The Blood Harvest

Director: George Clarke
Writer: George Clarke
Producers: George Clarke, Kenny Martin
Cast: Robert Render, Jean-Paul Van der Velde, Rachael Stewart
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: screener disc (Left Films)
Website: http://theyfiff.wix.com/thebloodharvest

Two weeks ago I watched and reviewed Battle of the Bone, George Clarke’s debut feature from 2009. After Battle Clarke made The Knackery (more zombies), The Last Light: An Irish Ghost Story, Splash Area, Onus (which was a UK-Norwegian co-production, apparently) and most recently The Blood Harvest. Six features in eight years is a prodigious production rate. Clarke’s Yellow Fever Productions has built up its own fanbase, even if it remains largely outside of most horror fans’ awareness.

The Blood Harvest is a more confident and mature work, as one would expect from a more experienced film-maker. It’s set in Northern Ireland but, apart from a couple of lines of dialogue and a map on a wall, there’s nothing distinctively Northern Irish about the story or characters; with the most minor of tweaks this could have been set anywhere. In fact, the propensity for both working and suspended police to carry guns at all times suggests Clarke may have originally written this with a view to filming in in the USA.

A serial killer is stalking the province. Bodies are turning up all over the place, distinctively disfigured: one eye scooped out and the Achilles tendons sliced. Robert Render (a Clarke regular who has also had bit parts in Ripper Street and The Frankenstein Chronicles) stars as Jack Chaplin, an experienced cop with some unlikely theories about who or what is responsible. After arguing with his superior, Chaplin is sacked but he keeps working on the case from home. His former partner Hatcher (Dutch actor Jean-Paul Van der Velde giving an agonisingly wooden performance) stays in contact with Chaplin while pursuing more traditional lines of enquiry.

We see several attacks on various victims which are as well-filmed as they are gruesome. For most of the running time this is a slick, nasty, bloody horror film structured around a gripping police procedural framework. The killer, who wears a crazy steampunk welder’s mask and drives a battered old 1950s car, is revealed to us but we don’t know who he is or why he’s doing this until the end.

Ah yes, the end – that’s where the film comes apart. For the first two acts we’re dealing with a psycho and there are enough hints of vampirism to keep us wondering whether the explanation will be rational or supernatural. I always enjoy films with that sort of ambiguity. But the waveform has to collapse at some point in the third act. And collapse it well and truly does, in a talkie scene that tips the whole narrative over into something that is frankly rather silly.

[spoilers on] So it turns out that the two (yes, two) grunting, screaming psychos we’ve seen at work are the sons of Hatcher, who is actually an alien. They crash-landed on Earth 30 years ago, when the sons were babies. Over time they discovered that the nutrients they needed to survive could best be obtained by sticking a straw into the back of somebody’s eye-socket, and were particularly good if the victim was in a state of abject fear (it’s difficult to see what other state one could be in after a stranger gouges out one’s eye with a fork…). Unfortunately The Blood Harvest simply doesn’t make the leap successfully from gritty cop-horror to out-of-this-world scifi-horror. The transition is too jarring and the explanation too daft. Plus we’re left wondering what the aliens did in the 29 years before they suddenly started kidnapping people and forking out eyeballs. And how a man with no identity was able to become a senior police officer... [spoilers off]

Even without the explanation of What’s Really Going On, the plot has some major holes. Not least how someone could commit 40 gruesome murders in less than a year without sparking the biggest man-hunt in UK history. And how the killer could so effectively evade justice when we can see that (a) he has serious mental problems and (b) he drives a really distinctive car. And groovy though that mask is, it’s never explained.

Don’t get me wrong, The Blood Harvest is a fun ride for horror fans and George Clarke continues to be one of the most consistently interesting horror film-makers in the UK. But you need to go into this film prepared for a preposterous revelation near the end. If you’ve ever seen WAZ, well… as Northern Ireland-shot cop movies about serial killers with a bizarre MO go, this ain’t WAZ, let’s put it that way. On the other hand, there are some absolutely cracking individual scenes, mostly based around the killer’s isolated farm and the attempts of two victims to escape. (One of these is Matt McCreary, who wowed the Britain’s Got Talent judges in 2015 with a free-running routine.)

I guess I have to give props to George Clarke (and fellow producer Kenny Martin, who shares story credit) for ploughing a distinctive furrow. I’ve got no problem with the third act per se (talkie scene aside), rather it’s the first two which needed work as they don’t adequately prepare us for what is to come. If more inexplicable (but ultimately, narratively justifiable) things had happened in the first hour, we would better accept what is revealed in the final 30 minutes.

Filmed in October 2014, The Blood Harvest premiered at the Freak Show Horror Film Festival in Orlando one year later where it won Best SFX and Best Actor (for Render). Left Films picked up the movie and released it to UK DVD in January 2016, including a Making Of, bloopers and trailers. (There are also bloopers under the four minutes of end credits.) Clarke’s next project should be the utterly bonkers Zombie Schoolgirls, Attack!!, a teaser for which was shot back in March 2014.

MJS rating: B

Princess Warrior

Director: Lindsay Norgard
Writer: John Riley
Producer: Philip J Jones
Cast: Sharon Lee Jones, Mark Pacific, Dana Fredsti
Country: USA
Year: 1995
Reviewed from: Online version (naughty)

Princess Warrior has two things in common with Demonsoul. First, it was produced and distributed by Vista Street Entertainment, the stack-‘em-high, sell-‘em-cheap outfit whose greatest contribution to modern culture was dragging their Witchcraft franchise out to an incredible 13 films. The other connection, or rather similarity, is that like Demonsoul I have been waiting 20 years to see this.

Back in the 1990s, I used to collect VHS sleeves. I’ve still got stacks of them. You could buy them for 25p a pop from dealers at film fairs, or just save the ones off rubbish videos you had watched once and then chucked. Naturally I acquired a lot of them during my time on SFX. I don’t know where my sleeve for Princess Warrior came from, but it intrigued me. Two hot women fighting with light-sabres, one clad in a short, simple white dress, the other wearing a sexy black dominatrix get-up. Surely this must be a film worth watching.

In 1998 I found myself in Los Angeles at the AFM where I picked up what was sometimes confusingly called a ‘one-sheet’ for the film. Not a poster but a piece of glossy card about A4 in size with imagery and blurb, a promotional doodad for places like the AFM. It had the same image as the video sleeve. Except: I couldn’t help noticing that the VHS sleeve from the UK had an unexpurgated photo with a fine view of the sexy upper thigh of the white-clad actress, while the one-sheet from the USA had a pair of pink pants crudely Photoshopped into place! From such minutiae is an unhealthy interest begat.

I also met actress Dana Fredsti at the AFM, and did an interview with her which it looks like I never got round to typing up. It must still be in a pile of cassettes somewhere.

Over the years I kept meaning to pick up Princess Warrior, but I never saw a copy anywhere and when it turned up on Amazon it was too expensive for me to bother. But recently I was idly googling stuff and came across a version that somebody had uploaded to YouTube and I felt compelled to finally watch it.

When I eventually got round to viewing Demonsoul after two decades, it turned out to be a revelation, a seminal proto-text for the British Horror Revival. Princess Warrior was less satisfying though I did get some perverse pleasure from watching the thing. A bit like watching Wacko. I’m not saying it’s good. No-one would ever say it was anything less than utter crap. But that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. And not, I wish to emphasise, in  a post-modern or ironic way. I genuinely did like watching this film, and would happily watch it again. About once every 20 years or so.

The story is actually mostly Earth-bound, but topped and tailed by scenes on an alien planet, a matriarchal society populated entirely by fit young women of the same age, except for the High Priestess (Selga Sanders: Interview with Terror) and the dying Queen Mother (Cheryl Janecky: Witchcraft II), who are what would later become known as MILFs. The Queen Mum (Gawd bless ‘er) has two daughters and by rights the throne should pass to the eldest. But this is Curette, a mean, dark-haired bully played with glee by Fredsti in her first major role. So in a break with protocol and tradition, the throne is passed instead to the second daughter - sweet, blonde Ovule, played like a plank of wood by Sharon Lee Jones (Leapin’ Leprechauns).

Well, I say throne. It’s actually a sort of vaguely futuristic-looking recliner. In one of those low-budget rooms where you can’t actually see the walls because that would mean building a set. There’s some sort of hooha between the two sisters and their acolytes – as depicted on the video sleeve, although that’s not an actual image from the movie - the upshot of which is that Ovule escapes by climbing into some sort of transportation chamber which looks for all the world like Bill and Ted’s phone booth. And to use this, she has to be naked for some reason. Though you don’t really see anything.

Meanwhile, on Earth, specifically in LA, we meet Bob (Mark Pacific). He’s currently employed as DJ in a dodgy bar/club owned by dodgy Italian stereotypes Vinnie and Vito (Lee N Gerovitz and Stephen J Cassarino, a double act who call themselves the Clever Cleaver Brothers, billed as ‘TV’s zaniest celebrity chefs’!). Right now, the club is hosting a wet T-shirt contest, which consists of three young ladies gyrating to Bob’s music while occasionally having jugs of water poured over their, well, their jugs. It must be said, this hasn’t exactly brought in the crowds. There’s just a handful of middle-aged guys sitting around, letting out the occasional half-hearted whoop.

The wet T-shirt contest is dragged out endlessly but suddenly ends when a fourth girl appears. Yes, it’s Ovule, whose BillandTedatron has materialised inside the bar, without anyone noticing, and conveniently next to the table with the branded T-shirts. This enables her to grab one and put it on before emerging.

What? You were expecting actual full-frontal nudity? In a Vista Street movie? You’re new round here, aintcha?

Of course, while the other three girls wear short, cut-off T-shirts and put their all into the bump’n’grind, Ovule’s T-shirt is long enough to effectively be a dress. And she wins for simply walking past the other three. Which really doesn’t seem fair.

Ovule runs out of the bar, frightened and confused. Bob goes after her and gets sacked for his troubles, so he hops on his motorbike and cruises the surprisingly empty night-time streets of LA until he finds her.

Meanwhile, the phone booth transporter has disappeared. When it reappears it contains Curette and two of her cronies, Bulimia (Isibella Peralta: Cybernator) and Exzema (Laurie Warren: Twisted Justice). I hope you’re laughing at these hilarious character names because they’re the closest this ever gets to actual comedy. All three are naked, of course, but once again you can’t see anything and they pass up any chance of a three-way lesbo clinch to slip into three more oversized T-shirts and then beat up all the guys in the bar for ogling them. After which they dress in matching lycra jogging outfits for the rest of the film.

And thus we come to what one might term the Middle Act, which drags on and on and on without ever really going anywhere. Bob attempts to help Ovule, who makes a token attempt at being dismissive of him because he’s a man although that aspect of the story is swiftly forgotten. We are introduced to two cops, clearly based on the Lethal Weapon model: middle-aged, black Matt (Augie Blunt: Hell Spa, Steel Justice, Club Dead and the voice of a spirit channelled by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost) and young, white Johnny (Mark Riccardi, a stuntman whose credits include Star Trek: Generations, Die Hard 4, Big Ass Spider, the 2014 Godzilla and Battlefield Earth). For what seems like hours Bob and Ovule are chased around the dark streets of LA by the cops, by Curette and her cronies, or by the cops (with Curette and her cronies in the back of their car). Every time it seems like this part of the film is over, someone drives past someone else and suddenly the chase is on again. It’s extraordinarily dull.

Actually, the first introduction of the cops isn’t too bad and exhibits the sort of curious anomaly that Vista Street would sometimes let slip into their films. Curette and her cuties catch Bob and Ovule in a motel room and decided to torture Bob by heating a metal soup spoon over a stove until it’s white hot, then sticking it in his mouth. Fortunately Matt and Johnny burst in just in time to prevent this happening, but not before Fredsti delivers a staggering graphic description of what such an act would actually do, in medical terms. (This part of the script was apparently her audition.)

Intercut with all this are scenes back on the alien planet where Curette’s other acolyte Ricketsia (Diana Karanikas: Dead Girls, Tales of the Unknown) has locked herself in the room with the BillandTedotron. The High Priestess gathers around her Ovule’s followers (or possibly just slightly lower Priestesses – it’s difficult to tell and doesn’t really matter) who eventually concentrate hard enough that one of them is able to magically enter the locked room somehow, defeat Ricketsia, and send the phone booth back to Earth. Where Curette has finally been defeated, and Bob and Ovule have fallen in love, so that he returns with her to her home where they can jointly rule.

Or something.

Princess Warrior is rubbish of course. On any absolute scale of one to five stars this would barely merit the individual pixel on the bottom left point of the first star. But in the world of cult movies (and the people who make ‘em) scales are not absolute and there’s a camp fascination to Princess Warrior that makes it bizarrely watchable. Lots of it doesn’t really make much sense: apparently several bits weren’t filmed (hence the car chase padding) and other parts were directed by Brian Thomas, who was Fredsti’s boyfriend at the time. (Fredsti and Thomas are jointly credited as fight choreographers.)

The whole thing was shot in two weeks for 60,000 bucks, with far more time lavished on the wet T-short contest than on the climactic fight between Ovule and Curette in an old warehouse. But Vista Street sold it to USA Network who screened it in a late night slot for bad films, and between that and the UK rental VHS rights, they probably made a clear profit even before DVDs were invented.

Vista Street released the VHS in 1992 then sold the rights to Simitar Entertainment who put out a region-free DVD in 1997 followed by a two-fer disc the next year double-billing this with Eye of the Serpent, a 1994 fantasy cheapie whose only similarity is a ‘battling sisters’ premise. Amazon lists a Spanish VHS release from 2000. Apparently, Troma now have the rights: the film is available on VOD with entirely unrelated artwork showing a woman standing in a field holding a samurai sword. (?).

Many of the cast had never acted in anything before. Many – including leading man Pacific – never acted in anything again (at least, not under the name used here). One of the wet T-shirt girls was Heather Kennedy who went on to a successful career as a bikini model and competed in the Topless Dancer World Championship(!). Another was Janie Liszewski who was a dancer in From Dusk Till Dawn and then turned to stunt work, racking up credits including Spider-Man 2 and Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Fredsti made a couple more films in the 1990s - Time Barbarians and Bloodbath - before concentrating on writing. She has penned mystery novels, zombie novels and assorted scripts, and is evidently also very into cats, big and small.

Composer Marc Decker is Marc David Decker, the guy who scored The Dark Backward, Psycho Cop Returns, Soulmates and Bikini Squad. And not, I was disapponted to discover, Dr Marc Decker, Assistant Professor of Music at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. Editor Tony Miller cut Inhumanoid and The Omega Code, as well as loads of TV including Alias, Roger Corman's Black Scorpion and the US remake of The Tomorrow People.

Production designer Greg Hildreth (not the Broadway actor) has various credits on The Willies, Dead Girls, the original Mirror Mirror and Not of This World (a 1991 picture not to be confused with any of the various versions of Not of This Earth). The art director was my old pal Mark Adams, later director of Minds of Terror! Costume designer Roxie Poynor now does 'couture bridal gown design'; I think this was her only film gig. Cinematographer Robert Duffin also DPed  action thriller Cause of Death and had a number of cool credits as electrician/gaffer in the 1980s, including Prison, Frightmare and Evil Dead II. "Special visual effects created at William S Mims Productions" is the effects credit; Mims also worked on Time Barbarians and at least one Witchcraft sequel.

Director Lindsay Norgard is a bit of an enigma. When he shot Princess Warrior he was a 25-year-old kid from Michigan. The IMDB lists four other films as writer and/or director and/or producer between 1992 and 2006. I know he directed some commercials, including a superbowl spot for Dorito's. But beyond that I'm drawing a blank. Maybe he'll read this and get in touch. The IMDB thinks that writer John Riley was later a production assistant on Independence Day and Men in Black, which could be true. I think he's now a props maker.

Princess Warrior is a curio. It feels more '80s than '90s, like the film-makers had been watching some old Fred Olen Ray movies and decided to make their own. It really does remind me of Wacko in that there's absolutely nothing to recommend about this film, yet it's far from the worst thing I've ever seen and it exudes a bizarrely magnetic fascination.

MJS rating: C-

Call Me a Psycho (1990)

Directors: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Writers: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Producers: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Cast: Peter Ward, Andrew Jones, Ian Paterson
Country: UK
Year: 1990
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at bottom of review)

Despite being about a serial killer, and the title notwithstanding, Call Me a Psycho is not a horror film. Rather it is a cop comedy about a couple of likeable but not particularly efficient policemen tracking down an escaped homicidal lunatic.

What it also is, is a fascinating time capsule. Because this isn’t the 2008 film Call Me a Psycho - this was made in 1990. Turns out the 2008 film is a remake by the same guys, the ‘Superteam Productions’ trio of Peter Ward, Andrew Jones and Ian Paterson, who share three-way credits for writing and producing and directing this zero-budget epic.

When I say ‘zero budget’, let me put that in context. The early scenes of the psycho (played by Paterson) escaping from a mental hospital are shot in an anonymous corridor where the signs on the various cell doors are hand-written on bits of A4 paper. One of the reasons why this can’t be considered a horror movie, even a borderline one, is because there is not a drop of blood, simply because there wasn’t any money to pay for it. (Though there are some animated dripping-blood screen wipes.)

And yet, as sometimes happens with these things, the enthusiasm of the film-makers overcomes their limitations and I actually enjoyed the film. Some parts are genuinely funny, mostly the bits which divert into Zucker-Abrams-Zucker-style surrealism: an alarm clock that makes bizarre noises, or a scene of a character typing in which he has three hands.

Typing on a personal computer circa 1990, that is. This really is a fascinating window into a world a quarter of a century ago. The cars! The clothes! The haircuts! The telephones! Wikipedia lists fewer than 30 British films from 1990, among them a handful of remembered titles including Memphis Belle, Nuns on the Run, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, The Krays, The Witches and Truly Madly Deeply. That really was the doldrums of the British film industry, and yet Superteam Productions grabbed themselves a camcorder (probably quite a bulky one!) and shot a reasonably coherently plotted, genuinely amusing feature-length-ish (69 minutes) comedy police movie.

The film’s success rests on the chemistry between Ward (who looks like a young Peter Sellers) and Jones as Detective Inspector Ward and D.I. Jones. They are clearly useless at their job, but not in a bumbling way, nor in a cynical way, just in a natural, easy-going, trying to do it but not very good and easily distracted sort of way. Most of the supporting cast are predictably wooden but the back-garden nature of the film renders that less of a problem than it might be.

There’s not much by way of plot: the psycho escapes, the two cops try to track him down while he goes on a (largely off-screen) killing spree. Scenes were shot outside Feltham Police Station in West London and at a local video store, Terminal 5 Video, which has a Terminator 2 ad in the window. It’s the little background details like that which make this so fascinating. One character wears a Skid Row T-shirt, another is evidently a fan of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. There is a trailer on TV for borderline mystical BBC sitcom Mulberry. And the soundtrack features a number of not-cleared for copyright songs including David Essex’s 1973 hit ‘Rock On’ and the Echo and the Bunnymen 1987 cover version of ‘People are Strange’.

Because this film is so obscure that it’s not even listed on the IMDB, it behoves me to list the cast which, in addition to the principal trio, consists of Tony Lloyd, Clinton North, Brian Da Silva, Barry Hutton, Margaret McEnechey, Steve Clarke, Darren Tyrel, Gidden Stratton, Maurette Cahill, Lee Burl, Richard Tyrell, Betty O'Brien, Gareth Burt, Kelly Bradford, Ryan O'Neil, Adrian O'Neil, Nicola Darge and Tanya Darge. Where are they now, eh? There are no other credits; basically Ward, Jones and Paterson did everything themselves.

The Superteam, erm, team went on to make several further shorts and features before returning, in 2008, to the Call Me a Psycho script and remaking the film, almost word for word, using some of the same sets and one of the same lead actors. Over the years their films have been available on DVD from their website although it’s not clear how this first version of Call Me a Psycho was distributed if at all. Fortunately for those of us who like to watch this sort of ultra obscurity, Paterson posted all the Superteam films to YouTube in February 2014, hence this review.

The rating below should not, of course, be taken as any indication that this is, in any way, a ‘good’ film but it’s far from a terrible film and I have to give the film-makers props for doing what they did (which was at least something) with what they had available (which was nothing).

MJS rating: B

Call Me a Psycho (2008)

Director: Ian Paterson
Writers: Ian Paterson
Producers: Ian Paterson, Peter Ward
Cast: Peter Ward, Tracy Redington, Dave Marley
Country: UK
Year: 2008
Reviewed from: YouTube (link at bottom of review)

For a couple of years now, Call Me a Psycho has just been a title in my BHR masterlist. It was originally made available on DVD through the Superteam Productions website in 2008; frustratingly I only discovered this after Urban Terrors had been published, placing this among the addenda to that critically acclaimed tome.

Having now seen it, I’m in two minds whether to remove it from the list because it’s not really a horror movie, despite the title. However, my criteria for inclusion are personal and flexible and one of my meta-criteria is that as a film becomes more obscure or interesting, so my criteria become more flexible. That was why, for example, I was prepared to consider Sentinels of Darkness British enough for inclusion – who the hell else is ever going to write about it? – but there was no point in similarly stretching the definition of British horror to include something like Resident Evil.

Call Me a Psycho, while not exactly horrific, is both very obscure and very interesting – because it’s a remake of itself.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. Way back in 1990 three mates – Ian Paterson, Peter Ward, Andrew Jones – made a comedy cop movie entitled Call Me a Psycho. Then they made a bunch of other stuff. Then, 18 years after the original, they remade Call Me a Psycho. And not a loose remake either but the same script, give or take a couple of extra scenes.

The original was jointly directed by Ward, Jones and Paterson, with Ward and Jones as the cops and Paterson as the psycho. Eighteen years down the line, Paterson restricts himself to directing solo (apart from a brief cameo as a corpse) with the psycho played instead by Dave Marley who, it must be said, is much more suited to the role. Skinny, young Paterson never convinced as a dangerous psychotic mass murderer, but Marley is very tall, very fat, and has a small moustache that pulls his face into a permanent sneer. He looks like he could and would kill you. But in a funny way.

Although there is no sign of Jones beyond a courtesy credit, Ward is back, looking 18 years older, 18 years chubbier and with 18 years less hair. Actually that’s unfair. He’s neither fat nor bald, but he no longer looks like a young Peter Sellers. Realistically, who among us does? His partner this time is a woman, Detective Reddington who is taller than Ward, rocking a trouser suit combo and spiky black hair (Tracy Reddington was in the even more obscure Box of the Dead aka Satan’s Box and also had uncredited bit parts in Quantum of Solace and The Fifth Element). That said, there isn’t quite the same chemistry between Ward and Reddington as we saw in the original film between Ward and Jones.

Most of the script is word for word identical. There are a few extra short scenes, but they just add a little context. The discrepancy in running time – the original was 69 minutes, this is 86 – is actually down to a massive 14 minutes of out-takes which run under the glacially slow credits. (I’ve always said: if you’re going to drag out the credits, at least run bloopers under them. Finally, someone listened!) Anyway, as the maths graduates among you can see, the remake is actually only about three minutes longer than the original.

We still have the psycho (here given a name: Cy Coe) murdering a fellow patient due for release and thus absconding from the loony bin where he has been incarcerated. A few more conversations between two doctors pad out this sequence and dupe us into thinking this won’t be an exact remake, but the first scene of Ward and Reddington in the car on a stake-out of a drugs den lets us know that this will be, fascinatingly, the exact same film made 18 years later. Furthermore, the location of the stake-out looks very much like the same street/house used in 1990 and throughout the film there are sequences which, if not shot in the original locations, match them pretty closely. Certainly the exterior of Feltham Police Station is back for more.

What was a scene in a video shop is now a scene in a shop that seems to concentrate more on second-hand computer games, although the dialogue still calls it a ‘video shop’. The final sequence, previously set in a derelict building, now happens in a deserted Spearmint Rhino club, although who knows, maybe that was built on the site of the original’s scene? A throwaway gag subplot about an old man who gets stranded on a roundabout (the road junction, not the playground equipment) is slightly fleshed out with more back story for the old man. A newsreader replaces the original’s captions (she looks familiar, and is: it’s Gabrielle Amies who was the ex-wife in Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit).

So how does the 2008 version square up against the 1990 original? It’s better, of course, if only because it has a budget, microscopic though that may be. There are better locations (for some scenes), actual costumes (police uniforms!), actual props – the whole thing has moved up from a few mates larking about with a camera to a legitimate entry in the 21st century renaissance of British independent film-making (and arguably the BHR). The film-makers are more experienced now, and that shows: this is slicker and more professional (though still bargain basement on an absolute scale, of course). There is even, in lieu of copyrighted pop songs, a properly written theme song by a band called The New Assassins (who appear as themselves in one of the new scenes). The events and characters of the intervening Superteam productions are referenced in some new dialogue which seems to be trying to tie all their films together into one continuity.

There are casting links too. The legend that is Norman Lovett – he of Red Dwarf and Evil Aliens – appears in one scene as the psycho’s father, having previously starred in probably the best known Superteam film, retro-scifi-western-epic Roswell 1847 (also now available on YouTube, after what seems to have been some wrangling between interested parties). Lovett’s two daughters appear with him as passers-by, concerned that he is being harassed by the police.

Speaking of YouTube, distribution is the other huge change between 1990 and 2008. The original film would only have been viewable on VHS, and only made available to anyone who knew the Superteam trio personally, or possibly may have been advertised in fanzines back in the day when ‘cut and paste’ literally involved scissors and Prittstick. But by 2008 there was an interwebs and even a YouTube and Superteam Productions could have a web presence that made their reach global, rather than a five mile radius of Feltham Nick.

Although there are instances of film-makers remaking a short as a feature, there are very few features which have been remade by the original film-makers at a later date with a wee bit more money. The only one I can think of right now is Pete Jacelone’s Psycho Sisters (which shares with Call Me a Psycho the interesting situation that the remake is on the IMDB but the original isn’t). So if there are any film students out there looking for a subject on which to write their dissertation, with an interest in low-budget film-making, here is a golden opportunity. The same film, made 18 years apart, by the same people in the same place with the same script. It’s a study in contrast, and while I certainly don’t have the time to go through it with a fine tooth comb, comparing and contrasting every element, some enterprising undergraduate certainly could. [I just found another one: Chris Sivertson and Lucky McKee made All Cheerleaders Die in 2001 and remade it in 2013. - MJS]

Also in the cast, most of whom have been in other Superteam films and/or the related works of American executive producer William Cheney, are Ari Gill (director of short thriller The Briefcase), Neil Higham (Waiting for Dawn), Michelle Kernohan (The Good, the Bad and the Undead), Stephanie Montreux (who was in Get Him to the Greek, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and the 2006 Royal Variety Performance!), Rob Talbot (Jack Says, Peter Goddard’s Season of the Witch and Any Minute Now, The Butterfly Tattoo plus horror shorts Waste Disposal, Evil of the Vampires, Vampire Gang Origins and Attack of the Zombie Vampires), Marlon Williams (Stormhouse, Girl Number 9 and two episodes of Torchwood) and Susannah Todd (background roles in EastEnders, Holby City and Sherlock).

On close inspection, some of the minor characters are played by the same people, including (I'm fairly certain) the guy in the video store and one of the witnesses to a massacre in a McDonalds. Most fascinating of all, some of the out-takes under the credits show Peter Ward filming scenes with a male partner who I presume is Andrew Jones – what on Earth happened there?).

Although the remake is better than the original, the film-makers had more to work with – in terms of props, cast, experience, opportunities etc – and thus the rating, for what it’s worth, remains constant.

MJS rating: B

Monster from Bikini Beach

Director: Darin Wood
Writer: Darin Wood
Producer: Christy Savage, Amy Slockbower
Cast: Stephen Vargo, Galen Howard, Stephanie Hyden
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.trashfilmorgy.com

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this film. Something cheesy, something deliberately lo-fi, something silly. When a production company calls itself Trash Film Orgy, you don’t raise your hopes too high.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this is a well-produced, professional-looking, enormously entertaining... cheesy, lo-fi, silly film. There’s nothing desperately new here; everything in Monster from Bikini Beach has been done before, sometimes better, often worse. Without ascribing specific influences, one can construct a melange such as this from easily available ingredients: a touch of Attack of the Giant Leeches here, a smidgeon of The Pink Chiquitas there...

But this isn’t a movie which claims to be the big new thing, it’s an hour and a half of fun: sexy chicks, surfin’ guitar sounds, narrating detectives and an impressive monster.

Stephen Vargo (The Final Job) stars as Sammy Payday, a bent cop with a loud shirt, a gammy knee and a 1966 Cadillac. His silent, also bent partner is Charlie Snaps (David Ainsworth, who also has several crew credits on the film) - the only man in Camaraville who owns a shirt and tie, apparently. Together they are on the trail of a supply of cocaine which has gone missing somewhere in the city, threatening an inter-gang turf war. When not running protection rackets or investigating disembowelled corpses, Payday likes to sit by the pool watching his bikini-clad squeeze Honey ‘Boom-Boom’ Stacks (Laura Stahl) go-go dancing.

In another, overlapping plot strand, there’s a love-hate relationship between two young journalists whose paths have diverged since college. Cool geek Archie ‘Scoop’ Barclay (Galen Howard: Homeworld, Canary) is a freelance photographer, making no money but determined to uncover the truth while well-preened Raquel Vanvanderzander (Stephanie Hyden: Sukeban: Octopus Pot) is an on-screen reporter for Channel 13, selling her independent spirit for local fame and a decent wage. Archie is convinced that a putative local serial killer is actually a monster but Raquel is more sceptical: Scully to his Mulder.

The other main characters are gun-toting local catfish-tickler Noodlin’ Stu (Keith Letl) and his dynamite-toting ‘niece’ Fanny Jo (Liesel Hanson), who together play the Bert Gummer role, plus goateed entrepreneur Lonny Valente (Adam Saake) who plans to launch his new beach-front nightclub with the first ever Camaraville Midnight Gogo-a-thon.

The monster itself is never fully explained. There is a suggestion that it’s a giant catfish mutated by toxic waste and there is also talk of it having been worshipped by Indians in the area for centuries. Basically it’s a ten-foot-tall, green mouth on legs, looking not unlike the thing from The Host only vastly cheaper and less Korean. Josh Lashells is inside the suit for most shots but occasionally it’s worn by Nick Roberts or the tireless David Ainsworth.

Some people get eaten, some people get killed and lots of hot chicks and crazy guys party the night away, oblivious to the terror in their midst. But what makes the movie really work is that it is played completely straight. There are no winks to camera, no cheesy grins. Sammy Payday is a corrupt and frankly quite unpleasant character, the two young journos are sincere, Noodlin’ Stu and Fanny Jo are downhome, honest folk. People question the existence of the monster, people scream when it appears - and people’s guts get ripped out in surprisingly good (but not gratuitously unpleasant) gore scenes. Of particular note is the way that the T&A is integrated into the movie and relevant to the plot rather than the film simply stopping dead every ten minutes for a cheesecake sequence. Many film-makers could learn from this.

With a coherent plot (which is a rarity nowadays), good acting, decent camera-work, clear sound and above-average production values, Monster from Bikini Beach is the sort of film that I thought they had stopped making. And the whole thing is back with the twanging guitars of some kicking surf bands. The credits list them as Necrobeach, the Hypnotic IV, the Pyronauts, blackbird RAUM and Danny Amis with Lost Acapulco and the Mexico City Brass. Phill Baldwin provides the score inbetween surf tracks.

This is the debut feature from writer-director Darin Wood, who shares editing duties with his wife Christy Savage, who was DP and one of two producers. The other producer, Amy Slockbower, also supervised special effects. These three are the main driving force behind Trash Film Orgy which is much more than just a B-movie production company.

Trash Film Orgy is a festival of alternative culture held annually in Sacramento since 2000, a mix of big-screen movies, stage shows, bands, audience participation and general good-natured, tacky mayhem. It sounds freaking brilliant. In 2005, Wood and co. produced Curse of the Golden Skull, a serial starring masked wrestler ‘El Tigre Diablo’ which was screened before the movies at that year’s TFO. Stephen Vargo was in the cast of that too. Now the TFO team have put all their knowledge and experience of ‘trash cinema’ towards the task of creating their own instant cult classic and by George, I believe they may have succeeded.

There is a tremendous sense of fun and joie de vivre in Monster from Bikini Beach. For example, not content with simply listing bit parts as ‘second beach girl’ or ‘man in bar’, every character has their own very groovy name: Desdemona Nova, Retro-Chic Monique, Pinky Moldanato and White Pants Dutch. Even among the crew, the fun continues. What other movie can boast such enviable jobs as ‘break-away bikini-top technicians’, ‘psychedelic naked girl painters’ or a ‘director of nonsense’?

Enormously entertaining but made with a professionalism that demonstrates a true understanding of what makes B-movies great, this is a film you shouldn’t miss.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 27th February 2009

Mil Mascaras: Resurrection

Directors: Chip Gubera and ‘Andrew Quint’
Writer: Jeffrey Uhlmann
Producers: Jeffrey Uhlmann, Kannappan Palaniappan
Cast: Mil Mascaras, Willard Pugh, Richard Lynch
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Stick with me on this one because it’s going to take a little while to get to the point.

When I was a young man - in fact I think I was still at school - I bought a budget-price LP called The Very Best of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I had probably heard one or two Bonzo songs and I knew of their connection with Monty Python but I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for when I first put the stylus on that record.

Those of you who are familiar with the Bonzos will, I am sure, realise the effect that 40 minutes of the band’s best songs had on me. Those of you who don’t know the Bonzos, well, you are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. This was a band, who released a few albums in the late 1960s, early 1970s and had one solitary top ten hit (produced by Paul McCartney under a pseudonym) and who have a very strong claim to being the greatest comedy music act of all time. They weren’t parodists like Alan Sherman or ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, they weren’t satirists like Stan Freberg or Flanders and Swann. Probably the closest comparison would be Spike Jones and his City Slickers, in terms of their free-form, take-no-prisoners approach to lunacy. Except that the Bonzos were art school graduates, steeped in admiration for the surrealist school (in fact their original name was the Bonzo Dog Dada Band but they got fed up having to explain to people what dadaism was) and reacting against not only 1960s pop and rock but also, during their brief existence, the oddity that was the 1960s trad jazz revival.

Look, if you don’t know anything about the Bonzos, just go and buy, borrow, download, whatever some of their songs and I hope you will realise just why they are so special.

I bought a couple of their original LPs, I bought the complete collection on CD when it was released, I got excited every time I saw a clip of them on TV, invariably one of their appearances on semi-lost proto-Python quasi-kidfare Do Not Adjust You Set, I even saw solo gigs by two of the ex-members. But there was something missing and it was this: the Bonzos were, by all accounts, an amazing live act. But there was no actual record of this beyond hearsay and contemporary reviews. No recording existed of them actually performing, apart from the DNAYS clips and their legendary cameo in Magical Mystery Tour, neither of which really captured them in a live setting.

Then in 2006, twenty years after I bought that LP, something amazing happened. The Bonzos reunited. They did some Christmas shows in London with some of today’s biggest comedians handling vocals in lieu of the sadly missed Viv Stanshall. And then - they went on tour! All the original members (bar the two dead ones), in their sixties or seventies (or eighties in one case) with Phill Jupitus and Ade Edmondson sharing vocals. It was a real live Bonzos show - and it came to Leicester. It came to my town.

I was able to go to my local concert hall and see the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band performing live, not just trotting through a few old tunes but having a whale of a time indulging in all the old lunacy: the robots and the costumes and the props and the head ballet and music for the leg and, ooh, everything. All this happened, right there, more than thirty years after everyone thought it had ceased for ever. Holy freaking cow. Even now I can’t get over this.

It was the pop culture equivalent of finding a coelacanth in your fishing net.

Well now, here’s another coelacanth. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is an honest-to-goodness brand new lucha libre movie starring the actual Mil Mascaras and pitting him against the most iconic monster ever to emerge from the Mexican film industry - the Aztec Mummy.

I can’t claim to be anywhere near as familiar with Mexican wrestling films as I am with the Bonzos but I’ve seen a few, in fact I’ve seen enough to know that this is spot-on. The plot, the dialogue, the characters, the wrestling matches: everything is archetypal. And yet this is not some cheesy spoof or even a sincere homage, it actually is a genuine lucha libre film (starring a genuine lucha libre film star). The production values are bang up-to-date and the picture was actually made by Americans in the Unites States yet the ‘feel’ is pure 1960s south-of-the-border grapplefest. And part of that is a casual acceptance on the part of every single character that the portly fellow in the gaudy mask - whose name is pronounced MAS-caras, not like the make-up - is a real-life superhero, an inarguably noble, valiant force for good. “You are the most respected man in the world,” somebody tells him at one point.

‘Mil’ is called in by the never-named black, bespectacled Police Chief (Willard Pugh: Puppet Master 5, RoboCop 2, The Guyver and Brian Yuzna’s Progeny) to help solve a puzzling series of crimes: seven blood banks have been robbed of blood on seven consecutive nights. Mil points out that all seven nights had a full Moon (yes, it’s that old B-movie staple, the full Moon that lasts a week). “Vampires?” queries the Chief. “No,” responds Mil, “just someone who can’t see very well in the dark.”

Using a female-voiced computer (which, apart from this one scene, is never seen, heard or mentioned again) Mil brilliantly deduces where the next robbery will take place - because there are only eight blood banks in Mexico City.

You can see that already we are into some seriously loopy plotting but the fabulous thing here, which gives the movie its verisimilitude, is that the whole thing is played completely straight. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is absolutely serious in every respect - which is why it is so deliriously, knowingly , hilarious, deliberately entertaining. In fact our introduction to MM has him eating dinner in a posh restaurant where his fiancee (Stephanie Matthews) gently dumps him. “I don’t really know you at all,” she laments. “Is it because you have never seen me without my mask?” he innocently queries.

As well as Mil and the Police Chief, our other major protagonist is an equally unnamed Professor (Kurt Drennen Mirtsching, who is actually director of a chain of pizza restaurants!), resplendent in lab coat, pony tail and dickie bow, whose daughter Maria (Melissa Osborn) has the hots for Mil Mascaras. Well, what young woman wouldn’t fall for an overweight, elderly man whose face she has never seen?

Ranged against these guardians of justice are an Aztec Chief (computer scientist/film critic Marco Lanzagorta, who has co-authored several technical papers with this film’s writer-producer Jeffrey Uhlmann and is now working on a book about HP Lovecraft) and the Aztec Mummy whom he reanimates with the blood of a human sacrifice (Jonathan Verdejo-Rocha) in a prologue. We also get to see Officer Guerrero (Gary Ambrosia, who was also production designer here and has directed several action flicks) - who for some reason gets a surname while more major characters don’t - attempting to arrest the Aztec Mummy only to fall under the hypnotic spell of a blue jewel in the top of the Mummy’s staff.

When Mil turns up late for the stake-out at the blood bank, having been slightly delayed due to a tag-team wrestling match over-running, the only cop still around is... Officer Guerrero! And the bad guys jump Mil but he beats them up and so on and so on. There are loads of neat, straight-faced fights in this movie including two wrestling matches, the first of which, the aforementioned tag-team bout, partners Mil with... Santo! (Played by... El Hijo del Santo!)

The second bout is Mil Mascaras vs Magister, who plays himself in the ring but is played by Aaron Laue (who was Fox Mulder in an X-Files fanfilm!) in a locker room scene where the real Magister is knocked out and replaced by one of the Aztec Mummy’s supernatural goons who then adopts his form. One of the absolute sacrosanct rules of Mexican wrestling, which this movie faithfully follows, is that every match must have the same basic plot. Which is this: the bad guy beats up the good guy over and over again, doling out cruel and painful punishment while the crowd screams at the good guy to stand up for himself, then eventually, for no apparent reason, the good guy decides that he can fight back after all and kicks the bad guy’s arse. Every match, exactly the same.

The basic plot of this film, by the way, is that the Aztec Mummy and his feather-crowned, flabby friend the Priest have been stealing blood in order to raise an army of dark-robed minions, somewhere inbetween zombies and Jawas. His ultimate aim is to capture and hypnotise Mil Mascaras because once he has the world’s greatest human being under his command, everyone will follow him. But the plot is just an excuse on which to hang a whole host of ideas, some of which are dealt with in depth, others of which are skimmed over and then forgotten.

For example, the Professor has a quite brilliant robot called Idaktor which has been programmed with information about “science, art, wrestling, technology, history, philosophy and literature” and this does come into play at the movie’s climax. On the other hand, there is one shot where we see that the Prof’s vehicle of choice is a (genuine) prototype solar-powered car - supplied by Richard Whelove of the University of Missouri Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department - but this is not mentioned in the dialogue and never seen again.

There is also a sort of prophecy: Maria has a birthmark on her back (which we never see) that matches a symbol in some stones in the Aztec Mummy’s temple and marks her out as important in some way, although when she is kidnapped (off-screen) towards the end it is merely to act as bait in a plan to trap Mil Mascaras.

Incidentally, a couple of points about Mil himself. His name (which obviously means ‘thousand masks’) stems from his habit of wearing not a single distinctive mask like other luchadores but a different mask for every bout (invariably with an M on the forehead). Or in this case, a different mask in every scene. And there is a terrific sequence where the Prof explains to Mil that his mask matches his head perfectly (well, duh, it’s made of cloth) and that it has some sort of amazing magic/technology within its fibres that rearranges the design at frequent intervals. In fact the Prof has worked out that there are one thousand different variant designs that this single mask could have, This is a great bit of retrofitted explanation for the many mask designs.

Of course, Mil didn’t make or find this mask, it was handed to him by his father, also known as Mil Mascaras, who got it from his father. An early scene has Mil, desolate at being dumped by his fiancee, talking to an image of his late father reflected in a river.

What else can we find to enjoy in this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink curiosity? There’s a scene where Mil travels to America to meet with the US President (Richard Lynch: Trancers 2, Puppet Master 3, Cyborg 3, Scanner Cop, Necronomicon, Curse of the Forty-Niner, Halloween remake) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; there’s a sequence where he poses alongside two 1960s-style dolly bird twins (Jenna and Jessica Brondel) for a photo-session, then subsequently discovers that the girls are vampires; there’s a scene in a restaurant where a fake waiter poisons Mil with hallucinogenic mushrooms; and there is a burgeoning romance between Mil and Maria. Oh, and Halloween’s PJ Soles turns up as herself, judging the tag-team wrestling bout.

Best of all, there is a sequence near the end when a whole gang of luchadores (and a couple of luchadoras) come to help Mil in his battle against the Aztec Mummy’s henchmen. This ‘Champions of Justice’ squad consists of Blue Demon Jr, Neutron, Huracan Ramirez Jr, Dos Caras, Argozan, La Torcha, Maura Incognita, El Medico Angel, El Cardo and Trench Fighter. (Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras both starred in a 1971 lucha movie called Champions of Justice and its 1972 sequel.)

Really, Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy (as it is alternatively known) gives lucha fans everything they could possibly ask for. The production values are expertly judged: good when they need to be but allowed to drop when required (the robot, for instance). The acting is all very slightly stilted but never hammy or over-the-top. The script manages to shoe-horn in pretty much everything that you might expect and a whole lot more. This is a film made by lucha fans for lucha fans but it’s certainly not a fan-film. The whole thing looks extraordinarily professional, and I use the term ‘extraordinarily’ for two reasons. First, because no Mexican wrestling movie has ever looked this slick, and second because no film made by Associate Professors of Computer Science has ever looked this good.

Jeffrey Uhlmann wrote the script, produced and executive produced as well as playing the Aztec Mummy. In real life he has a PhD (Oxon) in robotic engineering which must have come in handy as that’s also him inside the robot suit. He now teaches and researches at the University of Missouri-Columbia where “his most cited works relate to unscented Kalman filtering, covariance intersection, and metric trees.” Which, you must admit, is not something that you can say about many other film-makers. His colleague, the gloriously named Dr Kannappan Palaniappan, shares producer and executive producer credits; he obtained his PhD at the University of Illinois. And the whole shebang was directed by Christopher ‘Chip’ Gubera who sings and plays lead guitar with alt rockers The UnFashionables. But I can’t find anything saying where he got his doctorate.

Ah, but there is another credited director - one Andrew Quint - and this is where the story behind Mil Mascaras: Resurrection gets interesting and rather complex. Uhlmann originally offered the directing gig to Scott Spiegel of Evil Dead 2 screenplay fame, whose previous directorial work includes the first From Dusk Till Dawn sequel and a 2004 Modesty Blaise movie. Spiegel declined but recommended Jeff Burr, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, Pumpkinhead 2 and Puppet Master 4 and 5, who accepted.

For some reason, Burr was not going to be able to make it out to Missouri until a couple of days before principal photography commenced so he sent over two guys whom he knew and trusted to handle pre-production on his behalf. These were Dan Golden (director of Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats, who had worked with Burr on Night of the Scarecrow) and Chuck Williams (producer of, among other things, Danny Draven’s Stitches, who had worked with Burr on Straight into Darkness). Burr also brought ace cinematographer Thomas Callaway to the project. As well as photographing Night of the Scarecrow and Eddie Presley for Burr, Callaway has DPed such B-movie classics as Creepozoids, Critters 3 and 4, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Steel and Lace, Project: Metalbeast, The Dead Hate the Living and Doll Graveyard.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of falling out between Uhlmann and Burr with the result that Burr and his associates (most of whom were working without contracts) dropped off the project. Nevertheless, Callaway retains sole credit as cinematographer, Golden shares 1st AD credit with Mike Neu (Last Breath) and Williams is the third of the named producers. As for Jeff Burr, he evidently took his name off the picture, substituting the pseudonymous ‘Andrew Quint’, which he also used on Devil’s Den. (It’s the name of Oliver Reed’s character in the 1967 Michael Winner film I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name.)

This raises an interesting question, which is: how much better could the film have been if these experienced, LA-based film-makers had worked on the whole thing? Well, having watched the film without any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, I have to say: not much. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection is absolutely terrific. It’s note-perfect. I honestly couldn’t see any area where it could be improved. I don’t know how much of that is down to whatever work was done on the project by Burr and co and how much is down to Uhlmann and his colleagues - and it doesn’t matter. One’s enjoyment and appreciation of an artwork - of any sort - should not be coloured by knowledge of who created it. That knowledge may colour one’s expectations, of course, but if it colours one’s experience that’s rather sad because it moves one into the realm of the fanboy. And that applies as much to those people who believe that a particular author or film-maker can do no wrong as it does to those scholars and critics whose opinion of a painting or poem changes when it’s confirmed as a long lost Rembrandt or an uncatalogued sonnet by Shakespeare.

Elsewhere in the credits, Vaughn Johnson provided the score and the editor was Thom Calderon whose assistant editor credits include Gremlins 2, The Flintstones and Dude, Where’s My Car? The ‘sound design’ is shared by Kent Gibson and Alan Porzio whose coolest credits are, respectively, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and the 2003 extended cut of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Thaddeus Wadleigh (The Mangler Reborn) and Gene Ertel (who worked on Chip Gubera’s earlier films: Snakebite, The Wilding and Song of the Dead) share the curious credit of ‘associate directors of photography’ which I can only imagine is a consequence of the brouhaha referenced above.

‘Creature masks and effects’ were provided by the dudes at Robot Monkey Lab (Undertow, Savage Harvest 2) while Scott Uhlmann (brother?) designed and constructed the robot. Sandra Keeney was in charge of wardrobe while Mil Mascaras designed his own costumes.

Although he didn’t direct it, this is very much Jeffrey Uhlmann’s movie. As well as his writer, producer, executive producer and actor credits, he is listed as one of seven ‘featured stunt/body doubles’, one of fourteen ‘Mummy henchmen and henchwomen’, one of 27 ‘resurrected creatures’, one of six stunt co-ordinators (along with Mil Mascaras and Neutron!) and ‘additional mask tailoring’. Plus he apparently had a personal assistant with the completely brilliant monicker ‘Bambi Fontaine’!

You’ve got to give credit to Uhlmann: against all odds and expectations he has fashioned a film which in its own way has revived the lucha libre genre as successfully as Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who. Under his guiding hand, something which could easily have been a labour-of-love, self-indulgent, fanboy monstrosity has emerged as a hugely entertaining movie which both continues and celebrates the dormant genre to which it belongs.

In fact, Uhlmann has made two of the things. When the production of Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy fell apart in 2005 after the departure of Jeff Burr back to LA, Uhlmann, Gubera and Mascaras reteamed to make Wrestling Women vs the Brainiac before completing the first film with crew assembled for the second. And just as Mil Mascaras vs the Aztec Mummy has been retitled Mil Mascaras: Resurrection (although Uhlmann plans to revert to the original title when it hits DVD) so Wrestling Women vs the Brainiac has been retitled Academy of Doom. I haven’t seen the Wrestling Women film but the word on the net has it that it’s as enjoyable as MM:R without being so lavish or ambitious.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 27th November 2008

The Porcelain Man

Director: Sameer Kumar Madhar
Writer: Colin Bickley
Producer: Colin Bickley
Cast: Greg Hobbs, David Arnold, Scott Morton
Country: UK
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener

This film was sent to me several years ago and at the time I was unfortunately unable to review it because for some reason the disc wouldn’t play in my machine. This week, I came across the disc and thought what the heck, let’s see if my current DVD player will accept it. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly.

Sadly, it wasn’t worth the wait.

Let me just, before launching into the review proper, tell you about Stone Man. Stone Man was an Italian superhero thing touted around in the early 1980s which never, so far as I know, actually got made. But it had a super poster. And I remember someone in Starburst - possibly John Brosnan - bemoaning that it was a real shame the Italians didn’t put as much effort into their movies as they did into their advance publicity materials.

Well, a similar thing applies here. On receiving the disc, and indeed for several years after, right up until this week, I had assumed that The Porcelain Man was a low-budget but professional movie. It had a slickly designed DVD sleeve and quite the most professional-looking full-colour promo pack I had ever seen for a low-budget UK indie film.

But when I finally got to see the thing, it turned out to be a 94-minute home movie. Utterly amateur on every artistic and technical level and, as is so often the case with these things, woefully unaware of its own massive shortcomings, The Porcelain Man is self-indulgent, unwatchable rubbish. Which is a shame.

The creative force behind the film was writer/producer Colin Bickley who, according to the website and glossy press pack, first came up with the idea in 1993. Although it’s unlikely he came up with the whole idea because the opening scenes are a rather obvious rip-off of 28 Days Later. On the other hand, 28 Days Later was released in November 2002 and The Porcelain Man allegedly started shooting on 4th December 2002, so maybe it was just synchronicity. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Christ, they need everything they can get.

You will recall how 28 Days Later started with some animal rights activists trying to ‘liberate’ a bunch of infected chimpanzees from a lab staffed by the funny-faced bloke off The Friday Night Armistice. Well, The Porcelain Man also starts with a deadly virus escaping from a lab due to the activities of anti-vivisectionist idiots. Except that Colin Bickley and his chums don’t seem to have really grasped the idea of animal rights activists because the two young men who murder a security guard, break into a lab and murder the scientist they find there later discuss how they did it for the money. Look, either these are hired goons or they are tree-hugging psycho animal rights loons. They can’t be both and the latter do not employ the former.

Also - and frankly I’m surprised this would ever need pointing out to anyone - the labs that animal rights activists break into tend to have, you know, animals in them. And the activists tend to make off, where they can, with the animals.

This lab (filmed at Aston University) has no animals, there is no suggestion that it contains any animals and the balaclava-wearing hoodlums who break in don’t look for animals. Instead they demand “Where is it?” and are told “Here it is,” as a terrified lab assistant hands them a rack with a couple of unlabelled test tubes of blue liquid. So in what sense are these animal rights activists, except in the sense that you had just watched 28 Days Later and thought: ooh, that’s a good idea?

It sort of reminds me of all those dodgy Terminator rip-offs which used the term ‘cyborg’ without bothering to check what it meant. Arnie was a cyborg because he was a cybernetic organism, part machine and part living being. That was essential in order for him to travel back through time, wasn’t it? Part organism, part robot. A bit like the Six Million Dollar Man who originated, as we all know, in Martin Caidin’s novel... Cyborg.

But all those 1980s and 1990s dodgy B-movie makers just called any old killer robot a ‘cyborg’ without knowing why because that’s what The Terminator did. Similarly, these are animal rights activists because that’s what 28 Days Later did.

I mean, it wouldn’t have been hard. Borrow a pet rabbit or a couple of white mice from someone, film them in close-up from a few angles, maybe changing a sign on the cage to look like there’s a bunch of them, then film your lab scenes creatively and add animal atmos to the soundtrack in post. How hard can any of that be?

Sadly, after this prologue the rest of the film is not ripped off from 28 Days Later or any other film that I know, which is a shame as that may have given me a clue as to what is going on. It’s some sort of police procedural, and the virus spreads gradually through human contact, and an old guy who may be a scientist sleeps in the nude and keeps getting phone calls in the middle of the night, and all sorts of people get killed, and there’s a police inspector with the biggest (non-prosthetic) nose you’ve ever seen, and there’s the world’s least exciting car chase around a multi-storey car park, with both drivers rigidly observing the 5mph speed limit.

And the whole thing, while it claims to have cost £5,000, looks like the film-makers may have got £4,990 change back. Because this really is the cheapest, tattiest, most ludicrously over-ambitious piece of amateur rubbish I’ve seen for a while. It makes no concessions to its minuscule budget and inexperienced cast and crew but just blithely charges ahead, somehow convinced that it’s going to end up as a watchable film. Which was never, ever going to happen. Because a watchable film can only start out with a decent script.

Like far too many ultra-low budget British action films, there is absolutely zero characterisation. I couldn’t tell you what any of these characters are called, what they do, who they are, how they relate to any of the other characters, what their motivations are, where they come from, nothing at all could I tell you about them. And it’s clear that the film-makers couldn’t either. All we know is that they all like to spout clichés and run around pretending to shoot at things.

Oh, and there are zombies in this film.

You might think I’ve left it a bit late in the review to blithely mention the existence of the living dead. But that’s because the zombies themselves barely feature. They’re in maybe two scenes and they’re discussed in a couple of other scenes (using the Z-word) but otherwise you could easily miss them. It’s absolutely extraordinary. Why would you film a zombie movie and almost entirely neglect to feature or mention zombies? This is just the most half-arsed, half-hearted, pointless zombie film I have seen in a very long time because There Are Almost No Zombies In It.

It’s possible that one reason the zombies are so limited in their screen time is because they are really, really crap zombies. You know, the world isn’t short of aspiring make-up effects artists who know how to do a zombie and are willing to pitch in on a project so they can get a feature credit on IMDB. And while there were fewer such people in 2002, they were certainly out there.

But these zombies just look like they’ve had a bottle of ketchup poured over them, which makes the often ludicrously purple dialogue even more risible as characters are repulsed by these ‘rotting corpses’ and then amazed when they somehow ‘come back to life.’ “He was dead. I saw him. He was dead,” emphasises one character whose name (like all the rest) I don’t know. But what he saw was what we saw: someone who appears to have had a drunken accident with a ketchup bottle shortly before collapsing into a coma.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” asks another (or possibly the same) character in another scene, staring in horror at his hand which has a small violet blotch on it. Actually yes, I have seen something like that. I remember it distinctly because it was the last time that my pen leaked. This disconnect between dialogue and image reaches its apotheosis with a character explaining how his hands are now covered in whatever this is, except that he’s explaining over the phone so we can actually see one of his hands and it’s as clean as a whistle.

Although that’s not the only disconnect between soundtrack and image. Director Sameer Kumar Madhar was brought on board the project shortly before principal photography via Shooting People, after a number of other directors had apparently stepped up and then backed off from the project. He has a - shall we say? - distinctive style.

Basically, what Madhar does is constantly cut between two different scenes one of which is silent leaving a continuous soundtrack of dialogue from the other. Which might have worked sparingly but is employed almost continually here. And it might have worked in instances when the two scenes take place simultaneously within the narrative, but Madhar likes to do this with scenes that take place consecutively within the narrative. Often featuring the same character. This adds enormously to the incoherence of the plot, although I’m sure it would be equally incomprehensible if it had been directed by somebody who wasn’t convinced that film direction needs a new paradigm and a crappy micro-budget horror/action picture shot in Nuneaton is the place to start.

There are no credits for production designer or costume designer which is fair enough because clearly nobody bothered to design the production or costumes. Despite several of the characters being police officers, none of that alleged £5,000 was spent on hiring a couple of police uniforms for a day from the local fancy dress shop to tog up a couple of extras and actually give the impression of police work. It’s very obvious that all the actors are simply wearing their own clothes (or not, in the case of the old sleeps-in-a-smile geezer).

The mostly amateur cast includes nobody you’ve ever heard of and neither Bickley nor Kumar Madhar seem to have ever done anything else. Originally running 117 minutes, the running time was cut to 94 minutes by hacking out a lot of exposition at the start. “What was originally a 20 minute investigative segment (lots of mobile phones, edgy 24-style camerawork and creepy 'trust no-one' X-Files-type glances between leads), containing five chronological scenes now exists as one five minute sequence of cross-cut scenes that effectively explain the whole plot in one short swoop” reckons the press pack. Well, apart from the fact that the phrase is ‘fell swoop’, you dingdong, I can also certify that whatever this five-minute sequence might be, it only explains the plot to people who already know it.

The Porcelain Man (I’m still not sure what the title means) had a single cast and crew screening in July 2004 at Warwick Arts Centre and then was sold on DVD via the website (without certificate), presumably also to the cast and crew. There were a couple of reviews (from people who could evidently get their screener disc to play) before the movie and all associated with it lapsed back into justifiable obscurity. I can’t see a special edition of this one being released any time soon, sorry.

MJS rating: D

review originally posted 26th August 2011