Under Surveillance

Director: Dave Campfield
Writer: Dave Campfield
Producer: Dave Campfield
Cast: Eric Conley, David Rigg, Felissa Rose
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Official website: www.davecampfield.com

Justin Besler (Eric Conley) is a young man who has been living with his mother for several years but now returns to the old family home to live with his father Kurt (David Rigg), a cop with, shall we say, old-fashioned values. Justin is studying for a law degree; he is a practising Christian and has a much more liberal attitude than his dad although he gets on well with Kurt, which is more than his mother does.

Justin meets up with an old friend, Scott (Fred DeReau), and Scott’s college roommate Rick (director Dave Campfield himself) who makes extra bucks by selling beer to under-age students. He also meets and befriends a mysterious local girl, Kayla (Alexandra Eitel), whom he meets outside his house.

Since getting divorced, Justin’s dad has converted the family home to include three apartments which he rents out. In Apartment 1 are ‘masseuse’ Heidi Broonen (Felissa Rose: Sleepaway Camp, Nikos the Impaler, Zombiegeddon) and her autistic younger sister Sonja (Brenda Abbandandolo, who was also in Nikos); Apartment 2 is home to Robert Krol (Chris Cooke, who was the voice of the Colonel in Bill Plympton’s marvellous I Married a Strange Person), a large man with a penchant for prostitutes; Apartment 3 houses garbage collector and aspiring actor Vincent Calabrese (Mark Love) and his abused East European wife Larisa (Sara Baker Bahr).

When Kayla is found murdered, the blame is pinned on a local cult, the Black Circle, which Kurt has been trying to track down for some time in connection with earlier crimes. Justin is convinced that the killer lives in his own house and lets Rick persuade him to install hidden cameras in the three apartments. Rick, Justin and Scott then spend their nights watching monitors in a Ford Transit parked across the road.

Half an hour in, the film promises to turn into one of those films built out of digetic camera footage, like Hell Asylum or My Little Eye. Although we do sometimes see what the trio see, Campfield doesn’t quite have the confidence to work with the restrictions of high-angle, fixed cameras and instead the ‘monitor footage’ is simply black and white, but retaining close-ups, multiple angles, reverse shots and other directorial/editing touches that simply couldn’t exist in genuine surveillance footage, along with perfect sound. This is a shame as it distances the viewer from the action, making us no more than a normal TV/film audience, rather than placing us into the position of the voyeurs in the van. A few shots do flirt with realistic monitor images but it’s not consistent enough to work. This seems odd. Why build a story around captured TV footage and then not show us that captured TV footage?

Despite the above caveat, the story becomes engrossing and even tense. Justin and Scott are sucked into Rick’s enthusiasm for spying but find that what happens in the apartments is affecting them, even as they are affecting what happens in the apartments. At one point they slip an accusatory note under each door to see if anyone will give themselves away by their reaction, but the results are not what they expect. The watchers’ intrusion into the three homes, physically in a couple of instances when they want to check something out, has unforeseen effects, creating tension between the Broonen sisters, between the Calabreses and between Krol and his succession of hookers.

At the same time there is tension in the van (they later move the monitors into Justin’s bedroom, which seems more sensible) as Justin and Rick find that their agendas are very different. Can Rick be trusted? Is Justin being completely honest about his relationship with the murdered girl? And meanwhile, Kurt is on the trail of the Black Circle, unaware that it may lead him to his own home.

Under Surveillance (later retitled Dark Chamber) is a gripping and original thriller which confidently twists its protagonists (and antagonists) around what could have been a relatively straightforward plot. The large cast of characters, many of whom never interact outside their own immediate relationship, are well-drawn and believable. Campfield directs with a slick professionalism while DPs Xavier Rodriguez and Andrew Seltz make the film look more expensive than it presumably was with great camerawork, especially within the confines of the van. The Black Circle, who favour half-black masks and pentagram tattoos, are mysterious, threatening and not overplayed and there are some really quite scary moments when they appear.

This is an impressive debut feature which displays Campfield’s obvious cinematic talents to the full.

MJS rating: B+

Review originally posted 15th April 2006

Unknown Beyond

Director: Ivan Zuccon
Writer: Enrico Saletti
Producer: Valerio Zuccon
Cast: Emanuele Cerman, Giorgia Bassano, Robert Marrelli
Year of release: 2001
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: VHS screener
Official website: www.ivanzuccon.com

Italian horror cinema has a long and proud history. In no other country has horror been such an intrinsic part of national cinema. Not fantasy (there’s plenty of that too but it’s best left alone) or science fiction (again, best avoided) but genuine, scary, bloody horror. Italian horror movies date back to the silent era but really came of age in the 1950s, just as horror was also coming to the fore in the UK and on the seedier side of Hollywood. Argento, Fulci, Bava pere et fils, Michele Soavi, even trash barons like Ruggero Deodato or good old Joe D’Amato - what other country has produced so many iconic scare merchants over the years?

I say let’s add Ivan Zuccon to that list. And let’s add him up there at the better end with Fulci, Argento (when he was good) et al. Because Unknown Beyond confirms that The Darkness Beyond was no flash in the pan. Zuccon is a major horror talent and he’s here to stay (for further proof, check out his third feature, The Shunned House).

Darkness was written by Ivan himself but this semi-sequel was scripted by Enrico Saletti so there’s something of a change in tone, though it’s still unashamedly Lovecraft-ian. It’s a more complex story, with more characters - there’s more action and more interaction. Also a whole heap of religious iconography, stirring up that whole Catholic guilt thing that underlines some of the best Italian horror. The opening sequence is amazing as a stumbling soldier comes across a crucified man and, at his feet, a pram containing a crying baby which, on inspection, turns out to be a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Blood drips from the sky, then rises back to Heaven. What the jiminy is going on?

One thing which Unknown Beyond definitely shares with its predecessor is a dreamlike structure which plays fast and loose with causality and the sequence of events, indeed with reality itself. The Old Ones-engineered supernatural apocalypse that we glimpsed in the first film has enveloped the world, but now we are a generation on and Captain Ian Hicks (the ever reliable Emanuele Cerman) leads a small band of survivors hiding out in some catacombs.

Cerman was Private Randolph Carter in The Darkness Beyond - and Hicks is having dreams in which he is called by that name. Is he the same character? Who knows? Locked up in a cell in the catacombs is a painted-face witch, Keziah (Roberta Marrelli, who was Elena in the first film), who serves the Old Ones and seeks to seduce Hicks. Meanwhile two members of the group, Valerie (Liliana Letterese) and Pickman (Alessio Pascuti - Private Walker in Darkness) have gone missing.

Walker turns up, transformed into a mad demon but roped and held by two of the soldiers. For a moment the film looks remarkably like the scene with the captive zombie in 28 Days Later but I’m sure that’s coincidental as it’s unlikely that Alex Garland or Danny Boyle would have seen Ivan’s film. Walker is locked up in another cell.

Valerie, wandering across the desert at night, is gripped by hands from under the sand and raped by something unseen. She subsequently slakes her thirst at a river of blood, from which she fills her canteen. A day or so later she is back with the main group.

Hicks has translated some surviving parchments (possibly the ones created by Al-Caleb in the first film’s prologue) and knows that the only way to defeat the Old Ones is to find the Necronomicon. He sets out with two comrades, Alan (Piergiorgio Schiona) and Boris (Francesco Malaspina - Darkness Beyond’s Sgt Clark). Back in the catacombs, the swiftly pregnant Valerie gives birth to an ultra-fast growing cocoon from which emerges, only minutes later, a full-grown man. Played by Michael Segal, the first film’s Lieutenant Salgari, this character is credited as ‘il figlio dell’Altrove’ - ‘son of the beyond.’ Indeed, the Italian title of this film is Maelstrom: Il Figlio dell’Altrove (the working English title was Call of the Beyond). He proceeds to bloodily slaughter his way through the cast.

What the film is leading up to, via some quite startling imagery, is a three-way battle between Segal’s character and the unborn children carried by sole survivor Anouk (Giorgia Bassano - that’s not a spoiler by the way as she’s not identified by name until late in the film) and Keziah. Three will be conceived, the prophecy states, but only one will survive to become heir to the Old Ones...

With an extra twenty minutes’ running time over the first film, Unknown Beyond can cram more in and that may be why it seems slightly less languorous (or more hurried, depending on how you look at it). The main characters are well-defined and we care about what happens to them - although I’m still not certain about Keziah the witch. Marrelli comes close to overacting sometimes in a role which is, I think, a difficult one for foreign audiences to grasp.

There are some amazing setpieces, including a whole field of tortured souls on cross-frames, and also more action with some well-choreographed fight sequences. This film is more obviously shot on video than Ivan’s first movie, and is almost entirely set at night: a couple of scenes about 50-60 minutes in are the only daylight exteriors in the whole film. Sometimes initially confusing, the plot does unravel well, revealing hidden motivations: “Deception has always been evil’s stock-in-trade,” says one character, observantly. Although this film shares numerous cast and crew with The Darkness Beyond the actual plot connections are tangential and watching the first film is not necessary to enjoy this one. Though I would of course heartily recommend watching both just because they’re so good! (A tip of the hat also to Nicola Morali whose music perfectly creates the spooky, unnerving mood that the film requires. Nicola kindly sent me a CD of the Unknown Beyond soundtrack a while back and it’s a truly excellent piece of work.)

There was a time when Italian horror cinema was the finest in the world. But the last spaghetti scarer to really achieve international acclaim with critics and audiences was Michele Soavi’s superb Dellamorte Dellamore and that was nine years ago. Since then, what have we had? Pupi Avati’s obscure The Arcane Sorcerer, Sergio Stivalleti subbing for the late Fulci on Wax Mask, Massimiliano Cerchi’s laughably inept Creatures from the Abyss and Satan Claus, Argento treading water with The Stendhal Syndrome, Phantom of the Opera and Nonhosonno - and let’s not even mention the justifiably derided Fatal Frames. The genre needs a shot in the arm - and here it is.

Unknown Beyond confirms the arrival of a startling new talent. Ivan Zuccon is the best thing to happen to Italian horror, arguably to horror cinema in general, in a long, long time.

MJS rating: A-

Review originally posted 5th December 2004

Uzumaki

Director: Higuchinsky
Writer: Takao Nitta
Producer: Sumiji Miyake
Cast: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Keiko Takehashi, Ren Osugi
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: R2 DVD (Artsmagic)

Uzumaki - The Vortex (as Artsmagic’s video sleeve calls it) should not be confused with Rasen (also available from Artsmagic), even though both titles have been translated into English as ‘spiral’ by various sources.

The first feature from Ukrainian-born Japanese director Higuchinsky (who previously worked on the popular fantasy TV series Eko Eko Azarak) Uzumaki is a deliberately enigmatic film which bases it story around a shape - spirals - rather than characters, relationships or events. It’s very different - which is good - but not quite as outré as I was expecting. Perhaps my appetite for Japanese lunacy was spoiled by watching the utterly bonkers Wild Zero only a week or so earlier.

It’s difficult to say precisely what Uzumaki is about (except it’s about spirals). The central character is Kirie (Eriko Hatsune) whose boyfriend Shuichi (former model Fhi Fan) has an odd father, Toshio (Ren Osugi: Audition, Exte: Hair Extensions, Hypnosis, Full Metal Gokudo), first seen videotaping a snail. Shuichi’s father is obsessed with spirals and helices, collecting anything in that shape (even if it means stealing) and eating spiral food; he also commissions Kirie’s father, a potter (Taro Suwa: Another Heaven), to make him some spiral-based pottery.

Eventually Shuichi’s mother tires of all this and throws out her husband’s entire spiral collection, so he commits suicide in a spiral way - by climbing inside a top-loading washing machine!

But other weird, spiral-related things are happening at Kirie and Shuichi’s high school. A boy commits suicide by throwing himself down the well of a spiral staircase, a girl named Kyoko (Hinako Saeki: Misa the Dark Angel, Rasen) has curly hair which grows out of all proportion until she has enormous (CGI) spirals growing out of her head. And a geeky boy comes to school covered in slime, eventually mutating into a human snail.

Higuchinsky inserts spirals everywhere he can - keep an eye on the clouds and on patches of sand - but does it all actually mean anything? It seems to be symbolism for its own sake and there’s no truth revealed at the end about life or the world. There’s no doubt that Higuchinsky has a distinctive style, which he has apparently repeated with symetrical butterfly shapes in his second feature Tokyo 10+01, but weirdness for the sake of weirdness rapidly pails and he will need to concentrate more on story if he is to achieve anything other than novelty value for his films.

Nevertheless, Uzumaki is well worth seeing. It’s unique and bizarre and quite scary/gruesome in places too. Artsmagic’s disc includes 21 stills, one piece of promo artwork and trailers for this film, Evil Dead Trap and Junk. There are also bio/filmographies for the director and some of the cast from Yours Truly; if the choice of cast members featured seems odd or eclectic, please remember that I write these DVD notes before I see the film, so I have to take an educated guess (based on printed or on-line reviews, if there are any) as to which characters are the main ones.

Finally there is Uzumaki Q, a short ‘making of’ featurette incorporating a not-terribly-informative interview with Hatsune. There are some interesting behind the scenes shots and design sketches seen very, very briefly - but that’s what the ‘still’ button on your DVD remote is for.

MJS rating: B+

Review originally posted 6th May 2006

interview: Jeffrey Uhlmann

When Jeffrey Uhlmann contacted me to ask if I would like to review his film Mil Mascaras: Resurrection, he described the movie but I replied, “You had me at ‘Mil Mascaras’.” Having thoroughly enjoyed the film, but heard from other (reliable) sources about its somewhat complex creation, I was naturally delighted when Jeff agreed to an e-mail interview in December 2008.


How, when and why did you become interested in Mexican wrestling movies?
“I’ve been a connoisseur of genre and cult films for as long as I remember. I find lucha films particularly fascinating because they combine the aesthetic of the classic Universal horror films with comic book-style superheroes. Better still is the fact that the masked heroes actually exist in the real world. It’s that interface between the real and the surreal that I find most interesting.”

What was the impetus for a group of computer science professors in Missouri to revive this dormant and very culturally specific genre?
“I came to the University of Missouri with a plan to make this film and establish an emphasis area in something I called entertainment engineering. Pre-production activities began back in 2000 right after I arrived but things really started coming together when my colleague, Kannappan Palaniappan (Pal), became involved in 2003. We crossed the interface between the real and the surreal when filming began in late 2004 with Mil in an Aztec tomb constructed in an engineering building at a major university. And of course real-life dining at restaurants in Columbia, MO, with Mil and officials from the university was much like scenes we were shooting for the film. In other words, the world we were filming became the world we were in.”

How did you get Mil Mascaras involved and what was he like to work with? (Did you ever see him without a mask?)
“I met him at a technical conference many years ago but we really never worked together closely until around 2002. He’s a great guy and as professional as anyone I’ve ever met. He is very protective of his image, so he understandably has strong standards for his films and requires that they be realistic and respectful of the traditions of the mask. I will always be respectful of those traditions.”

Can you give me your take on why Jeff Burr and his LA colleagues dropped off the film, and how did this affect the production?
“I hired Jeff Burr only a few weeks before filming was scheduled to begin and he hooked us up with some great people who contributed a lot to the project, including cinematographer Tom Callaway and the multi-talented Gary Ambrosia. Our first shoot in December of 2004 had some problems but the second shoot in the spring of 2005 was a fiasco from the beginning. We realised by the third day that Jeff didn’t want to shoot the kind of film that we wanted to make and things went downhill from there. At the end of that shoot we had a total of over 50 hours of footage from the two shoots but nothing documenting what had been shot and what was still needed.

“Jeff Burr is a good guy and on a personal level I like him a lot but it was clear that he just wasn’t really into making this kind of film. He naturally wasn’t happy about our decision not to have him back as director for the last shoot but he understood why we weren’t happy with certain things (and certain of his associates). We informed him that whomever we hired for the last shoot would be listed as a co-director and he accepted that.

“However, when we later informed him that he wouldn’t be involved in the editing process or any other aspect of post-production he asked us to replace his name with a pseudonym and we accommodated. At that point the official relationship with Jeff Burr was severed. However, we continued to work with Tom Callaway - eg. for colour correction - and I’m still very grateful to Jeff Burr for getting Tom involved. They’re both good guys and I look forward to seeing them whenever I’m in Los Angeles.

“As for that third shoot, we were originally planning to hire Rene Cardona III, whose father and grandfather were legendary Mexican genre film directors. In the meantime, however, plans were underway to shoot another Mil Mascaras film Academy of Doom at the university. I had brought in Chip Gubera and Bob Swope as instructors in our Information Technology program based on their work on a film called Song of the Dead and I invited them to be a part of Academy. I realised that if we combined the last shoot of Resurrection with the last shoot of Academy we could reduce costs significantly which was critical because Academy’s budget was already very low. That turned out to be a good plan and in the spring of 2006 we shot Academy and then proceeded to finally complete Resurrection.

“I should point out that Chip and the entire Academy crew did an amazing job in pulling off the two shoots because after Academy wrapped everyone had to switch gears and start on what Pal and I had planned out for finishing Resurrection. That was rough because they had been immersed for weeks in Academy and were now having to hit the ground running on what we needed for Resurrection. For a lot of it they were flying blind as to how each shot would fit into this other film that they knew little about. I know that was especially challenging for Chip but he’s a guy who is always ready to take on any challenge.”


What aspect of the film do you think works best and is there anything that you think could have been improved?
“After the second shoot we didn’t have the car stunt or even the final battle with the mummy and we knew that many other scenes were incomplete or would have to be re-shot for quality reasons, so Pal and I had to log all 50+ hours to determine specifically what we had. I then re-wrote parts of the script to allow us to piece together as much as possible so that we could complete the film in one more shoot.

“That last shoot was more complicated than the previous two because we were filling in pieces of scenes that were shot over a year earlier. In a couple of cases shots in the same scene were filmed a year and a half apart. (In one scene the change in age and voice between shots of the Professor turned out rather jarring.)

“Although it took an inordinate amount of time and effort (and money) to piece everything together, I think the final film captures what was originally intended: an alternative universe in which luchadores and resurrected Aztec mummies are as mundane as cops and robbers. Whatever small issues there are don’t really bother me because I view films like impressionist paintings: the focus should be on immersion into the world that’s depicted rather than on the details of the brush strokes.

“However, if I had to point to something that could be improved it would have to be the scene in which the twins seduce Mil. We just didn’t have the coverage to make that work right, so we ended up piecing together a bunch of disparate elements to make something reasonably coherent.”


How has the film been received and what are the current plans for release?
“The film has played at film festivals around the world to enthusiastic audiences. The reviews have all been extremely positive (except, ironically, for a couple of local reviews in Missouri, where the film was produced). A Spanish review after the Cinema Fantastico festival in Estepona described it as the best lucha film ever made but audience feedback reveals a much broader appeal than what one might expect for a typical lucha film.

“As for distribution, we have had queries from many distributors around the world since 2004, including one very exciting opportunity with one of the majors, but the plan right now is to let the film complete the international festival circuit before making any commitments. I think the last of festivals will be in South America sometime in the spring or summer of 2009.”

Website: www.mmvsam.com

interview: xian vassie

The following e-mail was received in August 2003 from xian (Christian) vassie, director of uncompleted British indie horror Talisman. My thanks to xian for taking the time to reply to my out-of-the-blue enquiry.

Hi Mike

I have just found the letter you sent me in July. I have also nosey-parkered your article on Talisman. Good detective work!

I suppose you are principally interested in knowing more about Talisman. To be honest I think you have more or less covered all the bases already. It is the tale of another underfunded British film failing to find completion funding. As we did the cap-in-hand rounds, the most frustrating refusal we received was from one of the main funding bodies (I forget which) who turned us down on the basis that the project was too commercial! At that point I confess I became a little confused as to what the British film industry was all about.

I think your analysis, based on what you saw, is probably accurate - the film would have made an entertaining low budget horror romp. We shall never know. Two fifths of it was in the can when shooting stopped.

You have already found out that my principal work is as a composer. I have just finished a major series about the Medici that will be shown in about 30 countries early next year. Justin Hardy (director of Gentleman Thief) and I have worked on seven or eight productions including The Great Plague, which won Best History at the Royal Television Society Awards last year, and Invitation to a Hanging, which was shown last May and got rave reviews in all the papers. On Invitation to a Hanging I not only composed the score (a jazz/blues/reggae score for an eighteenth century film) I also did most of the sound design.

It is a shame we did not get to finish Talisman. From a creative point of view I was looking forward to using my background in sound to create an original movie. I am mindful of the way in which Blair Witch turned the rules of film making upside down, whereby the soundtrack is the narrative and the picture is an impressionistic collage. It had been planned to use sound to tell the story as well as to support it.

You have obviously found out a great deal about many of the cast/crew. Roger Eaton is indeed making a success with several good projects on TV in the last year.

Do I have any other directing projects on the go? Yes. Justin Hardy and I are planning a short film based on a story by Chekhov which we will co-direct. Justin is also well on the way with plans to shoot a horror film, for which I will in all likelihood be acting as composer. He is a great director to work with because he gives everyone involved in a production the freedom to break rules and to do their best work.

I hope the above is of some interest.

regards

xian vassie