescription drugs, designed to reign in her violent and psychotic tendencies. And David? He’s a masturbating stalker who has been spying on his neighbour, even sneaking into her house to photograph her while she’s sleeping. He has rape fantasies about her and now here’s his chance.

I told you it was unpleasantly creepy.

Every so often we cut to Ruth’s husband John (director Andrew C Tanner), handcuffed in a squalid room, talking to camera. In fact this is the opening shot in an incredibly short prologue which then lunges into a quick flash-forward montage of shots from about five minutes into the film, which made me wonder if I was actually watching the trailer (there was no menu on the screener disc). A ‘one year earlier’ caption indicates that everything we’re being told is effectively a flashback as recounted by John Hayes, who apparently stands accused (falsely, he claims) of David Giles’ murder.

In these scenes John has long, wild hair but he is much smarter in the shots we see of him at home, most of which are flashbacks-within-the-main-flashback. In some of these he is talking on the phone to a doctor with a strangely distorted voice (also Tanner) who explains what drugs Ruth must take and why.

On the day of the gas leak, John has gone out to buy some more intravenous prescription drugs for his wife who subsequently drops her last bottle on the floor. So, sooner or later, she’s liable to go loco. But will that happen before David gives in to his base urges?

It’s a classically simple, yet highly original, situation for a psychological thriller. Two people, trapped by outside forces, each presenting a danger to the other, unaware of the danger which they face. I’m not entirely convinced that we need the framing story of Ruth’s husband; this might have worked better as a two-hander. The set-up would certainly make for a powerful stage play.

What you wouldn’t get on-stage of course is all the constant flashing back and forth - some of it in sepia for no apparent reason - including a sequence featuring the house’s previous occupant Tony (Rhys Hills, who also wrote the very evocative original music) going insane. David reckons that the whole street is strange in the head and that perhaps it’s something to do with the perfidious influence of the chemical plant. But David is no more a reliable narrator than Ruth or John.

And then there are the mysteries. What, for example, is inside the package which David took receipt of when the postman found no-one in next door? We see Tony opening up then resealing the box so it is something significant. We do later discover what is in the box and it seems banal and irrelevant - then we find out more and suddenly it’s very relevant again.

Equally mysterious is a locked upstairs room. Ruth hides the key, adamant that the door is locked and unopenable (David later finds the key, going straight to it without explanation). A flashback shows us John trying to clean this room; whatever is in there is smelly enough to make him sick and sounds like it has attracted a lot of flies.

Psychosomatic runs a crisp eighty minutes and yet it still seems to drag in places with scenes going on just a little too long. Any film with only two principal characters is a challenge to make interesting and that’s made even more difficult when one of them is doped up to the eyeballs. So one can’t blame Andrew for sticking in all those flashbacks and inserts (including some odd cutaways to flies). But he is definitely too keen on finding interesting camera angles; so much of the film, especially at the beginning, is shot on a slope that it’s quite a shock when we see any image that’s upright and square-on.

The DV image is nothing special and shows up the film’s ultra-low budget but on the other hand such simplicity fits the parochial banality of the setting (we can see from the address on the parcel that Ruth, David and John live in Barry, South Wales). The sound is no great shakes either, to be honest, especially when voices are raised - but that’s the perennial problem of micro-budget indies. Tellingly, there is no cinematography credit although Tanner was ‘camera operator’ (also editor, foley and sound effects). Samantha Jones, who appears briefly as David’s wife, was sound recordist while Gareth Price, who also has a bit part, was ‘tech advisor’ whatever that means. There are no other credits.

Despite its technical shortcomings and directorial overindulgences, Psychosomatic is a clever and creepy film, surprising its audience with twists and reverses to the end while maintaining an air of sinister, slimy dread. Naturalistic performances from the two leads which look semi-improvised in places, hold the film up whenever it threatens to start flagging and the original premise keeps the viewer hooked. This has been a success at several festivals and frankly I can see why.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 5th July 2009

Satan Claus

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Director: Massimiliano Cerchi
Writer: Simonetta Mostarda
Producers: Massimiliano Cerchi, Ken Greenblatt
Cast: Robert Cummings, Jodie Rafty, Robert Hector
Year of release: 1996
Country: USA/Italy
Reviewed from: R1 DVD


Released on a double-bill disc with the nominally similar Psycho Santa, this turns out not be the expected cut-price, shot-on-video indie but an hour-long, professionally made flick filmed in what looks like 16mm (a lot of on-line reviews say this is shot on video but it very obviously isn’t). What is more, director/producer/executive producer Massimiliano Cerchi turns out to be the real name of Al Passeri, Italian helmer of the sublimely dreadful Creatures from the Abyss.

In fact, Satan Claus gives us pretty much from the off what Psycho Santa promised but never really delivered, which is a guy dressed as Father Christmas repeatedly hacking up innocent people while laughing in a jolly manner.

Our hero is aspiring actor Steve Sanders (Robert Hector: The Vampire Project) who is collecting for a local orphanage, dressed as Santa, when he meets his photographer friend Sandra Logan (Jodie Rafty) and her boyfriend Jeff, who is murdered in front of them by the jolly fat guy with the beard. Steve and Sandra report the murder to the cops, specifically a senior cop named George Ardison (Barie Snider).

All we ever see of the Police Station is Ardison’s office, which he shares with a plain clothes police woman named Sharon; there’s a uniformed cop (John Romanelli) who pops in and out, but there is nothing else to indicate that we’re actually in the station. Like most of the interior sets, Ardison’s office is kept very dark to hide the lack of a set dressing budget, so all we see are the two desks and a couple of wall flats with things pinned to them (including, for some reason, a photo of Bill Clinton).

Jeff was actually the killer’s second victim, the first being Ardison’s wife. Over the full sixty minutes a whole bunch more people get hacked up by the killer, who telephones Ardison after each murder asking if he likes the latest ‘present’. Steve has an African-American friend named Maman (writer/performer Lauretta Ali), formerly a witch doctor in New Orleans, and she senses that something evil and unholy is at work, rather than just a psycho. Halfway through, we are suddenly introduced to Steve’s other friend, policewoman Lisa Red, who takes over Sharon’s desk for no apparent reason.

Steve goes to visit Sandra and discovers in her studio a cabalistic circle of candles and a blood-spattered 8x10 of Ardison, plus a Christmas tree decorated with body parts removed from the victims. At the end, Ardison turns up dressed as Santa but so does Sandra and it turns out (I think) that she raised a demon to take revenge on Ardison’s wife because she was having an affair with Jeff. Or something.

Though the plot makes precious little sense, the script has moments of surprisingly decent characterisation while the acting varies from really quite good (Hector, Ali) to thoroughly wooden (Snider). The biggest problem is that almost everything takes place at night, and even the few daytime scenes are dark and underlit, because of the aforementioned budget constraints. However, this does have the advantage of helping to render the rubber body parts less unrealistic.

Satan Claus himself is played by Robert Cummings (widely miscredited on-line as ‘Robert Cummins’). He is hidden behind a beard, but I’m guessing that this is Robert Cummings the stuntman who played ‘Klingon gunner no.1’ in The Search for Spock and was also in They Live, Predator 2, Pumpkinhead, etc. It is certainly not the better known Robert Cummings, the 1930s/1940s comedian who later had roles in Dial M for Murder and Beach Party, on account of him having died in 1990.

Several of the cast and crew were also in Cerchi/Passeri’s next film, Hellinger, including DoP John Gilgar and Nicholas Van Eeden who plays Jeff. Passeri’s other movies, which I have yet to enjoy, include The Mummy Theme Park and Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface. In an earlier life he was allegedly assistant production designer on Alien 2: Sulla Terra and a special effects technician on The New Gladiators. Producer Ken Greenblatt makes a brief appearance as one of a trio of vigilantes attacking anyone they find dressed as Santa. (There is an agent in LA named Ken Greenblatt, but as Satan Claus was filmed in New York I suspect this is actually the off-broadway producer behind Menopause: The Musical.)

The IMDB dates this film to 1996 while other sites say 1999 with the Bill Clinton photo being the only visual clue. There is no copyright date on the print and, given that the six-year-old Creatures from the Abyss was being touted as a new film when I saw it at Cannes in 2000, it is clear that Passeri likes to keep his production dates - shall we say? - fluid. The really odd thing here is the running time - almost exactly sixty minutes. Since there is no market for an hour-long film (except as the bottom half of a Sub Rosa double bill DVD, obviously), one can’t help wondering whether it was supposed to be this long or whether this was all the usable footage that could be salvaged from the production.

MJS rating: C

review originally posted 19th December 2004

Psycho Santa

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Director: Peter Keir
Writer: Peter Keir
Producer: Renee Riordan
Cast: Jeff Samford, Eric Spudic, Krystal Stevenson
Year of release: 2003
Country: USA
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Sub Rosa)


Psycho Santa is an odd film in that it’s sort of, but not quite, an anthology picture. What we get is a series of flashback stories being told by a guy named Ron (Jeff Samford) to his girlfriend Jess (Michelle Samford, who looks a bit like him so may be his sister) as they drive to a Christmas party. But the stories all feature the same psycho (I think) and are in narrative sequence. Perhaps this just helped with the logistics of filming, allowing each part of the film to be treated like a short.

Under the titles we see a young woman moving around among abandoned cars, apparently hiding from a familiar red-and-white figure whom we glimpse occasionally. When the movie starts with the couple heading for the party, it’s not obvious what the relevance of the credit sequence was.

The first story, ostensibly set ten or eleven years earlier, has two girls (Sequoia Rose Fuller and Rachel Michelle Gnapp) turning up at a remote cabin for their annual Christmas slumber party. The third part of the trio seems to be already there as there are several parcels under the tree with her name on them - shouldn’t they have the other girls’ names on them? - but there’s no sign of her so they assume she has wandered off somewhere. One girl goes out looking for pebbles while the other has a shower. I suppose if you find pierced nipples attractive this nude scene might be sexy, but for some of us it’s a complete turn-off.

As the negligee-clad girls get into party mode, somebody is watching them from outside, then...

After a clever little shock (which I won’t reveal here) we cut back to Ron who explains that all three girls died. His girlfriend doesn’t question him on how anybody could, therefore, possibly know what happened in the cabin.

The next story is set ‘last year’, with two burglars breaking into an empty house, only to find a sexy young woman in her underwear there (statuesque model/make-up artist Gayle Elizabeth). The moment when she sees them, then walks right past as if they’re not there is very nicely handled by the actors and the director. That’s probably the artistic highlight of the film and the explanation makes perfect sense, which is more than can be said for the burglars’ gratuitous murder of the girl. They then open a locked door, from behind which they can hear strange noises - and both meet a gruesome end. (One of the burglars is Lucien Eisenach, who wrote, directed and starred in Fetalboy Goes to Hell, which shares several cast with this films.)

It turns out that the unseen psycho from the first story was this woman's son, something we learn as her husband (Robert Lanham) is interviewed by a detective (writer-director Steve Sessions whose films - Cremains, Hellbound: Book of the Dead, etc - share many of this movie's cast; he also provided the excellent music for this film). The psycho, named Chris and played by Jason Barnes, was thought deceased in a fire at the asylum (‘for the dangerously insane’) where he was held, but in fact he survived with horrific burns and has been kept locked up by the couple ever since. Now he’s on the loose and we see him kill a bloke in Santa costume and steal his clothes and beard.

A couple more murders follow - all flashbacks from the story being told by Ron, and similarly impossible for him or anyone else to know as everyone involved (apart from the psycho) gets offed. Finally, we have Josh (associate producer Eric Spudic, writer of Maniacal and Aquanoids, who was kind enough to send me this disc) and his geekily attractive sister Alice (Krystal Stevenson) whose car breaks down, and we recognise her as the girl from the title sequence.

Probably the biggest failing of the movie, which is well directed with some top notch photography and good editing, is that despite all this it’s very slo-o-ow. Too much time is spent on (well-directed, well-shot, well-edited) sequences of people doing things that we don’t need to see, mostly with little or no dialogue. We watch the burglars, for example, walk up to the house, and then we watch them carefully pick the lock, and then we watch them walk around the house looking for the safe, and it all just goes on too long with nothing happening.

The first story in particular is a tale of about ten minutes that could have been told in two, or could actually have been stretch out to a twenty-minute Tales from the Crypt episode if the characters had been given some dialogue and something to do other than shower, put on underwear, pick up pebbles and dance. Atmosphere is good, but you can have too much atmosphere...

I must confess that by the time we got to the brother and sister walking through the woods I literally fell asleep. Okay, I was a bit tired, but it was just a lengthy sequence of two people walking through the woods. Nothing was actually happening.

After they split up, the girl is menaced by the psycho Santa, runs away from him, and is suddenly, inexplicably (unless I fell asleep again) in a car graveyard, where we have a differently edited re-run of the title sequence. There is a lovely bit of audience misdirection when she hides from her pursuer in an old school bus - more clever, tense scenes like that would have benefited the film overall. Her brother meanwhile ends up at an old cabin, where he also comes face to face with the psycho Santa, but a denouement is in the offing.

Psycho Santa looks surprisingly good for a shot on video feature, and the gore effects are not bad at all. The problem is, it’s simply too long. Well, maybe not too long - it runs about 81 minutes - but there’s just nothing happening for most of that time. And the ending, back with the couple in the car, manages to be both predictable and lame, unfortunately. But I’ve seen far worse.

Available on a convenient double bill with another cut-price Christmas horror, Satan Claus. Most curiously, the film carries no crew credits apart from writer-director, producer, associate producer and composer. Despite the camera-work, editing and special effects all being highly creditable, no-one is actually credited for them! (It also manages to spell Lucien Eisenach's name wrong in the cast list.)

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 14th December 2004

Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming

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Director: James Plumb
Writers: Andrew Jones, James Plumb
Producer: Andrew Jones
Cast: Mel Stevens, Alan Humphreys, Philip Harvey
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website:
www.northbankentertainment.com

Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming is a very interesting film. I’m not convinced that it succeeds in what it sets out to do, but neither am I convinced that I’m necessarily the target audience. And in any case, the ways in which it fails to live up to its lofty ambitions are fascinating and make it very worthy of your attention.

This is one of the new breed of PD remakes. Instead of some bloated Hollywood studio remaking an old movie that was already perfectly good, at a thousand times the budget, creating some soul-less cinematic behemoth, PD remakes are totally independent film-makers remaking an old movie, often one that actually wasn’t very good but is now conveniently within the public domain, at a budget even lower than the original.

Andrew Jones (The Feral Generation) and James Plumb have collaborated on this and also on the first British entry in the somewhat confusing pantheon of Night of the Living Dead remakes and sequels. The original Silent Night, Bloody Night was made in Long Island in 1972 and released two years later. It stars genre fave Mary Woronov as Diane, daughter of the Mayor of a little town where a troubled house comes up for sale. John Carradine plays a mute newspaper editor, there are various Warhol acolytes in supporting roles and Lloyd Kaufman was an associate producer (though it is not, and never has been, a Troma film).

I was advised by the film-makers to watch the original film after their remake and I would advise you, unless you are already familiar with it, to do the same. It’s widely available on various el cheapo-cheapo DVDs and it’s probably all over YouTube too. Watching the 1974 film not only clarifies some of the choices made by the 2012 film-makers but also, truth be told, highlights some of their problems too. Thus, much like the Macbeth porter’s booze, ”it provokes, and unprovokes; ... it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him.” There y’are - that’s classical, that is.

So here’s how the original goes. Back in the 1950s, a man named Wilfred Butler returned to a house outside town which he owned but never lived in, and promptly managed to set himself on fire, fatally. The house was inherited by his grandson, Jeffrey Butler, who has also never lived there, and the townsfolk would like to get rid of the place because of its ghoulish history.

On Christmas Eve, a lawyer appears who has been hired by Butler (over the phone) to offer the town the house at a knock-down price, provided that the money is paid in cash, within 24 hours. The town is represented by the Mayor (Diane’s father), Carradine’s newspaper editor, the Sheriff and the town’s switchboard operator, a large, dowdy woman. The lawyer and his girlfriend plan to spend the night at the Butler House but they are interrupted by an axe-wielding maniac, who then phones up the four local worthies and invites them to the house. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Butler himself turns up at Diane’s door and the two head up to the house to work out what is going on. Wilfred Butler’s diary reveals that, back in the 1930s, he turned the house into a private mental asylum where the patients included his own teenage daughter, Jeffrey’s mother.

Or something. The whole thing is framed as a flashback as Diane takes one last look at the building before the bulldozers move in.

So that’s the original Silent Night, Bloody Night (not to be confused with the 1984 picture Silent Night, Deadly Night or any of its many sequels). The above synopsis pretty much covers the remake as well, with just a few tweaks. The framing story has been dispensed with, two of the worthies have been combined so that the fat, dowdy woman is now the newspaper editor, and the whole story has been updated, so that the self-immolation now takes place in the 1980s and the private asylum was set up in the 1970s. In Wales. All of these changes, however, create problems.

Without the framing story and the snatches of narration from Woronov, the whole diary sequence comes across as a massive tell-don’t-show infodump; the film just stops for a while so that we can be told about a bunch of stuff from the past. It has to be said: the sequence works much better in the original.

John Carradine, with his piercingly quizzical stare, slightly wonky dicky-bow, ever-present cigarette and lack of vocal chords (presumably caused by same) really looks and behaves like a newspaper editor. I can also believe that the fat lady is the switchboard operator (which obviously is not a 21st century profession). But I don’t for a second buy the remake’s large local lady as a newspaper editor. Nor do I buy the ‘newspaper office’ location (where, in this version, Diane now works as a cub reporter) - it’s not nearly cluttered enough to be believable.

Then, as regards the updating (which is of course unavoidable), that only works if we suspend all disbelief and accept this as some sort of fantasy, parallel world. It is believable that an individual might turn their home into a privately run lunatic asylum in the pre-war United States. But not in Great Britain in the 1970s. We have a little thing over here called the NHS.

James and Andrew have had fun recreating in their script some of the most memorable aspects of the original. For example, there’s a rather notorious sequence where somebody’s eye is gouged out with a broken wine glass and this is dutifully re-enacted. They’ve kept character names (and had fun adding other, fan-friendly ones into the credits like the Fulci-inspired ‘Freudstein’ - or indeed, ‘Woronov’). But in other respects I think they’ve taken their eye off the ball, being too faithful sometimes and on other occasions missing out fairly crucial elements.

There is, to be more specific, a distinct lack of motivation in the remake: characters do things but we’ve no idea why. In the original, Diane greets the stranger at her door with a gun, and takes quite some persuading to accept that Jeffrey Butler is who he says he is and not the escaped maniac from a different, nearby lunatic asylum who has been reported on the radio to still be at large. In the 2012 film (which features a mass inmate break-out in the first act), Butler steps through Mary’s door and they just instantly bond.

Likewise, in the 1974 film the slimy lawyer has a wife and kid back home and the reason he wants to stay in the Butler house overnight is for a torrid night of passion with his bit on the side, whereas 28 years later there’s no obvious reason why the lawyer and his girlfriend are staying there. The biggest motivation concerns the truth behind the town, a revelation about the film’s victims which I won’t reveal except to observe that it is, quite coincidentally and somewhat bizarrely, the same plot element as the prologue of a Bollywood comedy I watched recently! In the original, this is revealed, out of the blue, in dialogue very near the end. If it’s mentioned in the remake, I missed it, but actually I think this is an improvement. It’s a pretty daft plot point which gives the killer a reason to pick these people beyond their being pillars of the community. In this instance, I don’t buy the original and prefer the slightly random killing of the remake.

Not that I am particularly a fan of slasher films anyway. I can take them or leave them, but I know there are fans out there specifically devoted to the slasher subgenre. And I have no doubt that SNBN:TH will give slashers fans precisely what they’re looking for. In that respect, it hits its targets. But I can only report, as a more general fan of horror, that I enjoyed the original more than the remake: partly (and this is something that could never be fixed) because its age gives it a certain nostalgic charm, especially given the tattiness of certain prints used for the various PD transfers, which glosses over its narrative failings.

Maybe it would be better to watch the remake in isolation. I don’t know. It’s a choice between not knowing why certain things are the way they are and understanding those things but also seeing how some other things could have been better. For example, while conflating the newspaper editor and the switchboard operator into one character, James and Andrew have simply dispensed with the eccentric chain-smoker, then taken the dowdy woman, crossed out ‘operator’ and written in ‘editor’ with a biro. But newspaper editors aren’t like that, especially in today’s commercial environment, they are hard-nosed businessmen/women. They are still mostly a bit eccentric and I bet they all chain-smoke (or at least they should do in films).

A couple of other things concern me. At one point a character escapes from some handcuffs using a piece of broken pottery to gouge chunks out of their wrists. And while that makes for a bloodily gruesome effect, it should be plenty obvious that You Can’t Do That. Even if you were to find a shard of pottery sharp enough to cut through flesh (we’ve all picked up broken plates - they’re not exactly razors), the thing that keeps a handcuff on you is not your wrist, it’s the fact that your hand is considerably bigger than your wrist. You would need to somehow break the bones in your hand - and there’s a lot of them so you’re looking at crushing rather than snapping - and then gouge chunks out of the heel of your thumb. Or cut your whole damn hand off (but with a plate?). But what we see on screen here, though the prosthetic is good and the image is squeamish and gory, makes no sense.

And finally: Christmas. Truth be told, in neither original nor remake is the Christmas setting particularly relevant. The only way it affects the story is that it makes it a bit more problematical for the town to find a large amount of cash within 24 hours. And I suppose it explains why there’s hardly anyone else around. Really, it’s just a novelty thing in the original: let’s set a horror movie - at Christmastime! There’s an uncomfortable contrast between the general goodwill of the season and the nastiness and violence that ensues.

But at least the 1974 film looks like it’s set at Christmas. There are holly wreaths on the doors, decorations and cards in the interior sets, and snow everywhere. People mention the season. It feels like Chrimbo. There are precious few decorations on show in the remake, and I don’t think anybody ever wishes anyone else happy Christmas. Most egregiously, the film was shot in April so in daytime exterior scenes we can see that the trees and hedges are lush and green with new leaves. Obviously you can’t guarantee snow (unless, like The Children, you spend half your production budget on fake stuff) but this is screamingly obviously not December. There is one gratuitous killing of a random person dressed as Santa, but that’s about as festive as it gets.

The trouble with writing a review like this, where I point out a relatively small number of problems and detail why they are problematical (and sometimes how they might have been solved) is that the piece overall becomes very negative, with these criticisms outweighing the positives. So please consider this review in this context: there are many good points to the film, albeit ones which don’t require individual paragraphs to elucidate. It is well-directed, the acting is fine, the camera-work and sound are good. The horror sequences (including one which was not in the original: an attack on a horny young couple using the empty house as a conveniently isolated location for a spot of Percy Filth) are particularly well-managed, combining slick editing with impressive gore effects. For slasher fans, this is clearly the stuff that is important, not whether the editor of the local rag looks like Aunty Mabel or the leafiness of the hedgerows round-abouts. But like I say, I could never describe myself as a ‘slasher fan’, just a guy who likes horror movies, some of which could be classed as slashers.

And so to the cast and crew round-up. Philip Harvey (who appeared briefly in The Last Horror Movie) is Wilfred Butler, Alan Humphreys (Panic Button, New Years Evil) is his grandson, Kathy Saxondale (Old Zombies) is his wife Marie in flashbacks and Mel Stevens stars as Diane (who, despite being the central character, doesn’t appear until nearly halfway through). Also in the cast are Sule Rimi (Daddy’s Girl, Panic Button, Elfie Hopkins), Richard Goss (In the Dark Half, I am Cursed) and Friday the 13th’s Adrienne King in a voice-only role.

Executive producer Robert Graham was production accountant on a selection of indie features including The Feral Generation, Stormhouse, Panic Button and Outpost 11 (a steampunk horror feature unrelated to Nazi zombie sequel Outpost II) and is clearly now a busy guy. His IMDB listing cites 15 features he has ‘in development’ including Requiem for the Ripper, Legacy of the Ripper and three films called Dragonman. The other exec prod is Manish Patel (The Amityville Asylum) who mostly makes health videos for the NHS. Music, cinematography and editing were all handled by James Morrissey who previously made impressive 2008 half-hour short Alone with the Dead. Alex Harper (Dead of the Nite) was responsible for the make-up effects and Mick Bahler (Red Kingdom Rising) handled the visual effects, including the self-immolation in the prologue.

Needless to say, many of the cast and crew also worked on Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection.

Is SNBN:TH worth watching? Absolutely. Does it work? Sort of. Is it as good as it could have been? Yes and no. Some parts work, others don’t. A few Christmas decos wouldn’t have busted the budget (they’re usually pretty cheap at the start of the year!) and a little less fidelity to the original might have been beneficial - because it’s only relevant to those viewers who watch both, and the film should be able to stand alone. On this basis. I retain high hopes for NOTLD:R, not least because that ‘franchise’ is already so diverse that there’s less to be faithful to, and I think this will give Andrew and James more leeway to make their own film, rather than tying themselves up with trying to accommodate ideas from four decades gone-by.

MJS rating: B

interview: Eleanor James

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Eleanor James first came to my attention in Pat Higgins’ horror-rom-comHellBride and since then she has become a regular name in indie British horrors with roles in such films as Three's a Shroud, Slasher House, Backslasher andBordello Death Tales. I finally had a chance to meet Eleanor at the UK premiere of Ivan Zuccon’s Colour from the Dark in January 2009 and followed that day up with a e-mail interview in early February.

How did you get started in acting, and specifically acting in low budget horror movies?
“Completely by chance, I had never really considered acting as something I could do. It seemed like something that was completely out of my reach. I’d dropped out of uni and just got back from two years travelling with absolutely no idea what the hell to do next, so I was doing random promo jobs and bits of modelling here and there.

“I’d starting seeing this artist/director who I’d met in a park and he kept telling me to take up acting. Not that I’m a drama queen or anything! And I kept saying,'But how do you do that?' There was no way I was going to drama school. Not my scene. So I was doing some incredibly dull promo job and met this actress who gave me a list of websites like Shooting People etc. and I started applying for acting jobs.

“I did lots of short films and pretty much everything and anything I could to get acting experience. Then a few months later I got cast as a demonic angel in Forest of the Damned, a horror film with Tom Savini, and became quite a fan of low budget horror after that.”

What attracted you to the role of Josephine Stewart in HellBride and what was that film like to work on?
“I love playing extreme characters. Josephine Stewart was a girl in love in 1840 who caught her fiancé cheating on her on her wedding day, went on a killing spree - well, of course - then got a bit pissed off that some other bird from the 20th century had nicked her wedding ring. And who can blame her? So she came back as a ghost with a beaky monster as a sidekick.

“It was great fun I got to wear a vintage wedding dress and Beverley Chorlten did an amazing job on my make-up. I was completely unrecognisable for most of the film and I love that. It was a lot of fun working with Pat Higgins who is an incredibly nice guy and even let us cover him in fake blood at the end of the shoot. Why? I have no idea... it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.”

How did you land a role in Colour from the Dark and, apart from the language, what differences did you find making a film in Italy?
“Ivan Zuccon found me on a casting website and e-mailed, asking me to read the script and consider the role of Anna. I read the script and loved it. It all seemed too good to be true! I couldn't believe how lucky I was, actually. Also it was great because my role was a 1940s Italian peasant and I got to cry, scream, do the ironing and get shot in the head... We were filming mainly at night in the countryside and were next to a huge lake so instead of freezing on set in England I was warm but getting eaten alive by mosquitos. I had about 20 huge bites on my feet and was constantly scratching! We were filming in a derelict house which was definitely haunted (we named him Albert) so it was naturally very creepy as well.”

What were the challenges of playing Stitchgirl in Alan Ronald’s Universal-homage segment of Bordello Death Tales?
“Stitchgirl has only just been stitched together and is a little awkward in her new body. So my movement had to reflect this. The director Alan Ronald asked me to study Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein so I tried to incorporate a few of her jerky body movements into my performance. I also had to keep my eyes as wide open as possible and not blink. There was no dialogue for my character, just a few squeaks, so in some ways it’s my least challenging role so far but hugely enjoyable!”

Back in May 2007, reviewing HellBride, I commented that you could be the next Eileen Daly - and 18 months later we find you and Eileen working together on Braincell. What can you tell me about that film?
Braincell is written and directed by the talented Alex Birrell and stars Joe Zaso, Raine Brown, Billy Garberina, Eileen Daly, Leon Lopez and Matt Berry from The IT Crowd. It’s being produced by Cinema Image Productions in New York. The film's a bizarre sci-fi horror concerning mind control and dreams with a few mental patients-turned-zombies thrown in.

“We filmed in and around Liverpool and I played an ex-porn-star-turned-nurse called Monica. A lot of my scenes are with Eileen who it was great to finally meet. Eileen had the role of Nurse Audra which was written for her by Alex Birrell and you could say our characters have a rather intense working relationship.”

How happy are you with your current association with horror movies and where would you like your acting career to go in the future?
“Right now there seems to be more opportunities for me in the indie horror scene because it seems there's more horror films being made. I’m a fan of the horror genre: there's such a huge range out there and as an actress the characters I could play in horror films are probably more extreme. Obviously I do and would like to continue working in other genres too but for now I’m more than happy to be associated with horror movies.”

interview originally posted 3rd February 2009

interview: Thomas Jane

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When I visited the set of Mutant Chronicles in June 2006, of course I had to speak with Thomas Jane who not only plays the lead role in the movie but is also a major fan of sci-fi, comic-books and similarly cool things.

Tell me about your character in this film.
"I don’t know. I’m not good at talking about stuff like that. What do you think? I’m a kind of soldier guy, I guess."

What attracted you to this?
"Well, I’m a big sci-i fan. I like it. Are you a sci-fi fan?"

Yes. I love it. I get to write about it.
"What turned you onto sci-fi?"

Doctor Who. Everyone in this country started with Doctor Who.
"I watched Doctor Who. They had it over on PBS I think, over in America. We only had 13 channels. We used to get Doctor Who on the UHF channel back in Maryland. I went to see Alien when I was eight - my dad took me - and that kind of changed my world. I was never quite the same since then. That’s really what cracked it open for me with sci-fi. Then I saw 2001 and my dad started turning me onto all the great old sci-fi movies and that’s how I became a fan. So I’ve always been a fan of sci-fi since I was a kid. So I’ve always wanted to do parts like this. I love it."

It must be more fun doing something like this than a straightforward acting role.
"You get to create your whole world. You get to create down to the cigarettes people smoke and the whiskey people drink and the way people dress. Sometimes the language they speak. Every angle of the universe can be played with and toyed with. That’s always exciting. In our world, everything has been destroyed three or four times over. All the natural resources are used up or burnt up or blown up. Now we’ve just built our way up to about the Victorian age of old, so it’s sort of a new Victorian age. Everything’s steam-powered, everything’s massive, iron structures with rivets and rusted all to hell. It’s raining all the time, cities are ruined, the world’s gone to hell. It’s really fun!

“I’m a product of that world: a cynical, hardbitten soldier who doesn’t really see a way out of this. I was born into it, I’m pretty sure I’ll die in it. I lost a bunch of friends in the war. I’m way beyond even having friends any more, just waiting to die. Then this monk pulls us out on this mercenary mission to go down into the Earth to find this machine and blow it up. So I’m having a blast."

Does working with effects and green-screen make things easier or harder?
"It’s easier. I think it’s just a matter of being very specific about the world you’re creating. Everybody has to be telling the same story and acting in the same environment. So I just try to ask a lot of questions about where we are, the geography of things, what it’s like and what it’s going to be like when the special effects boys are finished working their stuff. So that when we see it, everybody’s acting in the same picture.

“When visual effects movies fail is when you can tell that the actors are inside of a box and they’re putting everything in later. You don’t really feel like they are existing in the same scope that the guys are creating later. I think Sky Captain suffered from that - everyone seemed to be very aware that they were acting in a small warehouse and later the actual images were so grandiose. It’s a difficult thing to grasp. I think theatre actors have a better chance at green-screen acting because they’re used to creating everything with their imagination. Film actors tend to be a bit lazier: if they don’t see it then it’s not there and it doesn’t exist."

How do you find Simon Hunter as a director? This is a step up for him.
"I think Simon always had this sort of film in his mind so for him it seems like a natural progression. I’m impressed. He’s got a great sense of visual grammar. He knows what lenses to use, he’s a big fan of the wide-angle lens. He really knows what’s going on. He’s got a great idea of the movie, it’s all in his head and he’s storyboarded every scene, which is unusual. Most people just storyboard the key sequences. Simon’s got every scene storyboarded. There’s a book on set here, you can read the whole thing like a graphic novel."

Is that helpful to you as an actor?
"Very helpful to see what the director has in mind for a scene. Because I could be acting my ass off and the director plans on doing the whole thing in a giant wide shot - useless! Don’t waste my time. I like to know what the shot is and how I fit into that shot. The director can pick the right frame and I have to do very little."

Were you familiar with the game?
"No, I wasn’t. I don’t think very many people are unless you’re from Sweden. And I don’t care. I’m not a big game person. But we have a really good story and the universe that the story exists in is interesting. I’m sure that came a lot from the game, it’s a very complex, complicated thing."

Is there a lot of action? Are you having to to do stunts?
"You bet - all that crap! A lot of fun stuff. We’re having a lot of fun. The movie comes out in 2008 so for me to tell you all about this stuff now would be kind of useless. I’d rather save it up for when we’re getting closer to when the movie’s coming out."

Will you be involved much in post-production?
"I don’t know. I’m sure they’ll bring us back for little shots and green-screen stuff. The beauty of green-screen is if we’re missing something we can literally just throw it up and grab a camera and a costume and knock it off. So that’s exciting. I’m having a ball. The character’s a real throwback to the adventure characters from the 1930s and 1940s. A soldier with great boots and cool guns and military outfits. I’m having a ball."

Is it more a war film than a sci-fi film?
"There’s a lot of war in it. It’s definitely set in the future, it definitely looks like: ‘Oh, I haven’t been there.’ So you could definitely say it’s a futuristic war film. there’s a great opening war sequence. After that it’s a bunch of soldiers burrowing their way into the Earth, looking for this machine. It’s kind of like Journey to the Centre of the Earth with soldiers and fucking mutants. Which is really cool. We’re going down through layers of time so as we get deeper into the Earth we start getting skyscrapers and shit like that."

What have you got lined up after this?
"Punisher 2 starts in January, so we’ll be making that. They’re writing the new script now; the old script wasn’t so good so we’re getting a new script. We’ll steer that up to go for early next year. I’m excited about that. I’ve got this production company called Raw Entertainment and I’m producing a horror movie. Steve Niles, who wrote 30 Days of Night, is my partner. Sam Raimi’s making 30 Days of Night. So Steve wrote that, and we’ve got a thing called The Lurkers which is a detective noir horror movie. I’m also going to direct my first horror movie next year, called Dark Country right now. We also have a line of comic-books that we’re putting out. One’s called Bad Planet, a sci-fi book, amazing shit. We’ve got Bernie Wrightson doing a cover, Mark Schultz, Mike Kaluda, Dave Stevens is working on a cover for us. We’ve got fantastic interior artists. Tim Bradstreet’s doing the inks for issue one and we’re working on issue two right now."

Are you a big comics fan?
"Yes, big comics fan. We have another one - it’s called Alien Pig Farm, which is basically rednecks vs aliens in Kentucky. Aliens land in Kentucky in this pig-farming community and try to eat everybody. The pig farmers unite and try to battle the aliens. Fun stuff and a great comic. It’s in the vein of Lil’ Abner. We have a terrific artist named John Marquez working on that. He’s got a very Frank Frazetta style but it’s in that Lil’ Abner vein. I’ve been a huge comic fan, especially sci-fi comics, since I was a kid so I started this Raw Studios which is a sci-fi and horror comic book line and those are our first two books."

Is the idea to do comics and then turn them into movies?
"Absolutely, we’ll mix it all up. Steve Niles has a comic-book called The Lurkers so we’re adapting that at Lion’s Gate into a film. Dark Country is a film and I’ll do the graphic novel version of that."

What’s Dark Country about?
"It’s a newlywed couple driving back from Vegas at night and they come across a body in the road who is still alive. There’s been an accident. They put him in the back seat and try to find a hospital. The guy wakes up and tries to kill the guy driving. They tumble out of the car and the guy driving beats him off with a rock, killing him. They don’t know what to do so they decide to bury him in the desert - then it all goes downhill from there. It’s sort of a noir horror in the vein of Blood Simple meets Detour. So that’s going to be a lot of fun.”

website: www.thomasjane.com
interview originally posted 10th October 2008

interview: Samantha Janus (2002)

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Five years after interviewing Sam Janus on the set of Breeders, we met again on the set of Strange, the short-lived BBC supernatural series. This interview was conducted in Sam’s dressing room at Ealing Studios in October 2002 and part of it appeared in Shivers. It was a joint interview with David Richardson from Starburst.

What attracted you to doing Strange?
"I took a year off and had a baby, and was quite careful about what I was going to do when I came back, because of this kind of hiatus: what should I come back with? There were many suggested things the like of which I’d done before. Strange was the first thing I came to which was unlike anything else I’d read. It wasn’t a cop show, it wasn’t based in a hospital - not that there’s anything wrong with those kind of shows. But it was just new.

“There’s a strange path between the darkness of it and the comedy. There are some light moments. The two characters - Jude and Strange - have this wonderful way of dealing with the situation through humour at times, but there is this incredible darkness running through it. I would promote it as a drama, a sci-fi drama, as opposed to anything else. It’s not light entertainment, although there are lighter moments in the horror I suppose. So it was that, the originality."

The series had a good start in the pilot episode with your character’s boyfriend turning out to be the bad guy.
"It was a good set-up, a good way to start a pilot. But it alienates Jude straight away. At the beginning of the series we now find her alone, a single mother. And that’s a good starting point, but you’ve got the background of why she’s there, and what introduced her into the world of demons. She’s not on a par with John Strange. They become two isolated individuals from two separate worlds, and yet are very good at working well together. Him with his background knowledge and his demonic history, but Jude’s analytical mind, because she studied as a scientist - they’re a great combination. They work out impossible situations where, if they were apart from each other, they wouldn’t. So it was a good starting point, that pilot, because they’re both alienated. And of course they’re thrown together because they’re the only people who know what’s going on."

In the pilot, there was the boyfriend, and it looked like Canon Black (Ian Richardson) was the bad guy, but that has now changed for the series. Is it almost like starting again?
"We wanted to replicate the things that worked in the pilot, obviously. The strange thing, obviously if people haven’t seen the pilot, is to establish the story, but without repeating what you’ve done in the pilot for the people who remember what they’ve seen. It was a strange one, so we’ve brought elements of their relationship through that remind them of what happened before - which are important reminders but nevertheless you can quite easily tune in and pretty much get a grip on the story, if you just caught this episode and not the pilot."

When this goes out, a lot of papers are going to compare the Jude-Strange relationship to Scully and Mulder.
"There are always going to be comparisons. I think what’s interesting about this programme is it’s very difficult. What people tend to do is say, ‘It’s a mixture of this/this/this...’ - and the reason they do that is because there hasn’t been anything like this before. Yes, you could say there are elements of The X-Files, you could say there are elements of Buffy, you could say there are elements of paranormal drama, there are moments of comedy. But what is unusual about it is that it fluctuates between all these different things pretty effortlessly. That’s down to Andrew Marshall’s writing. He’s been very clever in not taking it too seriously, because of course you want to take that away from the audience straight away. You don’t want to overindulge yourself in the drama of it because it would be boring for the audience.

“So there are lighter moments that relieve you, and it’s very difficult to play. Richard and I have been struggling with just hitting the right note in each particular moment with each scene. Because one minute you’re confronted with your boyfriend disappearing and being a demon, your son possibly being involved more than you know, everybody that you’ve known or loved being taken away from you - yet then there’s suddenly a lighter moment when the scene needs to be lifted. Obviously that’s very difficult to do, so it’s really about colour and shade and just highlighting those moments very, very carefully, and sticking true to Andrew’s writing. If we do that, then it’s okay."

Does the story unfold over the six episodes?
"I would imagine that their relationship story unfolds, and that’s not to say that they have a relationship which is more than just friends. What’s interesting and what I like about this piece is that they have a partnership with no emotional ties, so far. And that works well, that you’ve haven’t got that carrot dangling - will they? won’t they? - all the time. Whether that’s introduced later on, I don’t know. But what’s interesting is that throughout each story you get a little but more information on where John Strange has been and where he’s come from, his traumas of the past, and what Jude’s been through. So you’re getting more and more information about the characters, and then that information that you get fuels your desire to watch them fight the demon. I would say there’s probably a demon with each episode; it’s about targeting all these demons that cover the face of the Earth, in all their different guises. So that’s predominantly the set-up with the characters and what makes it work."

Are the effects sequences spread throughout all the episodes?
"I don’t know about throughout all of them. Certainly the ones that we’re doing at the moment are incredible. It is important. What’s important about is that, unlike The X-Files and Buffy, we’re actually getting to see some incredible technicians at work. This promise of something that’s lurking in the shadows absolutely comes to fruition. Some of the effects that I’ve seen certainly, I’ve thought: that’s not ever been seen on British TV before. Certainly the BBC haven’t done that. So that’s quite daring, but it means a lot of time and attention has been paid to them."

Does it help that you made the pilot some time ago so you’ve had time to think about and evaluate the characters?
"Yes, we got a chance to see what worked in the relationship, to find the truth in this relationship. And I think, watching the pilot and realising how well the lighter moments work gives us the confidence to follow them through. We’ve stuck quite close to what we did in the pilot."

Have you worked with Ian Richardson much?
"So far I haven’t. In the pilot, I did. He’s amazing - terrified the life out of me in one scene, honest to God. An incredible actor, and an amazing character; none of us are really sure where Canon Black stands. And I don’t know whether Andrew knows, whether he’s not telling us. It’s being left up to the audience, there’s lots of stuff where you haven’t got there yet, you’re not sure. It’s ambiguous. "

Are you trying to put your work on Breeders behind you?
"Funnily enough, the guy who’s done the tree demon on this episode, Neill Gorton, did the alien in Breeders. I was not really happy with the outcome of Breeders. I thought it had the potential to be fantastic. But you put it down to experience. Actually the people that were making it were fun to work with and I made some great friends on it. We had very little money, we were up against it - and it showed. But I believe that the people who made it have gone on to do bigger and better things. It was a learning curve for all of us really."

What do you find different about this show from other series that you’ve worked on?
"Normally when you do a piece of work, you are reminded of something else that you’ve done, it doesn’t have to be the same kind of energy and buzz. There’s a feeling around this that it’s quite special because it’s so new. Everyone’s much more curious, people are wandering around set far more than they do normally, coming and having a look and really enjoying it. It’s something very different and I’m enjoying that aspect of it. It’s also working very well, all those elements of light and shade - so far, touch wood - in the things that we’ve filmed have been quite magical. I hope that comes through on screen. We’re shooting out of context at the moment, and there’s the location work still to come - but I can just about manage to follow what’s happening.

“Next year, at the end of the year, because it’s gruelling - we’re filming a block of three, then a week off, then the second three - they’re all completely out of context as well. I think we might spend more time on the finales because it’s where all the special effects happen, so we’ve got all of our finales in the space of about four weeks. The finales are energetic, you’re hyped up, and we’re going to be doing those every day for four weeks."

You know what SF fans are like.
"Yes, and I love that."

There is already a Strange fansite on the web.
"Yes, I’ve got a little doll made of Lego and everybody else has got a proper one. Whoever made those should remodel me in plastic!"

If it takes off and overshadows everything else that you’ve done, are you prepared for the conventions and the fanzines?
"Science fiction fans are very loyal and I do like that. There’s real dedication involved. When you’re creating something that is that important to people, it’s a real responsibility. However, it is so important, the other half of the year, to make sure you’re not doing that but stretching yourself by doing something that’s the complete opposite. It comes down to the individual really."

Do you think that making a show like this is risky for the BBC?
"Yes, I do feel that this is a big risk for the BBC. It’s a real mix of entertainment and drama, and there’s a really strange feel behind it of: what’s this going to be? What’s this going to become? So the pressure is on and I am very, very aware and very conscious to make it as good as it possibly can be, because it’s important to me."

Had you seen director Joe Ahearne’s series Ultraviolet?
"No, but I've seen some of his work. Joe has an incredible sense of imagery when it comes to suspense and horror and the darker elements, just in terms of where he’s putting the camera and the lighting. His precision is incredible. It affects what we’re doing on set because he has twisted the camera up in some strange way so suddenly we’re dwarfed, or whatever. He’s very clever."

Where were the locations filmed for the pilot?
"A lot of it was in London. Jude’s hospital was really close to me originally, was in Crouch End, has moved to Greenwich! So I’m having to travel for that, but everybody else’s locations are at the end of my road. So every time I see location scenes I think, ‘Fantastic! Two minutes to work!’ Everybody else is at the end of my road, but I’m in Greenwich. But the gothic, shadowy stuff is predominantly North London, Highgate and that sort of area. I love being on location.

“One of the things with being here is that it’s dramatic on the first day when you arrive and see everyone and everything, but within about an hour it saps all your energy. We were doing a three-and-a-half page scene yesterday - by natural light. It was really congested, about 20 of us crammed into a small room lit by candle-light. And just pictures of demons everywhere. After a while it begins to permeate through your skin. You begin to feel quite low and quite depressed and your energy levels are going lower and lower. We had to snap ourselves out of it. Here in my room I have scatter cushions, candles, potpourri and Joni Mitchell, which helps!"

How long does production go on for?
"Our last day is 23rd December. It’s a long stint - three months. Sometimes finish at 8.30, get back home at nine. It all depends on having the right people around you, becoming excited about the scene that you’re going to do. It’s a difficult piece. After this, I’ve got a play that I want to do in January and February. There’s one episode where I age to about 85 and my son has been promised that he can come down and see me when I’m 85 - he’s really excited at the prospect of that!

“I’ve been fitted for my facial pieces. I had a face cast done for the first time which is a bizarre experience. Your face is literally covered all over with a kind of silicate which then dies and is pulled off. It’s like being born again! For a while all your senses have disappeared completely - sight, sound, smell - all you’re left with are two tiny nostril holes for you to breathe. And it gets tighter and tighter as it dries, so after a while you feel: let me out! Then they quickly peel it off and they’ve got this wonderful face cast from which they can build a mask. I’m going to invite my grandmother down because she’s not going to see me that age, ever. It’s the only time she’ll get to see me as an old lady!”

interview originally posted 18th October 2005

interview: Samantha Janus (1997)

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I interviewed Samantha Janus on the set of Rampage, a British monster movie produced by PeakViewing Transatlantic, in January 1997. Rampage was shooting in a freezing cold aircraft hanger at the Northern tip of the Isle of Man. The film was screened as Deadly Instinct before finally being released as Breeders. Five years later I interviewed Sam again on the set of the TV series Strange.

How's it been going?
"It's been going really well, but it's really cold. I've got about a week to go now, so we've done most of the action stuff, which has all gone brilliantly. Only a few lumps and bumps and bruises. A few broken ligaments - no, it's been going really well."

Have you done much action stuff before?
"I've done no action stuff before. This was the first one I've done. What would you say, Glen? Above average?"
(Glen Marks, stunt co-ordinator: "12 out of 10.")
"12 out of 10! Said by our stuntman! There was one which I didn't do which was too dangerous, which was a fall from about 30 feet. My stunt double did it, because there was quite an impact with the water and the water wasn't very deep. So I didn't get to do that, which was just as well, because I jumped into about a foot of water the other day and twisted my knee!"

Are you having fun doing this?
"Yes, the best fun I've had in ages. I'm normally sitting around studios, playing the girl next door and comedy parts and stuff. On this one we're running around with shotguns and turning into aliens. It's brilliant. Never a dull moment."

How did you get this role?
"Paul Matthews, the director, wanted a bit of a name. He was looking around, and he saw me in Pie in the Sky. He connected that I was somebody who was up for the role. I went to meet him, and he offered it to me there and then. I had another project, but we worked it out timewise, so that's really good. But it means I have to work three weeks on this as opposed to four, because I shoot straight off to Cardiff and do another one."

What's that?
"The next one's a film about rugby called Up and Under. I play a rugby trainer. Written by a guy called Jon Godber."

The guy from Hull Truck.
"That's right. So we're going to do a British movie. I've got myself into shape with this one, because I'm supposed to be playing rugby when I get there, against Neil Morrissey, Gary Olsen, Griff Rhys Jones. I get tackled by the lot of them, and I'll kill them when I get there because I am one tough cookie now."

What are the rest of the cast like?
"We've been so lucky with the crew and cast members. They've just been fantastic. My co-star, Todd Jensen, is brilliant. We've got on like a house on fire. Maybe too well, because we're giggling on set a lot. There's been a couple of days when we've been collapsing into giggles and had to be rapped on the knuckles by Paul. But all in all we've got a fantastic cast. Kadamba Simmons I knew from school, who plays the host to the alien, so we get on really well. And also the crew here are brilliant. They've all worked together before, so it's a really nice little set-up. Which makes life so much easier, because there's a lot of stuff to do here and we haven't got that much time to do it in. If we'd had anyone that was making problems for us it would have been a problem. But we've been really, really lucky, and everyone helps each other out."

Are you happy doing the stunts?
"Yes. The only ones I've had a problem with are with it being cold. You can feel how cold it is. Yesterday was really, really cold and I was shivering, but actually it worked for the scene anyway because I was supposed to be scared shitless of this alien. I chucked myself off the balcony which was great fun. I did that really well. We did a huge stunt fall and I was supposed to break through this barrier on the mezzanine level where the bedroom is. Todd and I did that; we had great fun. We landed on these crash mats. We did it twice, and we just saw the rushes the other day and it looks brilliant. Down to Glen, again."

Do you think you're going to be pleased with this when it comes out?
"Yes, what I've seen already - some of the rushes - I'm thrilled with. I think, to be honest, the alien that we've got on this, the special effects and the set: we've been so lucky. Edward Thomas, who's designed most of the sets, has done a fantastic job. You can see by just looking around; the stuff he's done is phenomenal. And our alien just looks so convincing. If you think of the scariest aliens you've seen on TV, like the alien from Alien, it's actually not far off that. We've got all the electronics behind the mask, the eyes moving and the lips. And he looks grotesque. When I did that scene with him yesterday, there wasn't that much acting involved. I was terrified, having those huge growly teeth next to my face, slobbering all over me. It was disgusting."

interview originally posted 18th October 2005

interviews: Neil Jenkins

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I met production designer Neil Jenkins at the UK premiere ofEvil Aliensand subsequently interviewed him by e-mail in October 2005.

How did you first come to work with Jake West?
“Jake and I have been friends since we were sixteen. We both grew up around Tunbridge Wells where a good chunk of Razor Blade Smile was shot and we share a lot of similar attitudes toward music, film and philosophy of life in general. We happened to do our degrees - his in film, mine in fine art - at the same college and he asked me to design his degree film, Club Death, which was this extremely ambitious and elaborate death fantasy about the battle for a man's soul between Death and a nightmarish corporate 'Devil'. He must have liked what I did because he asked me back to do his first feature.

Club Death was the blueprint for Razor Blade Smile in many ways. It starred Chris Adamson as the Corporation Magus and Louise Edwards as Death, both of whom returned for RBS. The crew was pretty much the same and it definitely had the same 'lack of budget is no obstacle to entertainment value' attitude, which has become a theme of Jake's work.”

When Jake approached you about doing Evil Aliens, what sort of brief were you given?
“I had read the original pitch for Evil Aliens. It was amongst a few other ideas Jake had been asked to come up with after RBS 2: The Devil’s Vendetta stalled but it was rejected because of its frivolous tone. Somewhere along the line, Jake must have warmed to this little slapstick Night-of-the-Living-Dead/Evil-Dead-with-aliens. It cropped up more and more in conversation and he began seriously considering it as a possible second feature. He wrote the treatment - pretty much exactly the movie you see today - and commissioned some concept art from me of the aliens and their UFOs to illustrate the package for potential investors.

“The brief for the look of the aliens was quite simple, I think it just said 'DEMONIC' in capital letters! Jake's quite a prolific writer and has a number of scripts that remain unmade and he's fond of plundering them for interesting characters and set-pieces. Evil Aliens has a few elements from a script that Jake wrote - even before RBS I recall - about an occult group that raises a vengeful demon named Lirion. Jake really liked the design I did for Lirion so I dug it out and alien-ed it up a bit and that became the basis for the aliens. Jake was initially very keen to emphasise the aliens’ physiological differences, with jutting bone structure and elongated limbs coupled with a very heavy fetish aesthetic regarding the costumes - lots of moulded rubber.

“From the treatment it was clear that Evil Aliens would be homaging every sci-fi/horror/splatter/slasher film we loved and that was reflected in the initial concepts. Giger's Alien set the bar pretty fucking high, a nightmarish creation both utterly demonic and seductive, so it would have been rude not to have referenced such a design classic. Our aliens were more like primitive warriors than animals though, so they became a sort of tribal S&M version of the Predator, covered with ritualistic tattoos and wearing black rubber.”

From your point of view as production designer, what are the biggest differences between Razor Blade Smile and Evil Aliens?
“The 'production designer' credit on RBS was really just a tidy way of saying 'the entire art department for the movie shoot'. It was the same for all the departments: Jim Solan was the camera department etc. We covered the whole shoot pretty much with something like eight crew. As far as design in the traditional sense, there really wasn't much at all. Jake had been ruthlessly practical during the scriptwriting to make the film achievable on next-to-no money.

“Props-wise, if it didn't exist already and we couldn't borrow it, steal it or make it for nothing, it got cut from the script. It was the same with the interiors and locations - they were all places we either lived at or knew someone who did and was foolish enough to let us film there. I used a large amount of my and Jake’s personal property for dressing and re-vamped (if you'll pardon...) some of the props from Club Death. The only thing I hired for the whole film were a pair of flintlocks for the duel. It still amazes me that we achieved so much with so little, and shot on film too. Razor Blade Smile should be required viewing for aspiring filmmakers.

“The biggest difference between the two films is the CG. People think the dreams in RBS are CG but they aren't. Aside from the razor blades in the title sequence there is no computer generated imagery in RBS, it's all actual footage composited together. Evil Aliens has 150 CG shots including gore, fully CG aliens, the UFOs, digital mattes etc. That lets you take the design to entirely new worlds. We also had sets constructed for the mothership interior and the farmhouse interiors, designed by Jon Bentley, who was on exactly the same page as Jake and I regarding the film's tone. In short, the scope of Evil Aliens was much larger than RBS but the attitude and approach were exactly the same: take what you have and put it all up on the screen.”

What was the most difficult part of your work on Evil Aliens?
“I'd say the hardest part of Evil Aliens was realising the schedule. Although we had a lot more money than we'd had for RBS we were certainly in no position to squander any. Principal photography was five weeks: three weeks on location in Cambridge at the farm, mostly night shoots; one week on the coast in Dorset; one week on set in Halifax. There was no money to go over schedule at all and some optimistic planning on my part left the art department a little understaffed, so at times the shoot was quite arduous. But even during the low times it was a ridiculous amount of fun. Hopefully you can tell from watching the movie that, as horror fans, we were having an absolute bloody riot.

“Letting things go was hard too. In the beginning I had dreams of utterly amazing alien costumes but the cold reality of the budget meant we couldn't take the design beyond the 'man in a suit' solution - to be worn all day, every day, for five weeks by actors doing action, fights and stunt work. For practicality it had to be a simple costume - trousers and a top plus alien hat with latex arms. It's all about turning limitations to your advantage though, so we used the low rent nature of the aliens to add to the film's High Camp Index.”

...And what was the most satisfying part?
“The most satisfying part of the whole thing is definitely seeing the film do well. Jake's not the sort of British film-maker that gets a lot of support from the industry (though hopefully that will change) and so hearing the buzz that's generating and reading the responses, particularly from the US screenings, for a film that has had virtually no coverage in the press is really exciting. There is a genuine affection for the genre among the people who made Evil Aliens and it's a real pleasure to have contributed to the splatter canon.

“On a design level, one of the things I was most looking forward to was the alien mothership coming over the headland. It was a very complex design that Jake and I had worked on for some time, basically a giant flying magick circle carved out of stone, and was from the beginning going to be entirely CG. I asked Llyr Williams, the 3D animator, not to send me key-frames of the mothership model because I wanted to be sitting in the cinema when I saw it first fly over. He did an amazing job.

“I wrote one of the scenes in the film too and hearing people laugh at the gags is nice. In fact, every time I think about the film I remember something that makes me laugh. We packed as much as we possibly could into a frantic 85 minutes. There are so many things to be proud of.”

What have you been working on since Evil Aliens?
“The most relevant thing to you guys that I have worked on since Evil Aliens is probably Adam Mason's new movie, Broken (the trailer for which was shown before the screening of Evil Aliens at this years Frightfest, curiously enough). It's a straight-out horror about a guy who kidnaps women and keeps them as slave wives in the middle of a desolate forest wilderness. The make-up effects for it were done by Tris Versluis, formerly of Life Creations who handled the gore and effects for Evil Aliens. It was great to work with him again. As for the future, I am looking forward to the follow up to Evil Aliens, a twisted haunted house shocker...”

website: http://lazythirdeye.com
interview originally posted 4th August 2008

interview: Kenneth Johnson

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I have done face to face interviews, interviews over the phone, e-mail interviews and even interviews by fax, but my interview with Alien Nation creator Kenneth Johnson was unique. He was busy producing the movie Steel at the time (not a great success, in fact I don’t think it even went theatrical in the UK) and the only time he had spare was on his drive to work. So I faxed or e-mailed him a bunch of questions and he dictated his answers onto cassette as he drove to the studio, then sent me the tape to transcribe. This would have been in early 1997, I think, just as the last of the five Alien Nation TV-movies was set to air. A version of this interview was published in SFX.

To what extent were V and Alien Nation intended as socio-political allegories, and to what extent were they intended as SF?
“Back in the early 1980s I read a book called It Can't Happen Here, written by Sinclair Lewis. It was written in the '30s, about the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and how it could happen here, and how it did happen here in the course of his story. Suddenly America was a fascist regime. I was very intrigued by the notion because I felt that there was a great complacency among the American people that no real sea-change would ever take place in their life. They'd have their small personal triumphs and tragedies, but no great societal shift in their daily life. I thought: 'Gee, suppose there were a right-wing shift in the United States, and suddenly we found ourselves living under a police state.'

“I wrote what I considered was a very powerful script called Storm Warnings about just that occurrence taking place. My friend Brandon Tartikoff at NBC read it, and was very intrigued by the notion of America living under a totalitarian regime, and a resistance force growing to fight against it. But he was concerned about the notion of fascism and suggested to me that perhaps it was a Soviet or Chinese invasion which prompted the situation. I told him I didn't believe that the Soviets or the Chinese could sustain a protracted occupation of the United States, and somehow the idea came up - it may have been from Jeff Sagansky, who was Brandon's assistant at the time and now is the head of Sony pictures.

“Anyway, the suggestion came up that perhaps it was an alien force that caused the change-over in our lives. I was at first very against it, because I was tired of doing that kind of thing, having done The Six Million Dollar Man,The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk. I wanted to stay a little closer to reality. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I could do a really interesting, stirring allegory about the rise of the Third Reich and about how ultimate power can either corrupt someone or turn them into a hero.

"That's what V is certainly about, is power. The power of the alien force; the power that certain humans got by allying themselves with the alien force, much like the Vichy French with the Germans in World War II; the unexpected power that one finds in oneself when one is pushed to exploits of heroism, which is what happens to the character of Fay Grant, playing Julie. The heroes, incidentally, are named for Julie and Michael, two of my children. My oldest son, David having given his name to David Banner on The Incredible Hulk a few years earlier.

“So this is a long-winded way, I suppose, of saying that indeed V was particularly intended as a socio-political allegory, right from the very beginning. And it also commented on the people like the George Morfogen character, who wanted to just keep his hands over his eyes and pretend nothing was going on, even while his son was becoming part of the Hitler Youth. And the corruption of youth, played by David Packer in V as Morfogen's son, who was seduced by 'the power of the dark side', shall we say?

“The whole sci-fi aspect of it was sort of by happenstance. And all of the spacecraft and weaponry and such, which you will notice was designed after the World War II Germanic fashion: our guns look a lot like the German Lugers, the symbol of the alien force, the visitors, has a resonance of the swastika. You're probably saying, 'Well, duh?' at this point. What we were trying to do was keep those resonances going, and fortunately the American public, as well as the worldwide public, seemed to understand it.

“I think one of the most rewarding things I heard about V was after the government of South Africa had put it on the state-operated television as "an example of black people and white people working together happily". This was back in the days of apartheid, remember. But the day after it aired, there were big red 'V's spray-painted all over the walls in Soweto and Johannesburg. It was very interesting.

Alien Nation was a movie that Fox had made, which I looked at, which I thought had a fascinating premise about the world's newest minority. But very quickly the movie turned into Miami Vice with Coneheads and got totally uninteresting. I told Fox that if they wanted me to make a series out of it, which they were pressing me to do, I wanted to take a different tack and explore what it was like for the two cultures to be clashing. What it was like for these people to be the newest people off the bus. The most interesting moment in the feature for me was one in which Jimmy Caan picked up Mandy Patinkin at his alien house and Mandy - that's George Francisco - his family was standing on the front porch, waving to him. And I remember sitting in the screening and coming out of my chair and saying, 'Wait a minute - who are they? I want to know what their life is like and how it interrelates with human life and such. And forget all this cop stuff.'

“So Fox gave me a leeway to do that and that's what I did. And throughout the whole series and all of the subsequent TV movies, one of the things that we've enjoyed doing the most is presenting a situation and seeing how the two different cultures respond and react to it, and how it resonates through each of our characters. We never start out by saying, 'What's the plot going to be of this script?' We start out by saying, 'What do we want to write about? Is it about greed? Is it about “the enemy within”? Is it about lust? What is it about?' And then go from there to play it and see how that theme resonates through all of the characters. Andy Schneider and Diane Frolov, my old dear friends who were producers on the series with me, were masters of that sort of writing, and we had a wonderful time doing it.

“When you're writing in an allegorical genre, such as we are, it offers us a wonderful opportunity to make comments and allows us to see the human world through the lens, if you will, of the alien consciousness. So it was always a lot of fun to do. And speaking of fun, Diane Frolov was one of the writers who helped me to create the sequel to the original four hours of V. Diane helped me write the story and then wrote one of the two-hour instalments of The Final Battle. The script that we wrote was extraordinarily good. It was much better than my first four hours had been, by the time we were finished. It was much more intricate, it was more sophisticated in many ways, partly because I had some very strong minds working on it with me.”

How much of your original idea for The Final Battle made it into the filmed script?
“I only ever saw one small piece of the completed work of The Final Battle, because I heard that the script was pretty well decimated and screwed over by Blatt and Singer and Brian Taggert, and that it was only a pale reflection of what we started out with. I heard from people who did see it that they just made all of the wrong choices, wherever there was a choice to be made: in the writing and the casting and the directing and the execution.

“The only scene I ever saw, which was by happenstance, was the one in which the priest had given Diana The Bible to read. We had written a very carefully crafted scene, in which for the first time we thought we were seeing into Diana's soul, and discovering her very troubled by the morals and values that were spoken of in The Bible. And she appears to be about to bare her soul and then turns around and blows the priest away in a startling surprise. The priest incidentally was meant to be a very young, hip, good-looking guy - like Father Karas in The Exorcist for example.

“The piece that I saw from the completed picture was Diana having her conversation with the priest, whom they had cast as an old, Irish, Barry Sullivan stock priest, who was playing against Diana doing her most leering, moustache-twirling impression of a bad guy. The whole scene just telegraphed where we were going from the beginning and was totally awful. After I saw that two-minute honk, I could never bring myself to look at any more of the movie, and to this day I never have.”

Were there any unused ideas from V which made it into the Alien Nation series?
“To the best of my recollection there were no unused ideas from V that made it into the Alien Nation series. The Tenctonese - a name invented by my daughter Juliet, incidentally, who's an NYU Film School graduate; she also invented for me the language that they use. The Tenctonese were really a separate item entirely, and there was never really any connection between the two shows.

Alien Nation we all felt had been cancelled very prematurely. We felt that it had a lot more life in it. And indeed, Peter Chernin, the head of Fox, later apologised to the Television Critics Association for cancelling the show. He said it was the biggest mistake they ever made at Fox, and it only took me three more years to convince him that we ought to do some more.

“So returning to Alien Nation was a gift for all of us involved because the actors all really cared about each other. They all cared about their characters and about the show. The writers and the entire production was, along with myself, totally thrilled to be able to go back and do some more. And to be able to do five more was really the icing on the cake.”

How important were the fans in the revival of Alien Nation?
“I think the fans of Alien Nation certainly were very important in keeping the show alive. I think the constant stream of letters that was received by the Fox Network, by myself and by the various actors - we always managed to send those to the studio and the network as well - really let them know that there was indeed a core audience for the show which hinted at an audience that was even larger, that the show had yet to reach because of the lack of proper marketing from the Fox Network.”

What advantages/disadvantages does the two-hour, occasional format of Alien Nation have over the one-hour, weekly format?
“The disadvantage of doing two-hour movies is that the network is looking for us to save the world every time we go out which begins to get a little tedious and predictable. It's tricky to come up with stories which involve our family of players on a strong emotional level, yet still hint at larger metropolitan - or even cosmic - issues. It's been a battle from the beginning with the studio and the network to make them understand that the personal and the emotional stories were what really drove Alien Nation and made it the darling of the critics that it has always been. Indeed I don't think we've ever got a bad review from anybody. It's extraordinary in that regard.

“The advantage of doing two-hour movies is that we're given a larger budget. A normal budget for a one-hour episode when we were doing it was about $1,250,000. A normal TV movie gets in the neighbourhood of about $3 million, which is obviously more than two one-hours would cost. And in our case, because the show had demonstrated that it had some legs, our budgets consistently exceeded $4 million. We always brought the pictures in on time and on budget, but they were always in the $4 million to $4.5 million range, which is what's necessary for the make-up and the special visual effects. For point of reference, the make-up budget on a normal TV movie is about $50,000. On Alien Nation it's $500,000.

“Each head that our aliens wear can only be worn one time. After that they're thrown away because they tear and they can't be put back on. Each one is carefully crafted, hand-painted by our little cottage industry out in the San Fernando valley. And it takes an enormous amount of time and effort and supervision on the part of Rick Stratton, our make-up supervisor.”

What is the likelihood of further Alien Nation telefilms, or even a new series?
“The likelihood of more Alien Nation films rests solely on how well the last movie performs. It has yet to air. It is called The Udara Legacy and Fox still has yet to schedule it, although I anticipate that it will be shown sometime during the Spring or early Summer on Fox. If it does well, then they may order some more and we may see them in late 1997 or early 1998. If it doesn't do well, then we all will feel very pleased that we got to make at least five more TV movies when we thought the show was dead and gone. We all really counted our blessings over that one.”

How well is the production of Steel coming along?
“The production of Steel is going very well. I'm dictating these as I drive back and forth to Pasadena where we have our first audience preview tonight. So it will be the first time an audience has seen the movie. I'm very proud of it. It looks very good. It's a friendly action-adventure about a real guy who becomes a sort of blue-collar Batman. He's played wonderfully by basketball star Shaquille O'Neal who was completely charming and captivating as a hero. Everybody who has seen the movie so far has had good things to say about it, and I'm certainly hopeful that tonight's audience on Pasadena will not throw tomatoes at us.”

What can we expect from Steel that will set it apart from the current crop of comic-book-based superhero movies?
“I think the main thing that sets Steel apart from the current crop of comic book heroes: first of all, I've avoided those ever since The Incredible Hulk. I've had dozens of offers to turn some comic book or other into a movie or a television show or a TV movie or something. And I've always turned them down because I can't deal with people in funny costumes. When they first approached me about Steel, my first question was: 'Does he wear a funny costume?' And once I convinced them to take the cape off and just leave it as a high-tech suit of Kevlar - a suit of armour to protect him from the bad guys - then it became more palatable for me.

“I think the key difference between it and... well, there are several key differences. One is the budget. The Batman budget is about $100 million and mine was about twenty. But that's really in keeping with the organic nature of the show. Instead of operating from a sort of Bruce Wayne financial base with Wayne Manor and the Batcave and all of that, my guy operates from a junkyard in the ghetto area of Los Angeles and is a very real guy that has to piece together stuff himself. At the same time, he believes earnestly in what he's doing and that makes him a real hero. The key for me throughout has been to keep him absolutely as real and all the effects as realistic as they could possibly be so that an audience seeing the movie will say, 'Yeah, this is really happening.'

“I'm also excited about the fact that the female lead in the picture, her character is written as a paraplegic and she's in a wheelchair through most all of the movie. And the Hasbro toy company I understand, as they fashion their dolls to go into toy stores, they're actually making a doll in a wheelchair, which I'm very excited about. I think it'll probably be the first mass-marketed handicapped doll. I think that's terrific mentally for handicapped youngsters to be able to play with, but also for able-bodied kids to be able to think about what it's like to be in a wheelchair and to see that just because you're in a wheelchair you don't have to be handicapped. Which is one of the lessons that my heroine learns in the course of the story.

“If everything goes on schedule, the movie should be released in late Summer on '97, and I certainly hope that you guys over there enjoy it as much as we've enjoyed making it.”

website: www.kennethjohnson.us
interview originally posted 14th January 2007

interview: Andrew Jones (2007)

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Andrew Jones, director ofThe Feral Generation, kindly agreed to an e-mail mini-interview in June 2007 and sent me these terrifically detailed answers.

What were your original intentions for The Feral Generation and how close is the finished film to what you originally intended?
“I started researching the script back in 2005. I basically just wanted to do a love story in an unconventional setting. I came across an article in a British newspaper which talked about how the Home Office had released statistics which showed that there were up to 60 people aged between 16 and 24 in every inner city in the UK living lives similar to those depicted in the film. The press had dubbed this group 'the feral generation'. I knew when I read that article that it was definitely the perfect backdrop - and title - for my unconventional love story.

“So I did some meticulous research, speaking with homeless people and drug addicts as well as people who had been sexually abused and raped. In fact, pretty much all of the experiences spoken about by the characters in the 'interview' sections of the film are very close to the stories told to me by the people I spoke to during my research. When I first wrote the script I envisaged making it along similar lines to my first feature film Teenage Wasteland, ie. self-financed for a few grand and starring unknowns. But of course, the opportunity came to make it at a higher level than that so needless to say the finished film is everything I wanted it to be and much more.”

How did you get two well-known TV actors aboard and how did that benefit the production?
“I'd always been a fan of Brooke Kinsella and Ray Panthaki. I had thought of Brooke for the film when I first finished the script. I had seen her many years earlier in a film by Peter Kosminsky called No Child of Mine. I think she was only about 13 at the time and she played a young girl who was abused and it was an incredible performance. I'd followed her career with interest since then so when I finished writing the character of Nikki I knew there was only one actress who I wanted to play it.

“So I tracked down Brooke's e-mail (through means probably more in keeping with a stalker than a film director!) and e-mailed her, telling her all about the script and the character of Nikki. She got straight back to me and was really enthused and interested in the role. So I sent her a script and she read it straight away and loved it. What I didn't realise at the time was that she was, and still is, a couple with Ray Panthaki in real life. Ray had just come off co-producing Kidulthood which was a gritty urban drama. At the time he'd been reading a shitload of similar scripts, looking for his next project. Brooke passed him The Feral Generation and it was right up his street. So Ray indicated his interest in playing Vincent and I basically bit his hand off, having been a fan of his work for many years.

“I remember when I first met them both in a Covent Garden hotel in London. The minute they walked in I just knew I'd found my leads. Then spending a lot of time with them I noticed a real natural affection between the two of them and realised that with such a genuine chemistry they were gonna make my job a lot easier! It's strange really but from the first time I met them I had no doubts in my mind whatsoever about whether they could carry the film.

“A lot of people knew them from the soap EastEnders but I was more interested in them because of some of their great independent film work and TV dramas. But EastEnders did give them a pretty high profile and with Ray coming on board as a producer on the flick I think their profiles were a big help when it came to raising the budget. I don't think our investor would have been so keen to put so much money in if we had cast two inexperienced unknowns in the lead roles.

“But at the time none of that occurred to me. I cast them because I think they're two of the most underrated actors in Britain and I couldn't picture any other actors as Vincent and Nikki. I now feel very proud that they not only agreed to do the flick but gave such passion and commitment to the roles. If they don't win awards for their performances next year I pledge to run through Swansea city centre wearing nothing but a cheeky smile!”

What did you learn on Teenage Wasteland that you were able to apply to making The Feral Generation?
“I learnt how to be a director making Teenage Wasteland and certainly learnt by my mistakes. I never went to Film School or had any education on how to be a director so that film was my learning curve. I can't really go back and watch Teenage Wasteland now because I'd just be critical, knowing so much more now than I did then. But I think it's important as a film-maker to make mistakes on your first production because you become a better director for it. I think you're in trouble if you make a perfect flick first time out because you don't learn anything. In hindsight Teenage Wasteland allowed me the perfect opportunity to test drive some of the things I did in Feral, such as counterpointing music and trying to present potentially contentious issues in a non-judgemental way. I learnt so much on that first film that by the time it came to directing The Feral Generation I knew exactly what I wanted and how to get it.”

Is the film intended to make a political/social point or is it just an exploration of character and situation?
“I was certainly interested in bringing the lifestyle of the so called 'feral generation' to an audience and giving them a glimpse into a world very unlike their own. But I didn't set out to direct from the top of my soapbox and make an overtly political movie; I'm a film-maker, not a politician. I hate the fact that people like Bono from U2 try to be so political. That guy is a musician, not Jesus; he should know his place and shut the fuck up about saving the world!

“So I'm not trying to be any sort of spokesman for social issues. I just took a socially relevant issue and made it the backdrop for what I felt were two interesting characters. I wanted to do an unconventional love story between two characters that audiences don't usually see as the protagonists in a movie. In Hollywood now their lead characters aren't even allowed to smoke! I think the notion that protagonists in movies have to be totally ‘pure’ to be relatable is bullshit. Every person has their good points and bad points so as a film-maker why not embrace the flaws in your characters? I think audiences are not given enough credit and are sick of seeing these cookie-cutter, mainstream movies where characters are morally black or white. I know I am. I hope every movie I make will have lead characters who are a little fucked up. It's just more interesting to me.”

How has the film been received so far and what are your distribution plans for it?
“The film has only been seen by a test audience consisting of regular filmgoers and at an industry screening but it's been highly praised by all who have seen it so far. What I've actually found interesting is the conflicting perceptions of the lead characters by people of different ages. I've found that people in their twenties, for instance, really care for the characters and seem to even relate to elements of the relationship between Vincent and Nikki. However people in their thirties and forties find the characters pretty scummy and dislikable. I think that says a lot about the different generations and their perception of the world. Either way, it seems to be unanimously acknowledged that the two central performances are brilliant, even by people who found the subject matter depressing as hell!

“Regarding distribution we've had tremendous interest as a result of an industry screening and are currently in talks with a number of distribution companies. I don't want to say too much but I'm really excited about some of the high profile companies we're talking with and we could potentially have some very exciting news about the distribution of the film very soon. What I can say with confidence is that the film will definitely see a modest theatrical release in the UK by the end of the year. Personally I'm pushing for the film to be marketed like one of Richard Curtis' cheesefest love stories. Then an audience going in, expecting a story about some floppy haired posh twat getting the girl in the end, will have the shock of their lives when that rape scene comes along!”

How did you get attached to the remake of The Driller Killer and what are your plans for that film?
“My production company Masterplan Film Productions got together with Ray Panthaki's production company Urban Way Productions and approached the US-based rights holder of the original film, who had actually been interested in doing a remake of it for a couple of years. So we basically combined our plans and are currently just a few formalities away from finalising the financing. Contrary to previous reports on the net we won't actually begin shooting until early 2008.

“There's a real fashion for remaking cult classic horror films now and there is a frustration amongst horror fans because the remakes are usually needless and inferior. In fact I visited a lot of horror film forums to talk with horror fans when the news of the remake spread all over the internet. It was funny because people would start threads and flame the shit out of me for doing it but then when I got involved in the chats people suddenly became a lot nicer about it!

“But no matter how much some horror fans might dislike the idea, I'm still very excited about remaking The Driller Killer. Although the first film had a great concept I think even Abel Ferrara would admit the execution could be a lot better with a bigger budget and name actors. I know we're gonna create a horror film that does what a lot of modern horror films fail to do - which is give an audience characters they actually give a shit about and a story that actually delivers the scares.

“Because we're not shooting The Driller Killer until 2008 I've been offered the chance to shoot another project on a similar six figure budget to The Feral Generation this year. When it came to deciding what that project would be, I realised that I wasn't finished with the characters of Vincent and Nikki just yet. So the script is complete, known actors are attached and a budget is in place for The Beautiful Outsiders, a sequel to The Feral Generation which follows the lives of Vincent and Nikki six years on from the original. Shooting begins later this year.”

interview originally posted 12th June 2007

interview: Andrew Jones (2012)

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Last time I interviewed Andrew Jones he was a director talking about his gritty, powerful dramaThe Feral Generation. Four and a half years on (in January 2012) he’s a producer talking about a Welsh ‘re-imagining’ of Night of the Living Dead! As ever, he provided detailed, fascinating answers to my questions.

What is the legal/copyright situation with regard to calling a film Night of the Living Dead?
“The original 1968 film fell into the public domain after the original distributors failed to put a copyright notice on the original prints of the movie. This has resulted in various distributors around the world being able to release the film without a licensing fee and for producers to be able to remake it. Obviously this isn't particularly pleasing to the filmmakers behind the original film and there are many fans of the original who have criticised filmmakers and distributors who take advantage of the public domain status. I understand the criticism but all of the filmmakers behind the original film have gone on to have successful careers and are now multi-millionaires as a result of success they've achieved with their subsequent films. So it's not like by using that title we're pissing on people who are in poverty.

“Getting a film financed is a difficult process and the current climate dictates that something with a known title has a far greater chance of investment than something original. That may sadden some people but that's just the way it is. Film-making is a business and a hard-nosed one at that, so you have to try and play the game if you want to get a foot on the ladder. Ultimately once you make money for someone else you will get the opportunity to do a wider variety of projects.

“Some fanboys have accused us of exploitation but that's what the film business is! Every film made happens because the producers or studios feel they can make money out of exploiting a concept that appeals to a particular demographic. But where we differ from the studio remakes is we have the independent freedom to do something unique and different with the Night of the Living Dead concept. Just because we have a known title that's no excuse to make a shit film. We've worked hard to make sure we make a good movie that will please horror film fans, because ultimately we are horror fans ourselves.”

To what extent, if any, does Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection tie into the existing continuity of the original NOTLD or any of the various sequels/remakes?
“There are some familiar characters from the 1968 film and there are some elements of the story that play on the audience's knowledge of the original. But we use that knowledge of the original to surprise the audience with plot twists as we take the characters and story in a new direction. The best thing about having a concept that's been done to death is people are familiar with it. So we've had great fun using that to mess with people's expectations. Anyone who goes into this film expecting a retread of the original film is going to be very surprised.”

In an age when video shelves are awash with zombie films, what makes NOTLDR different?
“I guess the most obvious difference is our setting! I don't remember a zombie movie set in West Wales with Welsh characters before. But beyond that, our characters have emotional substance and there is genuine suspense and atmosphere throughout the film. There is also an underlying social conscience as the story touches on very topical issues such as how the younger and older generations react so differently in times of crisis, as well as universally relatable family dynamics. So I believe we have a lot more going on beneath the intestine ripping than other low budget zombie movies.

“I wish I could be more specific about the elements of the plot that make this different but that would involve giving away major spoilers! In this age of technology when plot details for movies are often revealed by someone on the internet before filming has even been completed, we are happy that so far we've managed to keep our big plot twists secret. The less you know going in the more impact the twists will have.

“Although we will no doubt be measured against Romero's movie, comparing the two films is pointless. The original is a classic and no matter how good a film we make we will never match the cultural and cinematic impact of that film. Bottom line is we're not looking to make The Godfather Part II. This is not high art. We've made a gritty low budget horror film that has all of the elements genre fans will love; suspense, intensity, gore etc. When those things are done well, you have an enjoyable horror film and that's what we have here.

“What I've found interesting about some of the criticism on message boards is that people point out that this film is low budget like that's a bad thing. It's amusing to hear that because those same fans complain about how studios remake the horror classics with big budgets and as a result the remakes have none of the gritty charm or soul of the original films. Every great horror film I've ever loved, without exception, has been a low budget affair. The original Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Hills Have Eyes. There's something about the stripped down, gritty quality of low budget horror that makes it a far more visceral and frightening experience than the glossy studio movies. As a horror fan I long for the return of the quality low budget horror that we saw in the '70s and '80s, so as a producer I want to make horror films that try to recapture the vibe of that wonderful era.”

How did you and director James Plumb come to work together?
“We originally met a few years back and talked about working together then. But at that point I had a lot of different balls in the air so it didn't happen. But I've long admired James' short films and I noticed how creative he was able to be with a shoestring budget. I've often thought that low budget separates the men from the boys. A great director will be able to use the budgetary limitations to his advantage and come up with unique ways to shoot. James has always been able to do that. So when I envisaged a low budget British re-imagining of Night of the Living Dead I knew James would be the right director because he is a great visual storyteller. He doesn't see a limitation, he sees a challenge.

“I had an opening scene I had written for a previous unfinished script called ASBO of the Living Dead. We took that as the opening scene for this project and discussed ideas for a new approach to the original story. It was clear we were on the same page creatively as we loved the same horror movies. I wrote a bare bones first draft in five days and then I turned it over to James and told him to make the subsequent drafts his own. After two months the script was complete and then we secured our financing from Independent Moving Pictures to begin production.

“I believe a producer should always allow a director to make the film his own. Otherwise what's the point in hiring someone else to direct? Although I've directed before I never had any desire to muscle in on James' territory during the filming. That's because he is a remarkably assured director with a clear vision. Having someone like that in charge of the creative direction of the project makes my job as producer so much easier. I can concentrate on the business side of the film knowing that the creative side is in the right hands.

“I always think projects run into trouble when you have producers and backers trying to have too big a say in the creative process, you end up with a script or film without a distinct authorship and inevitably the working process becomes a strained one. I think it works best when the producer concentrates on the business and administration aspects of the project, and the director focuses on the creative. That's how the working relationship between James and I has developed and hopefully it'll carry through as successfully on many other projects in the future.”

Apart from producing NOTLDR, what have you been up to since The Feral Generation?
The Feral Generation was a satisfying creative experience but after filming it turned into a bit of a nightmare. We had four producers who all had something good to offer, but they all had different ideas for the direction of the project and even though the film had DVD distribution offers it wasn't commercially released because of disputes between the producers. I don't think one particular individual was at fault, I just think too many cooks spoil the broth. I didn't exactly cover myself in glory either, I was clueless about the business side of film-making and I acted like a total prick back then. Now I would have handled that project a lot differently. But ultimately the experience set me in good stead and since then I've had other interesting experiences that I also learnt a great deal from.

“After Feral I tried to get a project off the ground called The Beautiful Outsiders, which was a Bonnie and Clyde style movie set in Wales. We initially had great fortune with it, managing to get a lot of ‘name’ actors involved in supporting roles and securing Michael Douglas' son Cameron in the lead role. Cameron became an associate producer on the project and was set to bring in his father as Executive Producer. We were well on course to have the whole project financed at that stage and then Cameron got busted in America for being a crystal meth dealer.

“Of course that was a great surprise to me because he had been nothing but professional in my dealings with him. It was a strange time, I had People Magazine, gossip website TMZ and British newspapers contacting me to dish the dirt on Cameron, asking if he had used drugs during the development of our project and stuff like that. So we ultimately had to distance ourselves from Cameron and we released a statement to the press confirming we had terminated our agreement. Unfortunately in doing so we lost out on financing the film with Michael Douglas' involvement.

“We tried to rescue the project by quickly replacing Cameron with Lost Boys actor Corey Feldman but what we found out is that Corey is not seen by certain people in the industry as a financially viable leading actor. The amount of agents and investors who told me that because of his reality TV work he was not someone they wanted to be associated with was extraordinary. It's a pity, because I think Corey is a really good actor who still has a lot to offer. At that stage the project was becoming more trouble than I felt it was worth so I sold the script to a US production company and moved on.

“Around the same time I was also attached to write and direct a remake of The Driller Killer and that looked promising, but ultimately it became clear that the two individuals who held the rights to the original (one of whom was Abel Ferrara) were never going to reach an agreement on financial terms. So after a year or so of wrangling and negotiation it didn't happen. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

“After that I did quite a few writing jobs. One of the commissions I had was from Ovidio Assonitis, the producer who gave James Cameron one of his first directing gigs on Piranha II: The Spawning. I wrote a remake of the 1974 Exorcist rip off Beyond the Door for his company KOA Entertainment. That was a pretty fun script to write, but after turning in the second draft Ovidio wanted to take the story in a direction that I wasn't interested in going, so I bowed out at that point. I don't think they've made the movie yet, although I'm sure they plan to at some stage.

“In the last couple of years I've done associate producing on other people's projects and ended up becoming more interested in producing than directing. Moving into producing was also influenced by my experience on The Feral Generation. I was powerless on that project because I didn't have my own production company involved and I wasn't a producer. Now on everything I do my company North Bank Entertainment has a controlling interest because I don't want to be in a situation where the production and sale of my movie is at the mercy of other people.

“Creatively, I've also moved away from wanting to make dramas. From a business perspective, gritty dramas have a limited commercial potential. Thinking about the wider UK indie scene, I'm sick of so many British films being kitchen sink dramas or mockney gangster films. I think we should be concentrating on making a wider variety of genre pictures and it's nice to see that many independent producers in the UK feel the same way. From a personal viewpoint, I feel horror movies are my true calling. I grew up watching little else. I had Freddy Krueger's image on my birthday cake when I was six years old! Kind of twisted when you think about it because the character is a child killer, but I loved those movies from a very young age. So it feels natural to now be making horror films.

“My school of thought on film producing is very much the same as Roger Corman's approach. Find a concept that makes sense creatively and financially, then produce the film economically and utilise new talent. Hopefully, North Bank Entertainment will help shine a light on undiscovered British talent and launch a lot of careers. I've no interest in moving to London or LA so we're trying to create our own little indie film factory here in South Wales.”

Finally, what is your own favourite zombie film?
“Obviously the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are classics but my favourite zombie movie has always been Day of the Dead. I enjoyed the more thoughtful approach to the material that film had. It tackled the philosophical questions of a scientific approach versus a military approach, plus it had the best special effects of any Romero zombie film. The characters were also great in that film: Logan, Bub and Rhodes. I could watch Joe Pilato as Rhodes all day long, it's such an enjoyable performance. ‘Choke on 'em!’”

interview originally posted 5th January 2012

interview: Jonathan Jones

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Jonathan Jones played Paul in Julian Richards’ filmSummer Scars. I interviewed Jonathan on set in South Wales in August 2006.

What can you tell me about Paul?
“Paul’s the leader of the group. He’s the biggest one and the head dog, as you might say. He’s got a bit of a mystery to him because of what happened to his brother with the car accident where he lost the use of his legs. So he’s sad but he still keeps a straight face. Above that, he’s quite a violent person!”

How did you get this role?
“I auditioned for it through my agent in a group audition. Then I got called back for a recall for three different roles in this film. Then I got a recall a couple of weeks later, saying I’d got this part. Then a couple of weeks later I got the script sent to me.”

For the auditions, were you just reading sides?
“The first audition, it was totally improvised, everything was improvised. The second audition was reading from script.”

How old are you and how old is the character?
“The character’s fourteen but I’m seventeen in two weeks so there’s a big difference. He’s an oldish-looking fourteen-year-old boy.”

What have you done before this?
“I’ve done mainly extra work. Quite a lot of extra work, actually. It’s experience anyway, isn’t it? And I’ve done Screen Gems which is ten-minute films and half-hour films and that. I’ve done three series of Treflan [? - MJS] but that was extra work as well.”

So you’re used to being on a set?
“Oh yes, I’ve been doing it about six or seven years.”

Is this something you want to make a career out of?
“It’s more of a hobby of mine. I enjoy it. I would make it as a career but it’s hard. You’ve got to know people. I’m certainly getting there but it’s going to take a couple of years.”

How are you finding the experience of a lead role?
“It’s all right. It’s stressful at times but it’s okay. I’m in every day of the shoot so it’s tiring as well, but apart from that it’s a laugh. Everyone’s really fun round here.”

Are you going to do some of the riding on the moped?
“Yes, we’re doing that now. I’m the only one who can actually ride a moped properly, out of the whole cast! I ride motorbikes now and again so I’m sort of in charge of it at the moment.”

How are the actors getting on? Do any of you know each other?
“Well, me and Ben, which is my brother in the film - his real name’s Chris Conway - we go to school together and so does his brother Ryan. Everyone else in the cast we’ve met in the last three weeks and we’ve all just really got along. Ryan’s the only boisterous one. He’s loud and he has his times but apart from that, he’s all right.”

Do you have other work lined up?
“It’s just this at the moment. Apart from that, I don’t know. I just finished Young Dracula, doing extra work in that. I might go up to London for a couple of weeks and just try my luck up there.”

interview: Peter Jones

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I interviewed Peter Jones by telephone on 18th January 1998 for a feature that I was writing for SFX to celebrate the twentieth anniverary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For some reason, despite being very approachable and delightfully avuncular, Peter was very, very rarely interviewed so I took the opportunity to ask him about his other work on radio and TV and in films, as well as his writing. Peter Jones passed away two years later. An extract from this was used in the SFX article and the whole thing was printed in the Hitchhiker’s Guide fan club newsletter but I think it deserves more widespread exposure. Peter Jones passed away in 2000. A few years later, when Hitchhiker's Guide returned to Radio 4, Peter's role was taken by his good friend William Franklyn.

Do you remember when you were first approached about the radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
"Well, I was in Cornwall doing a bit of work, writing. A script arrived in the post from the BBC and they asked me to read it, said they were thinking of doing a pilot and was I interested. I read it and I must say I was fascinated. It was such a very different style to anything I’d been asked to do before, so I told them I would be very interested. It was Simon Brett who was in charge of it then; he sent the script."

That would be summer 1977?
"I don’t know what time it was, but if they say it’s twenty years then it must be, I suppose. Didn’t take long to get underway."

You recorded all your stuff on your own.
"Yes, that was rather boring in a way because I like meeting other actors. It’s always fun to be with a group."

Was it just going to be a six-part series, or were they looking at expanding it?
"Oh no, I think they just thought it was six. I didn’t get the impression that many people at the BBC were all that enthusiastic about it. They were a bit tentative."

When did you realise that it was starting to really take off?
"Well, good Lord. We’re talking twenty years ago, aren’t we? I don’t know. I suppose when they asked me to do another series."

Was the second batch of six seen as all one series, or was the Christmas episode seen as a one-off for recording purposes?
"Again, you’ve got the advantage of me because you’ve got figures there in black and white. But I don’t remember that."

Douglas Adams is famous for being very, very late with his writing.
"Yes, he was. He was very late. Twice I turned up at the studio on the appointed day and there was no script so I was sent home."

It’s said that Douglas wanted a Peter Jones type voice but tried several people before he thought of Peter Jones. Were you aware of that at the time?
"(laughs) No, no."

Do you mind being thought of as 'the voice of Hitchhiker’s Guide' even though you’ve had a long and varied career?
"No, I don’t mind. It was very popular. I’ve been very fortunate with things I’ve done on the radio. I mean, Just a Minute has been going on for 25 years. And then many, many years ago there was a programme with Peter Ustinov which was very very successful."

In All Directions - was that partially improvised?
"Oh it was, wholly really. We weren’t allowed to act without a script so we used to meet and improvise it, then secretaries at the BBC would transcribe the tapes and provide a script. But we couldn’t stick to them; they didn’t read at all well. You know what I mean."

You’ve got to have some spontaneity in there.
"That’s right. So we just refreshed our memory of what the sketches were about and then re-improvised them in the studio. Of course we were at a disadvantage with the BBC because they didn’t have tape recorders then. Peter and I both had one, but the BBC were rather slow. As they always are."

That would be a big reel-to-reel thing.
"That’s right, yes. But of course they weren’t able to edit these discs which they recorded on. Well, they were, but it was very difficult. We had a marvellous producer, Pat Dixon, who was a legend at the BBC, and he really got the thing off the ground, with the help of the late - unfortunately - Frank Muir and Denis Norden."

Another radio series you did was J Kingston Platt. Where did that character come from?
"Well, I wrote it, you see. They were short stories on showbusiness, and he was an old actor-writer type who remembered a lot. I did three series of that. Yes, I enjoyed that."

Getting back to Hitchhiker’s Guide, was it seen as a natural given thing that most of the cast would go on and work on the TV series?
"No, I don’t think so. I rather thought they would probably ask me to narrate it as I did on the radio. But the other people were not all the same, were they?"

I guess you were stuck away on your own in a cupboard again.
"That’s right, yes."

Was there any major difference, from your point of view, between recording the narration for the radio series and for the TV?
"No, none at all. In fact I think I thought at the time: why didn’t they just use that? But there was probably some contractual problem about that."

Were you pleased with the graphics?
"Oh yes, I thought they were terrific, very clever."

There were also the LPs.
"Yes. Well, first they were done independently of the BBC on discs, and we never got much money from them. I think the company went bust eventually."

Stephen Greif says he’s never been paid for it at all.
"Well, I did get something, I know. But I don’t know what. The BBC of course didn’t publish the books either. They were very slow. Years and years passed before they realised what a goldmine they had on their hands."

Were you ever approached to play the Book on stage?
"No, I wasn’t. Not as far as I remember anyway. No, I don’t think I was."

There’s been lost of talk about the film. Have you heard that Douglas has signed a deal with Disney?
"No, I didn’t know that."

It should be in cinemas by summer 2000.
"Well, that would be nice. I mean, if they ask me."

You’d be up for it, then?
"Oh certainly, yes. I know Disney pay very badly, but even so, it must be better than the BBC. I was in America the same time as Douglas when he was negotiating Hitchhiker’s with some other company, I think."

This would be in the 1980s?
"Yes, I think it was. And he was quite optimistic at that time."

Have any of the people who’ve had the film rights ever approached you?
"No. No, they haven’t. No, I was there because I wrote a television show called Mr Big, and it was picked up by an American company. They took an option which they renewed every year for ten years. Twice during that time, they said, ‘We’re going to do a pilot. Can you come over and talk to us?’ and so on, which I did. Unfortunately, it never came to anything."

Was there a British Mr Big series?
"Oh yes, two. It was about a very small group of crooks who were never very successful. Well, they were complete failures really. Mr Big and my wife, Prunela Scales, Ian Lavender and his girlfriend, in the series. There were just four of us. We were living in ghastly situations. They would have done more, had I not done The Rag Trade again for London Weekend, which was a great career mistake."

Why was that?
"Because Bill Cotton didn’t want me to do it for London Weekend, since he’d already turned it down. He didn’t want to do it at the BBC so as soon as London Weekend said they were going to do it he would have liked to have done it, I think. But anyway, he didn’t. He said, ‘You do realise that there probably won’t be any more Mr Big if you do this?’ If he’d offered me a contract to do Mr Big for another two or three series I’d be interested, but otherwise, I just had to go along with it. Bird in the hand."

The Rag Trade originally was in the early 1960s.
"Yes, it was. But then the authors tried to revive it. It didn’t work, because although Miriam Karlin was in it, none of the others were in it. It just wasn’t the same."

I also remember an early 1980s series you wrote called I Thought You’d Gone.
"Oh yes, now that was not successful at all. That was because Kevin Laffan and I agreed that we wouldn’t have an audience - the critics always say, ‘What a pity, the studio audience ruins it.’ - or even canned laughter. And we didn’t have any of that. It was deathly quiet and didn’t work."

You’ve done a lot of films.
"Oh yes, never very good."

Some of them were very good.
"I mean I didn’t shine in them, really."

A lot of them you only had very small roles in. You were in Dead of Night.
"Yes, amazing."

You’ve only got a small role as the barman, but that’s a classic, one of the first great British horror films.
"That’s true, it was."

Do you remember making that?
"Oh I do, yes. Because I’d been really quite ill, with pneumonia and everything, and I’d been to Brompton hospital and they told me that I’d have to give up acting. A very depressing prognosis. Anyway, I went home for couple of weeks and felt good, then I got this little offer and so I did it and I’ve never looked back, from that point of view. Healthwise I mean. And I loved working with Basil and Naunton Wayne. I did a lot of radio with them subsequently."

Was that your first film?
"No, my first film was Fanny by Gaslight. It was not so long before Dead of Night."

Some time in the late 1940s?
"Yes, it would be, that’s right. Again I only had a few words. But that was quite effective because the first scene is in - they weren’t allowed to call it a brothel, but it was a brothel. In order to establish the sorts of things that were going on, I arrived with another raw chap who hadn’t had much experience of life, and we would walk in and I would peep through a curtain into an alcove. I’d say ‘Good Lord!’ and close it. And that is meant to get over the fact that there are writhing bodies inside. Anthony Asquith directed that, and I did work for him again once or twice. Very nice, clever director."

I’ve got a list of your films here.
"Good Lord."

You were in School for Scoundrels.
"Yes, that was quite a nice scene with Dennis Price."

Is that the one where you’re dodgy car dealers?
"That’s right, yes."

Wasn’t that similar to characters you played in In All Directions?
"Yes it was, and I think Peter Ustinov was supposed to be doing it with me, but something went wrong, I don’t know what. Dennis Price was very good."

You were in one of the St Trinian’s films.
"Yes, I was. I think I was in more than one, I’m not sure. And I was in a play that Frank Launder wrote at Guildford. I don’t know when that was. It was called The Night of the Blue Demands. It was a terrible flop. I didn’t really like the script much. I just thought, ‘This man is so experienced, he’ll get it into shape when we’re at Guildford.’ But he didn’t lift a finger. He just came and enjoyed it all, roared with laughter throughout the rehearsals, and didn’t do anything.

“But what I do remember is that when we finished our rather dismal run at Guildford, he said, ‘Now Peter, we’re going to do this again. So don’t do anything else until you hear from us.’ And I never heard from them. But then, about ten years later I was in my agent’s office, Richard Stone, and he was talking to Frank Launder on the phone. So at an appropriate moment I said, ‘Tell him I’m here. I’d like a word.’ He handed me the phone eventually and I said, ‘Frank, last time I saw you, you said don’t do anything until you hear from us. And I’ve never done anything and it’s been about ten years now. Do you think I would be free to offer my services elsewhere?’ He didn’t think that was very funny."

In The Magic Box, like most people you’ve only got a small role, but it was an incredible cast.
"It was, yes, it was. It was almost we were working for charity. I don’t know what charity it was. But it was a great thrill to be close to Robert Donat who’s a great hero of mine. I help him to die at the end."

Was it the British film industry finally saying thank you to William Friese-Green, who doesn’t normally get the credit for inventing cinema?
"Yes, I think it was. Yes, that’s right."

Lovely film.
"Yes, it was."

At the other extreme, you were in a couple of Carry Ons.
"Yes. I can’t understand it that I get fan letters still for being in that. There’s some organisation somewhere which I wish I could stamp out, where they supply people with photographs of anybody who’s ever been in it. I think they’re very misguided people because I never liked the Carry Ons much. I never thought they were very funny. That’s not the sort of humour that I like, really."

It’s not the sort of humour you’re associated with.
"That’s right. The second one - I was rehearsing Polonius in Hamlet for the Ludlow Festival. They asked me if I’d fit in this appearance in the Carry On, and it rather appealed to me to be doing the two things at the same time. But Polonius was much more successful, I think."

You were in the TV series of Whoops Apocalypse.
"That’s right, yes. I loved my bits in that. Awfully well written."

You were the Prime Minister.
"That’s right, yes. I had a mental condition, I thought I was Superman. Did you see it? You probably don’t remember. I know I had the pleasure of throwing a dog out the window: ‘Go for a walk round the block.’"

I wish they’d repeat it. It hasn’t been on for so long.
"That’s right. I think there were things that offended people, like a huge penis on a truck or something."

You’ve done a lot of guest spots, like an episode of The Avengers.
"Yes, I got a cheque the other day for being in The Avengers. I was amazed."

It must be thirty years ago.
"That’s right, yes. But there’s some organisation in France where they trace that kind of thing and manage to extract cheques from the companies. So I was pleased to get this little present, as it were. But I can’t believe this sort of thing’s very interesting to people. I don’t know what you have in mind doing with it."

Were you in an episode of The Goodies as well?
"God yes. I used to get cheques for that, but they stopped a few years ago. And I used to think, ‘My God, those people in The Goodies - the three of them - must be getting huge amounts because there were so many episodes.'"

But they don’t show them any more.
"They’re a little bit old hat, are they?"

A lot of people would like to see them.
"Of course, the BBC throw a lot away, you know."

Have you got copies of most of your films and TV shows on tape?
"No, no I haven’t. I’ve got one or two."

Are you one of these actors who doesn’t like to watch themselves working?
"No, I don’t mind. I often get a bit depressed because I think I didn’t act enough. I underplayed rather often. That’s my normal criticism. I’m sorry that I didn’t come out of my shell a bit more."

Do you wish you could have done more writing?
"I do, in a way, yes. But, having had three children I like to keep working, keep the money rolling in. I’ve just lurched from one job to another, really."

What have you been up to recently?
"Well, I did something called Midsomer Murders. The BBC did a pilot of this last year sometime, and they’ve done now four more and I was in one of them. Two-hour play or film; that’ll go out at Easter."

Have you got anything lined up?
"No, no I haven’t. But I’m quite old now and I don’t have to work all the time. I did last year 13 episodes of something called Titch, which is a children’s programme. I think they’re going to do another 13 and I shall be doing that. It’s very nice, like a pension. It takes less than an hour to do it once a fortnight, and they can negotiate the time, so I’m quite pleased.”

interview originally posted 9th March 2006

Kaew Kon Lek

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Director: Suthas Intranupakorn
Writer: Suthas Intranupakorn
Producer: Suchela Toipan
Cast: Winai Kraibutr, Kongkapun Sangsuriya, Ninnart Sinchai
Year of release: 2003
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai DVD


In a historical prologue we see the evil tyrant Mekin (Thai superstar Winai Kraibutr: Nang Nak, Snaker, Krai Thong) captured and imprisoned, and his lover (Pissara Umavijani) killed most unpleasantly. A series of hooks are attached to her face, which is then ripped off and presented to Mekin. Cool! Distraught, he entombs himself in some sort of magical elixir, awaiting rebirth.

In the present day, Narudom (Kongkapun Sangsuriya: Win Yarn Tee Took Sarb) is the only surviving heir of the Prachart family, who has just graduated from university in India and plans to now settle down and marry his sweetheart Chotirot (Pornthip Wongkitjjanon). Narudom is a nice guy but starts to change when he comes into his inheritance, the palatial mansion known as ‘Payamek Castle’. While poring over an obscure Tibetan holy text about immortality which he picked up on his travels, Narudom accidentally restores Mekin to life - as a vampire.

Of course, like any good tyrant-turned-vampire, Mekin seeks the reincarnation of his lost love, who turns out to be Romanee, girlfriend of Narudom’s best mate Wittawas (Ninnart Sinchai: Body Jumper). Narudom becomes Mekin’s servant while Wittawas and his companions try to thwart his plans.

What we have here is, to some extent, a Thai version of Dracula, albeit a very loose one. It certainly trades on European vampire iconography - all gothic set design, flowing dresses and stone sarcophagi - rather than native Thai superstitions, which makes it both odd and annoying that the DVD has no English subtitles. The above synopsis comes from a couple of summaries that I was able to track down on the web - because without subs the story is simply not followable - but there is much more to the plot. There’s an old man who gives Wittawas a magic ring which not only repels vampires but can imbue any weapon with anti-vampire properties, leading to a scene where a car steering lock magically transforms into a mystical sword. That’s a new one!

There is also a moustachioed vampire hunter who turns up without explanation in one scene to fight a vampire in a graveyard. This is one of three female vampires created by Mekin and she attracts her prey by pretending to have hanged herself. A young man helps her down and is bitten for his troubles. But our Thai Van Helsing appears with a magic whip, causing the vamp to impale herself on a spike. Mekin then appears, absorbs without flinching whatever magic the vampire hunter can fling at him, then takes his vampire bride and flies away, transforming mid-air into a giant eagle (one of several quite good CGI effects).

The film moves into a whole new area towards the end when Mekin calls forth an army of Romero-esque zombies who lay siege to Payamek Castle. Fortunately a squad of riot police arrive - followed by a SWAT team abseiling down from helicopters! The cops blast the zombies with copious amounts of automatic weaponry which has only a temporary effect. Fortunately our heroes, including Van Helsingthikul and his magic whip, are able to reduce the monsters to enjoyably horrific crumbling skeletons with their various magic weapons.

Among the other delights on offer is a scene of Narudom and Chotirot exploring the mansion’s catacombs which features swarms of CGI cockroaches, rats, bats and snakes. These shots are repeated under the end titles, without and then with the effects, which is a nice touch. We also get to see the three vampire brides attack a man underwater - another interesting twist.

Kaew Kon Lek (also known as Immortal Enemy) is an entertaining, well-paced horror flick with enough special effects to keep western viewers interested even without subs. It’s not particularly gruesome, despite the face-ripping in the prologue, and what gore there is on show is only seen fleetingly. The film opened theatrically in Thailand in March 2003 but doesn’t appear to have played any western festivals (making the seven-minute extract that I showed at Leicester Phoenix Arts in 2004 effectively its UK premiere). I bought my DVD, which sadly has no extras apart from 12 chapters and a 2.0/5.1 sound option, from the ever-reliable eThaicd.com.

The cast also includes model-turned actress Thanyaluk Worapimrat, Kanyaphat Unshagate, Kirk Schiller and Luppaporn Jaruchaisitthikul. Director Suthas Intranupakorn, a former cinematographer (Killer Tattoo) wrote the screenplay from a story by Tree Apirum. Cinematography duties on this movie were shared between Vichan Reungvichayakul and Rawi Kruewan (The Hotel).

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 19th December 2004

KillerKiller

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Director: Pat Higgins
Writer: Pat Higgins
Producer: Pat Higgins
Cast: Dutch Dore-Boize, Cy Henty, Danielle Laws
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.jinxmedia.com


KillerKiller is great. Honestly, this is a terrific little movie with an original premise, interesting characters, good dialogue, a thought-provoking ending and - for those of you who don’t really care about such things - there’s plenty of blood too.

Eight serial killers in a maximum security institution awaken one morning to find their cell doors open, the guards gone and the whole building transformed overnight into a state of semi-dereliction. What on Earth is going on?

Now, I know I’m always comparing films to The Exterminating Angel but it is the sine qua non of there’s-nothing-stopping-us-but-we-can’t-leave movies. In this case, there is a dense, freezing fog around the building and when one inmate tries to make his way through he comes back so frostbitten that he looks like someone has dipped him in liquid nitrogen.

So the eight are trapped and forced to examine their situation. Gaunt, shaven-headed Lawrence (RADA-trained Dutch Dore-Boize - Twisted Sisters, Lovesick: Sick Love - who spends his time between films working as a bouncer at a top London nightclub!) is our central character, our point of reference. Irish Rosebrooke (Cy Henty) who admits to having been a goth in his younger days, maintains that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice but the others admit their crimes with varying levels of passion and dispassion.

There’s mentally retarded Perry (Richard Collins) who can’t be separated from his scrap of security blanket; cultured physician Harris (James Kavaz: Siamese Cop, Bean 2) who has a dislike of the working class and is presumably named in honour of the creator of Hannibal Lecter; cheerleader-murdering duo Samuel and Victor (Scott Denyer and Danny James); monstrous Nicholas (Nick Page) who is so psycho that the other seven lock him in the cellar for their own safety; and Wallis (Rami Hilmi) about whom we know very little because he’s the first to die.

Lawrence has his back turned at that point and the question is: who killed Wallis? In fact, it’s difficult to see how any of them could have done it as they were all several feet away when he suddenly collapsed in a pile of stab wounds. Nevertheless, the finger of suspicion points to Harris, as does the knee-in-the-groin of retribution and the headbutt of finality.

But as the others succumb, one by one, over the course of 75 finely paced minutes, we see what happens from their point of view. Each murderer finds himself suddenly somewhere else, where a blonde woman (Danielle Laws) kills him in a suitably gory and apposite way. From the point of view of those around him, death is instantaneous, inexplicable - and bloody. Gradually, the group is whittled down until there are only two left, by which point it is clear that nothing is real - but then what is it, if it’s not real? Lawrence advances the possibility early on that they might all be dead and in some kind of limbo, and while that’s probably not the case, it’s as good a theory as any.

This is not a movie with pat answers, it’s a movie which is ripe for endless discussion and debate, much in the manner of The Descent or The Prestige, to name two recent examples. Who is Helle (as the female character is credited)? Where are the eight men? What is going on?

In fact, whereas I normally praise movies for keeping under 80 minutes, in this instance I felt that the film was a tad too short. I would have liked to have seen more debate about whether things were really happening. Although the question is raised over whether the killer is one of the men or somebody else in the building with them, the former option is largely discarded after the second death and I was hoping in vain that something would happen near the end to make us doubt the veracity of what we had seen and ponder whether it might be a straightforward series of violent deaths at the hands of one of the octet after all. I was also hoping that, once the gang were down to two or three, there might be more suspicion among the survivors, in the manner of The Thing or Ten Little Indians. There’s a bit but it’s not really played up as much as it could be.

In any case. it’s clear from the off that the cause of death is something at the very least supernatural and quite possibly metaphysical or theological. I would have liked to have my doubt stretched a little more. After all, we are relying on psychopaths as our guides in this story, who are not the most reliable or trustworthy people, and nothing improves a film like an unreliable narrator.

But such criticism is churlish when the film as a whole is such a belter. There’s some great character conflict and some wonderful character development as we find out more about each of these killers. It’s a surprisingly talky film but writer/director/producer/editor Pat Higgins (TrashHouse, Hellbride) adroitly balances the dialogue scenes with the gore. There’s also a wonderful vein of very black humour just below the surface, which any film of this sort has to have. Interestingly Henty, Denyer, James and Page are all stand-up comedians.

The acting is good, with a very strong double act between Lawrence and Rosebrook at the core of the film. (Collins and Henty both previously worked with Higgins in TrashHouse, while Kavaz and Laws were also in Hellbride; James was in both.) Higgins’ regular cinematographer Alan Ronald (Jesus vs the Messiah) does a great job on the film which was almost entirely shot within an abandoned Victorian mental hospital. However, the sound has some technical problems and I found some of the quieter bits of the dialogue difficult to make out.

Incredibly, Higgins shot Hellbride and KillerKiller back-to-back (and in that order) during the summer of 2006, with the latter premiering first in November of that year at a film festival in Portsmouth. To have produced something this professional in such a short space of time, while doing post-production on another film, is a heck of a work rate. But KillerKiller doesn’t suffer because it’s clear that Higgins has done all his prep including making sure he has a damn good script.

On the basis of KillerKiller, I have ordered myself a copy of TrashHouse and I am eagerly awaiting a screener of Hellbride.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 30th November 2006

The Killin'

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Director: Kevin Powis
Writer: Kevin Powis
Producer: Kevin Powis
Cast: James Harris, Becky Neal, Chris Stanton
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener DVD
Official site:
www.lastindependent.com

Here is an enjoyable, professional-looking ten-minute comedy horror film from one-man band Kevin Powis (soundman David J Nock, who was a werewolf victim in Full Moon Massacre, is the only other credited crew). It’s a simple tale of three Brummie friends, walking home through the woods, scaring each other with stories about an unsolved brutal murder which occurred in the same spot three years earlier.

James Harris (jokey James), Becky Neal (exasperated Becky) and Chris Stanton (introspective Tod) flesh out their characters into believable and likeable people. Siddique Hussaine (who doubled as stills photographer) rounds out the four-strong cast as ‘the man in the woods.’ The dialogue has gags about Ring, Psycho and Friday the 13th but uses them to illuminate character rather than just show off the director’s video collection.

Powis’ direction is taut and his editing is slick. There are some nice reveals which show that he knows what he is doing with a camera. The sound is good (which can be quite an achievement shooting entirely on location at this level of budget/production) and the photography is crisp.

There are no real scares - the ‘horror’ element is discussed and implied, not shown - but there are some real chuckles. Comedy is the hardest genre for low-low-budget indie producers to work in, but Powis does a good job. It’s not a laugh-out-loud funny film, it’s not meant to be - but there’s a nice, light touch to the characterisation that is deftly handled.

Well-made, fun to watch and doesn’t outstay its welcome. I wish I could say that about more films on this site. The Killin' has been screened at cinemas in Birmingham and Wolverhampton.

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted 20th November 2005

The Killing Floor

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Director: Gideon Raff
Writer: Gideon Raff, Ryan Swanson
Producer: Gideon Raff, Eden Wurmfeld
Cast: Marc Blucas, Shiri Appleby, Reiko Aylesworth
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Reviewed from: UK disc (Revolver)
Website:
www.thekillingfloor.co.uk


Although Revolver are touting this as a horror film, it’s really a Hitchcockian thriller. But it’s a good one and Israeli director Gideon Raff’s next picture should be a real horror movie; he’s attached to the remake of Terror Train.

There is a peripheral horror connection because Marc Blucas (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) stars as David Lamont, a literary agent specialising in representing horror authors. He moves into a fantastic three-story penthouse apartment in the middle of Manhattan and almost immediately his life starts getting more complicated and more dangerous.

Lamont isn’t a particularly bad guy. I mean he’s an agent, which means he could walk under a snake’s belly without taking his hat off, but we never actually see him lie, cheat or steal. He’s just a bit self-possessed and selfish. He treats his PA Rebecca (Roswell’s Shiri Appleby) as a skivvy even though she works incredibly hard for him. And he forgets to make an important phone call which means his brother Bobby (Andrew Weems) doesn’t get a job, then thinks he can make it up to him by sending a bunch of flowers. Or rather, getting Rebecca to send some flowers. He doesn’t even bother to write his own note.

So a bit of an arsehole, but not actually evil. Apart from the whole ‘agent’ thing.

Lamont falls for a downstairs neighbour, the sultry Audrey Levine (24’s Reiko Aylesworth) and throws a housewarming party where he argues with Bobby, ignores Rebecca and fails to get off with Audrey. But his real problems start when a detective named Soll (John Bedford Lloyd: The Bourne Supremacy) turns up late one night with a young man, Jared Thurber (Jeffrey Carlson) who claims that he legally owns the flat because it was his father’s. Soll humours Thurber, Lamont talks with Soll and asks him to speak with his lawyer in the morning who will prove that all the deeds are in order.

But this is one of those thrillers where nobody is likely to be precisely who they say they are or doing what they claim to be doing. Who can Lamont trust as he starts to receive mysterious envelopes containing photographs which appear to show a murder in his home - yet when Soll checks police files there’s no record of a crime at that address.

I liked The Killing Floor because I’m usually hopeless at really, really complicated thriller plots but I could follow this, keeping track of who was claiming to be what and whether they were or not (and who knew that they were). Being critical - it’s kind of my job - there are a few bits that don’t stack up near the beginning, such as a couple of indications that Audrey does not actually live downstairs (which we subsequently discover, she certainly does). I also found myself thinking, as the threats became more physical and Lamont became justifiably panicked about intruders in his flat: you know, you live on your own in a huge home and you’re filthy stinking rich so why don’t you just hire a bodyguard and install him in your spare room?

One also has to wonder how an agent could afford something quite so palatial. What, does he represent Stephen King and Dean R Koontz? Even on 15 per cent of their advances, I’m not sure someone could afford this place. The actual ‘represents horror writers’ angle does become peripherally relevant to the plot but it’s hardly vital.

Nevertheless, The Killing Floor is a gripping thriller worth 90 minutes of anybody’s time.

Among the crew, the most notable name is composer Michael Wandmacher who also scored Revenant, Cry Wolf and the Night Stalker remake. Costume designer Erika Munro also worked on Trail of the Screaming Forehead!

Before leaving Israel for the USA, Gideon Raff was apparently “a best-selling author, a columnist for the country´s largest newspaper and a paratrooper in the military.” That last one is probably just his military service so basically he was a writer. He moved to California, studied at the American Film Institute in LA and had some festival success with a 17-minute coming-of-age film, The Babysitter. His break was landing an internship as ‘assistant to Mr Liman’ on the Doug Liman-directed Bradgelina film Mr and Mrs Smith.

Liman, together with ex-Marvel man Avi Arad (who was impressed with The Babysitter), executive produced The Killing Floor which was shot on location in New York over 25 days in 2006. Raff describes his debut feature as: "Right on the border between a psychological thriller and a horror film. There´s a little gore. The movies I like the most are ... scary, but there´s a human story being told."

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 6th June 2007
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