In a Lonely Place

Director: Davide Montecchi
Writers: Davide Montecchi, Elisa Giardini
Producer: Meclimone
Cast: Lucrezia Frenquellucci, Luigi Busignani
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: Facebook

Within the first couple of minutes of my viewing of this film, one thing became clear to me. In a Lonely Place has absolutely the best cinematography of any independent film that I have ever seen in my entire life. Shot after shot after shot is drop-dead gorgeous. Long shots, two-shots, close-ups, static shots, panning shots: you could take a hi-res frame-grab from almost any moment in this film, blow it up, frame it and hang it in a gallery.

The light, the shadow, the colours and oh so many reflections. Mirrors make extra work for cinematographers, obviously, but In a Lonely Place is packed with mirrors. Mirrors on walls, mirrors on the floor, mirrors in front of someone, mirrors behind someone, shattered mirrors, multiple mirrors in one shot. Holy cow, this is visually the most amazing thing you’ll see all year.

Fabrizio Pasqualetto is the man responsible, and if there isn’t an Oscar somewhere in that man’s future, I’ll eat my hat. He paints with light.

A tip of the hat also to camera operator Lino Hermaus, focus puller Matteo Franca and digital image technician Guido Zamagni. Between them these four gentlemen have crafted something stunningly beautiful.

This could be the first film review in history to mention the focus puller before the director but that’s just because I wanted to acknowledge the camera crew up front. The whole film is the vision of Davide Montecchi, and what a vision it is. There are only two actors and, to be honest, not a vast amount of dialogue when you consider that the film runs only 80 minutes (plus credits) and numerous lines are repeated over and over again. But that just leaves more room for the film to be ‘a film’, exploring the possibilities of cinema.

Describing the ‘plot’ of In a Lonely Place would be like synopsising a poem. It would completely miss the point and belittle the work. (“A guy gets freaked because a raven flies into his library while he’s having a nap, and it causes him to think about his dead girlfriend…”) Lucrezia Frenquellucci is Theresa, a young woman who has been invited to visit an empty hotel. Luigi Busignani is Thomas, the man who invited her there, an obsessive, mentally disturbed stalker.

We open with Theresa tied to a chair, and then follow two narratives. In the main story Thomas abuses and tortures Theresa, both physically and mentally. Interspersed with this are flashbacks of earlier in the evening as they share a meal, she dresses in one of the hotel rooms, and then he takes some photographs of her. One story leads up to that opening shot, one leads away from it.

I did say that summing up the story would belittle the film. The above paragraph makes In a Lonely Place sound like trashy (if good-looking) torture porn. There are hundreds of micro-budget, misogynist ‘horror’ films that have basically the same ‘plot’ (a few, a very few, are actually worth watching). But you know, the world is also full of representations of ‘a beautiful man with an amazing physique flashing his cock’: 99.999% of those are gay porn, and then there’s Michelangelo’s David. I’m not belittling the gay porn industry – I know some great guys who make gay porn films – I’m just demonstrating how a very simple, essential concept can, in the right hands, treated and viewed in a special way, become something with not just genuine artistic merit but the sort of work that transcends conventional concepts of art to become iconic.

Through a combination of Montecchi’s direction, Pasqualetto’s photography and two excellent actors (working in a foreign language) – plus the many other crew who contributed, of course – this movie takes something which could be (and often is) tawdry and cheap and turns it into a work of art. I’m not saying it is actually as ‘good’, on some impossible, hypothetical scale of artistic quality, as David because, bloody hell, Michelangelo. I just want people to understand that the narrative content of the film, which is limited in the first place and will be naturally brief in descriptions, short reviews, film festival catalogues or DVD sleeves, is not a fair summation of the cinematic experience here.

Adding to all of this is the amazing location: a huge, empty, modern hotel. A landscape shot shows nothing nearby except a power station (though that may have been digitally altered of course). The interiors, whether they are genuinely part of that building or studio creations, are amazing. The main room where the primary story takes place has been carefully arranged so that every square centimetre contributes to the film’s look and feel. This hotel is disused but not derelict. It is in a mysterious, transitory state between a vibrant, busy place and an empty ruin, which places the limited story and the two characters in a sort of limbo, divorced from the real, outside world.

Ivana Alessandrini was the set designer and has done an amazing job which Montecchi and Pasqualetto have then taken and turned into magic. (Tip of the hat also to set decorator Diana Fazi and set dresser Annalena Piri.) If you ever wondered what ‘mise-en-scene’ actually means, take a look here.

One more striking visual is Luigi Busignani himself who has a fascinating, angular face that you won’t soon forget. He speaks with a strong accent: stressing, each, word, separately. Sometimes he whispers, sometimes he shouts, but he never tips over into being a cartoon psychopath. Lucrezia Frenquellucci’s performance is one of confusion and vulnerability but with determination below the surface. Her character is, apparently, a model/actress so it makes sense that she is beautiful, but in an interesting, human way, not an airbrushed, formulaic, magazine sort of way. Theresa’s voice has been looped by Barbara Sirotti; perhaps Frenquellucci has too strong an accent.

There is some violence and injury on screen, with special make-up effects provided by Mauro Fabrizcky. Be warned that there is also a disturbing (but entirely fake) moment of animal cruelty.

I don’t know what else I can tell you about In a Lonely Place. It is an extraordinary film. A true cinematic experience. Take the opportunity to watch it if you can.

MJS rating: A+

Slaughter

Director: Dan Martin
Writer: Dan Martin
Producers: Dan Martin, Scott Castle
Starring: Scott Castle, JA Chittenden, Kayleigh Young
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: DVD

I really, genuinely expected Slaughter to be awful. It was self-released with a pictureless sleeve bearing the bold proclamation ‘Banned in the UK!’ which is, of course, utter bollocks. A film can only legitimately claim to be banned in this country if it has been submitted to the BBFC and rejected (and we all know they hardly ever reject stuff nowadays). Just being ’not released’ in the UK is not the same as being banned. The video of my son’s school play hasn’t been released, but that’s not been banned. Although, having said all that, read on…

That sort of approach, coupled with the self-penned IMDB synopsis which promises that Slaughter “takes horror back to its nasty, gritty and often tongue in cheek roots of the 1970's and 80's” suggested to me that Dan Martin’s hour-long feature would be, to use the technical term, crapola.

The fact that it’s not crapola came as a great surprise to me. In fact, although the movie as a whole is a tad ramshackle, some parts are very, very good indeed.

A sequence of opening captions tell us about a serial killer named David Ward who filmed all his murders, and that what we are about to see is a dramatisation based on police evidence. Some of the film is indeed shot on Hi-8 as found footage, but some of it is more conventionally shot and the two formats integrate well together.

Ward is played quite magnificently by Scott Castle as a floppy-haired, masturbating loner, living in a caravan decorated with explicit photos cut from porn mags. In a clever touch, all of these pictures have noticeably had the woman’s head removed. In the commentary Castle claims this was to avoid any legal issues but actually what it does is emphasise Ward’s view of sexually available women as simply faceless pieces of meat for his own use.

Ward provides underground videos to a shady gangster known only as Mr X and seen only as a cigar-clenching hand, whom we first meet being serviced by a 14-year-old girl. The hand/shoulder is Dan Martin while the voice is Shaun Kimber, an academic authority on horror films who recently co-edited a book about snuff movies with my mate (and fellow British horror revival expert) Johnny Walker. Mr X offers Ward a thousand quid to kill – and film the death of – a whore whose recent pregnancy has made her surplus to requirements. A second young man (also played by Martin) brings the girl (Emma Wetherill) round to Ward’s caravan where the three sit down, swig some vodka and mess about a little before the two men start abusing, assaulting and torturing the woman.

This is one of several seriously impressive and disconcerting horror sequences. It’s all filmed in black and white on Ward’s Hi-8 camera, initially as a locked-off shot, later handheld but with disguised edits to give the impression of a single, uninterrupted take. It’s brutal, nasty, realistic and uncompromising. But what really makes this – and other scenes – work is the soundtrack. In lieu of diegetic screams and punches the whole sequence is filmed silent, ‘scored’ only by a repetitive, atonal sound that I can only describe as musique concrete. Credited to Adam Nelson, it’s a disturbing, even upsetting soundtrack, that like the headless porn images, stresses the inhumanity of what’s on screen. An appalling (and appallingly realistic) sexual attack and murder, which culminates in Ward raping the girl with a knifeblade, is reduced to the level of mechanical actions by a soundtrack that could be the pulsing blood inside his (or your) head. As horror film techniques go, it’s immensely successful and something that other film-makers could certainly learn from. (Nelson’s own subsequent directorial credits include feature-length drama Little Pieces and award-wining sci-fi short Emotional Motor Unit.)

We have already seen Ward attack a girl (Ella Mackintosh) in the woods, and stalk a man in a brief but very frightening home invasion scene. In the next sequence he brings two young women (Robynne Calvert – now a jobbing busker – and Alice Worsfold) into his caravan with the intention of filming a scuzzy, low-rent lesbian porno. This is shot conventionally, allowing the edit to jump swiftly to the point where - Ward having lost control - both victims are bloodied, bruised, tied up and terrified.

Intercut with these scenes are sequences of a detective named Jason King who is hunting Ward. This is Dan Martin’s father, credited as JA Chittenden, who picked the name himself so it is presumably an homage to Peter Wyngarde. Martin and Castle, who were both teenagers when they made this, are certainly too young to remember Department S. There are also a few clips of Ward, in an orange prison outfit, describing his crimes, including the sexual assault and murder of a child outside her parents’ house. This is dark, dark stuff. But it’s not presented salaciously or in a cheapjack attempt to shock.

Much of the second half of the film is a sequence before and after a Halloween party. Three friends (Martin, Aaron Grant and Lewis Powney) have decorated their house, got some booze in and are watching Night of the Living Dead on telly. We cut away just as the first unseen guests arrive and pick up the next morning when the trio discover one person has stayed over, unknown to them. This is Ward, whom they don’t recognise and didn’t invite. With him is a gleefully sadistic young woman, Sandra (an absolutely belting performance from Kayleigh Young). Ward and Sandra beat up and tie up the terrified lads then Ward anally rapes one of them while Sandra forces the young man to go down on her. Ward then produces a gun, shoots the boy in the head and forces the other two to carry the body out to the garage in a sheet.

This whole party sequence, none of which is found footage, has a feel of Last House on the Left to it, which Martin acknowledges as a major inspiration. In the film's penultimate sequence a final victim (Chloe De Salis) manages to escape from Ward after he rapes her in some woodland and pours petrol over her. This slip-up leads Detective King to Ward’s caravan and a final confrontation.

I have now watched Slaughter twice in succession, once with the regular soundtrack, once with the commentary by Martin and Castle. I am hugely impressed with what I’ve seen, and fascinated by the story behind the film. It transpires that the caravan sequence that moves from vodka to knife rape was a short film called The Last House on Straw Lane. The party sequence was also a short, billed as a sequel to the previous one but narratively unconnected. Slaughter was created by bolting the two together (with some nips and tucks) to give the impression that Castle is playing the same character, then filming enough extra material to bring the whole thing up to just about feature length. (Among the new footage was an interstitial shot of someone, presumably Castle, in a devil mask raping a young woman which appears occasionally, cluing us into the character’s unstable mental condition.)

The two shorts were shot in early and late 2007 while Castle and Martin were both studying at college in Gosport. Two of their lecturers appear in the film: Steve Launay as a TV news reporter and Bob Taylor as a vicar who is attacked by Ward in a churchyard. The rest of the footage was shot in 2008, with the DVD released in May 2009. Martin says on the commentary that the film had a few screenings but that some attempts were kaiboshed by local councils, which could well be true and, being fair, does give him some legitimacy for claiming that Slaughter was ‘banned in the UK’. (Would it actually pass the BBFC if submitted? I suspect so. It has artistic merit, it’s not prurient or sadistic, but it is a powerful study of psychotic amorality. Although there is some blood, there are no real prosthetics on show. Everything is framed so that we never see a blade actually entering. Far worse has been passed uncut 18.)

For a first feature by a couple of teenagers, cobbled together from existing and new material, Slaughter is extraordinarily accomplished. It has some random bits and some loose ends but that’s part of its accomplishment and its appeal. This is a true horror film: serious, disturbing, a journey into the darkest recesses of the human soul. There are references noted in the commentary (I wouldn’t have spotted them myself) to Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. This is a cine-literate film made by a cine-literate director.

Martin mostly DPed himself but a few bits, including the murder of the vicar, were photographed by Robert F White (who I’m guessing may have been the respected photographic retailer who passed away last year). Several of the credits are also Martin under such telling pseudonyms as ‘Dante Matheson’ and ‘Michael Deodato’.

Since making Slaughter, Dan Martin has adopted the screen name Juno Jakob and had made three more features: romantic drama No Direction Home; a very personal mental health documentary entitled They Call Me Crazy; and most recently Fox: A Documentary, a look inside a wildlife rescue charity. He has been trying for some time to find a way of making another horror film, Season of the Scarecrow. The IMDB credits him with something called Woodcote: Evidence of a Haunting (starring and co-written by Castle) but there is no evidence that this ever got made.

So that’s Slaughter, another forgotten gem of the British Horror Revival. It’s not perfect, in the same way that a Sex Pistols record isn’t perfect. It has the passion of youth, the fire of ambition, and the excitement and immediacy of let’s-do-the-show-right-here. Through a combination of design, accident and adaptation, Dan Martin and Scott Castle somehow created a film that, despite my initial misgivings, actually does “take horror back to its nasty, gritty and often tongue in cheek roots of the 1970's and 80’s”. They captured something that neither they nor anyone else could intentionally recreate. For fans of uncompromising, heart-of-darkness, human horror that knowingly nods towards early Wes Craven territory, Slaughter is a must-see. Tracking down a copy after all these years might be difficult, but keep an eye on eBay. I did, and I’m glad I did.

MJS rating: A-

Stray

Director: Nena Eskridge
Writer: Nena Eskridge
Producer: Nena Eskridge
Cast: Gabrielle Stone, Dan McGlaughlin, Samantha Fairfield Walsh
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.strayfeaturefilm.com

Some people think that all I do is watch and review British horror films. While it’s true that most of the films reviewed on this website are horror, and many of them are British, I do actually have a self-imposed broad remit of ‘cult movies and the people who make them’ which means that I can – and do – review whatever the heck I want.

As it happens, work on my next book means that, away from the website, pretty much all I’ve been doing for months is watching and reviewing British horror films. So it’s a real pleasure when something like this turns up in my in-box: an American psycho-thriller that I’ve never heard of, wasn’t expecting and can watch with neither expectations nor commitments.

I say ‘psycho-thriller’ but specifically this is a ‘psycho bitch thriller’, slotting into that subgenre of questionably misogynist pictures that includes the likes of Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Questionable because there’s a debate to be had about whether the strength and power of these woman in getting what they want in a man’s world is enough to make up for the fact that they are bunny-boiling amoral psychopaths on permanent PMT that any man should run a freaking mile from – for Christ’s sake, what are you thinking? – no matter what his dick tells him.

The psycho bitch du jour is Jennifer, played by Gabrielle Stone (Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard, Speak No Evil) whose mother is Dee Wallace Stone. Which is pretty impressive, although to people of my generation, Dee Wallace Stone was everyone’s mother. We first meet Jennifer leaping out of a campervan and running away, having stabbed (in the arm) the man who follows her. She makes it onto a train (part of the rail network around Philadelphia) and we assume at first that she is a victim, escaping an abusive situation that could have been anything on the spectrum between chauvinist boyfriend and sex slavery. Now she can maybe start a new life. (In reference to the previous paragraph, Jennifer was actually a male character in early drafts of the script...)

And indeed a new life is precisely what she does start, initially attaching herself to a retired insurance agent named Marvin (Andrew Sensenig: Don’t Look in the Basement 2, Terror Trap, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, The Last Exorcism Part II). These early scenes are – hang on, there’s a sequel to Don’t Look in the Basement? Really? When did that happen? Anyway, these early scenes are finely handled by the two actors: Marvin finds himself helping Jennifer – whoa, hang on. There’s a sequel to The Last Exorcism? That doesn’t even make sense. Jeez, the stuff that I find out when I check the IMDB. Where was I? Oh yes: Marvin finds himself helping Jennifer out of nothing much more than philanthropy with a dash of paternalism. She takes more than she’s offered, but still our sympathy lies with Jennifer who is clearly escaping a shit life.

Said sympathy will last for not much more of the film than Marvin does, though I don’t want to go into any detail about what happens to him. Suffice to say: it’s not nice and it makes us adjust our opinion of Jennifer for the whole of the rest of the film.

She takes a job as a cook, tossing burgers for the customers of a bar run by Greg (Dan McGlaughlin: also in Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard). His girlfriend Sarah (Samantha Fairfield Walsh, who has some seriously sexy eyebrows) is a waitress in the bar and there is a resident elderly female barfly, Edna (Arita Trahan: 21 Grams - who passed away in May 2015). It comes as no surprise to us that Jennifer has designs on Greg, and the second act is a study in Machiavellian manipulation as Jennifer carefully prises Greg and Sarah apart, then moves in. Some of this is quite disconcerting because Greg is clearly a nice guy, albeit one who seems to have difficulty keeping Little Greg inside his trousers, and Sarah also seems sweet and kooky (I mean, she’s a bit clingy and emotional but she’s Mother Theresa compared to Jennifer).

Eventually not only do Greg and Jennifer become an item, they also have a kid, a scenario which requires the largest of several suspensions of disbelief throughout the film. The baby is born at home without medical intervention, but it doesn’t seem credible that Greg (and others) would be fine with this happening, plus a complete absence of antenatal or neonatal care. It’s never made clear whether Jennifer’s identity, or indeed name, is real. She’s on the run, she has secrets both old and new, and she is somehow maintaining the pretense she creates throughout all this with no-one ever questioning who she is or where she came from. She doesn’t want any medical help with the baby, not least because it would show that she’s further advanced than she claims and hence it’s not actually Greg’s kid (it is presumably Marvin’s).

The thing is: that might be believable if this all took place in the remote one-horse town of Shitsville, Arkansas but it doesn’t. These characters live in (and the movie was filmed in) Chestnut Hill, a small town suburb of Philly, so how is Jennifer going to full term without ever having a scan, and without Greg or anyone else close to them being concerned that she's not had a scan?

I can accept Greg taking on Jennifer at the bar without resume or references, even without needing her address. It’s bar work and presumably it’s cash in hand. That’s fine but the other gap in believability here is the lack of interest by the cops in what happens to Marvin. There would have been some sort of investigation, and it would have uncovered something, surely. There’s actually the stump of a subplot when Sarah has coffee with her police detective brother Andrew (Sean Patrick Folster: episodes of Gotham and Mr Robot) because she’s starting to suspect that there’s more to Jennifer than meets the eye. Which is very perceptive, and I guess it’s fair that Andrew dismisses her concerns because she doesn’t even have a concrete accusation, let alone evidence. He does reappear right at the end but in a different context which has no real bearing on the plot and really just saved them hiring a different actor to play Other Cop.

I was disappointed that this aborted investigative subplot never went anywhere since it meant that revelations of Jennifer’s background – and hence her deceit and criminal record – were never really in danger of coming to light. Her relationship with Greg is strained, but her own web of lies is never under threat, denying us some tense plotting that would have enlivened the third act. Oh, and one other thing that seemed less than believable. Sarah hires a waiter, Michael (Ben Lyle Lotka) who is obviously gay. Jennifer uses this innocent friendship as part of her armoury, encouraging suspicions of infidelity in Greg’s mind (even though Michael is obviously gay). Yet it’s only much, much later, after the baby is born, that Greg discovers (actually, is told by someone) that Michael is gay. And to be fair to Greg, the fact that Michael has a boyfriend doesn’t mean he wasn’t necessarily also up to something with Sarah. You know, he could be bi.

The above nitpicking notwithstanding, I really enjoyed Stray. As long as you don’t think too carefully about the practicalities of Jennifer’s machinations (and Greg’s naivety), this is a gripping, solid thriller with well-rounded characters and well-crafted relationships that either draw them together or push them apart. The cast are all terrific and Nena Eskridge directs her debut feature with a polished, deft hand that makes her look like an old pro. Fine cinematography by David Landau (Dark Tarot) and top-notch editing by Sam Adelman (Donnie Brasco, Desperately Seeking Susan) complete the picture, almost literally.

Stray played festivals in 2015 and was released onto Amazon Prime in late 2016. Very much worth your time – check it out.

MJS rating: B+

Hollower

Director: MJ Dixon
Writer: MJ Dixon
Producer: Anna McCarthy
Cast: Adam Dillon, Becca Talulah, Nicholas Vince
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.mycho.co.uk

Released in August 2016 alongside Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, Hollower is the fourth entry in the Mycho Cinematic Universe, an ambitious shared world of loosely connected characters, scenarios and stories which began with Slasher House and continued with Legacy of Thorn.

Right, that’s the links out of the way.

Hollower is MJ Dixon’s most mature work to date, less cartoonlike than the previous three and more interested in using characterisation, narrative and atmosphere to generate fear than simply being scary. It’s principally a three-hander, or rather a brace of intercut two-handers. Our framing story sees Nathan (Adam Dillon) - battered, bruised and handcuffed – questioned in a police interview room by Detective Miller (Nicholas Vince: Hellraiser, The Day After Dark). A sequence of flashbacks visualise Nathan’s responses and show how he formed first a friendship and later a romantic/sexual relationship with his neighbour Isabelle (Becca Talulah, who was a cheerleader in Legacy of Thorn).

Nathan is the young man who worked alongside Eleanor James' Red in Slasher House (which means that my assumption that this would be about the third psycho, the one who isn't Cleaver or Thorn, was wrong - sorry). He is agoraphobic and hasn’t left his flat in two years, ordering all his supplies online. His life is repetitive and small, his only pastime (apparently) being the creation of slightly creepy dolls. Isabelle, on the rebound from an abusive relationship, moves in across the hall. She’s attracted to the shy, reclusive guy opposite, especially when he stands up to her angry ex (Joe Hughes, a barman in Cleaver).

Slowly, very slowly, Nathan starts to engage with Isabelle, gradually making progress in dealing with his own mental health problems. It’s a sweet, romantic tale laced with occasional moments of delightful humour (his attempts to cross the hall to leave a present outside her door are a hoot) and scored with a variety of faux-sixties pop songs.

But always we cut back to the interview room and Detective Miller. We don’t know what it is that Nathan has done (or at least, is accused of doing) but it’s probably not good. And it probably involves Isabelle.

Dixon employs his trademark colour schemes, albeit with less startling tones, to emphasise the contrast between the two stories. The interview room is a chilly blue while Nathan’s flat is a mix of orange and reds. It may just be my old, rheumy eyesight but I got the impression that the flat eased gradually towards more natural shades as the Nathan-Isabelle relationship progressed. Apart from the hall and a couple of scenes right at the end, these are the only two locations.

As the story progresses – at 90 minutes this is the longest MCU movie yet but it doesn’t feel stretched – we start to get clues about what this terrible crime might be. Nathan says he can’t remember anything, and Detective Miller doesn’t go into detail. But it’s in the flashback scenes that we start to get our first hints. Unremarked, in the background, just occasionally, we can spot something significant, something disturbing.

To say more would be unfair and spoiler-ish. I will note that, like the other Slasher House prequels, this works as a stand-alone horror film and you don’t need to have seen any of the others. Frankly it’s more than three years since I watched Slasher House and my knowledge of it relies almost entirely on the review I wrote at the time. (I’ve watched and reviewed a lot of films since then…)

The three leads give fine performances, especially Dillon who successfully portrays two very, very different versions of the same character. Bam Goodall provides special effects, as he did for Slasher House, Thorn, Cleaver and Dixon’s segment of eagerly awaited anthology Blaze of Gory.

Stylish, spooky, slick and seriously disturbing in its finale, Hollower is an accomplished piece of film-making that shifts the Mycho team of MJ Dixon and Anna McCarthy up a gear. Still to come from Mycho are Slasher House II, Mask of Thorn and Return of the Killer Clown, plus who knows what other delights. You don’t have to watch every entry in the Mycho Cinematic Universe – but I’m glad that so far I’ve been able to enjoy them all.

MJS rating: A-

My Little Sister

Directors. Maurizio and Roberto del Piccolo
Writer. Roberto del Piccolo
Producers: Maurizio del Piccolo, Elenoroa Turri
Cast: Holli Dillon, David White, Saverio Percudani
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.moviedel.com

This is the third feature from the del Piccolo brothers who previously brought us the British The Hounds and the Anglo-Italian Evil Souls. This one is solely Italian although the dialogue is all in English (with a variety of accents).

As such, we can count this as part of the Italian Horror Revival, a reinvention of traditional cinematic conventions as groundbreaking – and as consistently ignored – as the more familiar (to readers of this site) British Horror Revival. Just as 21st century British horror film-makers have reacted against the gothic tradition, refusing to slavishly copy creaky old Hammer tropes, themes and imagery, so too have their Italian counterparts marked out new territory, unbeholden to the works of Argento, Bava et al.

To put it simply, we don’t need any new Argento films because we already have the old Argento films, just like we don’t need any new Hammer films because we already have all the old Hammer films. And yet vast amounts of print and pixels are devoted to each new feature from Dario (with Alan Jones inevitably touting it as a return to form, apparently assuming people will forget he said the same thing about the previous flops…) just like the press fell over themselves to lavish attention and praise on The Woman in Black, hailing it as some sort of rebirth of British horror cinema when it was actually an anachronistic throwback artificially bolstered with a stuntcast leading man.

To put it even more simply: film-makers in Italy are making terrific movies that you’ve never heard of, just like film-makers over here are. Principal among these are of course the films of my pal Ivan Zuccon but he’s absolutely not a lone voice. There are a lot of horror movies being made in Italy right now, many of which have little or no impact outside of their home territory. You have to search for these things.

(The IMDB lists 129 Italian horror features released between 2011 and 2016 but of course some of those are international co-productions that aren’t strictly speaking Italian while others are unfinished and possibly unstarted. Nevertheless I’d love to see Domiziano Christopharo’s Hyde’s Secret Nightmare, Luciano Onetti’s Francesca, Lorenzo Bianchini’s Across the River, Luca Boni and Marco Ristori’s Eaters, Raffaele Picchio’s Morituris, Anotonio Micciulli’s Tempo di Reazione, Tommaso Agnese and Gabriele Albanesi’s Italian Ghost Stories, Domi Cutrona’s Dark Red Blood, Brando Impota’s 46 Wounds, Alessio Nencioni’s Possessione Demoniaca, Lucas Pavetto’s Lui Non Esiste, and of course Alan Cossettini’s Sharracuda. Viva la rinascita dell'horror Italiano!)

The Brothers del Piccolo certainly have an advantage over many of their compatriots in how their British connections increase their visibility on the global horror stage. I’ve still not seen The Hounds but I enjoyed Evil Souls and I enjoyed My Little Sister also. Here’s why.

Truth be told, there’s not a great deal of story in this taut, 75-minute slasher. There’s not exactly a huge amount of characterisation and really very little dialogue indeed (even if your definition of dialogue includes screams). What you will find here is lashings of tension, some real horror and a refreshing attitude towards the clichés that bedevil so many similar films.

One image in particular stands out. You may remember (or you may not; on the balance of probability the latter is more likely) that in my review of The Other Side of the Door I bemoaned the tendency of horror film soundtracks to emphasise spooky imagery with music stings. As a monster scuttles across the corridor in the background, a massive chord always seems to crash onto the soundtrack, ostensibly underlining the horror but actually robbing the imagery of its intended effect. Well, there is a shot in My Little Sister, inside a tent, in which we see an unidentified silhouette, carrying an axe, cross the rear canvas. It’s only brief, the characters don’t notice it and thankfully neither does the composer. And the very absence of any sort of musical recognition makes it much, much more frightening than it would be if there was an accompanying orchestral “D’naaaaa!” Horror movie soundtracks: less is more, folks. Less. Is. More.

So: a young couple go camping in the woods. They are expecting to meet three friends in the selected clearing but, though the tents are there, the folks are not. A creepy guy with an axe warns them to pack and leave because of a local (male) psycho named ‘Little Sister’ but they dismiss his concerns. They have also spotted (and laughed at) a mad woman with bandaged wrists wandering around the forest.

Those three friends, we may reasonably surmise, were the three folks whom we saw tortured by a nutter in the prologue. He wears a padded anorak and a mask made of human skin and likes to peel people’s faces off. His name is Igor, and he is our protagonist.

Well, before too long, Igor/Little Sister has the boyfriend trussed up, ready for a face-slicing. The middle act is a very well handled game of cat and mouse as the girlfriend creeps around Igor’s house and outbuildings, trying to avoid him while staying close enough that she might be able to effect a rescue.

Igor’s back-story is revealed in some convenient home movies which are being watched by a silent figure in a wheelchair. Over the course of the film we gradually learn more about Igor’s family and background, without any need for dialogue or explanation. The whole thing culminates in one of his victims taking a gamble on doing something utterly horrific in an attempt to trick Igor, taking advantage of his diminished mental faculties. It’s an audacious move for both character and film-makers which helps, along with other clever twists, to distinguish this from the many generic rent-a-slasher features out there.

The solid cast includes David White (Apocalypse Z, Zombie Massacre 2) and Holli Dillon (who was in Evil Souls and Steve Look’s 2011 zombie short Night of the Loving Dead). The brothers’ regular DP Tommaso Borgstrom does his usual fine work. The make-up effects are by someone named Chiara MechanicDoll!

My Little Sister is a superior slasher and a fine addition to the brothers' steadily building body of work, as well as to the Italian Horror Revival. If your idea of Italian horror is some creaky old giallo from the 1970s, here is a chance to see what modern spaghetti nightmares are really like.

No distribution has been announced yet.

MJS rating: B+

Devil Dog Shuck Returns

Director: Paul TT Easter
Writer: Paul TT Easter
Producer: Paul TT Easter
Cast: Paul TT Easter, Darren Luckin, Jim Ford
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener

I have been familiar with the name and work of Paul TT Easter for some time. There are several of his films in my BHR masterlist. But this is the first one I have actually watched. And let me tell you, it’s bonkers

Not to put too fine a point on it, Devil Dog Shuck Returns is one of the most bizarre, distinctive, subversive, idiosyncratic, clinically insane slices of avant-garde cinema that has ever troubled my eyeballs. It really is like nothing that I have ever seen. Are all of Easter’s films like this? Jesus Christ!

For ninety minutes I wondered: “What the hell is this I’m watching?” But not in a bad way. This is an eye-opening film, not an eye-watering one. On the basis of this movie, I would venture to suggest that Paul TT Easter is one of those underground British auteurs, like Joe Wheeler or Tom Rutter, whose work will be rediscovered 20 or 30 years from now and hailed as pure cult cinema. Or, looked at another way, if Paul Easter had been making films like this back in the 1970s, there would be books about him by now and festival retrospectives of his career.

So what is Devil Dog Shuck Returns actually about? What’s it not about? It’s mostly shot POV, though I would hesitate to call it ‘found footage’ because there’s no sense of this being recovered film in the way that something like Exhibit A or The Dinosaur Project was (or indeed, Blair Witch or Cloverfield). There are references to the camera being used and indeed it’s often visible when we spot Easter’s shadow. But there are also more conventionally shot and edited scenes, as for example early on when Paul, playing himself, wants to buy a van off a bloke. Unable to reach a deal, the van driver departs and we see him in the cab talking with someone else on the phone.

Paul has – or has access to – a large area of overgrown land somewhere in the wilds of Norfolk were he and his mates can mess about with vehicles and junk. As indeed they do, the film turning into an East Anglian Jackass for a while as they skid cars, tow each other around the snowy ground on improvised sledges, and drive a car straight through the side of a large caravan, an unfaked stunt that some films would spend thousands on.

After some time, we watch Paul and one of his mates heading to a rave in the woods, except there’s no-one and nothing there. They do however find some clothes hanging on a tree along with an axe and a samurai sword.

None of this, I’ll grant you, sounds much like a horror movie. But the ‘plot’ as such has been set in motion by Paul receiving the startling news that he has a long-lost twin brother. And about half an hour in, we suddenly find Paul and his mate brutally slaughtered (off camera) by said twin.

Mr Easter spends the rest of the film, shirtless, playing his own retarded psycho twin brother who sets out to reclaim everything that was Paul’s, including his camcorder and his pooch, the eponymous and playful ‘Shuckie’. He enters Paul’s house, where Paul’s girlfriend is asleep on the bed, and gropes her in a scene which is the closest this movie ever gets to sex. But he also finds time to change his voice and do a spoof aftershave commercial when exploring a shed looking for a JVC camera charger. Probably oddest of all is that, while in his brother’s house, he puts on a DVD and watches scenes from earlier in the movie, including the incomplete van deal.

Being honest, Devil Dog Shuck Returns makes not a lick of narrative sense – but that is surely its strength. This is a trippy, unashamedly self-indulgent film, its very self-indulgence rendering it fascinatingly watchable as it offers an unadulterated view inside the mind of Paul TT Easter, an old-school auteur with a completely individualistic approach to cinema.

On an absolute scale, yes it’s complete rubbish and many people would turn it off after 20 minutes then head straight to the internet to register their disapproval. But cinematic appreciation is not absolute – that’s what keeps film critics in a job! Approached from the right direction this is a work of, not genius exactly, but certainly a work of maverick brilliance.

Devil Dog Shuck Returns was released online through Vimeo on Demand in February 2016. Paul Easter is now planning his own zombie epic which should be something to see…

MJS rating: B+

The Rise of Jengo

Director: Joe Wheeler
Writer: Joe Wheeler
Producer: Joe Wheeler
Cast: Joe Wheeler, Natalie Graham, Meaw Davis
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: Online version (archive.org)
Website: joewheelerfilms.vhx.tv

The Rise of Jengo is an extraordinary film, a film you really should see if you have a genuine interest in contemporary British horror cinema. This is not, however, a film for everyone.

It’s not for you if you expect your horror to be sweetened with a dash or dollop of humour. It’s not for you if you are only interested in creaky Victorian gothics. It’s certainly not for you if you like cat-scares and 3D jumps. But, if you are interested in the limits of horror, in transgressive works that explore the very notion of horror as an artistic genre, then I think you’ll get a big kick of out of The Rise of Jengo.

Multihyphenate (or, if you like, one-man band) Joe Wheeler writes, directs, produces, photographs, provides effects and music – the whole bit. He also stars (as ‘Jake Weaver’) and really it is his incredible performance which makes this film so essential and fascinating.

Jake is possessed by a demon named Jengo. When Jengo takes control, Jake brutally murders people, wearing a mask made from the face of an earlier victim. And to be honest, that’s about it as far as narrative goes. This isn’t a film about plot and it’s certainly not a film about dialogue. For much of the time, Jake/Jengo/Joe is alone on screen (or shares it with a terrified, screaming victim). He grunts, he screams, he howls, he laughs, he cries, he leaps around, he screams some more. Really, this is the most amazing, intense performance I think I’ve ever seen in a low-budget horror film.

There’s no hint of embarrassment or reticence, but there’s also none of the theatricality that one might get from a professional ac-tor. Wheeler simply throws himself heart, body and soul into portraying an insane, amoral, violent lunatic. It’s powerful and disturbing and alarming and everything that good horror should be.

Jake/Jengo kills a plumber who comes to check the boiler. He kills a couple of ghost hunters invited round to the flat because of mysterious happenings. He kills a woman who comes for a photo session. Each in turn arrives at the flat, is let in, then finds themselves attacked from nowhere by this British Leatherface. All of this happens against a continuous soundtrack, ranging from choral to industrial, polyphonic to atonal, which barely lets up and drags us even deeper into the nightmare scenario on screen. Wheeler himself, hence also Jake, is shaven of head and baby of face; in scenes without the mask his innocent expression (among splashes of blood) makes the violence and screaming, demented anger all the more scary.

At some point amid the mayhem we have to take stock and ask the $64 million question: is any of this real? Is Jake really possessed, or is he an extremely disturbed young man with major mental health issues, acute schiozophrenia manifesting itself through extreme violence? Well, you can ask this all you like. You won’t get an answer, and that’s one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Jake shares the flat with his girlfriend, Jodie (Natalie Graham), who reveals herself, about half an hour in, as a Satanist who has summoned Jengo and conditioned the hapless Jake to submit to the Demon’s possession when triggered by key phrases. But does this really happen? Is Jodie actually one of Lucifer’s acolytes or is this sequence the product of Jake’s disturbed imagination, finding a rationale for his behaviour? Jodie disappears during the middle act but reappears near the end when her sister comes to stay. Eventually Jake and his sister-in-law flee to Mexico after having killed three police officers. But an epilogue sees Jake wake from a nightmare back in the flat.

What is reality? What is Jake’s reality and what is real reality? Is Jodie’s admission real? Is Jodie even real? Are any of the killings real? We’re left to make these decisions for ourselves. There are no easy answers here. The Rise of Jengo is a unique movie and one that you won’t easily forget.

Well, I say unique but actually, as far as I can tell, this is a remake of Wheeler’s first feature The Evil Outside Your Window which was self-released on DVD in October 2010. The Rise of Jengo was shot in September/October 2011 and swiftly released in December. Wheeler sold the disc through a now defunct website and also posted a lo-fi version online, which can still be viewed at archive.org. To be honest, the lessened quality ironically works in the film’s favour, in my opinion. The photography is a mix of close-up handheld shots that waver in and out of focus, and a few locked-off tripod shots where the focus is fine but obviously the framing is subject to the vagaries of the actors’ movements. Both of these are deliberate artistic decisions and both work, helping to disorientate the viewer. So a small, soft image doesn’t actually make me want to see this larger and clearer. (A one-off theatrical screening in December 2011 was announced but I'm not sure whether it actually happened.)

At the end of 2013 Wheeler remade the film a second time as Jengo Hooper, expanding on the idea to provide a framing story of Jake Weaver locked up in a mental hospital, further blurring the waters regarding whether this is a tale of demonic possession or mental illness (or indeed, both). This actually played a festival in November 2014 and picked up a couple of awards. The DVD is available from the director’s website, and the film is also available VOD via Indiereign.

The Curse of Jengo, a prequel to Jengo Hooper, is apparently in the can but hasn’t yet been released. Two further titles, Jengo Hooper Returns and Jengo Hooper’s Cannibal Café(!), are listed as future projects on Wheeler’s IMDB page. Among a number of documentaries that he has directed in the past few years is one non-Jengo horror film, The Curse of Ba’al, although I can’t find any evidence of that having a release of any sort.

A few of this film’s cast play the same roles in The Evil Outside Your Window and/or Jengo Hooper. Several actors have no other IMDB credit except this. One of the few with non-Wheeler credits is Meaw Davis who was also in Le Fear and Thugs, Mugs and Violence.

Joe Wheeler is one of those fascinating names that make the British Horror Revival so fascinating. He clearly has his own following (I can’t believe he’s just selling these films to family and friends) but even serious, hardcore British horror fans have never heard of him. Well, they should. The Rise of Jengo is made with passion, creativity and unwavering dedication and commitment, and the result is something artistic and worthwhile.

MJS rating: A-

Flowerman

Director: Rob Burrows
Writer: Rob Burrows
Producer: Denise Wakefield
Cast: Amy Ornston, Jason Savin, Ian Stewart Robinson
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: online (TubiTV)
Website: www.facebook.com/flowermanmovie

This suprisingly nasty psychothriller starts out inoccuously enough, introducing us to Amy Ormston as Sarah and Ian Stewart Robinson as her husband Andrew. They’re blissfully happy, married with two kids (Mark Burrows and Ellie Ormston) who love their parents as much as the parents love each other. The first 10-15 minutes really lets us know how warm and loving and supportive and happy this family is. To be honest, it makes you sick.

But we signed up to watch a horror movie, so it ain’t gonna last. So that's alright.

Sarah works in a flower shop where one of her regular customers is Nigel (Jason Savin) who couldn’t be more obviously villainous if he twirled a waxed moustache and said, “I’ll get you, my lovely!” Still, there are people who look villainous and then there are stone-cold sociopathic sadist nutjobs. And that’s Nigel.

First he breaks into Sarah and Andrew’s home and steals a few personal items, making sure to dress entirely in disposable overalls and overshoes. Very careful and methodical this one. Then he kidnaps Sarah and whisks her off to his farm outside town where he chains her up, cuts off her clothes and forcibly tattoos her with his name and the name he thinks she should have: ‘Wendy’.

Over the course of the film, Sarah will be abused and humiliated by this psycho, who flips between hammy explanation and brief surges of savage anger. It’s an interesting performance by Savin, reined in just this side of pantomime villain and all the more scary for it. But what really sells the film – especially given that some of the supporting cast are, well, not great – is Ormston as Sarah.

We really feel her terror and her pain, her loneliness and her broken will. It’s a belter of a performance, it really is: utterly credible and utterly pathetic in the truest sense of the term. But where many films about men torturing and abusing women are misogynist trash, Flowerman is much more sensitive and astute. This is a film about the suffering of the victim, not the power of the abuser.

And abuse of power is definitely the theme here. Nigel has warped plans to force Sarah to marry him. He sends texts from her phone to Andrew, saying she has left him. They even get as far as a solicitor. Nigel has Sarah’s passport from that earlier robbery, and she is so under his control by then that she can only meekly agree to his promptings.

Even when, later on, she does manage to effect an escape, Sarah is still terrified of Nigel and convinced, as abuse victims often are, that it is somehow her fault. So although she makes it as far as the house of a helpful Polish prostitute (Luiza Stefanova), she doesn’t call the police. Some commenters find this action unbelievable. They need to learn a bit more about manipulative abusers: not every woman is Sarah Connor.

What of Andrew? He is sure that Sarah would never leave him but the two coppers investigating the case (writer-director-DP-editor Rob Burrows and Emma Marshall) think it’s just a domestic disagreement and that Sarah has simply walked out on him. This idea is supported by a neighbour (Denise Burrows) who is convinced that Andrew is having an affair with a work colleague, Jenny (Faye Ormston). The irony is that he wasn’t - but he is now. Jenny has been carrying a torch for Andrew for some time and swiftly makes her move, becoming a surrogate mother to the kids. Nevertheless, Andrew still loves Sarah and is convinced all is not right.

By the third act, three people have been brutally murdered by Nigel and he plans to destroy Sarah’s will even further by making her watch as he kills her family. Clearly by this point he has crossed a line – I mean a line much further along than the one he crossed by initially kidnapping and abusing Sarah. Something will stop him, sooner or later. The resolution, when it comes, is somewhat out of nowhere but not completely deus ex machina and the film just about gets away with it.

Flowerman is one of those movies that begins unpromisingly but picks up when it starts getting very nasty, not because of any salacious appeal of gender-based violence but because Sarah represents abused women everywhere. It’s not her actual husband abusing her, but it’s a man who thinks he is her ersatz husband and can become her real one. Nigel's obsession manifests itself first in stalking – he has a wall of photos he has taken of Sarah – and then in a belief that he can force her to love, honour and obey him through violence and intimidation. She, as far as he is concerned, belongs to him, body and soul. Thematically therefore this sits with The House of Him and The Devil’s Vice in the ‘domestic abuse as horror’ subgenre.

The movie is not without its faults, principally some wooden acting (it’s never a good sign when so many of the cast share surnames) plus it’s too long at 97 minutes. We don’t need the top’n’tail scenes of Sarah writing the story longhand in a book, and a subplot about Nigel’s brother (Richard Batey) goes nowhere and serves no real purpose that I could see.

The other problem is the accents. Every single character speaks with a really strong Northeastern accent (it's actually set in Durham, according to the on-screen police cars) and there were several moments when I literally had not a clue what was being said. The only exception is Stefanova, but her Polish accent is just as thick! The version I watched (on TubiTV, free but with adverts) had close captioning but it was out of synch with the image by about a minute so not really much help.

Flowerman won two awards at the Tenerife International Film Festival in July 2015 and also played Milan in November of that year, with an R2 DVD in December. The actual first release was across various VOD platforms in March 2014. This was Burrows’ third feature after Dead Frequency and Entwinement, and he has since made a fourth, Temporal. Several of the cast were in those other films, as well as Warren Speed’s Coulrophobia and also The Legend of the Chained Oak, a half-hour horror short from Mark Mooney and George Watts.

Powerful enough to overcome its shortcomings and with some genuinely horrific moments, yet rooted in solidly British domesticity, Flowerman is certainly worth a watch.

MJS rating: B

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

WebKam

Director: James D Layton
Writer: James D Layton
Producer: James D Layton
Cast: Eleanor James, Joanne Gale, Kim Sønderholm
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: YouTube

I was always a big fan of Eleanor James.  Between 2005 and 2012 she appeared in more than 30 films, mostly British horrors but also some overseas stuff like Karl the Butcher vs Axe and Colour from the Dark. Whether it was something well-crafted and entertaining like Hellbride or Bordello Death Tales, or a piece of forgettable nonsense like Le Fear 2, or just a cameo like the spoof advert in Harold’s Going Stiff, Ella always brought a real sense of class to a production. She was a good actress, sympathetic to genre and budget level, with a good scream and unafraid to either add blood or remove clothes. She has been retired these three years gone by. Don’t know what she’s doing now but I hope she’s happy and settled and doesn’t regret her not insignificant contribution to 21st century British horror cinema.

Because these things can take time, quite a lot of Eleanor James’ roles didn’t appear until after her retirement from acting. David VG Davies’ Monitor was finally released a couple of weeks ago. Three’s a Shroud is due out next year. Forest of the Damned 2 and Chinese Burns remain in limbo. I had WebKam down for a similar fate but, to my surprise, it has actually been released.

Way back in August 2008 James D Layton (who at the time was using the name Ibraheem James Layton, for some reason) sent me some stills from WebKam, which he had just shot (in Birmingham, over a single week). Nothing happened for a very long time and the film seemed to be a lost one. Then in August 2013 a trailer appeared on YouTube (since removed) suggesting that a release was imminent.

It turns out that the whole film was posted on YouTube in December 2014, although it took me eleven months to notice it (in which time it accrued 2,800 views). The YouTube account, on which this is the sole video, is called Boneyard Models but it seems to be official because that’s the same photo of Layton and his girlfriend that’s on his Amazon page (he now writes romantic fantasy novels).

So, after a mere seven years, I finally sat down to watch WebKam. Was it worth the wait?

Sadly, no. WebKam turns out to be a load of cheap, dull, amateur, misogynist torture porn. Not even the delightful Miss James can save this one. Damn.

Eleanor is Victoria and Joanne Gale (When Evil Calls, Survivors) is her friend Lilly. Victoria, who has recently split up with her boyfriend Matt and has also quit her job, finds that her PC has somehow logged itself onto a site with pictures of a creepy clown-masked figure called Kam. Leaving Lilly on the computer, Victoria has a nap, after which she finds that Lilly has gone and left a note. It then transpires that Kam has kidnapped Lilly.

The bulk of the film is Kam, leaning over Lilly, who is tied to a chair, ordering Victoria to do certain awful things to ostensible save her friend. Nominally connected to the seven deadly sins, these include extracting one of her own teeth, carving a word into her forearm, cutting her hair, drinking a glass of petrol, removing her panties and carving a lump of flesh out of her thigh.

The actual set-up is a bit vague to be honest, not helped by this version (which runs exactly one hour) apparently missing some scenes. So although Victoria has one hour to ‘save Lilly’ (and in fact sets a kitchen timer to this effect!) it’s not clear what will happen at the end of that hour. Will Kam just let Lilly go? We also seem to be missing the bit where Kam introduces himself to Victoria at the start, and the ‘drinking petrol’ bit seems to come out of nowhere. But even if those extra bits were included, this wouldn’t work. It’s basically a first draft script based around the loose, unpleasant idea of a psycho in a mask forcing an attractive, lone woman to injure and humiliate herself. If you get your rocks off on movies like that, please go read somebody else’s website. I’m not a prude and I’ve certainly never been PC, but pointless sadism like this is just boring.

The one and only bit of character development comes when Lilly, who gets her ear cut off at one point, tells Victoria that she slept with Matt. At the end there’s a ‘twist’ which is completely predictable and obvious and serves only to reinforce how desperately short of imagination this whole film is.

Technically it’s not much to write home about either, being shot almost entirely in one kitchen (presumably Layton’s own). The webcam footage of Kam and Lilly is, according to the dialogue, in a concrete room underneath a lake. Except it’s plainly just a garden shed, quite possibly the one we’ve seen outside in Victoria/Layton’s own back garden. Craig Whyte’s camera-work is shaky and the lighting is flat (is this the same Craig Whyte who directed sci-fi short Hypersleep and now makes documentaries about mental health?). The sound isn’t great and Kam’s voice is so electronically distorted that you can barely make out what he’s saying. (Kam is played by Danish actor/film-maker Kim Sønderholm whose UK horror credits include Sam Walker’s Tag and James Kennedy’s Dead City, plus David Noel Bourke’s thriller No Right Turn, a trying-too-hard Canadian thing called Zombie Werewolves Attack!, lots of shorts and feature lash-ups and his own 2008 horror-thriller Craig.)

The YouTube version of WebKam rather cruelly only credits James and Sønderholm on screen – plus Layton himself of course, who also edited – but not Gale (who, like Ella, gives a performance that’s way better than the material deserves). Neither does DP Whyte get a credit, nor Aimee Long who provided costumes and make-up (including the surprisingly effective leg-carving effect). She now does beauty/wedding make-up. Stills photographer Suzanne Cook is the only other name on the IMDB or EOFFTV pages.

Layton’s production company name was originally ‘Oh Gosh! Productions’ but the finished version, which carries a 2014 copyright date, is credited to ‘Crowmarsh Studios’. (The Inaccurate Movie Database has this down as a 2010 film, which is two years after it was made and four years before it was released.)

In 2011 James D Layton was attached to a mooted found footage horror called Hayze which fell apart before it could reach production, and since then he has been concentrating on his books. It’s good to finally be able to take WebKam off the list of MIA 21st century British horrors, but I can see why it was never properly finished. Its release on YouTube adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle, but its absence was no great loss to cinema and there’s no reason to watch it unless you’re a British horror completest and/or a serious Eleanor James fan.

MJS rating: C-