Portmanteau

Director: Mark Garvey
Writer: Mark Garvey
Producers: Mark Garvey, Jasmine Knight
Cast: Jasmine Knight, Mark Garvey, Paul Woodcock
Year of release: 2017
Country: UK
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.markgarvey.co.uk

The multi-story films which we commonly refer to as anthologies were once given a different name, one that has largely fallen into disrepute. A picture like Dead of Night or Gilbert Harding Speaks of Murder was known as ‘a portmanteau film’.

The word ‘portmanteau’ has two other meanings. Originally it was a type of suitcase or travelling trunk which was divided into compartments, the earliest known use being 1579. Three hundred years later, in Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll had Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice that some of the odd words in Jabberwocky – like ‘slithy’ meaning ‘slimy and lithe’ – were “like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Hence comes the more common usage, applied to any word coined by bashing two other words together so hard that bits of them fly off. Smog, brunch and banoffee are all portmanteau words. I’m not sure when the film usage was first coined or indeed whether it comes from the Carrollian term or directly from the French luggage.

Mmmm, banoffee...

All of which brings me to Portmanteau, a smartly directed and very enjoyable multi-part horror film written, directed, produced, shot and cut by the (to me) previously unknown Mark Garvey. There are eight tales in the 85 minutes and while there’s no framing story, what we have instead is a loose narrative thread, in the sense that each story features a character from the previous one. There are no titles given for the segments on screen or in the credits (but see later).

After some smartly designed opening titles, we kick off with a photographer (Simon Cleary) who receives an unexpected roll of film in the post. Developing the images in his dark-room, he finds something he would rather not see. The actual horror here - and in some of the other segments- is somewhat random and unexplained but I didn’t really mind that. These aren’t simplistically gruesome morality tales in the EC Comics mould, rather they’re just little slices of unpleasantness presented in a darkly entertaining way.

The delivery guy who brought the parcel sets off in his van along a country lane. He’s played by Paul Woodcock and apparently this is a sort of running gag in Mark Garvey’s work, Woodcock having played the same character in three previous shorts and one previous feature. (It's Kelton the Cop all over again.) What happens here is that he reverses up and pulls into the side to allow a car coming the other way to get past. But the other driver (John Harper) also reverses and pulls in. Both cars move forward, then politely reverse again. And so it goes on, progressing from embarrassingly British politeness to irritation to road rage and ultimately something worse than road rage.

I would really, really like to think that this is an homage to the ‘Pride’ segment of another portmanteau movie, the 1971 comedy classic The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins. In this Galton and Simpson scripted vignette (originally made for TV as a Comedy Playhouse), Ian Carmichael and Alfie Bass are two drivers from different social classes, neither of whom will yield to the other on a narrow lane, creating an insoluble impasse. This is probably not an homage to that, but it would be nice if it was.

Our third tale concerns a young couple (Stuart O’Connor and co-producer Jasmine Knight) who are painting their flat. The fella is distracted by what he can see through the front door peep-hole: their neighbour (Madonna Norgrove) carrying heavy things out of her flat in plastic sacks. Surely she’s got parts of dead bodies in there. Or has she?

This leads into the weirdest segment, starring Mark Garvey himself as a birdwatcher, living in a remote (but nicely appointed) cabin in the woods. He shares this accommodation with his girlfriend, a blow-up doll whom he treats exactly like a human being. There’s a bizarrely hallucinogenic aspect to this tale of mental breakdown, not least a scene where the birder ‘conducts’ a (digitally created) starling roost plus – uniquely in a British horror film – stock footage of somebody handling a hawfinch. I’ve never seen a hawfinch. It’s been on my would-love-to-see list for 40 years but I’ve never yet spotted one. Outside of this film, anyway.

Story number five has an undeniable air of Berberian Sound Studio about it, concerning as it does a foley artist (this film’s composer Kyle Booth) hacking up vegetables to create the soundtrack for a horror film. Initially working alone on Zombiepocalypsegeddon, he is reassigned to work under a bossy supervising sound editor (Louise Blay) on a rediscovered lost classic, The Werewolf vs the Merman. And we are of course treated to the cheesy fake trailer for this epic monsterfest. A particularly fun sequence, which epitomises the creativity and innovation on display here, is a little musical number constructed from overlaying snippets of the sounds being recorded, visualised on screen in pop-up windows. It’s a rhythmic, percussive tune that comes across like Stomp on a table-top.

From Berberian Sound Studio we move to Joe’s Apartment as a writer (Kelli Watson) sits alone in her flat working on a script for the bossy producer from the previous segment (Victoria Markham). Constantly distracted by a seemingly invincible cockroach, she eventually snaps before suffering a genuinely ironic and awful fate.

Our penultimate story has a guy in a rabbit costume (Stuart Offord) watching two other men, in the distance, constantly getting in and out of a car. It’s very perplexing until we switch perspective and watch the story from the point of view of the other two men (Callum Oakaby-Wright and Jorden Harvey) who are trying to bury a dead body, with limited success. This then feeds into a final tale which features the girlfriend from the painting-the-flat story and, not unexpectedly, the original photographer. And thus the narrative comes full circle, not unlike Jack Rosenthal’s classic portmanteau film The Chain, or the film which inspired that, Max Ophuls’ La Ronde.

I strongly suspect that not one of the films I’ve referenced in this review had any influence on Mark Garvey at all, and it is indeed quite possible that he has never seen or even heard of some of them. But I enjoy drawing unlikely cinematic comparisons so sue me.

As so often with motion picture portmanteaux that have more than three segments, Portmanteau fair gallops along. If you’re not keen on the story you’re watching, hang on for ten minutes and something else will pop up. But astoundingly I did actually enjoy everything that I was watching. Sure, some of the acting won’t be winning a Bafta anytime soon, and a few segments are stretched just to the limit of acceptable repetition, but there isn’t actually a duff story here. Moreover, there’s tremendous variety in terms of realism, humour, approach and execution. It’s a real smorgasmord of horror vignettes; every one is a little cracker in its own way and the links that build to a circular narrative provide a cohesion that makes the whole film – unlike so many anthologies – greater than the sum of its parts.

I mentioned at the top that Mark Garvey was an unknown name to me but he’s not new to the film-making game. His IMDB page lists shorts back to 2003, although many more within the last three to four years. In fact, on closer inspection eight of the listed shorts are the segments of Portmanteau, respectively titled Exposure, Courtesy, Proxemics, Murmuration (told you the starlings were important!), Substantiation, Scuttle, Patience and Double Exposure. Any one of these tales certainly could stand alone as a short, but the linking factors show that this project has been conceived as a feature from the start and isn’t just a mash-up.

This is Mark Garvey’s third feature-length work following 874 Miles, a drama about cycling from Lands’ End to John O’Groats, and Postscript, a post-apocalyptic anthology. All of the cast have worked on previous Garvey films but none of them seem to have worked on anything else. It’s quite the rep company he’s got there.

At time of writing, Portmanteau is being submitted to festivals. Catch it if you can.

MJS rating: A

Magic Island

Director: Sam Irvin
Writers: Brent Friedman, Neil Ruttenberg
Producer: Debra Dion
Cast: Zachary Ty Bryan, Andrew Divoff, French Stewart
Country: USA
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Ladies and gentlemen, the Dick Van Dyke Award for the Most Preposterous British Accent in a Motion Picture goes to… the entire cast of Magic Island, a mid-1990s children’s fantasy from Charlie Band’s Moonbeam Entertainment.

Throughout the history of the talkies, there have been many hilarious attempts by otherwise competent American actors to replicate a British accent, any sort of British accent: from DVD himself and his notorious catchphrase “Cor Blimey, Maori Poor Pens!” to Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as Victorian England’s only Californian surfer dude. And never let us forget the monstrously bad Mary Reilly in which Julia Roberts’ accent took a walking tour of the entire United Kingdom, something which she actually acknowledged in media interviews but tried to excuse by saying, “We wanted to give the impression that Mary had lived and worked all over Britain and picked up lots of different accents.” (I’m not making this up. I saw her on TV saying this with a straight face, which I suppose shows that she is a good actress after all.)

Anyway…

Thirteen-year-old Zachary Ty Bryan from Home Improvement plays Jack Carlisle, the sort of clean-cut blond American 13-year-old traditionally played by child stars from Home Improvement. As an American playing an American, his accent is okay and the same goes for his obligatory single parent (Schae Harrison: The Bold and the Beautiful) who is too busy with work to notice that her son has no friends. When Jack’s mum skips dinner for a business meeting he is left with their Haitian cook, Lucretia (Ja’net Dubois, mostly a TV actress although she can be spotted as ‘Momma Bosley’ in the second Charlie’s Angels movie), whose accent sounds okay although I can’t guarantee authenticity as I have never met anyone from Haiti. Still, West Indian with a hint of French seems reasonable.

Lucretia gives Jack a book about pirates into which he falls, plummeting out of the sky, together with his shoulder bag. Boy and bag land on Blackbeard’s head, knocking the legendary pirate to the sand and thereby saving his opponent in a scene which will have you thinking, “That’s a point – I must watch Time Bandits again.”

Blackbeard is played as a sort of Happy Shopper pantomime villain by the Wishmaster himself, Andrew Divoff. He has a useless, foppish, heavily bewigged first mate named Saperstein (Third Rock from the Sun’s French Stewart, whose other DTV claim to fame is the title role in Inspector Gadget 2) and two dense comedy pirates, Duckbone (Abraham Benrubi: George of the Jungle, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died and later a regular on ER) and Jolly Bob (Sean O’Kane - who is actually Scottish!). Facing off against them are a trio of ‘buccaneers’ – so they’re like pirates, but good – led by Morgan (Edward Kerr: seaQuest DSV) who is the King of England’s nephew. (There is a scene later on where Morgan bemoans how his father never had time for him, thus mirroring Jack’s situation. Except, well, Morgan’s father was brother to the divinely appointed ruler of a globe-spanning empire, providing  close support to a blood relative who was continually embroiled in domestic and foreign politics and usually fighting at least one war, while Jack’s mum needs to get the Atkinson account faxed by Thursday. It’s not really the same thing.) Morgan is confident if not forceful but makes up for this with his choice of companions, a fierce-some wench named Gwyn (Lee Armstrong: Leprechaun 3) who is “the finest swordswoman in all of Ireland” and a black bodybuilder named Dumas (Oscar Dillon, who was one of Harvey Dent’s henchmen in Batman Forever that same year).

Between them, the pirates and the buccaneers are responsible for, I would say, seven of the ten oddest accents ever heard in a feature film. Gwyn’s is possibly the worst which is odd because: aren’t there some Irish people actually living in America? With the exception of Dumas, who is meant to be West Indian (we eventually find out that he is an ancestor of Lucretia and one of his relatives wrote Jack’s book), the actors produce accents which can only be described as ‘Britoid’. That is: they are clearly meant to be British accents, and they sound more British than, say, French or Japanese, but that doesn’t mean that they even remotely resemble any of the many accents spoken throughout the British Isles. They’re not Southern English, Scots or Irish although there are hints of those accents so presumably those are stronger influences than, say Brummie, Geordie or Welsh. (Dumas has a vague accent which seems uncertain whether it should be West Indian, American or Britoid. By comparison with the others it’s quite reasonable.)

You just wonder whether any of these actors has ever actually met anyone from the UK. Or seen a British film or TV show. Perhaps American actors train for British roles by watching Mary Poppins, Mary Reilly and re-runs of Frasier (famous for managing to extract a hilarious Britoid accent from an actress who was actually British).

Anyway, the pirates and the buccaneers are both searching for a treasure on Magic Island, a storybook isle populated by ghosts and monsters. Morgan and friends consider ‘Mad Jack’ to be a sorcerer and he impresses them over the course of the film with modern day miracles such as a Walkman and a cigarette lighter (though there is never any suggestion that he is enough of a rebel to actually smoke – it’s just a plot device). Climbing a pizza tree for food, Jack encounters a ‘sandshark’ – basically a big lizard which burrows through loose sand like a sort of low-rent Tremors graboid, except this actually has a shark fin on its back. Jack defeats it using bubblegum. He subsequently encounters Lily, a young mermaid who saves him from drowning and thereby is magically granted legs for one day. Which is convenient.

Played by 13-year-old Sally-Ann Friend, Lily is a real problem because she spends the whole film wearing a sea-shell bra and a loose, flimsy skirt. There is a romantic subplot between her and Jack which ends with a couple of chaste kisses which is just creepy. I mean, bless, young love and all that, but I think that I speak for adult heterosexual males everywhere when I say that watching skinny, scantily clad 13-year-old girls makes us uncomfortable. Unless they’re playing a coquettish Lolita in some serious drama, 13-year-old actresses should not really be strolling along beaches - wearing what is, effectively, a small bikini – while making goo-goo eyes. (Lily’s accent, while not Britoid – god I love that word now! – is nevertheless very, very odd. Fair enough, it’s not clear what accent a mermaid would actually have, but why not just stick with the actress’ natural accent? Or maybe that is her natural accent.)

Among the other strangeness encountered on the island, as the buccaneers and pirates make their separate ways towards the treasure, occasionally encountering each other, is a trio of carved talking heads – one silly, one angry, one female – voiced by no less a trio than Martine Beswick (Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Cyclone), Isaac Hayes (Shaft, South Park) and Saturday Night Live alumnus Terry Sweeney. Eventually a stone door is located by both parties, which Jack successfully opens by lifting the toenail of a large stone statue sat astride the entrance. This then comes to life – and so, in turn, does the film.

Animated by Joel Fletcher, who also worked on Dragonworld and now does CG animation on movies like King Kong and X-Men III, this 30-foot high statue is the undoubted highlight of the film. It’s very Harryhausen-esque, almost like Talos’ little cousin, and is not only well-animated but very well matted into the action as well, actually interacting with the background and the characters. Without wishing to belittle Magic Island – which is a fun kids film that TF Simpson thought was great – the sequence with the stone giant is like something from a different, better film. It has certainly notched this movie’s MJS rating up a couple of points.

After Jack defeats the stone guardian, the opposing teams meet up again inside the chamber where a vast amount of treasure is stored. This was hoarded by a warlock named Carabas who is in fact still there as a golden face on the wall – which is actually director Sam Irvin sticking his head through a hole in the set. Blackbeard suffers for his greed by being turned into living gold, unable to move as the walls start to grind towards each other, threatening to crush pirate and buccaneer alike. Everyone escapes but, alas, Lily’s legs have vanished and she’s back to being half-fish, so Jack pulls her out on a rug, just before the walls finally close.

Having returned Lily to the sea, and with Saperstein, Duckbone and Jolly Bob eager to be Morgan’s new crew, Jack takes his leave back into the book – and wakes up in his bed. His mother has skipped the meeting and come home to be with her son, which is a happy ending although it’s not exactly narratively satisfying because Mrs Carlisle’s change of heart is unexplained and unrelated to her son’s magical adventure. Normally you would expect the character who has the adventure to learn something about themselves and alter their attitudes or habits, but here it’s the other half of the faulty relationship who mends her ways, for no real reason.

Lily gave Jack a seashell to remember her by, which had all the hallmarks of being the item that would make him think ‘Was it really a dream?’ but in fact that is not mentioned in the epilogue whereas Jack’s torn and wet jeans are clear evidence that what he went through was real.

With its comedy villains, harmless swashbuckling and spooky encounters, Magic Island is good, solid fun for undemanding kids. I can’t see it going down so well with youngsters of Jack’s age but that’s okay. You should always make your child protagonist older than your child audience because kids aspire to be older. For adults, the highlights are the stop-motion stone giant and, of course, the hilarious bad accents. Irvin’s direction is fine, the sandshark and other special effects are okay and the Mexican locales are suitably photogenic and magical.

Zachary Ty Bryan, who was halfway through his eight-year Home Improvement run, had starred in Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter the previous year (some sort of contractual thing I guess as his Home Improvement co-star Taran Noah Smith went on to make Little Bigfoot 2 a couple of years after this). Bryan later had roles in The Rage: Carrie 2, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and episodes of The Outer Limits, Buffy and Smallville. Andrew Divoff’s massive genre CV includes Neon Maniacs, Graveyard Shift, Oblivion 1 and 2, Xtro 3, Nemesis 4, Brian Yuzna’s godawful Faust and a 2002 version of Dracula starring Patrick Bergin.

Director Sam Irvin was a protégé of Brian de Palma and has directed a wide range of features, ads, video etc; from our point of view the interesting ones are Oblivion I and II, Elvira’s Haunted Hills and a Making Of featurette for Gods and Monsters (a film on which he was co-executive producer). He also produced Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy. Neil Ruttenberg wrote Deathstalker II and also Prehysteria 3 on which he collaborated with Brent Friedman. Friedman’s other credits include Syngenor, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Prehysteria 2, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and episodes of three series on which he got a producer credit: Dark Skies, Enterprise and the 2002 version of The Twilight Zone.

Cinematographer James Lawrence Spencer lit a whole bunch of Band films in the 1990s, including kidflicks such as Prehysteria 2 and 3 and more adult fare: Beach Babes from Beyond, Dreammaster: The Erotic Invader, Blonde Heaven and Beach Babes 2. He DP-ed second unit on Castle Freak and Lurking Fear, and as a grip/gaffer/sparks he has worked on the likes of Creepozoids, Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Critters III and IV, Puppet Master II, Trancers II, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Amityville Dollhouse and The Dead Hate the Living.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 12th October 2006

Wolfskin

Director: Richard Mansfield
Writer: Richard Mansfield
Producer: Richard Mansfield
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: online
Website: www.mansfielddark.com

Many people still think that the first ever feature-length animated film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but tonto toon fans know that it was actually Lotte Reiniger’s shadow animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed, made in Germany in 1926. (Wikipedia reckons there were two earlier films made in Argentina, now lost.) Richard Mansfield’s extraordinary and poetic Wolfskin owes an obvious debt to Reiniger’s work and indeed is dedicated to her memory.

Whereas Prince Achmed was animated frame by frame, Mansfield’s technique - which he has developed across a number of short films - is more like traditional southeast Asian shadow puppetry with his figures animated in real time using wires. Just occasionally a real 3D object is used when necessary, such as a hand or a bottle. Modern video capabilities enhance this antique technique, providing Mansfield with a depth of field which Reiniger never had.

Wolfskin runs a full 71 minutes and is an amalgam of classical European fairy tales. Thus there are specific references to Sleeping Beauty (pricking the finger, city falls asleep), Cinderella (glass slipper, and chopping up feet to fit into it) and Rapunzel (really, really long hair). Plus there are mermaids, clockwork servants and, of course, wolves. While there are human-wolf interactions and relationships, including a human phoetus and a lupine phoetus developing in the womb as twins, there are no actual, traditional, common or garden werewolves. Nevertheless, anyone compiling a list of British werewolf pictures which didn’t include Wolfskin would be selling themselves short. There is certainly enough grim death and Grimm violence here to peg this on the fringes of the British Horror Revival.

Having said all of the above, I would be lying if I said that I could actually follow precisely what was going on. Not that I think it matters. This is a film that’s more about imagery than plot. It’s presented silent, as was Prince Achmed (albeit that was more forced on Reiniger by virtue of sound films not having yet been invented) with a pleasing, mellifluous score composed and performed by Anglo-Turkish singer/harpist/therimin-player Ozlem Simsek. Mansfield’s earlier shorts are mostly either music videos or narrated ghost stories, thus he is used to working without dialogue. The latter include versions of Amelia B Edwards' 1864 tale ‘The Phantom Coach’ and Francis Marion Crawford’s 1894 classic ‘The Upper Berth’, both available on the Mansfield’s Mucky Puppets blog.

It is this experience in matching imagery to sound that has led to Wolfskin where, ironically, the process has reversed with Simsek matching her music to Mansfield’s visuals. The whole film has taken three years to produce and is a quite singular achievement for all concerned. Wolfskin is a captivating, enigmatic, lyrical film - magical in a number of ways - which will repay you your 70 minutes many-fold as the imagery and visual ideas linger in your memory. The only contemporary comparison to Mansfield’s work would be Ashley Thorpe’s quasi-animated films: the intention is similar, though the techniques are different.

Mansfield is now expanding his creative work beyond animation and is currently in post on his first live-action feature, Who is Coming aka Owlman, partially inspired by MR James’ classic story ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ (you may recall that written on the whistle in that story is ‘Quis est iste qui uenit’ which the narrator translates as ‘Who is this who is coming?’) [This was eventually released as The Mothman Curse - MJS]. A second live action feature, The Secret Path, is also in production.

Wolfskin is a unique film, one of those oddities of the BHR which make the entire subgenre so fascinating and diverse. I really, really enjoyed The Phantom Coach and The Upper Berth too. Perhaps Mansfield’s next animated feature could be an anthology of classic Victorian ghost tales. In the meantime, take a look at Wolfskin. Lotte Reiniger would be proud.

MJS rating: A-