Zombiesaurus

Director: Milko Davis
Writer: Michele Pacitto
Producers: Michele Pacitto, Andy Haman
Cast: Andy Haman, Mia Klosterman, Cooper Elliott
Country: USA
Year of release: 2017
Reviewed from: UK DVD (101 Films)

When I first encountered Zombiesaurus it was just a listing on Amazon. Just a title. But what a title. Boy, that’s how you sell a movie. I knew I had to see it.

A little later, the sleeve image appeared. It was obviously misleading and hyperbolic in the grand tradition of B-movie marketing. After staring at the design, wondering why it rang a bell, I realised that 101 Films had used exactly the same stock library dinosaur illustration that 88 Films (who are presumably either 13 places higher or lower on some sort of arbitrary scale) had already used for Steve Lawson’s Killersaurus.

This week I was in Morrisons, browsing the video shelf as is my wont, and there it was. Zombiesaurus. Five quid. Into the basket it went. It had only been released that very day. Bought it on Monday, watched it on Tuesday, started the review on Wednesday, finished it on Thursday, posted it on Friday and I’ll stop now before people mistake me for Craig David.

I’m not going to lie to you. Zombiesaurus is not a good movie. However you measure it, this is pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. Genuinely entertaining. Not in a snide, so-bad-it’s-good, mocking way. Regular readers know that I would never approach a film like that. No, Zombiesaurus is considerably entertaining in a bizarre and strangely fascinating way, and frankly it’s not without its occasional moment of genuine cinematic cleverness and quality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty much exactly as bad as you expect, just not in the way that you expect.

I think the people who made this can be proud of what they have created. I’m just not sure they know what it is they have actually created. Because it certainly beats the hell out of me.

The core of the story is pretty simple and straightforward, and original too. There’s a bunch of people being chased around a sort of military/scientific/industrial building by a fiercesome, hungry dinosaur. The unique schtick is that this dino can’t be killed because it’s already dead (hence the green, glowing eyes). Furthermore, anyone unlucky enough to become dino-chow returns from the dead as a zombie, also with the green, glowing eyes. That’s pretty much the second half of the film right there.

I have no problems with the second half. Well, I do in fact have a whole bunch of problems, but we’ll come to them in due course. But let’s start with the first half, which really makes very little sense.

We start with a man we will come to know as Dr Wojick Borge (Cooper Elliott) – bearded and bald with a rather alarming cauliflower ear – who is making a shady deal in a car park in the middle of the night, for some reason, with some guy. The guy gives him a box containing some hypodermic needles, each of which has some sort of green, glowing liquid inside it (green and glowing is a recurring motif in this motion picture). Borge accepts this consignment and has, for no apparent reason, a living dinosaur under a tarpaulin on a trailer.

Wait, what?

Never mind because one year later Dr Borge, resplendent in lab coat and bow tie, is teaching a (small) class at a university. Let’s just listen in to some of the lecture he delivers to a dozen or so bored-looking students:

“Why not break the chain? The chain that causes the expiration of life. Why not expand on Darwin’s theory of evolution – and push further? I stand before you today, representing and educating the idea of progressing life. I want to eliminate the thought that forces us to believe that life must end. Remove the gauge.”

Anyone? Anyone got any ideas? Any suggestions what on Earth any of this is supposed to mean? No? Oh well. At least it’s not just me.

It’s not exactly clear what subject Borge is teaching, but it involves a dead cat at the front of the lecture theatre. He injects this with some of the green, glowing stuff and it comes back to life, to the shock and horror of the students. For this misbehaviour, Borge is chewed out by the Dean (Mary Jo Mauro) and given the boot. He will return to our story later. But for now, he’s crossing the road, getting hit by a car and swearing vengeance on humanity.

Cut to a shot of an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, with the curious caption ‘0515 HRS ZULU TIME’. I looked this up and apparently ‘Zulu Time’ is what the US Navy calls the time at the Prime Meridian, so they have a single reference for their ships around the globe who don’t have to wonder whether a given time is ten o’clock in New York or ten o’clock in San Francisco. Except there’s already a perfectly good name for this. It’s called Greenwich Mean Time. Silly Yanks.

Ten minutes in, we finally get the opening titles, which introduce us to five quasi-military types in a Humvee, driving through the desert accompanied by a CGI helicopter. There’s Duque (professional bodybuilder Andy Haman), the muscle mountain leader who someone later says looks exactly like Duke Nukem. There’s Spivey (Shale Le Page), the cocky, slightly crazy one. There’s Stick (Ruselis Aumeen Perry) the thankfully not wisecracking or hiphop-loving black one, Cuchilla (UFC fighter Raquel ‘Rocky’ Pennington) the taciturn, sword-wielding, kick-ass female one and Swat (Juan Gonzalez) the other one. The titles provide the lead actors’ names and tell us ‘Screenplay by Michele Pacitto’ but in defiance of tradition don’t mention either the producer(s) or the director(s).

A bizarre caption now appears – on screen and read aloud – which I think is worth reproducing in full (complete with incorrect apostrophe):

During a great time of peril on Earth, a deranged scientist emerged and took control of a secret military bunker deep in the desert…
Evil would unleash it’s monstrous secrets to destroy Earth…
Five commandos set out to eliminate the threat…
Out of the five commandos…
Two survived…
Out of the two…
One told the story…

What? I mean, what? I mean, right at the start: “a great time of peril” – do you mean a time of great peril? Has this been translated from Japanese?

Now we meet yet another set of characters: four young people in a car, also driving across the desert. Roxanne (Nicole Goeke) is a bimbo, her boyfriend Gunnar (Ben Johnson, who has played Superman in several Justice League fan films) is a jock. In the back seat are Sadie (Mia Klosterman) and her boyfriend Cameron (Adam Singer) who are kind of stoner gamer nerds.

Despite the somewhat simplistic descriptions that I’m using here, one thing the movie has going for it is characterisation. There are nine main characters and they are all different and distinctive. They all speak in different ways and act in different ways and have enough depth to them that they feel like individual, semi-real people, not just off-the-peg cardboard cut-outs.

Except for Swat. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about him. But that’s okay because – fuck spoilers – he’s the first to get killed.

As the kids’ car is overtaken by the commandos’ Hummer, Spivey waves a gun at them and throws something horrible onto their windscreen. And another shot of  that asteroid assures us that there’s just three minutes to impact. And whaddaya know, exactly three minutes later – in both real and movie time – it does indeed hit Earth. Causing untold devastation and destruction and…

Nah, it causes a bright, large, quiet explosion in the background which the kids in the car don’t even notice. It also causes an electromagnetic pulse which takes out their phones – and the car (which is not, as far as I can tell, electric). But evidently it doesn’t affect the Humvee and its occupants who overtook them three and a half minutes ago.

Somewhere up ahead the Hummer has stopped, the commandos get out, the CGI helicopter lands in the background and promptly explodes. Spivey’s rant at this (“Are you fucking kidding me?”) contrasts with his oppos’ insouciance in one of those genuinely clever and enjoyable moments which I referenced above.

Leaving their vehicle, the four youngsters trudge off across the desert (Sadie has an R2-D2 rucksack!) until they come across a CGI bunker in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a security fence. The EMP has evidently cut off the electricity to the fence. Apparently it has also cut off the barbed wire around the top since they climb over with nary a scratch. The door is slightly open, so in they go.

There’s then a considerable amount of creeping around, intercut with shots of the five commandos also creeping around, plus shots of someone (it’s Dr Borge – remember him?) wearing a hooded cowl and a mask that makes him look like the missing link between Bane and Palpatine. For some reason he’s listening to an old vinyl record.

There are canisters of something, labelled in Arabic. There’s a digital countdown timer with 47 minutes still to go. A green gas emerges from some pipes, which prompts Cameron’s helpful instruction “Back up. Don’t inhale that gas.” After which he and his three companions avoid its toxic effects by putting their hands over their mouths.

Elsewhere, poor old characterless Swat, who has somehow become detached from his team, omits to put his hand over his mouth when similar gas pumps out at him – and becomes our first actual zombie. Meanwhile, Duque and co find an old scrapbook, which Stick identifies as “Arabic codex pentagram (something)”, which contains drawings of dinosaurs and some convenient newspaper cuttings:

“Infamous for accidentally releasing toxins into the Colorado River during a stint at the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr Wojik Borge’s government career ended when he was terminated by the US Department of Energy for mental instability and obsessive claims of conspiracy.”

Spivey identifies this as “more of that Illuminati mumbo-jumbo” while Stick avers “I’ve seen some messed-up stuff but this is off the chain.” And the viewer just comments: “What?”

“Borge says,” continues Stick, reading with ease some tiny handwriting in a dark room, “that he has calculated the impending hit location, approximate date and time of impact, but government authorities have repeatedly warned the public to avoid his apocalyptic workshops and events as opportunistic fear-mongering.”

What’s really great here – and it’s only just occurred to me – is that this is an infodump scene which, because of the obtusely unfathomable script, completely fails to dump any actual info.

After Gunnar shoots zombie Swat, the two groups meet up. Then a hologram of a coughing Borge appears to tell them that a meteorite has hit, just as he predicted, and “every major electrical grid in North America will be down for months. There will be mass hysteria and the tartans will be released.”

Listening to that again he possibly says ‘toxins’, but given how little sense this all makes, it might well be ‘tartans’. He also assures them that “the Jurassic monster will be reanimated and America will destroy itself.” Throughout the past ten minutes or so we have had recurrent cut-aways to a large metal crate suspended on a chain being slowly lowered to the floor. Now the hatch on the front of the crate slowly opens. A pair of green, glowing eyes can be seen within. Out emerges… zombiesaurus!

And you know what, I’m going to give some serious props here. This film may have cost about ten bucks and change, it may have a script written by someone who had smoked way too much weed, it may feature large amounts of over-acting so ripe that it just falls off the tree… but the dino effects are pretty damn good. Not Jurassic Park good obviously, but better than SyFy movie crap. It’s a therapod, about eight feet high at the hip, portrayed by an effective mix of puppetry and CGI. Much of the time it seems to be a full-body costume (inhabited by Jason Hagan). Honestly, it’s way better than you expect in something like this. There are nice, Harryhausen-esque movements: the tilt of the head, the swing of the tail. I really dug the dino.

But not as much as I dug what happens next, which is that Duque, cowering behind oil drums with the others, decides to stand up, put down his big-ass gun and walk right up to the beast. He then proceeds to punch it repeatedly around the head until it falls unmoving to the ground, spilling a handful of teeth.

This is my absolute favourite thing I’ve seen in a film this year! It’s only a few seconds but it is awesome in its audaciousness, reminiscent of the gag when Mongo lays out a horse with one punch in Blazing Saddles. Honestly, it’s moments like this which elevate a film like this from crap to ‘Holy crap!’

That’s at the 40-minute mark. It’s followed by 26 minutes of the characters trying to escape the building while avoiding (or not) the not-as-dead-as-they-thought dinosaur and their zombified friends. Highlights include a touching moment between Roxie and zombie Gunnar, an unexpected gunshot fatality in the gents’ toilets, Stick sliding between the dino’s legs then shooting it up the arse, and the astoundingly bloody and protracted destruction of zombie Duque. The pace is well maintained while the editing and camera-work in the fight sequences are genuinely well-handled.

Eventually our three survivors burst out of the building in a (different?) Humvee, just as the countdown timer reaches zero, unleashing a chain reaction of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads across the cities of the world. There is a final incomprehensible, rambling monologue from Dr Borge which I can’t be bothered to transcribe here. Hopefully by now I have whetted your appetite enough that you are determined to view this surreal masterpiece for itself. I want to leave you a few unspoiled moments.

The final scene is these three driving across the desert, only now they all have zombie eyes and voices. Except that they have black and white contact lenses, not green glowing eyes. Now I’m really confused. The whole film lasts 69 minutes before the end credits appear under an extremely autotuned song, starting with a shot of each character that freezes and turns into a comic-book image.

But wait, just as you’re expecting ten minutes of glacially slow, Full Moon-style credits, there’s an extra scene of Stick being interviewed by TV host Cara O’Nightly (Julie Crisante) about a book he wrote about what we have just seen. Or something. Even in and of itself, this little coda makes no sense. She says, “I’m speaking of the fact that the journals had been stolen in the aftermath and were sold for profit.” He replies, “Cara, no-one really knows the full story. I am a soldier and I can say this with confidence: everything written in my bestselling thriller Z Rex – available in hardcover and paperback – is true.”

Seriously: what?

And that is indeed followed by nearly seven minutes of glacially slow, Full Moon-style credits. Director Milko Davis is credited with ‘story’ (and with ‘miniatures’) but not, so far as I can tell, with directing. A bizarre snafu on the Inaccurate Movie Database means that his name is listed there as ‘Milko Davis Main Director’! Davis has two previous features to his credit: Raiders of the Damned and Tsnambee: The Wrath Cometh.

As per Stick’s book referenced in the epilogue, before release this film was variously titled Z/Rex: The Jurassic Dead and also Z-Rex: Jurassic Apocalypse. But fair play to 101 Films, their new title is both more commercial and just plain better. Zombiesaurus. Love it. Filmed in Colorado in February 2016, the movie had a local premiere screening in April 2017, then this 101 Films disc on the other side of the Atlantic seems to be its first actual commercial release. It is, incidentally, an utterly vanilla DVD without even a trailer or chapter selection.

So let’s cut to the chase here: why does Zombiesaurus work as a movie, despite all expectations (and a fair bit of evidence) to the contrary? First, although it’s not a comedy or spoof it certainly doesn’t take itself seriously. Second, although it doesn’t take itself seriously, one can see that cast and crew took the making of it seriously.

But mostly I think it’s that the film has – more by accident than design, I suspect – found a perfect balance between on the one hand unpretentious, well-made, lightweight scifi-horror action and on the other a batshit insane scenario/context. What the hell is all that about the meteorite and its strangely selective EMP? Why does the helicopter explode? What are all the oil-drum canisters and why are they labelled in Arabic? In what sense does any of this take place in a “time of great evil” (or even a “great time of evil”)? Why do the survivors have different scary eyes to everyone else? What’s all that stuff about Stick writing a book? Why does Dr Borge reanimate a dead cat in front of his students? What is the Arabic Codex Pentagram (something)? What happens when the tartans are released? And above all, where the hell has that dinosaur come from?

I really, really don’t understand the story of this film. I understand the bit in the middle, the bulk of the second half when the dinosaur and zombies are chasing them – that’s cool. But I honestly don’t know what bigger story the film-makers were trying to tell. And I really honestly do have to wonder whether they do either. What were they trying to make? What do they think they’ve made? What have they actually made? I don’t know the answers to those three questions but I’m pretty sure they’re all different.

I get sent a lot of films for free, and pick up others cheap on eBay or in charity shops. Only occasionally do I buy a brand new film on DVD, and when I do the question to be asked is: do I want my money back? Or did I get good value? In the case of Zombiesaurus I can state with certainty that I got way more than five pounds’ worth of entertainment. Just the literary enjoyment of spending two evenings writing this review has been worth a fiver.

Somehow, in some way, Zombiesaurus transcends simple dichotomous concepts of good/bad or sense/nonsense. It's an extraordinary, amazing film. Should you buy it and watch it? Hell yeah.

MJS rating: A-

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Director: André Øvredal
Writers: Ian B Goldberg, Richard Naing
Producers: Rory Aitken, Fred Berger, Eric Garcia, Ben Pugh
Cast: Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Olwen Kelly
Country: UK/USA
Year of release: 2017
Reviewed from: DVD screener

The Autopsy of Jane Doe was directed by a Norwegian and is set in the USA, but most sources – including the US distributor – list it as a British film. The IMDb disagrees and says it’s a UK/US co-production, while Wikipedia describes it as fully American (as do, interestingly, the BBFC).

It is a joint gig between two production companies. The minimalist and Adamsian 42 is certainly a British company, based in London, comprised of producers Eric Garcia and Ben Pugh. They were also involved in the production of Monsters: Dark Continent and The Other Side of the Door. Impostor Pictures is based in LA so yes, this is an Anglo-American feature. Should I include it in my British horror master list? Well, I think it feels more British than American – possibly because of the European director – so I’ll consider it a British film made with some American investment rather than the other way round. Plus it was shot over here and it stars veteran Scottish actor Brian Cox. Sold!

With all that malarkey out of the way, what is it about?

Tommy Tindell (Cox) and his son Austin (Emile Hirsch) run a family crematorium/morgue/autopsy service from the converted basement of their house. Is this a thing? Are there places like this in America? Over here, any autopsy is going to be done in an NHS hospital and crematoria are usually managed by the church. But apparently in the States the two are combined in a business that runs effectively out of somebody’s parlour.

The local Sheriff (Irish actor Michael McElhatton: The Hallow, Ripper Street) brings in an unidentified body. She was found naked, half-buried in the basement of a house, the occupants of which have died in gruesome ways, with no sign of forced entry. Bereft of distinguishing features and with no fingerprint match, this Jane Doe body is the best clue as to what happened, and the Sheriff would like cause of death determined tonight so that he can face the press tomorrow (a premise which doesn’t exactly sound believable; murder investigations take as long as they take).

So autopsy technician pere et fils set to examining the body, taking us through the four stages of clinical autopsy: external examination; heart and lungs; digestive system; brain. What they find makes no sense. The woman hasn’t a scratch on her, yet she has some horrific and bizarre internal injuries, as well as certain foreign bodies inserted into her.

While they’re doing this, spooky things start happening. Which get spookier and scarier and more violent and dangerous and swiftly pass the point where they can be dismissed as anything other than supernatural. These phenomena must relate in some way to the mysterious dead body, but how and why? I won’t go into any detail, just say that the revelation of what is happening is quite clever and original, albeit kind of a spin on a very old horror trope.

Though I enjoyed the film, I have a problem with it, which is this. All the spooky, scary stuff is kind of random. There are indistinct figures in reflections, doors open by themselves, strange noises. There’s no pattern and it’s all just general spooky weirdness which doesn’t specifically relate to anything either on screen or subsequently resolved. In short, it’s impossible to tell from what’s going on… what’s going on. It’s all done a lot better than, say, The Haunting of Radcliffe House which was just daft. But I would have liked to have seen a pattern, something which gave us and/or the Tindells a clue as to what is actually happening.

It’s not a spoiler to say that the Tindells do eventually work out what’s actually happening, although I’m not sure there wasn’t something of a leap of logic there. Plus some of their actions are less than logical. At one stage they start a fire. This gets quite scary because of the supernatural stuff that happens to the flames but there didn’t seem to be any justification for starting the fire in the first place. When you’re in an enclosed, underground environment, a fire is the last thing you want.

That said, the script (by two guys who wrote episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Once Upon a Time) and direction (by the guy who made Troll Hunter) are both pretty good. The father and son relationship is well-handled by both script and the two actors, although an early bit about Austin talking with his girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond: Guardians of the Galaxy) about wanting to leave home rather than continue the business goes precisely nowhere and has no effect on the narrative. I spy the stump of an excised subplot.

Brian Cox is very good, as one would expect. His genre CV goes all the way back to The Year of the Sex Olympics and takes in Hammer House of Horror, The Ring, X-Men 2, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Trick ‘r Treat, the 2009 Day of the Triffids, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Pixels and of course the original Hannibal Lecktor (sic) in Manhunter. He played Sydney Newman in Doctor Who drama An Adventure in Space and Time, he narrated The Colour of Magic, and he was Daphne’s father in a couple of episodes of Frasier.

Emile Hirsch starred in the swiftly forgotten 2008 Speed Racer movie and has been in a bunch of other stuff including, at the start of his career, episodes of Kindred: The Embraced, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Third Rock from the Sun. Video game voice artist Jane Perry and Parker Sawyers (Monsters: Dark Continent) play supporting cop roles.

But the break-out star, as it were, is Irish actress Olwen Kelly who plays the naked body on the table, remaining utterly motionless throughout every shot. Apparently she drew on her experience of yoga and meditation. She is now making Dom Lenoir’s serial killer thriller Winter Ridge. As the autopsy progresses, a mixture of astute camera angles and superb prosthetics by special effects supervisor Scott McIntyre (Tank 432, Estranged, White Settlers, The Quiet Ones... Pudsey the Dog: The Movie), presumably assisted  by some digital doodaddery from VFX supervisor Stephen Coren (Ghost Machine, 28 Weeks Later), enables us to see Ms Kelly opened up on the table.

With production design by Matt Gant (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes) and cinematography by Roman Osin (The Rezort).

After a premiere at Toronto in September 2016, The Autopsy of Jane Doe was theatrically released in the States (and Latvia, apparently!) in December. In March 2017 there was a one-night only UK release co-ordinated by Frightfest. DVDs appeared on both sides of the Atlantic three months later.

I enjoyed the film but possibly the effusive praise it received from festival screenings may have raised my hopes too high. As for some of the comments warning of how visceral and gory this is, one does have to wonder whether some critics have seen any horror films before. Nevertheless this is an original and enjoyable 80-odd minutes of supernatural horror, worth a watch.

MJS rating: B+

Bigfoot vs Zombies

Director: Mark Polonia
Writer: Mark Polonia
Producer: Mark Polonia
Cast: Dave Fife, Danielle Donahue, Jeff Kirkendall
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: TubiTV

Despite a filmography of 42 features since 2000 (plus a few earlier ones), this is the first ‘Polonia Brothers’ picture I have watched. I do view a lot of odd stuff but I’m pretty sure I would remember if I had seen Preylien: Alien Predators or Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast or Peter Rottentail or Curse of Pirate Death or Jurassic Prey or Snake Club: Revenge of the Snake Woman or any of the three dozen or so other titles in that list. And boy, do these guys do titles.

I say ‘guys’ but since 2008 when John Polonia passed away, ‘Polonia Brothers’ has been a solo project by his twin Mark. I suspect that’s why there’s a two-year gap between HalloweeNight (listed as 2009) and Snow Shark, after which Mark Polonia returned to his hugely impressive output of two to four features every year.

Unfortunately that’s going to be the only usage of the term ‘hugely impressive’ in this review. Bigfoot vs Zombies is watchable, if you’re in the mood for lacklustre micro-budget tosh, but I’d hesitate to call it enjoyable. Nevertheless it deserves to be noted, if only for its status as a crossover between two otherwise utterly disparate subgenres.

The one thing that the film has going for it is an original setting, which is a body farm. If you’re not familiar with the concept, don’t worry, it’s explained about ten minutes in. A body farm is where dead bodies are placed under controlled conditions in order to be studied by forensic experts. It’s a clever (if gross) concept. If you leave three corpses on the ground and examine one after a month, one after six months, one after a year – then when the cops discover an actual dead body somewhere, the forensics dudes can judge how long it’s been there by the state of decomposition.

Obviously any body farm has to be well away from habitation and protected by a stout metal fence to keep out both intruders and wildlife. The object is to see what happens when a human cadaver is eaten by bugs, not by foxes or bears.

A body farm would be a place where there were lots of dead folk just waiting to walk again, although in real life they would more likely by in shallow graves or ponds than just lying around. And this premise does at least justify why the zombies here appear different to each other, with some merely grey-faced and others having stiff, skull-like masks. Although that may be more the result of there being dozens of zombies but only 11 actors playing them. Even then, we see the same zombies killed multiple times. Also, it pains me to say it, but the quality of this film can be judged by the fact that one of the ‘skull-face’ zombies has been so shoddily created that we can clearly see the actor’s beard underneath the skull…

This particular zombie farm is run by mad scientist Dr Peele (Jeff Kirkendall) and his long-suffering, bored lab/admin assistant Renee (Danielle Donahue). There is a truck driver named Andy (Bob Dennis) who drives around the farm, delivering cadavers to requested locations. And there is a security guard (Todd Carpenter) on the main gate who has no character name. Rather cruelly, the others refer to him throughout the film as ‘the security guard’ despite the fact that he is 25% of the farm’s entire workforce and they must all see him at least twice a day.

Stu (James Carolus) and Ed (Dave Fife) are delivering a couple of new corpses in their van. Stu’s an old hand at this, Ed is the new guy. Stu and Andy both constantly hit on Renee who is repelled by their unsubtle advances but takes a liking to nice guy Ed. So, you know, characterisation.

The problem is that Dr Peele has been working away in his ‘secret lab’ (which is literally an office with a microscope and a couple of bottles on the desk) to develop a serum which will deteriorate the bodies faster. The idea being that he can then process more corpses through his body farm and thus make more money from the local hospital that supplies them. Don’t look too closely at that plan, it maketh not one lick of sense.

Actually the real problem is that, far from deteriorating the cadavers, this serum brings them back to life. Although it is unclear whether this is due to the injections that Dr Peele has given the dead bodies or leakage from the barrel of the stuff which drops off Andy’s truck near the start of the film. Much later, it is discovered that an overdose of this stuff will actually kill a zombie but this is never followed up on, as if both the characters and the director simply forgot this ever happened.

As the dead start to rise, one more character arrives at the farm. Duke Larson (Ken Van Sant) is a big game hunter called in by Dr Peele because Andy has reported that one of the shallow graves has been dug up, presumably by a bear that has somehow got into the compound.

Well, strictly speaking two more characters arrive because here comes Bigfoot. We have already met him in a prologue where he spies on a hiker/photographer (Greta Volkova) who is later munched by a zombie after somehow getting past the security fence. For no reason at all, Bigfoot hides in the back of Duke Larson’s Jeep to get into the farm, where he starts fighting zombies.

The last part of the preceding sentence sounds very exciting and is the nub of this high-concept film whose title basically is it plot. And kudos to Polonia for the amazing sleeve art showing a giant, fearsome sasquatch hurling itself at a shuffling army of the undead.

But you won’t be at all surprised if I tell you that there ain’t nuttin like dat on show here at all, no sir ma’am.

This film’s Bigfoot is, well, it’s an ill-fitting, tatty gorilla suit with a long, shaggy wig over its face. It’s really one of the very worst Bigfoot costumes you’ll ever see. I know the movie isn’t exactly taking itself seriously but nevertheless this is just kind of embarrassing. Uncredited on screen, the actor inside the suit is Steve Diasparra according to the old IMDB and he does at least attempt to give the creature some characterisation, establishing a mute, somewhat touching relationship with Renee.

At various points in the film we do get Bigfoot fighting zombies but it’s all really half-hearted and lame. Basically they shuffle towards him and he pushes them away. In fact, that’s the film’s biggest failing: it is utterly devoid of even the slightest hint of action. There’s gore, certainly. Or at least, there’s fake blood in some scenes as people scream. But obviously they couldn’t afford to get any of that on the gorilla suit as the dry-cleaning bill would have trebled the film’s budget. So we have lackadaisical shuffling scenes, and shots of bloody terror, but nothing inbetween. No actual fast or emphatic movement. Even in dialogue scenes, people just stand around talking. Then they walk somewhere. It’s like they can’t do both at the same time.

There are a few nice bits of dialogue but the quality of the acting is generally poor. Most of the cast have been in various other Polonia pictures and some have other credits at a similar level, but nothing notable. And, for all his experience in film-making, Polonia’s direction remains thoroughly pedestrian. Cut to Renee; Renee says line; cut to Ed; Ed says line; cut to Renee, Renee says line... and so on. There’s no flair here, but there’s also no real sense of storytelling or atmosphere. It certainly kills any potential comedy moments stone dead. There’s no verve, no pizzazz, no oomph in any scene in the entire 79 minutes. And if there’s one thing that a film called Bigfoot vs Zombies should have it’s oomph. I don’t think anyone ever actually runs anywhere in the entire film.

A sequence in which Duke Larson drives his Jeep across the farm, shooting at zombies with a pistol, is probably the closest we get to any action - but there again the direction hobbles the potential enjoyment. We have close-ups of Van Sant in his jeep, and cutaways of zombies falling over, but no shot of the Jeep actually driving past zombies as Larson blasts them out of the way.

Yes, budgets (or lack thereof). Yes, shooting schedules. Yes, lots of other limitations on micro-budget indies. But there are plenty of micro-budget indie pictures which manage to stage action sequences, which manage to film exciting scenes, that demonstrate oomph or just where characters, y’know, run.

The film carries a 2014 copyright date, is listed as a 2015 picture in the sales agent's publicity, and eventually appeared on DVD and VOD in February 2016. Mark Polonia's subsequent films have been Sharkenstein, Land Shark and Amityville Exorcism. You've got to give the guy props for coming up with titles (and commissioning great sleeve art).

I can’t say that Polonia’s movie is the worst zombie film out there, not by a long chalk. Neither am I convinced that it’s the worst bigfoot movie ever made. And certainly within that tiny lozenge at the centre of this previously unconsidered Venn diagram, Bigfoot vs Zombies holds its own – primarily because of the absence of any other pictures that tick both boxes.

But I can’t help feeling that this could have been better, without too much additional effort. It honestly doesn’t look like anyone had fun making it. Maybe they did, but that doesn’t come across at all. And with a film like this, if it doesn’t seem like it was fun to make, sadly it’s not much fun to watch.

Still, it hasn’t put me off watching other Polonia Brothers productions. And boy, do I have a lot to choose from.

MJS rating: D+

Delusion

Director: Christopher Di Nunzio
Writer: Christopher Di Nunzio
Producers: Christopher Di Nunzio, Jami Tennille
Cast: David Graziano, Jami Tennille, Carolyne Fournier
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/thefilmDelusion

Delusion is a laudably enigmatic and ambiguous ghost story. Slow-moving and gentle for the most part, it eventually reaches a bloodily brutal climax but without any sudden shift or jump. I quite enjoyed it.

David Graziano is terrific as Frank, a middle-aged bloke whose wife Isabelle died three years ago. He has her ashes in an urn but we’re never told how she died. As the film kicks off he has received a letter from Isabelle that has somehow taken three years to reach him. This gives Frank a sense of closure which has been missing up to that point and he finds himself able to look for a new relationship.

A mysterious figure in a suit and red tie, who has something of the demonic about him, seems to be following Frank, who starts having bad dreams. He begins a relationship with a younger, very forward woman named Mary (Jami Tennille: American Poltergeist, House of Shadows) but there’s something not quite right about her. Frank goes to see a local psychic who reads some tarot cards and is concerned by what they foretell.

There’s a sense of magical realism to all this, a feeling bolstered by some Mexican-style ‘Day of the Dead’ facepaint. But what gives me pause, and makes the film work, is that we know Frank is taking some sort of medication. Meds which he loses, then finds, then throws away.

Without those pills, this is a fairly straightforward romantic ghost story, with Isabelle (Carolyne Fournier: The Last Halloween) watching over Frank from beyond the grave and Mary as some sort of succubus. But when we consider Frank’s medication, the story shifts so that it straddles the line between the occult and mental illness. Is Mary really a demonic entity? Or just a woman onto whom Frank’s psyche is projecting ideas and (mis)perception? Is she real at all? How corporeal, if at all, is Isabelle’s ghost? How imaginary is she? What about the sharp-suited guy? Is he real, or just an artefact of Frank’s broken psyche?

I always enjoy ghost stories based around supernatural/psychological ambiguity. The final violent scenes of this film can be viewed in a literal way if this is fantasy but offer much more scope for interpretation and debate if we consider that some of what we have seen hasn’t been real, in which case what is the real nature of this violence?

(To be fair, when the psychic hears actual voices that does tend to suggest a supernatural angle. But she thinks she’s psychic so of course she thinks she hears voices. That proves nothing.)

A solid cast and some good photography combine with unpretentious direction and a good script to create a fine slice of thought-provoking horror cinema that raises questions about what is on screen and follow-on questions about the nature of reality and ideas of mental health. A special note is due to Jessy Rowe who provides a lovely, characterful supporting role as a diner waitress with a passion for film noir.

Filmed around Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Delusion premiered at the Hudson Valley Film Festival in August 2016 with a VOD release two months later. Christopher Di Nunzio previously made an award-winning thriller, A Life Not to Follow and some interesting shorts (with some of the same cast and crew).

MJS rating: B+

Doll in the Dark

Director: Alejandro Daniel
Writer: Alejandro Daniel
Producer: Alejandro Daniel, Linda Ayr Calvo
Cast: Amy Crowdis, Robin Lord Taylor, Josh Caras
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: https://www.facebook.com/dollinthedark

Doll in the Dark is an obscure US indie which was shot back in 2009 as The Melancholy Fantastic, played a few festivals in 2011 and surfaced on American VOD and cable in 2012. It generated some good reviews and a bit of fan appreciation then pretty much disappeared.

In November 2016, the film resurfaced under its new, more marketable title when Safecracker Pictures released it on UK DVD/VOD, exploiting the casting of a pre-Gotham Robin Lord Taylor. If you like Taylor’s portrayal of proto-Penguin Oswald Cobblepot, you will definitely also enjoy seeing him in this movie. It’s not one of those situations where a subsequently well-known name has a small role that renders a film inconsequential except for the most extreme fanboys/girls of that actor. Taylor here is 50% of what is essentially a two-hander and his character has the same sort of restrained craziness as Cobblepot. Just younger and less sociopathic.

[Update: Since posting this review, I have been told by the director that Doll in the Dark is a heavily re-edited version, not just a retitling. - MJS]

Amy Crowdis is Melanie Crow, a teenage girl living alone after both her parents died. She has a very creepy life-size doll which she treats as a real person. It’s a home-made, skeletal affair of stuffed limbs and torso surmounted with a cracked ceramic head. Sometimes it sits on the sofa, sometimes it’s in the kitchen, sometimes it rides shotgun in Melanie’s car. There is absolutely no suggestion that the doll is actually alive or possessed or has any independent life. This is not a supernatural tale.

The doll never moves, except for a couple of shots when an arm flops down. Noticeably, we also never see Melanie move the doll, except for one scene later on when she carries it upstairs. Removing that shot would have kept the creepy factor higher, but it’s already pretty high so no great loss.

Melanie meets Taylor’s skinny-jeaned emo character in a public library. It’s quite some time until we find out his name is Dukken, which I assumed was Dougan until the credits. Although it seems odd that we have no scene where he tells her his name, that lacuna is actually justified by a reveal near the end. Dukken and Melanie’s paths cross a couple of times and they start spending time together. Dukken is puzzled by Melanie’s doll but not freaked out by it because he thinks it’s just part of her ‘sick taste’, like decorating her Christmas tree with razor blades.

What we have here is an offbeat love story. Sort of. It’s what happens when someone whose freakish unconventionality is a deliberate choice meets someone whose idiosyncratic, individualistic behaviour and rejection of the norm stems from genuine mental health issues. Melanie is very, very cute but in a damaged goods sort of way. Somethin’ ain’t right.

There are other oddities of behaviour. Melanie seems to survive largely on pink ‘snowball’ marshmallows. When she does vary her diet to include a PBJ sandwich, she uses a large carving knife to spread the peanut butter. She watches 8mm public domain cartoons in a car in a barn, her own private drive-in. Although mostly she just talks to an ugly, weird doll. And occasionally the doll talks back.

This doll, we eventually realise, represents her mother.

Because we see everything through Melanie’s eyes, and because it’s obvious right from the start that she ain’t right in the head, she is effectively an unreliable narrator. As the film progresses, we will start to question exactly what is or isn’t real. All credit to Argentinian-born director Alejandro Daniel, this is well-handled and effective. What really sells this unnerving ambiguity is an absolutely bravura performance by Crowdis who has many solo scenes acting opposite just the doll prop. Taylor’s role is more reactive and his character necessarily shallower, since Dukkan’s persona is his own creation, but it’s a fine performance and I can well believe that this is what persuaded the producers of Gotham to cast him.

There are some areas where the film does unravel slightly, not least that it’s not made clear until well into the third act that this is actually happening around Christmas. Most scenes take place in Melanie’s home or open fields and roads so we don't get any confirmation that this is actually the holiday season and the decorations in her house are not a further represention of her detachment from reality.

This is only a short feature, running less than 70 minutes without credits, and thus doesn’t outstay its welcome, reaching its satisfying third act without resort to padding or unnecessary subplots. Though the final scenes offer some sort of resolution, even a happy ending, we know enough about Melanie (or little enough, if you like) to retain doubts about where this will go after the credits roll. What looks like resolution and catharsis could just be redirection and hiatus.

If that last sentence sounded a tad pretentious, then be aware that Doll in the Dark does on occasion steer dangerously close to the naively mannered angst of sixth form poetry. There are musings on death, there’s a (thankfully brief) discussion of Nietzsche, a copy of The Stranger by Albert Camus is a significant prop and there is a length quotation from Kierkegaard in the credits which seems random now but which originally explained and justified the title.

Fortunately, any time that it looks like Doll in the Dark might tip over into pretension some sort of narrative self-righting mechanism steers it back on course. This is an enjoyable, interesting film which is genuinely thought-provoking. You don’t have to be a loner goth to enjoy it.

Filmed in snowy Connecticut, the movie was offered for sale at the 2012 AFM under the title The Christmas Stranger but doesn’t seem to have been released as that. Director Daniel, who used the screen name ‘AD Calvo’ for the original release, previously made a supernatural romance variously known as The Other Side of the Tracks and The Haunting of Amelia. Since completing this picture he has made three more horror films – The Midnight Game, House of Dust and Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl – plus a comedy thriller, The Missing Girl.

Josh Caras, Geneva Carr and David Pirrie make up the solid, if sparse and sparingly used, supporting cast, with Shirley Knight as the voice of the doll.

Bizarrely, the film has ended up on the IMDB twice, listed as both 2011 and 2016. This may lead to some confusion, but it should be pretty obvious, just from the stills, that Robin Lord Taylor made this several years before the first season of Gotham in 2014.

Doll in the Dark is available to download from the Safecracker website.

MJS rating: B+

The Shattering

Director: Jason Boritz
Writer: Ward Parry
Producers: Pietro Dioni, Malee Nerenhausen, Alex Splendore
Cast: Ben Fritz, Elizabeth Weisbaum, Holly Burns
Country: USA
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: TubiTV

The Shattering is an attempt to make a werewolf film with no werewolves in it. Not in a 13hrs sort of way, where there is a quasi-human transforming monster though it’s not strictly a werewolf. And not in a Lycanthropy sort of way where you’re meant to think there’s werewolves but it turns out there’s not. No, this very definitely features werewolves – characters freely use the W-word – but apart from some momentary POV attack shots, the werewolves themselves are not actually present on screen.

That shouldn’t be a problem. What you don’t see can be very frightening. Implication is all. There are no ghosts on screen in The Haunting but it’s still one of the scariest ghost movies ever made.

What hamstrings The Shattering (meaningless title by the way) is not the lack of actual hairy, toothy wolf-people. Nor is there a major problem with the acting or the photography. It all looks very slick and well-made.

But the script is bobbins. Which is a shame. And the direction doesn’t help.

We know we’re off to a bad start when we have a group of friends driving along in the middle of nowhere at night and one decides to ask where they’re going and why. What, were you drunk or asleep when they bundled you into the car, and you’ve just woken/sobered up? This is just lazy, convenient exposition, and it happens again and again in this film.

There’s a particularly awful bit where one character suddenly decides, out of nowhere, that a particular bit of wall is hollow and kicks it in. She then asks for a light and reaches inside because of course there’s something in there. Another character holds up a cigarette lighter which (a) does nothing to illuminate the hole in the wall because it’s a tiny flame about two feet away and (b) wouldn’t make any difference anyway because the person reaching into the hole isn’t looking into it. From the hole is extracted a locked metal box. Shortly thereafter this same girl appears holding a key, saying it’s what she was looking for, despite not having tried it in the lock. Quelle surprise, it does fit and from the tin she extracts a battered diary – which someone immediately opens to a relevant page – and a VHS cassette.

Despite being filmed (and presumably set) in 2013, there is a TV/VHS combi in the room and the tape plays exactly what they need to see, a moment of found footage nonsense wherein someone keeps filming as they are running away from something attacking their family. Said person then presumably rewound the tape, wrote up a few more diary entries, locked the tape and book inside a metal tin, put the key somewhere else in the house where it would be easily findable, knocked a hole in a wall, put the tin inside the cavity, then plastered and painted over the hole.

As you do.

That whole sequence is a masterclass in how not to progress your story through exposition and infodumps, convenience and coincidence. It’s just awful. Did no-one actually read through this script before making it? Because this sort of stuff is so, so obvious.

The initial set-up, which I’ll grant you is original, is that one of these friends has cancer and her boyfriend is taking them to a ‘healer’ out in the woods. Although that has its own problems because it immediately marks out all these characters as idiots. Drugs can cure cancer (sometimes). Chemotherapy can cure cancer (sometimes). A good diet and exercise can reduce your risk of getting cancer in the first place. But a ‘healer’ cannot cure cancer; all they can do is take your money.

There are some hunters in the woods who put a stinger on the road that gives the car a blow-out and when the driver gets out to change the wheel, he is dragged off into the darkness by something.

Now, whatever did that could be a wolf, a bear, a mountain lion or a particularly angry and strong skunk. Whatever it is, it’s out there. And there could be a pack of them. So what would be the best course of action? Would it be (a) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Close the doors! Lock the doors! Wind up the windows! Whatever you do, stay inside the car! Or would it be (b) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Everyone out of the car and let’s all run off randomly into these woods that we don’t know at all in ones and twos!

Somehow they all make it to an empty, unlocked house where the lights are on. Which is convenient. The hunters take occasional pot shots at them while falling prey one by one to the POV werewolf. Most of the middle act is just dull soap opera stuff about one of the girls discovering that her boyfriend is cheating on her with one of the other girls. Completely irrelevant to the plot.

Eventually there are only three people left in the house, and they’ve read the diary and watched the found footage VHS tape and realised that they are being used as werewolf bait (and that one of their friends may be the kid on the tape). The hunters have chucked a walkie talkie in there so there’s some communication. This one hunter says they should all run out of the house to draw the werewolf so that he can shoot it.

There’s no instruction of which door they should run out of, or which direction they should run, which would seem fairly crucial decisions if their goal is to lead the prowling werewolf in front of the hunter’s gun (they don’t know where the hunter is). There’s some final twist which doesn’t really make sense. And then it all mercifully ends. It’s all ultimately something to do with werewolf saliva having curative properties, or something.

None of the young people in the house are very interesting and I can’t remember any of their names. But at least they’re not as sketchily drawn as the hunters. At no point does it become clear how many hunters there actually are, or whether they are all working together, or who’s in charge, or where they are in relation to the house, or indeed anything at all. Some of the hunters have names in the end credits, some are just called ‘Hunter 1’ etc. What’s the difference? Damdifino.

I would have liked to have enjoyed The Shattering. I’m a sucker for a good low-budget werewolf movie, me. The cast are all competent and the production has been made within its limits. But the script and direction are so poor that, despite my best efforts to like this, I couldn’t. It’s just terrible. It's such a shame.

This is the only narrative feature from director Jason Boritz, whose other films are all documentaries, including bio-docs of Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Taylor Swift and Steve Jobs. The surprisingly Brit-heavy cast includes Yorkshire-born Jaz Martin (who has managed to be in both NCIS: LA and Emmerdale!), Northern Irishman Liam McMahon (’71) and Dorset-born Chris Jarvis (The Bill’s PC Casper, also in BHR entry Dark Rage).

For werewolf completists only, I fear.

MJS rating: C

It Came for Friendship, But Found Food

Director: Guy Gilray
Writer: Guy Gilray
Producer: Guy Gilray
Cast: John Varesio, Catherine Johnson, Angelo Varesio
Country:USA
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: Cult Movies app

I recently invested in an Amazon Firestick – and it has opened up a whole new world of watching for me. As I sit in my man-cave, while Mrs S watches Great British Menu in the living room and TF Simpson watches Cinema Sins on YouTube in his bedroom, I was previously reliant on watching things on my laptop, except for DVDs which got viewed through the TV.

Well, now I have the Firestick, which means when I want to watch shows on catch-up, like Pointless, University Challenge and… well, that’s about it, to be honest; I don’t watch much telly… I can view them on my TV. But there’s so much more. I’m not bothered about Amazon Prime or Netflix or any of that bollocks. I’m not bloody paying to watch television, bugger off. No, it’s all the free apps that are on there which excite me.

For instance, I have found a 24 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop shark channel. Nothing but shark documentaries, all the time, for ever, for free. Tell me why, in a world where this exists, does anybody ever bother to watch anything else at all? Close down the BBC. Tell Sky to pull the plug. There are 24-hour shark docus available at the touch of a button.

Or, if and when I ever do get bored of watching programmes about sharks, how about a channel which broadcasts nothing but music videos and comedy clips by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic? It’s a thing. All Weird Al, all the time. I take back everything I have said about the modern world. Life is great and it’s going to be a happy Xmas after all. Plus there is an app that has a massive archive of old 1950s US TV shows. Despite not actually being either (a) American or (b) from the 1950s, this is like manna for me. I’m actually watching Jack Benny and Burns and Allen and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and even You Bet Your Life. Some of these even have the adverts in them. LSMFT: Lucky Strike means fine tobacco!

As well as sharks and Weird Al and Jack Benny, there are also apps with free access to all manner of weird and wonderful (and sometimes deeply crap) movies. Indie stuff, public domain staples, borderline cases. Just so many movies to watch. And I started with this very, very strange indie sci-fi effort from just a few years ago.

Paul (John Varesio) is a middle-aged, unemployed guy who lives with his wife Svina (Catherine Johnson: Gabby’s Wish, Purple Mind) and grown-up son Kenny (Angelo Varesio, who has notably different coloured skin to the actors playing his parents). When Paul receives a parcel addressed to the house’s previous occupant, Tim Brown, he opens it and finds a bunch of oak leaves and a cocoon. Overnight, something breaks out of the cocoon: a weird creature like a cross between a beetle and a snail. Paul corners this and traps it in a glass jar in his garage, after which the thing starts communicating with him telepathically.

Svina and Kenny have been away up till now, visiting Paul’s mother. There is a whole load of stuff about how Paul was given up for adoption as a baby and only traced his real mother when he was 24, none of which seem to have any bearing on either character or plot. Once his family are back home, Paul keeps the door to the garage locked, claiming he’s working on a secret project.

What his family don’t know is that he has, on the instructions of the alien insect thing, been to the woods where he met a humanoid alien (called ‘Shelia’ although it sounds like ‘Sheila’!) that we previously saw in an unconnected splash-panel prologue. This addressed him as ‘Tim Brown’ (intended recipient of the parcel) and that is the alias Paul now adopts in finding victims for the aliens.

Initially he picks up a hooker (Vicky Anderson: Deep Dark); later he poses as a film producer, persuading two stoners to accompany him to a film shoot that needs extras. Where he’s actually taking these people is to a ‘hive’, a huge termite-mound-like structure in the depths of the forest where six-foot versions of the snail-beetle thing fly around (without wings) and prey on unwary humans. Later Paul takes Kenny fishing and returns home alone, telling Svina he dropped their son off at a friend’s.

Here’s where it starts to get really strange. Svina has become suspicious so has smashed the padlock on the garage door. However she doesn’t find the alien bug. Instead she finds a fairly large rock (about the size of a football) which she takes into the forest and throws from a bridge. Paul is furious when he discovers this because that rock was in some way special to him. Suddenly the two of them are magically in the clearing beside the hive where Svina is attacked and Paul runs away, bumping into a young hiker. We previously saw this lad and his girlfriend on a trek through the trees, discovering a giant cocoon which, when sliced open, disgorged a bloodied human corpse. The boy was so shocked that he fell over a log and hurt his back; the girl went for help.

There’s no real conclusion to ICFFBFF. It just sorts of ends while the viewer is wondering what all that bollocks about a rock was in aid of. An epilogue has Kenny returning home – seems Paul did indeed drop him at a friend’s house rather than offering up his only son with a cry of, “I for one welcome our alien overlords.” The family cat Cloudy, who has featured in a surprisingly large number of cutaway shot over the past 95 minutes, has got into the garage, knocked over the glass jar and partially eaten the bug within, which Kenny then flushes down the toilet. To what extent that might stop the giant bugs and their bipedal herald from taking over the world isn’t clear.

It Came... is tosh. Ambitious, sincere tosh, but tosh nonetheless. Surprisingly, neither the one-dimensional characters nor the rambling, unsatisfactory plot constitutes the film’s biggest problem. Nor indeed is the budget CGI used to create the aliens a stumbling block. No, the biggest problem here is that the film has absolutely no idea what decade it’s set in.

This seems to be the 1950s. It’s all shot in black and white. Paul drives a classic car. No-one has a mobile phone. The phone in the house is a traditional Bakelite, rotary dial model and the TV set (on which both Paul and Svina separately watch a movie called It Came for Friendship, But Found Food) is a small cathode ray tube television. When we first meet Paul he is typing up his memoirs, using a reel-to-reel audio recorder and a manual typewriter.

I’d love it if this all took place in the 1950s, the era of You Bet Your Life and The Jack Benny Program. But… the dialogue includes references to Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio, and to something that happened “back in the seventies”. (Plus Svina drives a modern car.)

Before we see Paul typing his memoirs we have a brief scene of him looking at a bridge, dictating into the reel-to-reel recorder a note that his grandfather died in an accident while constructing the bridge in 1912. Let’s work out how that could be true if this 2010 film is set in 2010. Paul has a grown son so he’s probably about 45-50. For his grandfather to have died in 1912, even if the intermediate parent was a newborn at the time, said parent would have had to be about 50 when Paul was born. Which is possible but unlikely. A date of late 1950s or early 1960s makes much more sense.

This could well have been shot over a period of months or even years, but as the creation of a single film-maker, you would think that it would at least have been consistent in its setting. Either you’re making a retro, historical picture or you’re telling a story in the present day. Make up your mind.

That one-man-band film-maker is Oregon-based Guy Gilray, whose only other movie is 2006 feature Scream of the Sasquatch (which shares several cast with this). He’s primarily a painter, having exhibited with some success at galleries in Portland in the 1990s. Specialising in ‘nocturnal urban landscapes’, he eventually got fed up of painting the same thing so turned his talents in other directions, thus: “First I made two independent feature films, losing about $17,000 in the process and eliciting many negative comments from the people who have actually seen them.” This was followed by an attempt to create digital illustrations for science fiction book covers and six CDs of instrumental music, neither of which projects could be accurately described as ‘successful’. Now he’s back painting again. I admire both his tenacity and his honesty.

Produced in 2010, It Came… was posted onto Archive.com in October 2014 and has had 18,000 views to date. Two years later it was posted on a YouTube channel called Watch Public Domain Movies; this has been watched about 320 times so far. There are two other versions on YouTube which between them have generated 40 views. Which is not great but still 38 more people than bought the poor bloke’s CDs.

MJS rating: C-