Evil Calls - world's longest film review (pt.1)

Here it is at last. Seven years after Kannibal and six years after it was actually shot, Richard Driscoll’s fourth feature (or possibly fifth) finally makes it to DVD, self-distributed through Driscoll’s InternetGore website without the benefit of a BBFC rating (which is not strictly legal…). The bulk of this film was shot in 2002 as Alone in the Dark although Driscoll had announced the previous year that he was planning to adapt Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (which he seemed to think was a story rather than a poem).

In a move which is bound to frustrate title purists, the actual release title is unclear. ‘Evil Calls’ is superimposed over a silhouette of a raven, then the two words fade away and the bird shape morphs into ‘The Raven’. So is it The Raven: Evil Calls or Evil Calls: The Raven? Or just Evil Calls? Or, as per the sleeve design and assuming that the three phrases thereon are to be read in the same order as the similarly structured logo for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, is this film actually called The Raven Episode One: Evil Calls?

Who knows? Who cares? I’m not bothered by these things the same way some other horror movie journos are and the actual title is the least of the film’s problems.

In terms of narrative theory and on the basis of the two Driscoll films which I have previously been able to see, the man is an auteur whose work falls into two camps: pictures like Kannibal which are blatantly unoriginal rip-offs and pictures like The Comic which are - please excuse me but I don’t know of any other way to phrase this with appropriate emphasis - Fucking Incomprehensible. Evil Calls definitely falls into the latter category, defying any attempt to establish a coherent narrative (although it does also rip off some better-known films, as we shall see). This picture makes absolutely no sense, both in terms of the overall story and at a more detailed level within individual scenes. Having watched it twice, my belief is that the only way to fit the film into any sort of narrative convention - the only way to effectively understand or ‘read’ the film - is to accept that it all takes place in an alternative dimension where the basic rules of time and space, cause and effect, reality and fantasy just break down completely and no longer apply. I am absolutely sure that this is not Richard Driscoll’s intention (at least, not throughout the whole film) but it’s a fun way of looking at this extraordinary motion picture.

I should stress here that, whatever else it may be, Evil Calls is enormously entertaining. The Comic was incomprehensible and boring but Evil Calls is a rare example of an oft-cited though rarely delivered cinematic genre. It really, really is So Bad It’s Good. Most films which are claimed to be SBIG, on inspection, aren’t. That’s one of the reasons why Mystery Science Theatre 3000 edited down the films it showed and added not just comments over the image but also interstitial scenes with the regular characters. In a sense it’s why horror hosts traditionally intrude into TV screenings to make comments. Yes, on a technical level they’re acting as bumpers to the commercial breaks but on an artistic level they are adding an additional level of entertainment to something which seems on the surface to be an absolute riot but which is likely to pall quickly if it goes on for more than ten to fifteen minutes without interruption. Essentially, the host is there to stop the viewers from channel-surfing by switching the action of the remote from the receiver to the broadcaster, pre-empting what-else-is-on boredom by jumping in to poke fun at the film, elevating mildly amusing concepts to (supposed) hilarity through pointed satire. Bad films simply aren’t So Bad It’s Good when you sit down to view them, they’re just bad. They need a regular infusion of good from somewhere else to be worth the time and effort invested in watching them.

Few indeed are the bad films which can stand on their own two feet, engaging a viewer’s attention for a full 70-80 minutes. As a jobbing film journo and devotee of cinematic exotica I’m probably easier to please in this respect than most people. But I genuinely do believe that Evil Calls is so awful, aiming so high and falling so low in so many respects, that it is actually far more fun to watch than many ‘good’ films which, in truth, are merely competent. By way of example, and before we get down to the review proper, allow me to place on record that this is a film ostensibly inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe which manages to misspell Poe’s name in the opening credits. It really is that gloriously inept and it rarely lets up. Truly, this is like an opera version of Tosca.

I almost used the adverb ‘relentlessly’ in the previous paragraph but Evil Calls is not relentlessly awful. One reason why it succeeds is because it has moments of genuine quality - not least the appearances by Rik Mayall and Norman Wisdom - which serve to break up the film in the way that an intrusive, satirical horror host might (or indeed a few decent TV ads). Ironically, Mayall’s and Wisdom’s scene are consecutive but as the film is fairly short anyway, they provide a suitable midway break. Mind, it’s the performances of the two actors which show quality, not the scenes themselves which are possibly even more Fucking Incomprehensible than the rest of the film.

So Evil Calls is, perhaps, the perfect bad film. It’s not too long, it’s packed with different ideas and themes and it’s sufficiently outré that the viewer can easily see that their incomprehension stems from the film-maker’s lack of talent rather than their own lack of understanding. Above all, it’s deliriously, decisively, deliciously weird. In an interview among the DVD extras, Mayall tries to argue that Alone in the Dark (as was) is not a horror film but belongs in its own subgenre which he calls “fucking weird”. He’s talking nonsense in claiming it’s not horror (though to be fair most of the really gruesome stuff was shot six years after his scenes and probably wasn’t in the script he saw) but he’s spot on with his ‘fucking weird’ subgenre. This is a trippy film, one that might actually start to make sense if viewed through a drug-induced distortion of reality, the unreality on screen effectively cancelled out by the unreality of the viewer’s narcotic-fuelled cognisance. That’s an experiment I’m not planning to try although that has more to do with my clean lifestyle than a reluctance to watch Evil Calls again. Still, who would ever have thought that Richard Driscoll would make a film that, in one sense, could stand comparison with masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Koyaanisqatsi?

The other point which I want to stress upfront is that I did not approach Evil Calls with preconceptions. Until I actually watched the DVD it was - like everything else I review - a quantum movie, inbetween the phase states of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (though there are of course many gradations within and between those concepts in the real world) and only settling into the latter state once I had seen the whole thing. Although I must admit it started leaning that way the moment I saw how they had spelled Edgar ‘Allen’ Poe in the credits. Of course I came to the film with expectations. On the basis of Kannibal and The Comic I fully expected Evil Calls to be rubbish - and my expectations were met beyond my wildest, erm, expectations. Any artist who establishes a consistent style across two or more pieces of work creates expectations but a truly open-minded and honest critic (which I like to think I am) knows that however consistent the artist’s work to date might be, each new piece can surprise and/or disappoint. Just as I would expect a Tim Burton film to be gothic, a Roger Corman film to be cheap and a David DeCoteau film to feature a number of young men without shirts, so I expect a Richard Driscoll film to be, by any reasonable standard, rubbish.

But expectation is not prejudice. Had this turned out to be a masterpiece, or even vaguely competent, then I would be the first person to sing its praises. Let’s face it, I’m the only film critic who ever writes anything about Richard Driscoll’s work so if I don’t give credit where it’s due, who will? And credit is due to some aspects of Evil Calls, as indeed it was due to some aspects of Kannibal (check my review - there are moments of praise in there) although I don’t think there are any redeeming features to The Comic apart from its highly commendable obscurity. In a sense, it’s the flashes of potential which make this film and its predecessor so terrible, serving only to emphasise how crap the rest of it is by briefly reminding the viewer what a real movie looks like.

So I come not to bury Richard Driscoll nor to praise him, only to document, explore and analyse his unique contribution to cinema. If I have a bloody good laugh along the way, that’s just a bonus.

Because of its lack of coherent narrative structure, the best way I can analyse Evil Calls is to take you through it, scene by scene, as I was forced to do with some of the more eccentric Thai films that I have reviewed in the past. In those cases I was hampered by cultural differences and a lack of subtitles but here there is no such obvious get-out clause for the film. Evil Calls simply Does Not Make Any Sense, as I am about to demonstrate. So if you would prefer to enjoy the film without my critical influence, I urge you to stop reading now, go to www.internetgore.com, order yourself a copy and watch it. Then come back here and see if we agree. I’m sure we will. For those who have seen the film or plan to never see the film or don’t care about spoilers - eyes down for a full house.

We kick off with two caption screens: the first verse of Poe’s ‘The Raven’ - with the writer’s name spelled correctly - and then ‘Monday, October 23rd’. Our first actual image is a helicopter shot of two horses running along a beach (are they from Driscoll’s stud farm, I wonder) which then pans to show a car driving along the coast road, a great big, white, open-top thing with fins and all sorts. I don’t know cars so I don’t know what make this is - it’s not any of the ones listed on the House of Fear ‘props’ page - but it looks 1940s/1950s to me. The odd thing is that this footage is sepia-tinted, has fake scratches and is juddery (presumably to give the impression of having been filmed at one speed but projected at another) which I can only assume is intended to make us think that this is very old film. But by the 1940s sepia tinting was virtually unknown and 24fps was universal on account of sound films having been invented. So already we have a contradiction in terms of implied time period.

The soundtrack meanwhile has Christopher Walken reciting ‘The Raven', accompanied by ominous music and sound effects. Back in 2001, when The Raven and Alone in the Dark were still two separate projects, Richard Driscoll attended a Fangoria convention where he told the attendees, “I've already shot Walken's scenes for the movie. This Raven is the Poe story with a Lara Croft spin on the material."

Now, apart from ‘The Raven’ not actually being a story - and let me assure you that there is no ‘Lara Croft spin’ on anything in the finished film - this raises the intriguing question of Walken’s ‘scenes’ of which, er, there aren’t any. Just this reading of the poem, here and then intermittently throughout the film’s soundtrack. The curious thing is that Walken had already recorded ‘The Raven’ in 1997 for an all-star CD of Poe’s poems and stories entitled Closed on Account of Rabies. This was released on Island/Mercury and also featured such bizarre delights as Iggy Pop reading ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and Diamanda Galas reading ‘The Black Cat’!

Walken’s track from the album (which you can listen to on Amazon and elsewhere) sounds remarkably like the reading in Evil Calls although the accompanying music is different. I suppose a pro like Walken would tend to always read the same poem the same way, especially if it’s one of his favourites. There’s no acknowledgement to Island/Mercury in the credits so we must assume that Driscoll did indeed record ‘scenes’ of Walken reading the poem a year or two before he shot Alone in the Dark and several years before he decided to retitle it and its two sequels as ‘The Raven Trilogy’. There’s no other explanation...

Now the car stuff becomes intercut with other footage of various sorts, some of which shows Richard Driscoll (or technically ‘Stephen Craine’, the acting name he uses as there is already a thespian called Richard Driscoll) wearing a check shirt, sitting at a desk in an otherwise bare log cabin. These images are quite heavily pixelated. There are also some exterior shots of the log cabin which sits in the middle of a wood and some extreme close-ups of a manual typewriter typing ‘D E A T H’.

Driscoll examines an ancient grimoire with a picture of a baby on one page and there is a close-up of a piece of paper with a series of handwritten names: WB Yeates, HP Lovecraft, MacGregor Mathers, William Wynn Wescott, Harry Price, Arthur Machen. I would expect most of you to be familiar with numbers one, two and six; Mathers and Wescott were both occultists involved with the Order of the Golden Dawn while Price was a psychic researcher. All except Wescott have Wikipedia entries and you can google him. All except WB Yeats are spelled correctly.

A hand, presumably that of Driscoll’s character, circles Lovecraft and Price. Who knows why?

As Chris Walken continues to recite, we have a shot of a semi-naked woman’s body impaled, through her breasts, on two curved, white horns from an antelope or somesuch; we can’t see her face. We also see that the typewriter has just typed ‘DEATH’ over and over again. And we finish this pre-title sequence with the most extraordinary shot, an image of Kubrickian symmetry as Driscoll’s character sits, immobile at his desk in the bare log cabin. First dark mould (or something) creeps across the floor in stop motion and then blood starts pouring through the walls. Lots of blood. I mean, gallons and gallons of the stuff, falling in scarlet torrents (well, they would be scarlet if all this stuff wasn’t still tinted sepia) and splashing and swirling on the floor.

If that really is Richard Driscoll sitting there without moving a muscle as this stuff cascades all around him, then hats off to the man, he’s a better actor than I have given him credit for. Of course, it may just be a cardboard cut-out of Driscoll or he may have been matted in in post-production.

Anyway, the point is that, apart from the obscurity and anachronism of the scratchy sepia-tinting, this is quite an effective pre-credits sequence although the woman impaled on horns seems a somewhat gratuitous and out of place mix of bare tits and gore. Freudians would have a field day at the use of animal horns to impale a provocatively displayed female torso, wide-lapelled coat held open, out-of-frame face anonymising her sexuality - but to be honest I can’t take this shot seriously since it occurred to me that she looks like she’s been impaled on an impala. However, the ‘gushing torrents of blood’ bit is marvellous. It really is. Who says I never say anything good about Mr Driscoll?

Mind, it’s one image. Images are for music videos, films need stories and characters.

Speaking of music videos, we then launch into the title sequence itself for which the music changes to a modern beat with snatches of Walken’s reading sampled over the top, like a rap version of ‘The Raven’. The title (just Evil Calls, Kim) passes across the screen over what I assumed, on first watching, to just be heavily pixelated footage of naked women. It was only on my second viewing that I recognised one of the women through the digital distortion and thought: damn me, it’s Bettie Page!

I have no idea whether Richard Driscoll knows the significance of the public domain images he’s using or whether he thinks it’s just generic old-time bondage stock, but how’s that for the final addition to officially the Most Eclectic Cast in Cinema History? Let’s just recount them (in alphabetical order): Robin Askwith, Jason Donovan, Rik Mayall, Bettie Page, Christopher Walken and Norman Wisdom - together at last!

Mixing in with the Bettie clips (and with the actual opening credits in red type over the top) are a series of apparently genuine, ‘true crime’-style magazine headlines about notorious wackos and serial killers: Albert Fish, the Boston Strangler, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. These, which have absolutely no connection with anything we will see in the next seventy-odd minutes, are followed by fake newspaper headlines as follows:

Then he tells them about the family who disappeared two years earlier. Rachel asks if the bodies were ever found and Karl assures her they were but Anna contradicts him and says they weren’t. He checks his pack - she’s right. But, but… how could she possibly know? That information was only in Karl’s pack and not anyone else’s.

Well gee, I don’t know. Maybe Gary mentioned it to her, maybe she googled ‘Harrow Woods’ before setting off. It’s clearly a well-documented case. What is spookier is how Karl could have not known that fact when Gary had clearly told him and shown him and when he had not only written it down in his own info pack but made a specific point of omitting it from everybody else’s.

Continue to Part 2