The Feral Generation

Director: Andrew Jones
Writer: Andrew Jones
Producers: Stuart Brennan, Neil Jones, Ray Panthaki
Cast: Brooke Kinsella, Ray Panthaki, Mads Koudal
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: screener disc

The Feral Generation is very definitely not a film that I would watch by choice. It’s a 90-minute character study of two homeless junkies wandering around Swansea, stealing, shouting, getting wasted and protesting their love for each other. Starring two refugees from EastEnders. It is pretty much the exact opposite of my ideal movie.

Nevertheless, I must tip my hat to Andrew Jones and say that he has made an extraordinarily impressive film. The subject matter doesn’t interest me, I felt no sympathy with or for the characters - damn it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where I hated the main characters so much - yet as the credits rolled I simply sat there, contemplating the film. It took me some time to even reach for the remote. That’s a sign of good film-making.

Those who know my cinematic taste know that I have no truck for social realism. I go to the cinema to see something different to the stuff I have to cycle past every day to get to work. I like to watch movies that explore the big questions in, and about, the world: the nature of humanity, the meaning of self, the past, present and future of the only habitable planet we know.

Or failing that, kickboxing cyborgs.

But I don’t like to turn down a screener when it’s offered and the great benefit of reviewing what you are sent, rather than just what you choose to watch, is that it broadens your horizons by introducing you to things that are outside your current boundaries of taste or interest.

And so we come to The Feral Generation, in which we follow a few days in the miserable, cold lives of Vinnie and Nikki. They steal food and money, they sleep either in stolen cars or in a communal squat, they score drugs from a dealer. Intercut with this, the two are interviewed separately, evidently at a later date when they have been cleaned up somewhat.

Now I really, really disliked these characters. Yes, they both came from wretched, broken homes and were abused by their parents. Call me a cold-hearted bastard but boo-bleeding-hoo; plenty of other people have had wretched childhoods without ending up stealing and mugging to feed their heroin habit. In any film where the protagonists are petty criminals, my sympathy is always with the anonymous victims, the ordinary decent folk working hard to earn a living. Somebody slaved and saved to be able to afford that car that you’re stealing. That shopkeeper barely makes enough to live on even before he takes account of shoplifting losses.

Yes, they’re homeless, yes, they haven’t any food or money. But the impression I got was that I would dislike this couple even if their circumstances were different. Nikki comes across as a pathetic (in the truest sense), clingy girl with an idealised romantic view of the twat she’s “in love with”. Vince seems to be a complete drip, a tosser who has somehow landed himself a bird and is happy to string her along. They’re a self-centred, self-pitying couple who elicit no sympathy whatsoever. When Vince, in an interview segment, pours scorn on a mention of Big Issue sellers, arguing that what he does is more noble and honourable, I just wanted somebody to come round from behind the camera and smack him in the mouth. This is somebody who may be in big, big trouble, and undoubtedly hasn’t got there entirely by his own actions, but he’s got no interest in trying to help himself or accept help when it’s offered.

But all the time I’m watching this, I’m thinking: this can’t be right. No-one makes films about homeless people in order to make the audience hate them. Surely this is aspiring to be a Cathy Come Home for the 21st century, a sympathetic look into an invisible underclass of society, a plea to tolerance and understanding for those who have fallen off even the lowest rung of the ladder. And maybe that is how a bleeding heart liberal would view this film and these characters. (And this review probably makes me sound like an evil bastard, even though I think homelessness is one of the great scandals of our age and do what I can to support charities that work to help people like Nikki and Vince. But guys, you’re fictional characters - give me something to work with here, some shred of hope or human spirit.)

So here’s my take on The Feral Generation. I think Andrew Jones has pulled off a genuinely objective, dispassionate study of an aspect of modern life about which it is very hard indeed to be either dispassionate or objective. The Feral Generation is not a film that casts judgements - we are left to do that for ourselves - but it simply documents in detail something which we normally only see briefly at a distance. It’s an incredibly difficult tightrope to walk, balanced between ‘look at these filthy leeches, why should anyone help them?’ and ‘those poor people, they never had the breaks, how can any civilised society allow this to happen?’.

What impresses here is not what the film has to say, if indeed it has anything to say (we all know that there are young folk out there, sleeping rough, cold and hungry and hooked on drugs - anyone who doesn’t realise that there are kids like this in every major city needs a good slap) but the way that it says it. For all that EastEnders on an actor’s CV is normally not associated with top quality thespianism, both Brooke Kinsella and Ray Panthaki (neither of whom I had ever heard of) are simply brilliant. They are utterly, utterly believable in roles which would tempt many actors to go that little bit over the top because oh, this subject is so serious and important and Bafta-worthy. This is terrific acting, this really is award-winning stuff.

And it is helped by Jones’ amazing dialogue which manages to be realistic and credible enough to fit in the mouths of these characters yet at the same time erudite enough to hold our attention and make us think about what is being said. The camera work is naturalistic without being obtrusive, the songs on the soundtrack are expertly judged, the editing is sympathetic and smooth. Frankly, some of the direction is astounding; there are some pauses in the interviews that seem to last forever and shots of the couple hugging and tearful which last even longer. This is incredibly assured and confident work for a young director on his second feature.

And then there’s the ending. We reasonably assume that the two halves of the film - interviews and homelessness - will connect in some way and of course they do but in a manner which is beautifully handled. We’re shown very little, told even less, about what happens between our last shot of the couple and the final interview segment, but we can surmise. I’m not even sure if I have surmised correctly but my explanation fits the facts (I think) and if there’s another equally good explanation, all well and good. That’s a sign of clever film-making.

It’s not all bleak, it’s not all grim, there is redemption of a sort at the end and that makes this film that I didn’t particularly want to watch, about two people who I would cross the road to avoid even if they had suits and jobs, eminently satisfying. (Let me just reiterate that point: I didn’t dislike Vince and Nikki because they were homeless junkies. I disliked them and they were homeless junkies.)

The Feral Generation is a magnificent film, powerful but not preachy, serious but not sentimental. In terms of storytelling it’s simply masterful: stunning acting, excellent script, amazing direction, supremely competent on every technical level. I’m not certain how cinematic it is though; it came across as more televisual, the sort of thing that Channel Four might have shown a few years back when it had standards.

Among the supporting cast, the only sizeable role is Paul, an amoral Scandinavian drug dealer played by the hardest working Dane in showbiz, Mads Koudal. However unlikeable your protagonists, you can always rely on Mads to play a character who is even more of a bastard. (Apparently Michael Berryman of Hills Have Eyes fame turned down a role and I assume that it was this one.)

Andrew Jones’ first film was Teenage Wasteland: “A hard hitting, documentary style look into the lives of three teenagers and their dysfunctional families in Swansea.” This played the Swansea Film Festival the same year as Gareth Evans’ bleak and violent Footsteps - boy, the parties at that festival must have been cheery affairs. (Evans gets a special effects credit on Feral.) Whereas Teenage cost under £2,000, this film's budget ran to six figures, largely on the basis of the casting of the two leads.

Among the commendable work by Jones’ crew special mention must be made of make-up artist Jodie Jones who does an amazing job of making Kinsella and Panthaki (both of whom can be quite glamorous, judging by a quick Google image search) look like they haven’t washed for a month. Vinnie and Nikki both look pallid, wasted, pale - the twin effects of irregular meals and regular junk are there to be seen in Jones’ handiwork. Like several of the cast and crew, she previously worked on The Lost, a recent British war/horror film which achieved a degree of publicity by using an audio recording of a poem to legitimately list Peter Cushing among its cast. Editor Ian Grey, DP Louis Fonseca and costume designer Grainne Joughin are among the other Lost alumni. Ray Panthaki, who is also one of the three credited producers, has his own war/horror credit - he was one of the soldiers in 28 Days Later.

Andrew Jones is currently developing a remake of Driller Killer(!) and the raw, powerful work on show here bodes well for that more obviously exploitable picture (although I suspect it will be very different to Abel Ferrara’s original). When violence appears in The Feral Generation - in the scenes with Paul the drug dealer and in the final act where a horrific event provides the impetus for progress and, eventually, redemption - Jones shows a sure and steady hand which lets us witness the brutality and ugliness of violence in a way that doesn’t simply shock but actually appals.

It is always tricky reviewing films that don’t appeal to me personally - but that’s what I have set myself up to do (it would be stretching it to say “but that’s my job”). Nevertheless a good film critic should be able to judge a film on how good it is, not whether he or she likes it. And this is very good indeed.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 13th May 2007

Female Big Boss

Director: ‘George Richardson’
Writer: Romeo N Galang
Producer: Bobby A Suarez
Cast: Marrie Lee, George Estregan, Dante Varona
Country: Philippines/Singapore
Year of release: 1978
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Diamond Films)

Picked this knocked-about 1980s rental VHS up off Leicester market the other week, attracted by the title and the sleeve image, a drawing of a massively endowed woman unzipping her top. It was in with a pile of old Italian sex comedies but the presence of names like ‘Romeo N Galang’ in the credit block clued me in to the fact that this was some sort of Pacific Asian action movie, simply aping a well-known Bruce Lee title.

In fact the film was original titled They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, an homage not to Bruce but presumably to 1973 blaxploitation classic Cleopatra Jones, and it is the first Singapore movie I have reviewed for this site - although not, I expect, the last. (I initially had my doubts about that original title, thinking that it was just Cleopatra Wong as the advertising materials I saw suggested that ‘They call her...’ was mere poster copy. But a browse through contemporary trade press shows that the full five-word title was the original and it was simply shortened later. There was a vogue for They Call... titles in the 1970s including spaghetti westerns They Call Me Trinity and They Call Me Renegade, Swedish action-thriller They Call Her One Eye, Sidney Poitier-starring drama They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and Filipino martial arts knock-off They Call Him Chop-Suey - written by this film’s director Bobby A Suarez.)

‘And introducing Marrie Lee’ stars as the eponymous Interpol agent and the opening credits show her riding a motorbike, demonstrating top class marksmanship with both automatic pistol and longbow, kicking the collective arses of a half-dozen opponents at a martial arts demonstration and - hey! - partying till dawn in a classy international discotheque. On holiday in the Philippines, she is interrupted, mid-shag, by a phone call from her boss and has to fly back to Singapore where she is assigned to trace the source of some top-quality forged currency.

By conspicuously spending some of the fake dosh in a jewellery store, she attracts the attention of a local gangster who kidnaps her and takes her to his palatial villa, reachable by cable car. There she is thrown to the whims of three overweight wrestlers whose expressions when she whips off her skirt prior to fighting them are straight out of a Tex Avery film. The fatties having failed, the gangster calls in about thirty teenage boys who similarly prove no match for Cleo, who jumps over a 20-foot wall and escapes with the help of her moped-riding assistant.

Somehow the trail leads her to Hong Kong, where an informer working at the docks recommends that she keeps an eye on a consignment of strawberry jam. She follows the crate and finds that this is how the money is being smuggled into Honkers - but where is it coming from?

Finally, she returns to the Philippines where she poses as a magazine photographer reporting on what one must presume is the legendary Filipino Strawberry Belt. Asking around, her questions provoke possibly the greatest line ever spoken in a dubbed action movie: “The biggest strawberry jam factory in this area is the Catholic monastery over the hill.” If I live to be a hundred I will never write a line that brilliant.

It seems that a bunch of gangsters with the most extraordinary range of dodgy international accents have locked all the nuns in the cellar, dressed up in habits and set up a printing press in the monastery, banging out forged currency for five different Asian countries, which they smuggle across borders by hiding rolls of notes in jars of the monastery’s famous strawberry jam. (It’s the whole strawberry thing that gets to me. If it was just generic jam, it wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining. There is a ‘thank you’ credit to ‘Strawberry House, Bagglio City’, wherever/whatever that is.)

Cleo launches an assault on the monastery assisted by four male agents and the last half an hour or so consists almost entirely of fake nuns with machine guns running around and being gunned down. It’s completely brilliant. The real nuns are released from the cellar and led away to safety in a sequence that plays like a cross between Black Narcisus and The Wild Bunch. It’s just awesome. Eventually, Cleo collects her previously barely noticed motorbike and we find that it has rear-firing machine guns in the panniers. She also gets to demonstrate her archery skills, something forgotten entirely since the pre-credits sequence, by firing three arrows simultaneously and blowing up the bad guy’s helicopter.

Relentlessly brilliant, Female Big Boss/Cleopatra Wong turns out to be relatively well known and one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films, which should not really some as any surprise. However, it doesn’t seem to have been released on DVD so there’s an opportunity for someone there.

Marrie Lee’s real name was the rather less-exotic Doris Young and she was cast from a newspaper ad which asked: ‘Are you smart, sexy and seductive?’ Young was 18 and working as a receptionist in a nightclub on Shenton Way, one of the major roads in downtown Singapore, when she spotted the ad; she turned up to the audition in boots and miniskirt, assured the producers that she could ride a motorbike, and got the job just like that, beating 150 other applicants. The stage name was designed to fuel rumours that she was Bruce Lee’s sister, what with ‘Lee’ being such an unusual surname and all that.

According to a report in Screen International (20th July 1977), Marrie Lee is 5’7” and was 36-26-36 at the time. She had recently finished attending a Catholic high-school and had acted in school plays as well as taking bit roles in Hong Kong pictures that shot in Singapore. Shooting on Cleopatra Wong began in August 1977.

Filmed in Singapore, the Philippines and Hong Kong with post-production in Hollywood (it was filmed in English so the voices, though dubbed, match the lip movements), Cleopatra Wong is one of the very few independently produced Singapore feature films and was always aimed at the international market. Bobby A Suarez produced the film through his Filipino company BAS Films Productions Inc and also directed under the pseudonym ‘George Richardson’ (sometimes cited as ‘George N Richardson’). Suarez was raised in the Boys Town orphanage and started out as a janitor in the Filipino branch of Rank, rising to Assistant Sales Manager before establishing his own film company. His mentor at Rank was RLH Davidson who went on to become a senior figure with Warner Brothers. Suarez worked in Hong Kong in the 1970s before returning to the Philippines where he made The Bionic Boy and then this film. He has since gone on to win stacks of awards, becoming a major name in the local film industry.

When Cleopatra Wong proved an instant success, Suarez decided to combine his two franchises into a joint sequel, Dynamite Johnson - which was released in the UK as The Return of the Bionic Boy (and has been sitting on my shelf for some years, so time to dust that one off, I think). Cleo returned for a third adventure called Pay or Die (aka Devil’s Three aka Mean Business) and would have starred in another Suarez production, Queen Cobra, if she had not left for the States at that time. She was actually signed up to a five-picture deal but The Vengeance of Cleopatra Wong, though announced, never materialised. ‘Marrie Lee’ apparently only made two other pictures: a Spanish/Mexican film called Target Scorpion and a Hong Kong movie called Showdown at the Equator. She subsequently ran a dance troupe for a few years, then a healthcare company. Suarez’s later works include such great-sounding titles as American Commandos, Warriors of the Apocalypse, Commander Firefox and One-Armed Executioner.

Romeo N Galang (Romy N Galang on the poster), who fashioned the script for this from Suarez’s story, seems at first glance to have no other credits apart from the screenplays for the two Bionic Boy movies and a 1968 picture, De Colores. But the Inaccurate Movie Database, as we know, is less than reliable and in fact he also had a career as a director which included a previously unknown 1971 movie called Fight, Batman, Fight! (an even more blatant rip-off than James Batman, by the looks of the poster). The IMDB and other sources credit him with the score for Cleopatra Wong but there is no music credit on the film itself.

Speaking of IMDB discrepancies, there is the question of this film’s nationality. BAS Films Productions Inc was a Filipino company and is the only production company credited on screen but there seems to have been considerable involvement - and probably investment - in this film from Singapore. So I think it’s reasonable to consider this a Singapore/Filipino co-production. Some sources throw Hong Kong into the mix but I think that was just used as a location. It is noticeable that there are 31 credited actors plus another 12 listed separately as ‘in Singapore’ and another five ‘in Hong Kong’.

Chito Guerrero seems to be the only actor (apart from Marrie Lee) in all three Cleopatra Wong films, as well as several other Bobby Suarez pictures. Kerry Chandler and Alex Pecate (who gets an additional credit as ‘action director’) were also in Dynamite Johnson while Johnny Wilson and Danny Rojo (Lady Untouchable, Karate Fighters) were also in Pay or Die. (Wilson was also in Burning Power, Death Raiders and Suicide Force - boy, those Filipinos sure can come up with great titles.)

Also in the cast are George Estregan (legendary horror movie The Killing of Satan), Dante Varona (Cirio Santiago’s Dune Warriors), Philip Gamboa (They Call Him Bruce Lee, Biokids), Joaquin Fajardo (who was in The Omegans with Ingrid Pitt as well as Ninja Kids, Magnum Barracuda and Supermouse and the RoboRats), Joe Cunanan (The Impossible Kid), Clem Parsons (both Bionic Boy movies), Bobbie Greenwood, Jesse Lee, Vic Romero, Steve Havaro, Avel Morado, Bernie Bernado, Tony Castro, Joe Canlas, Mark Sherak, Romy Misa, Robert Mendez, Don Bell, Skip Kriegel, Bill James, Paul Mejares, Buddy Philipps, Robert Mallet, Mike Youngblood and John Stewart. There are also credits for the ‘Thunderboys Stuntmen' and the embarrassingly named ‘PIS Stuntmen’.

Cinematography is shared between David Hung and Eduardo ‘Baby’ Cabrales (on screen) aka Eduardo Cabrales Jr (on the poster) although initial reports credited Hung and Arnold Alvaro, a BAS Films regular who also worked on Balbakwa: The Invisible Man and Blood Ring 1 and 2. First Assistant Director Pepito Diaz went on to be 2nd AD on Platoon(!) and also worked on William Mesa’s sci-fi thriller DNA. The special effects are credited to Apolonio Abadeza whose name seems to have umpteen spellings and who worked on two Antonio Margheriti/David Warbeck films, The Last Hunter and Hunters of the Golden Cobra. There are separate credits for ‘special sets’ (Vicente Bonus, who was production designer on Terror is a Man!) and ‘special props’ (Jesse Sto.Domingo, who worked on Wonder Women and a whole bunch of Cirio Santiago movies).

Back in 1977, when Suarez was selling The Bionic Boy to distributors around the world and preselling They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, his in-development projects included The Crime Busters, The Vengeance of Cleopatra Wong, Daughters of Satan and a Bionic Boy sequel to be called The 12-Million-Dollar Boy (which may or may not have mutated into Dynamite Johnson). The following spring, BAS Films took out a three-page ad in Screen International to promote their wares at Cannes. The page ballyhooing They Call Her Cleopatra Wong played up the sexy aspects: “She purrs like a kitten ... makes love like a siren ... fights like a panther. This side of the Pacific, she is the deadliest, meanest and sexiest secret agent!” This flies somewhat in the face of Suarez’s remarks to the press that his “adventures features are aimed at attracting family audiences and provide ample thrills to entertain both kids and adults.” The quote is more accurate than the poster copy - there’s very little sex or sexiness in Cleopatra Wong, except that Marrie Lee herself is undeniably sexy.

That issue of Screen International also carried a full-page ad for Dynamite Johnson: “Mightier and Stronger than KINGKONG (sic) ... Faster than the SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN... Deadlier than the BIONIC WOMAN ... More powerful than the SUPER-SONIC JET FIGHTER and ATOMIC BATTLESHIP combined!!!” Both posters describe Marrie Lee parenthetically as “Singapore’s handgun and martial arts expert.” Then the third page of the BAS Films ad presents titles and logos of other ‘forthcoming productions’: Super Woman, The Destroyers, Queen Cobra, One-Armed Executioner, Queen Cobra Strikes Again, Computer Boy, The Professional Mercenaries, Computer Boy Part II, Seven Thorns in a Mother’s Heart, The 3 Magnificent Shaolin Disciples and, of course, The Vengeance of Cleopatra Wong.

Keeping track of Bobby Suarez’s films is tricky with little to rely on except Google and the IMDB but his most recent credit as director seems be Obsessed in 1997 (he ostensibly retired in the late 1980s but that doesn't seem to have slowed him down at all). He was co-executive producer on Crying Ladies in 2003 and BAS Films produced Aishite Imasu (Mahal Kita) 1941 the following year. This last feature concerns the plight of a Filipino village under Japanese occupation; it has been shown at several festivals and is well-documented beyond the IMDB.

Googling around I came across Marrie Lee’s own webpage, an interesting (if slightly academic) treatise on Suarez’s work available as a PDF, and a blog by a Filipino critic which includes a lengthy post from Australian cult movies expert Andrew Leavold about his meetings with Filipino cinema legends including Lee and Suarez. The intriguing thing is, Bobby Suarez still has plans to make The Vengeance of Cleopatra Wong (with Marrie Lee in the title role). Whether this will come to anything, I don’t know. I’m not holding my breath. I also found a page which has a poster for a proposed Cleopatra Wong film, co-produced with BAS Films, called The Wandering Samurai.

It is evident that there is a big cult following for Marrie Lee, Bobby Suarez and the Cleopatra Wong films. Who would have thought all this could be found by just buying a tape from Leicester market for a quid?

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted 30th June 2007

Feast for the Beast

Director: Thomas Lee Rutter
Writer: Thomas Lee Rutter
Producers: Thomas Lee Rutter, WJ Davies, Corina Harper
Cast: Waynes Davies, Luke Coates, Richard Rowbottom
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Thomas Lee Rutter’s third feature is in some ways his best to date - as one would expect - but not in every way.

Full Moon Massacre featured a werewolf, Mr Blades was about a masked psycho; Feast for the Beast has elements of both. Well, not actually a werewolf. I think it’s supposed to be a demon of some sort. But it’s a werewolf costume, it’s black, sightless eyes a considerable improvement over the ping-pong balls in Massacre.

Wayne Davies stars as Stuart, a heavily tattooed, apparently unemployed young man who returns to his home town of Kidderminster to get his life back together. He takes an upstairs bedsit in a dingy Victorian villa. His landlord, who asks to be called ‘Sir’, is an unnerving, rubber-faced weirdo, played quite brilliantly by unnerving, rubber-faced actor Luke Coates. ‘Sir’ seems curiously eager to rent out the room, even without any money in advance.

Yes, I did say Kidderminster. The town itself features quite prominently in this film. Nothing wrong with Kidderminster, it’s just not the first location you think of when British horror films come up in conversation.

Stuart’s bedsit includes an armchair where someone was murdered several decades earlier and from where a creepy, masked figure briefly appears to frighten him (and us) before vanishing. Down in the building’s cellar is the lupine, bloodthirsty Beast of the title who exerts some strange psychic influence over Stuart, requiring him to bring the demon a regular supply of young women which the Beast bloodily slaughters. ‘Sir’ was the previous slave of the Beast and has only escaped by finding his master a replacement. However, he doesn’t leave Kidderminster and continues to crop up throughout the film. I think he feels guilty about having sacrificed his wife to the Beast after they first bought the house, but it’s not clear.

Powerless to resist these cruel demands and unable to leave Kidderminster - as we see when he tries but fails to board a train - Stuart make the best of his situation. He sets up a music system downstairs which will drown out the girls’ cries (I think).

Meanwhile, author Lloyd Hickox (Richard Rowbottom) arrives in Kidderminster to research his family tree and takes a (much nicer) room in a different house. We also meet Chloe (Katherine Venables) and Alice (Jemma Guest), two girls whose idea of a good night out is, apparently, a local council-organised(!) seance. Lloyd also attends this, having been invited by a local librarian (Ian Crompton).

Chloe doesn’t turn up at the seance - because she has been abducted by Stuart and murdered by the Beast. Alice is amazed when Lloyd starts talking with her friend’s voice. He subsequently tells her that he has been having recurring dreams about a young woman being murdering, and a rough biro sketch which he draws looks like Chloe...

This is all an intriguing set-up but the problem with Feast for the Beast is that it doesn’t do anything with it or really go anywhere (except to Kidderminster, obviously). Alice is abducted while waiting for Lloyd to pick her up; he finds some research papers which she dropped and reads them while driving at night before crashing his car (an admirably achieved effect considering the tuppeny-ha’penny budget). Apparently the original killer was his great grandfather. Er, so what? That neither explains nor concludes anything.

There’s an extraordinary final sequence where the Beast, now very visibly a baggy fur suit, like a Fozzy Bear costume with the wrong head, leads Stuart (on all fours) around Kidderminster on a dog-leash. I can’t make head nor tail of that and its silly, almost zany tone seems at odds with the rest of the film which is played straight. There is also a partially successful sequence earlier on where Stuart accosts a vicar who thinks his description of the Beast is a metaphor for drug addiction but who realises his mistake when confronted by the demon in the cellar.

In fact the vicar sequence, though it suffers from poor dialogue and the vicar himself is not a credible character (the actor is named only as ‘The Rev’d Tool’), is in a way the closest that the film gets to exploring its central premise. In any story about a serial killer (which is what Stuart is forced to become, effectively) the interesting point is not the abduction, abuse and death of the victims, it’s what is going on inside the perpetrator’s head.

I was hoping that we might be asked to question whether Stuart is really the slave of a semi-lupine demonic entity or whether he is a psycho who justifies his evil acts through delusions of a non-human ‘master’. But, the vicar’s suggestion of drug abuse aside, there’s nothing in this direction.

We’re never in any doubt as the existence of ‘the Beast’, although its nature, its purpose and its reasons for its actions aren’t ever touched upon. Where did it come from? Why does it require young women? Why does it need a human to bring them to the house? How was ‘Sir’ able to escape from this one-sided quasi-Faustian slavery by finding a replacement (and why does Stuart not attempt the same)? Presumably the masked figure is the ghost of Hickox’s great grandfather but was he the first slave of the Beast or was the Beast created through his evil ways? Why does Hickox have dreams about Chloe but none of the other victims?

There are a whole host of unanswered questions here which leave the viewer unsatisfied because the film has no real resolution. This is a piece-meal collection of ideas, many of them displaying an originality rare at this level of film-making, but there is no cohesive narrative binding them together. There’s not even a clearly defined central character: is it Stuart, Lloyd Hickox, Alice? So without an evident hero, there’s no hero’s journey. And the hero’s journey isn’t just a pretentious film studies metaphor, it’s a summation of the ideal narrative structure which successful stories either emulate or react against.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to say what Feast for the Beast is actually about. If it’s about a young man trapped in servitude to a demon, then it doesn’t work because we never find out what it’s like for Stuart to do what he does. If it’s about an author who discovers a dark family secret that is terrorised a town (Kidderminster!) then it doesn’t work either because Hickox only finds that information by accident (from notes which Alice has made during an internet search - not exactly an exciting thing) and he then does nothing with it. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that these two characters, who most closely fit the requirements of protagonist and antagonist, not only never meet but are not even aware of each other’s existence.

On top of all this is the constant, niggling worry throughout the film that if Stuart can’t leave Kidderminster but is forced to abduct girls from the street (as he does several times in the film) for murderous purposes, then Kidderminster should very rapidly become the scene of the biggest police investigation since the Yorkshire Ripper. In fact, if this has been going on for seventy years, with a succession of men serving the Beast’s appetite, then there should be seven decades’ worth of unsolved disappearances in Kidderminster. And surely somebody is going to notice that.

Just to add to the confusion, every ten minutes or so we have a brief, unexplained shot of a youth in a green hoodie waking up. This has no obvious connection with anything.

These story problems are a shame because technically this is Tom’s best film: a step up from Mr Blades which was itself an improvement on the rough-and-ready overambitiousness of Full Moon Massacre. The photography is good, even transcending the limitations of video at times, and the sound - which as we all know is often poor on micro-budget pictures - is excellent, in terms of both recording and mixing. The editing is good and at 73 minutes the film does not overstay its welcome.

I think the problem lies in Tom’s almost-a-one-man-band approach. He gives himself the credit ‘written, shot, edited and directed by’ and adds DP and ‘SFX creator’ to that at the end. I would suggest that from feature number four, Tom should start farming out some of this work to collaborators; stick with directing and either cinematography or editing but let somebody else handle the scripts. Tom’s great at ideas, at concepts, but I don’t honestly think he’s quite got the screenwriting skills to match his film-making talent.

Don’t get me wrong. I honestly believe that Tom has what it takes to make it as a film-maker. He’s still only, what, about twenty and he already has three indie feature films under his belt, none of which is going to win an award but none of which is embarrassing. That’s a fantastic achievement. I know that Tom idolises people like Fred Olen Ray, David DeCoteau and Jim Wynorski so he knows the level of movie-making that he is aiming at and I think he’s going to get there if he sticks at it. With every film his skills and understanding progress and he will still be irritatingly young when he reaches the level where adjectives like ‘commercial’ and ‘professional’ will come into play.

Feast for the Beast is a good stepping stone on that path and it contains enough good stuff to satisfy its intended audiences. But a feature film is not a showreel and needs a more satisfying, possibly simpler, overall structure than can be found here.

Steve Sibley (A Home for the Bullets) shares executive producer credit with Tom while there are three actual producers: WJ Davies (ie. Wayne Davies, who also get an ‘assistant camera’ name-check), Corina Harper (who plays one of Stuart’s victims) and young Mr Rutter himself. Tom and his brother Andrew (Statica) both play the ‘Masked Stranger’ in various scenes although someone named Mike Parker contributes his voice. The music is provided by Visual Audio Replicant.

The feature is followed immediately by a nonsensical, self-indulgent, ten-minute ‘spin-off short’ called Ultimate Power Tool starring - but apparently not directed by - Tom. You don’t need to watch this.

MJS rating: B
review originally posted 20th December 2008

Fear Eats the Seoul

Director: Nick J Calder
Writer: Nick J Calder
Producer: Whitney Thompson
Cast: Amber Green, Miles Meili, Nick J Calder
Country: USA/South Korea
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener
Website: http://njcalder.com

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day: a Korean/American miserabilist slacker zombie film.

Fear Eats the Seoul is very artistic and very indie. It’s all shot handheld and mostly framed off-centre or super-close so that characters are partially cropped. It’s 100 minutes long and much of that consists of people sitting around talking, or sometimes standing around talking, generally in a flat, listless monotone with lots of pauses before and after. And then, every so often, the pace picks up a bit when someone fights a zombie.

This makes the film sound pretty poor and in truth it’s not. It’s an impressive, original, sincere and mesmerising horror film. But if the previous paragraph puts you off, this probably isn’t the movie for you. It’s not conventional horror, it’s not for gorehounds. It’s for horror fans who want to see something different and who like to, you know, think.

Amber Green stars (and narrates) as Nadia, an American living in Seoul for a couple of years teaching English. Something unspecified has happened and the city is now virtually deserted except for roaming, hungry, animalistic zombies. Referred to as ‘demons’ in the publicity, we never get a really clear look at any of these as the zombie attacks are very fast-cut and very shaky. We can see that they have very long, sharp fingernails/claws. It’s a different look for what are, to all intents and purposes, zombies - and it works well. All credit to make-up FX designer Cho Young Hwa.

Nadia, a strong, bitter woman, is holed up in her flat with three other American EFL teachers that she has met since the unspecified disaster: grumpy Rufus (Miles Meili, also in ‘deep south horror’ Zydeco), meek Mary (Elinza Pretorious, who is actually South African) and relaxed Alex (writer/director Nick Calder, who was also DP and editor). They make occasional forays out into the city in search of food, where they target private property, so presumably the shops are by now all empty. Occasionally they have to face off against demons/zombies, smashing their heads in with whatever implement is to hand. The rest of the time, they sit around and mope. Not a lot else to do in Seoul these days, it seems.

On one excursion they come across Miji (Kim Hyun Do), a Korean nursery school teacher, and accept her into their group. But that’s four, now five, people holed up in a tiny one-bedroom flat and tensions are inevitable. Miji brings news that the zombie/demon problem is confined to South Korea and that a nuclear strike is scheduled a few days hence to wipe out the threat. Nadia proposes heading for the coast and commandeering a boat but first they need to find a car. This isn’t some dumb American thing where automobiles are routinely left with the key in the ignition when zombies go wild, or can be easily hotwired by any passing idiot. No, they actually need to find a car and the car keys that go with it. It’s not easy, but Miji thinks she can help.

Before this happens, they visit Olympic Park, just to get away from the confines of the apartment, but the fenced-in area is not as secure as they think it is and they are attacked, leading to tragic problems later on. I won’t reveal the ending, or whereabouts it lies on the bleakness-to-optimism scale, but it is slightly anticlimactic. Although I suppose that is in keeping with the generally bleak and depressing nature of the story and characters.

The film is divided into four sections, with title cards, and contains several flashbacks to earlier times, before the disaster. For example, after Alex realises that he has passed his 24th birthday without noticing it, there’s a scene of his older sister visiting him when he turned 23. The movie also has the unique schtick of dual subtitling: English subs for all the Korean dialogue and Korean subs for all English. I suppose that means it’s easily marketable in both territories...

Despite the violence of the zombie attacks (and the tension of trying to avoid them) this is a slow-moving, grim film, not unlike Andy Parkinson’s first two features in its outlook. If you reduce it to the core plot, it’s not too different from a hundred other zombie pictures but the mixture of western and eastern - both on screen and in the general approach - plus the restrained, pessimistic tone throughout (leavened only by the flashbacks of When Things Were Better) mark Fear Eats the Seoul as something unique. And yes, the title is a crappy pun, but this is a film about people’s crappy lives so I think it’s kind of appropriate.

A few cast/crew points of interest. New York-born Calder actually did work as an EFL teacher in Korea. However, he doesn’t speak Korean. Furthermore Kim doesn’t speak English so all conversations with her had to be translated (via Jo Young Hoon). Green and Pretorious starred together in Suicides in Vegas, a play which premiered in Seoul before touring Canada. Producer Whitney Thompson is not the skinny bit from America’s Next Top Model. Associate producer Raoul Dyssell is South African but now lives in Seoul. William ‘Sonny’ Sonbuchner, credited with ‘Demon Sound Design’ makes short comedies at www.thesonnyside.com. And there’s even a British contribution because the effective score was provided by my mate Scott Benzie!

Fear Eats the Seoul premiered in September 2011 with a Korean theatrical release the following month and a US premiere in New York in December. It’s a very impressive debut from Calder, who is still only 24, and it will be interesting to see where he goes next.

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted 8th February 2012

Fausto 5.0

Directors: Alex Olle, Isidro Ortiz, Carlos Padrisa
Writer: Fernando Leon de Aranoa
Producers: Eduardo Campoy, Ramon Vidal
Cast: Miguel Angel Sola, Eduard Fernandez, Najwa Nimri
Year of release: 2001
Country: Spain
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release

I had been wanting to see this Spanish movie for ages, knowing that it won the Golden Melies Award. So imagine my delight to find that it was playing Leicester as part of the BFI’s ‘Viva - the 9th Spanish Film Festival on Tour’.

Now here’s the question: is it SF, is it fantasy, is it horror? Well, here’s roughly what it’s about. Argentinian-born Miguel Angel Sola plays Dr Fausto who specialises in terminal illnesses. He travels to Barcelona - a slightly futuristic trashpunk city - for a medical conference and bumps into a man named Santos Vella (Eduard Fernandez) who recognises him. Vella claims to be an ex-patient from whom Fausto removed a stomach tumour before giving him three months to live eight years previously.

Fausto is an uptight, overly serious type while Vella is relaxed, cocksure, outwardly friendly but deeply, deeply annoying (to Fausto). He insinuates himself into the doctor’s existence during his short time in Barcelona and gradually his influence becomes more and more persuasive.

Of course Vella, with his goatee beard and uncanny ability to keep popping up wherever Fausto goes, is the Mephistopheles character here. Gradually it becomes clear that Vella is making Fausto’s wishes come true, but in sometimes vague and sometimes unpleasant ways. But is he actually exerting any supernatural powers, or is Fausto just paranoid? Or both?

The moral is, of course, ‘be careful what you wish for - it may come true’ but this simple idea is given a wonderfully complex and original spin, especially as Fausto starts finding wishes coming true which he didn’t realise he had actually wished for. The whole film is laced through with a delicious black humour which I have seen in other recent-ish Spanish genre pics like The Day of the Beast and The Ugliest Woman in the World. At one point a comedian telling sick medical jokes to a room full of medical conference delegates has a heart attack on stage - and everyone applauds!

Sola and Fernandez are both superb and it’s no wonder that they tied for the Best Actor award at the 2002 Fantasporto. The other major character is Najwa Nimri (Abre los Ojos) as Fausto’s assistant Julia. The whole film is full of startling images: an entire hotel wrapped in shroud-like cloth, a dog chewing on a live person’s entrails...

Directors Olle and Padrisa are the fringe theatre group La Fura dels Baus and this led to a lot of people missing this film when it toured UK as part of a Spanish movie package. Most cinemas only printed the first paragraph of the accompanying blurb, suggesting that Fausto 5.0 was some sort of arty alternative thing, when it’s actually a hugely enjoyable horror/fantasy romp.

Is it actually science fiction? It seems to be set in the very near future and the city of Barcelona exhibits some extreme poverty (there is also an obsession with trains being scrubbed scrupulously clean before travelling from one city to another). I got the impression that this is what Europe is like while America has turned into Blade Runner.

Director Padrissa says on the movie website: “Fausto 5.0 is set in a multiracial Barcelona, where the signs are in different languages and different cultures live together. It is a hypothetical future that does not take the form of science fiction." His colleague Ortiz reckons: “Fausto 5.0 is a psycho-thriller set in an indeterminate and undefined time, in which aesthetic elements from the past alternate with an imagined future. However, it could all be happening in our time.” So now you know.

And the title? It’s ‘5.0’ because this is the fifth version of the Faust legend which La Fura dels Baus have produced, though the others were for the stage and much closer to Goethe’s original.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted before November 2004