tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37349902074042328732024-03-13T14:49:43.661+00:00Cult films and the people who make themMJ Simpson presents: the longest-running single-author film site on the web, est.2002.MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.comBlogger1041125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-91030001832457885812020-10-03T17:17:00.008+01:002020-10-15T20:30:18.223+01:00interview: Kadamba Simmons<p><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-frxMs_f8YBo/X3ijxvIU72I/AAAAAAAAQss/9NE1-SWtgEkozCqc9XCphBB6-tAItQepwCLcBGAsYHQ/s398/ks1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="398" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-frxMs_f8YBo/X3ijxvIU72I/AAAAAAAAQss/9NE1-SWtgEkozCqc9XCphBB6-tAItQepwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/ks1.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div><i>In January 1997, I travelled to the freezing cold
Northern tip of the Isle of Man to report on the British monster movie</i> Rampage
<i>(aka</i> Deadly Instincts <i>aka </i>Breeders)<i>. One of the cast was Kadamba Simmons and,
as far as I knew, she was just an aspiring actress in a cheesy film. I have
since learned that she was a well-known party girl in London social circles and
her various beaux over the years included Matt Goss, Liam Gallagher, Nellee
Hooper and Prince Raseem. <a href="https://institut-epice.org/death-of-a-party-girl">This article</a> is a good summary of her life. </i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>But the reason that was written is because in June 1998 Kadamba was murdered by an unstable boyfriend; the tragic details are all in the article. Kadamba Simmons was a talented, vivacious, charismatic young woman and it was a pleasure to know her briefly. She would probably have become a star at some point, but what was great about her was that she never behaved as if she was a star already. She took life as it comes and didn’t take anything for granted. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I met her a second time when I flew back to the Isle of Man in September 1997 to visit the set of a thriller called </i>Dangerous Obsession<i> (aka </i>Darkness Falls<i>). Kadamba was helping out with the costume department; she recognised me and came over for a chat. In retrospect I think she probably enjoyed talking with people who were utterly alien to, and unaware of, her celebrity-filled London life. Nine months later she was dead (although I only learned of her passing several years later). This could be the only interview she ever gave. There’s not a lot to it but I think her warm, energetic personality comes across. I offer it here as tribute to a fascinating young woman whose life was cut pointlessly short, denying us all her future work.</i><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>It's not the commonest of names, is it?<br /></b></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“No, it's not. My parents are kind of hippies
really. My whole name is actually Kadamba Angel Isle of Compassion Simmons.
With a dad called John and a mum called Linda. When my mother moved to London,
one of her hippy friends found a guru, and she used to go these ashrams. A bit
of a Paula Yates vibe, I guess.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>How did you get this role?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“I'd worked with PeakViewing before. I was in a
previous film of theirs.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>Was that <a href="http://british-horror-revival.blogspot.com/2020/10/grim.html">Grim</a>?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“Yes. I think <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.com/2014/03/interview-paul-matthews.html">Paul Matthews</a>, when he was writing
the part, had me in mind. It's maybe a bit presumptious to say it was written
for me, but it was definitely written with my face in his head.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sPIgEWdWrpc/X3ijUUDLCdI/AAAAAAAAQsg/tOzotRdja044w9i4oXrfPz6NotpM83SEACLcBGAsYHQ/s415/1881515%252CpczZePI29d3kHG2jY%252BsMGo0%252BxBsbe3gst0GG%252B9YhijV7irBsu61Qzdsh2ktT1jUfsbjg7uaGx%252B3xHqkPavJQhQ%253D%253D.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="316" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sPIgEWdWrpc/X3ijUUDLCdI/AAAAAAAAQsg/tOzotRdja044w9i4oXrfPz6NotpM83SEACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/1881515%252CpczZePI29d3kHG2jY%252BsMGo0%252BxBsbe3gst0GG%252B9YhijV7irBsu61Qzdsh2ktT1jUfsbjg7uaGx%252B3xHqkPavJQhQ%253D%253D.jpg" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>How uncomfortable is that prosthetic? Can you tell
that it's there?<br /></b></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“Right now, no. Often I forget about it until
someone says, but obviously you'll work some ten, twelve-hour days because it's
going on back to back. What they stick it on with is a glue invented during the
Vietnam War, used on the battlefield when people had open wounds. Sticking arms
and legs on; they obviously didn't have time to sew things on so they used to
glue them on with this glue. That can't be good for me.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>Are you enjoying the shoot?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“Oh yes, it's great. I'm having a great time.
Everyone's great. What can I say? I haven't had any problems.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>What other stuff have you done?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“Filmwise, one of the biggest films I did was with
Stephen Frears, at Pinewood, and that was <i>Mary Reill</i>y. I was a character called
Rosie. That was in the brothel. Doctor Jekyll comes in and rapes and kills a
girl, but leaves his hankie, and that blows his cover. So Glenn Close was my
madam.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>What was that like to work on?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“It was great, it was all spectacular. My scenes
were when it was all going according to plan, and there had been no tantrums.
Everyone was happy. I must admit, Stephen Frears was so enthusiastic as a
director, which is brilliant. He keeps the energy up. If the energy of the
director's up, everyone else naturally has to follow suit.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Does the size of the budget affect you as an
actor?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">You know what? At the end of the day, a set's a
set, a catering van's a catering van. You might have an aircraft hanger like
we've got here, or you might have a beautiful brothel with chandeliers. But
it's just a backdrop, isn't it?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>Do you do any stagework?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“Not really, just because I work back to back on
screen. But as a child, <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.com/2013/12/interview-samantha-janus-1997.html">Sam Janus</a> and I used to go to the same stage school,
where we were trained to be precocious little starlets. I used to do shows
there - we used to do West End shows. That was the only time, but that was more
singing and dancing.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Do you like doing straight stuff or more OTT
fantastic stuff like this?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“It's always nice to do fantasy and over-the-top
stuff. You know what, it's anything you can get your teeth stuck into, whether
it's running away from monsters or getting divorced on camera. As long as it's
not just hovering in the background looking beautiful, I don't care. But yes,
it is great to do stuff like this. To see the monster, have half my face hanging
off, get slimed. You know what? It's fun. It's a lot of fun, because it is so
far removed from the life that we live. You have fun with it, without hamming
it up, obviously. It's like all the old comic books that we grew up on. I'm
taking lots of Polaroids and sending them to my cousins who are seven years old
and really freaking them out. When I was seven, it's just like: 'Yes!
Monsters!'”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b>How does the monster here compare with the one in
<i>Grim</i>?</b><br /></span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">"Completely different. The one in <i>Grim </i>was more of
a troll. This one, because the guy actually playing the monster is a trained
dancer and has studied ballet, so he's so much more graceful. The movement
within the monster is so much more believable. If I'm acting to that monster, I
will believe it. The one in <i>Grim </i>was almost like a lump of lard in comparison. This
one is streets ahead. There is actually no comparison, I think.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span face=""Geneva",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Geneva;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ECpqqR-HfJ0/X3ikDUXYpKI/AAAAAAAAQs0/IhNqElJUv8stqMqzfIo_6r8FtpfS3ih0wCLcBGAsYHQ/s251/ks2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="201" data-original-width="251" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ECpqqR-HfJ0/X3ikDUXYpKI/AAAAAAAAQs0/IhNqElJUv8stqMqzfIo_6r8FtpfS3ih0wCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/ks2.jpg" /></a></b></div><b><br />Is it disappointing when you do something like
<i>Grim </i>and it doesn't even get a video release in the UK?</b> <i>[</i>Grim <i>was subsequently released
on UK DVD – MJS]<br /></i><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">“I never really expected it to anyway. If you
think about the market for horror movies, it's all in America. I was doing an
American accent, so it was an American film. It didn't disappoint me. It did
really well over there, and I'm really happy. I wasn't expecting it.”</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt;">RIP </span><span face="Geneva, sans-serif" style="font-size: 16px;">Kadamba Simmons, 1974-1998</span></i></p></div></div>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-59741327011484787332020-07-13T21:16:00.002+01:002021-01-13T19:15:21.596+00:00interview: Joe Bangay<i>I interviewed photographer Joe Bangay about his work on</i> Queen Kong <i>in January 2003. This interview, during which Joe read from some of the production notes he wrote back in 1976, originally appeared on my old </i>Queen Kong Lives<i> fansite (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080221190407/http://www.queenkonglives.com/">archive.org link</a>). Joe passed away in 2017, robbing the world of so many outrageous anecdotes. I'm glad I was able to preserve a few.</i><br />
<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QZwH9olEx2g/XwzAF8sOHAI/AAAAAAAAQpI/pI_sQ_Lsu18NuCpe2oSypS-a0XcNVdO-ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Joe.jpg.gallery.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="923" data-original-width="615" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QZwH9olEx2g/XwzAF8sOHAI/AAAAAAAAQpI/pI_sQ_Lsu18NuCpe2oSypS-a0XcNVdO-ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Joe.jpg.gallery.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<b>It sounds like you’ve got more memories of <i>Queen Kong</i> than most of the cast.</b><br />
"It was one of the most amusing times, as a photographer, that I’ve spent. With an Egyptian director, a producer who was always running out of money, and the most beautiful girls you could get in Britain."<br />
<br />
<b>How did you get involved?</b><br />
"There was a producer called Keith Cavele and he used to call me in to do photographs for him, special work. We didn’t bother about doing stills of the whole film. My technique is: I read the script and pick out the vital times when I should be there. Because he’s incredibly mean with money so he’d pay me for the time I spent there. And I made sure I got all of those pictures."<br />
<br />
<b>What sort of films had you done before?</b><br />
"I was John Huston’s photographer. I’ve done the big ones: <i>The French Lieutenant’s Woman</i>, <i>The Big Sleep</i>, <i>The Winner</i>, <i>The Quiet American</i>. I did about five Bonds. I was a film photographer in the seventies when films were fashionable. As you know, films went bust in 1979/80. That thing of Lew Grade’s - <i>Sink the </i>something or other? - <i>Raise the Titanic</i>! It broke him and it broke right the way down the business. Because it was pretty fraught, to make a living, at that time. So I’ve not done many films since.<br />
<br />
"But I was one of the leading guys in the field. People like Terry O’Neill and I were doing major films all over the world. I did a Sophia Loren film, a couple with David Niven. I was never a stills photographer, I was a specials photographer. In those days it was a trade where you were friends with the producers. You’d say, ‘I’m looking for pictures,’ and they’d say, ‘Well, a good week to come in is in a couple of weeks.’ I spent three weeks on <i>The Man Who Would Be King</i> with Huston and Connery."<br />
<br />
<b>My favourite film of all time!</b><br />
"It is a great film. It should have done so well. Yes, I did the specials on that. Shakira Caine played a part in it, and Michael’s there. His dad died in the middle of filming and John Huston sat in a chair and smoked cigars and did bugger all whilst Bert Batt directed the battle scenes. They used to like me on the set there because both Caine and Connery were mad about HP Sauce and I used to take six bottles out with me! <i>Queen Kong</i> was quite different. It was a place for nutters."<br />
<br />
<b>If you were working on these big budget films, why did you take a job on this little movie?</b><br />
"Well, I did quite well financially frankly. If you own your photography and control the set - nobody else was allowed on - you’re going to make money, aren’t you? Nobody got on set except me. At that time Robin Askwith was quite a name. Rula Lenska had just done her big series on television about rock chicks so she was quite a big name. There were so many funny things on the film.<br />
<br />
"I had done two films with Keith before. One had been a very sexy film called <i>Golden Lady</i> which all went wrong. It was easy to make money on because Prince Charles had a fling with the leading lady at the time - which gave you two pages in the <i>News of the World</i>. I know a lot about films, I know all the big actors. Tony Quinn - I did <i>Caravans </i>and one or two other films with him. I’d sit and play chess with him in the morning after breakfast for an hour. And let him win otherwise he’d be bad-tempered all day. We had the Queen of Persia on the set in purdah, in secret, because she put money into the film.<br />
<br />
"I’ve had lots of adventures on films. I worked with this chap called Don Short. He was Showbusiness Editor of the <i>Mirror</i> and he walked out because they double crossed him. He told Richard Harris he wouldn’t print something and the bloody <i>Mirror </i>did so he walked out of the <i>Mirror</i>. We went into a partnership and we went round the world together. We did Jane Seymour’s first film, <i>Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger</i>. For ten years I was on every big film, British-inspired usually."<br />
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5LYnENJokEk/XwzAVLSvdvI/AAAAAAAAQpM/Agmga4gFXF4T0cBysUK7ukTViXssdCcjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/0034583163.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="895" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5LYnENJokEk/XwzAVLSvdvI/AAAAAAAAQpM/Agmga4gFXF4T0cBysUK7ukTViXssdCcjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/0034583163.jpg" width="179" /></a><b>Then you ended up on <i>Queen Kong</i>.</b><br />
"It was the last film I did, I think, probably. I wrote a lot of stuff. I’ve written books as well, so I wrote a lot of the copy for it as well. Keith got a good bargain from me. He paid me money but he got a bargain. He got his biogs written for him and he got the cream of the pictures. Bastard though, what he did is he borrowed the stills from me when he was going to try to sell the film and he never bloody returned them. The wife he worked with was a great friend of mine. We went to Cannes - to sell <i>Queen Kong</i> or something - and we went down the hotel and Keith was in bed with the leading lady of his next film!<br />
<br />
"It was very different then to how it is now. I was a great friend of Bob Mitchum, I did a lot of his films. He liked me, we were quite friends. He was honorary godfather to my youngest daughter. I have this lovely house on the river bank at Marlow, near the studio. It’s very private and people used to come here. I always used to go to Cannes, I went to Cannes for 13 years nonstop. So there you go - you’ve got a bit of the background. I’ve got a huge library of these people. <i>Queen Kon</i>g was different though."<br />
<br />
<b>Can you remember what you thought about it at the time?</b><br />
"It was a laugh. My children - I had five daughters - were always coming on set for the fun of it. I thought it was a great idea. the last film I’d done with Keith, I’d done quite well. Frankly we all found that we could trust Keith. <i>Queen Kong</i> ended in a legal mishmash and the artists being called under the Shepperton Tree. Have you heard about the Shepperton Tree? It’s a big oak that stood outside Shepperton offices. It’s now gone. But all big decisions on films were always announced under the tree. So this raggle-taggle bunch of page 3 girls, B-grade actresses, B-grade actors and a really hard-bitten crew were all called together and told:(a) we’ve lost the legal rights, and (b) we’ve run out of money anyway. Then six weeks later Keith got some money together from somewhere, called us back and we finished it off. Obviously he’s made his money again, he’s sold it on."<br />
<br />
<b>Frank Agrama is the guy who’s selling it.</b><br />
"He was the director, wasn’t he? He brought his Egyptian wife and his son over. He hadn’t got a clue, I thought, he was the worst director I’ve ever seen."<br />
<br />
<b>He was used to the Italian film industry.</b><br />
"He brought some money in - that’s why he got the job. A charming but slightly devious Egyptian gentleman; I hope I’m not libelling him. He had a charming Egyptian wife who was always on set. We had fun - I’ve never had so much fun on a film in all my life. You might find something funny in the <i>Express </i>today. I talked to Vicki about it and she said her first job after leaving drama school was running around with a tiny loin cloth, carrying a spear in Shepperton woods.<br />
<br />
"All sorts of things happened. For example, we had a big tug-cum-steamer - we shot a lot of stuff at sea. We used to berth at Newhaven, where we all stayed, and went out, up and down the Channel, near the French coast. We were pursued by playboys in speedboats who were tossing their phone numbers to the young English actresses. It was quite funny. We had a girl called Barbara Allen, who was one of the page 3 girls, and she mesmerised the French by water-skiing topless behind the steamer whilst filming. Valerie Leon could tell you about that - she shot some of her scenes on the boat.<br />
<br />
"We landed at Newhaven. Keith had got us in quite a good hotel, believe it or not, and the partying was fantastic. We had 30 beautiful girls on this trip, all partying in this hotel. One famous writer - I won’t name any names - was crazy about one of these girls. And we all said, ‘Right, we’ll fix you up.’ We got her to say okay, then he was so nervous, he got so drunk, we delivered him to the bedroom door and he collapsed to the floor and passed out!<br />
<br />
"The monkey we made looked terrible, but we finished the film off after Keith got extra money, went down to Bournemouth and that village down there. We had this guy in a monkey suit climbing all over it while we filmed it. Then we had a big monkey’s hand on the end of one of those things you do lights with down the motorway. It was quite a laugh. We had a big stage built in the air in Shepperton, a giant picnic table. My children all felt like film stars when they walked on this set. For crowd scenes, anybody who happened to be going past the studio was pulled in to make up the crowds. But I haven’t got stills, I’ve only got memories now, which is a pity.<br />
<br />
"Valerie Leon is very upset because one of the critics on the internet is saying she had her tits taped up. She said, ‘My bosom never needed taping up.’ Rula Lenska was in the first stages of her divorce from Brian Deacon so that was a bit atmospheric. Rula was not happy about the role once she’d got it. She wanted the film to be scripted properly. Robin Askwith was always on time and always knew his lines, a bit like Olly Reed.<br />
<br />
"I worked a lot with Olly, we were quite close friends. I had a fight with him in the middle of a Japanese dining room. He threw me so bad, I whizzed down the table and cleared all the food off it onto the laps of the geisha girls. I finished up in jail with Olly the next day because we got drunk at his hotel and he threw a television set out of the window which landed on a police car. So we got busted but let off by the station sergeant. We went fishing in the afternoon to one of those indoor trout-fishing lakes, but Olly was still drunk from the night before. He jumps in the lake, wades towards the fish and then pisses in the lake, so we get pulled in by the police to the same station and the same sergeant says, ‘Oh, not you two again...’<br />
<br />
"That’s all by the way. Who else was in <i>Queen Kong</i>? I’ve actually got a call sheet for the film. Every film I’ve done I’ve kept a file on. Ah, here it is, next to ‘Pantos.’ There was a girl killed herself later, Trudi Van Doorne. Mireille Allonville, she was French and she had the most enormous tits and a sexy walk. Felicity Devonshire - she was the top topless model in the country. She was a bit stand-off-ish but very, very grand. Mandy Perryment, she was a top page 3 girl. Paul Cowan, the assistant producer, is doing major films now - he was a lovely man. There’s a lot of well known names there. Jeannette Charles played the Queen in it."<br />
<br />
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<b>This was made at the same time as the Dino de Laurentiis <i>King Kong</i> and was obviously designed to take advantage of it.</b><br />
"It was a rip-off, yes."<br />
<br />
<b>Do you recall that being discussed much?</b><br />
"Oh yes, I was there during all those discussions."<br />
<br />
<b>Were cast and crew thinking ‘surely we’ll get sued over this’?</b><br />
"No, nobody thought it. It was so unlike it and it was so bad that no-one would take it seriously. Keith Cavele by the way was doing pop music with EMI before he got into films, and his first film was called Exposé, Tony Richmond’s film. Ah, former <i>Baby Doll</i> star Linda Hayden, who is now married to Paul Elliott. The film had a cast of seven men and 47 girls. '<i>When some of the French money for the production failed to arrive on time, the cast and crew held a strike meeting under a palm tree. Queen Kong took the opportunity to quit the film to return to her philosophy.</i>' She was a philosophy student.<br />
<br />
"Caron Gardner played a prostitute - she’s still a kept woman and she was in those days. Carol Drinkwater was in it - very weird girl, she was. Used to do all sorts of weird things. Annette Lynton was in it, she’s married to one of the Pink Floyd boys, possibly the drummer. She was a classy bird, married into money. Anna Bergman was in it - that’s Ingmar Bergman’s daughter. Maria Pavlou played Queen Kong; she was a philosophy student at the time and Keith was having a bit on the side I think. She was a classical dancer and a pupil of Marcel Marceau. She also published Britain’s leading Buddhist magazine and held conversion classes amongst the crew.<br />
<br />
"We were doing <i>Queen Kong</i> down in Bournemouth, wrecking the model village. She wrecked an oil installation and her coat caught fire. They got another gorilla suit. She used to compose herself by going into the corner to read Goethe. <i>‘Robin Askwith said, “Being held 30 feet off the ground was no kid glove stuff. I always do my own stunts, but it was a bit hairy.” The film was always designed as a spoof send-up of </i>King Kong<i> and takes a dig at women’s lib. To produce the early footage about the jungle search for Queen Kong, a harbour tug at Newhaven was converted into a search ship called the </i>Liberated Lad<i>y with an all-girl crew. This boat-load of scantily dressed models from the page 3 agencies of London had a sprinkling of cool, organised actresses to shepherd the dumb blondes.'</i>"<br />
<br />
<b>Did the people making this film seem to know what they were doing?</b><br />
"Well, everyubody who was in it knew what it was all about. It was a very sociable film - everybody had dinner together. People were aware what we were doing."<br />
<br />
<b>Did people think, ‘God this is awful but it’s not taking long and it’s paying the rent?’</b><br />
"That’s what Rula was saying: ‘I hope to God it doesn’t come out.’"<br />
<br />
<b>When the legal action from RKO and De Laurentiis started, what was the reaction of the cast and crew?</b><br />
"Well, they were disappointed because they would have liked to have seen themselvs on screen. I’ve found another funny bit: <i>‘In one sequence, a High Priestess played by Hai Karate ad girl Valerie Leon leaps aboard from a native canoe to kidnap the sleeping hero. In the first take, Miss Leon got caught up by her bra on a deck spike and was stripped of her costume. In the second take the lady pirates on board were swept away and had to be rescued by the rescue boat. On another day, associate producer Italian Virgilio DeBlasi, in the face of a refusal to work in the sea because of its roughness, jumped in to prove its safety. He nearly drowned and had to be rescued.’</i>"<br />
<br />
<b>Were you following the legal side?</b><br />
"I knew Keith was going white, and Frank Agrama was, because they had money riding on it. Keith, although he was stopped from selling the film, I notice he got the money together afterwards to finish it, so he had a completed film. Which Frank obviously had a copy of. <i>‘After shooting, the cast went fishing in the rescue boats. Mackerels, well-cooked, washed down with champagne kept cold by immersion in the sea. The sight of so many bikini- and loincloth-clas girls dancing about the boat was too much for the passing fish trade. At times the ship, the </i>Liberated Lady<i>, looked like the flotilla leader of a naval revue as pleasure boats and fishing boats clustered around. The director Frank Agrama fell overboard into the sea and had to be rescued, taking the main camera crew and cameras with him.’</i> You know now why we did <i>Queen Kong</i>, don’t you? It was a bloody laugh, wasn’t it? Legally I can’t help you. You’ll have to talk to Caroline Cavelle. She’s a barrister."<br />
<br />
<b>Do you recall the dance/dream sequence?</b><br />
"Recall it? Yes. It wasn;t anything special."<br />
<br />
<b> Any idea why it was dropped?</b><br />
"It wasn’t very good."<br />
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<b>Do you remember anything about the band?</b><br />
"That was shot in the open, the band playing on the open stage in Shepperton. It was a big set, you know. I didn’t realise how funny it had been, until I read these notes."<br />
<br />
<b>Did everyone get paid on it?</b><br />
"Eventually. I didn't get paid until I wouldn’t give him the stills, then I got my final payments. The actresses got paid weekly, I know that. Maybe they lost their last week’s pay. I got paid weekly but I didn’t get paid the last week because he didn’t have to pay me, did he, to get me the next week."<br />
<br />
<b>What do you remember about Virgilio de Blasi? The finished credits are Keith Cavele as Executive Producer and de Blasi as producer.</b><br />
"He brought money in. That’s why he was in it it. He was an old boy who came for the crumpet. I think there was an arrangement whereby he had access to the crumpet."<br />
<br />
<b>The co-producer was Andre de Genovese.</b><br />
"He was an Italian money man, Virgilio’s money man. Charlie Simmons built the sets - good sets. Casting director was Miriam Brickman - she’s around still."<br />
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<i>And there we must leave it. RIP Joe Bangay 1930-2017</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-11038294653246677812019-03-18T15:46:00.001+00:002019-03-18T15:46:34.698+00:00interview: John Carl Buechler<i>I'm not sure of the exact date of this phone interview with FX legend John Carl Buechler, about </i>Tarzan: The Epic Adventures<i>. It was published in the July 1997 issue of</i> SFX <i>so must have been conducted a couple of months earlier. Buechler was an absolute joy to talk with and sent over loads of stills and designs from the show. The second, unpublished part of this interview covered his broader FX/directing career - I'll save that for another time.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I dug this out in March 2019 when I heard that John Carl Buechler had passed away, aged 66, after a short battle with cancer. We never met in person but it was a privilege to interview him and I offer this here as a tribute.</i><br />
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<b>How did you get involved with <i>Tarzan</i>?</b><br />
“Honestly, I found out about the show by virtue of a small article in one of the local trades. So I called the executive producer. Actually, I didn't find out about this show - I found out about <i>Conan </i>that the executive producer is also doing. I called him up and said, 'Hey, I gotta do <i>Conan</i>.' And he says, 'Hey, I know you. Yes, I know you'd love to do Conan but it ain't ready to go yet. How about <i>Tarzan</i>?' 'Okay, fine! Let's do <i>Tarzan</i>.' So I met with everybody - I understand there was a lot of people in the running - and they liked my work. I went ahead and got the show.”<br />
<br />
<b>Are you a big fan of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books?</b><br />
“Oh, huge, yes. I think probably the first book I ever read for pure entertainment was<i> A Princess of Mars</i>, which was the first book in the series of John Carter adventures. And after I went through that series, I wanted more Burroughs and I started reading the <i>Tarzan </i>books. Yes, I'm a huge fan.”<br />
<br />
<b>Was this a dream for you?</b><br />
“Absolutely! I love Tarzan, I love Conan, I love all those characters who were created for the pulp magazines between, say, 1914 and 1936 or so. They're really larger than life and full of adventure.”<br />
<br />
<b>Is <i>Tarzan </i>screening in the US yet?</b><br />
“Yes, I think we're into the second season. We did twenty episodes in South Africa. I think in syndication that translates to roughly ten episodes per season. And they're showing the second season right now.”<br />
<br />
<b>Are there any more beyond those 20 episodes?</b><br />
“Yes, they're gearing up right now.”<br />
<br />
<b>Are you going to be directing any more?</b><br />
“They really liked the stuff that I did. It's the concern for me. I do not want to compromise on one job for the sake of the other. But I think we have a system now where I can do a little bit more directing. Initially, Max Keller, the executive producer of the series had wanted me to do six or seven episodes, plus do all the creature and make-up effects. I didn't think that was feasible, with regard to: how am I going to do this?... there's no system yet... we've got to start things up... I've got to figure out how. Because essentially we build everything in the United States and ship it. There's never enough time between when a script is developed to do the essential construction on the average television schedule. If you keep in mind that you have to ship and get through customs and all that nonsense.”<br />
<br />
<b>It must be tough trying to get giant spiders through customs.</b><br />
“Right, but I think we arranged a system that works.”<br />
<br />
<b>How tight is your schedule on an episode?</b><br />
“Six days. We've got to shoot the whole thing in six days.”<br />
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<b>How much advance warning do you get of creature effects?</b><br />
“I try to get five weeks advance notice of every major creature effect that's in the series. What that means is that at the beginning, in pre-production, I do a tremendous amount of design work and sketches. And ultimately it comes to the point where they pick the basic characters that they're going to use in the shows, and then it's a process of me to go ahead and begin to construct.”<br />
<br />
<b>How many of the characters you create are from the ERB books, and how many are original?</b><br />
“Some of them. The Oparians certainly are. There are some new inventions - the Lysarians which are a reptile people. And the particular episode that I directed, I tried to stay as close to Burroughs as possible; I love the material. So I created the Shagoths of Pelucidar, I created actually two species of Mahar, and we threw in Rokoff who came from <i>Tarzan Returns</i>. And the Iron Mole! Which tunnelled to Pelucidar in actually <i>At the Earth's Core</i>. So we borrowed from all the books in my episode and tried to put them into one big cluster of something interesting.”<br />
<br />
<b>Burroughs is wonderful, imaginative, pulp fiction stuff.</b><br />
“I find that the <i>John Carter</i> series just being really larger than life, is something every teenage kid should read because it's fantastic stuff.”<br />
<br />
<b>Are they republishing the books to tie in with the series?</b><br />
“Yes, they are. I've seen more Burroughs on the shelves now than I have in quite a while, thank goodness.”<br />
<br />
<b>Are you having to liaise with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate?</b><br />
“I understand that the production company is in close contact. I have yet to meet them, but I really want to; I'm a huge fan.”<br />
<br />
<b>What sort of reaction is the series getting?</b><br />
“Actually, in New York it's number one in its time slot. I think that people who are new to the concept of Tarzan in fantastic worlds are taken a little aback until they realise that this is what Burroughs initially intended. And now they're looking at it not so much as a rip-off of <i>Hercules </i>but as a translation of Burroughs' vision. In that regard, we're satisfying a lot of folks. I believe that there probably are some die-hard Edgar Rice Burroughs fans who will find problems with some of the execution of the material. I think probably everybody will.<br />
<br />
"You cannot please absolutely everybody, so the best that you can possible do is attempt to remain true to what your vision of the material is. I certainly tried to do that with my episode. I guess that it's good that I'm an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, and I actually got to do the design and direction of one of these shows, so maybe the Burroughs purists will respond kindly to mine. I don't know; I hope so. I hope I got it right.”<br />
<br />
<b>Roughly how many creatures have you made for the series so far?</b><br />
“Oh, golly. At least 20, not including all the different appliances and prosthetics. There's quite a few - at least one per episode.”<br />
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<b>Do you have to mould the suits to the particular actors who play them?</b><br />
“Essentially, what we do is: there are generic body types that we can start with. I've been in the business a number of years and I have a number of full-body castings of people. Sometimes when I design a big guy, we have to find a big guy to portray the creature. But by and large I brought into this project an acquaintance of mine, and we've since become good friends. His name is Don McCleod, and he is one of the most versatile, talented actor-mimes in the world. He has played in 90% of the creatures, and many of the creatures are based on his body proportions. He plays Bulgani the ape - he essentially plays all the apes! Sometimes there's somebody else in the suit, but he's very good and he does a lot to sell, in terms of performance, the reality of the costume. That, combined with a certain amount of attention to detail and sophisticated animatronics; I think we've come up with some very wonderful fantasy pieces.”<br />
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<b>Are you doing all effects in camera, or are you using computers?</b><br />
“What we're doing is that the computer comes in when we, say, digitally composite a large character into a scene. An example would be the Mahars. There are many flying sequences, and I shot all of my people in their costumes in front of blue screens. Then we digitally composited those characters into the matte that I had shot. Then they digitally animated the shadow of the creature on the ground as it was flying across. We also did a giant spider, where we created a full animatronic spider plus a miniature which was digitally composited into the frame and a shadow was made beneath him. We've also done a sea serpent type of creature that was digitally composited into the background. So there's a lot of interplay between the two media.”<br />
<br />
<b>Was the sea serpent a puppet?</b><br />
“It was a puppet with a radio-controlled head.”<br />
<br />
<b>Was it tricky doing something with as many legs as the spider?</b><br />
“Well, it is and it isn't. It's a matter of planning out. I think we had eight puppeteers on the miniature spider, so it wasn't that complex. It was just a matter of co-ordinating the movements. If everyone has a monitor in front of them, in a few hours they can get it down in terms of exactly what they're doing. then it becomes a process of choreographing the camera movement and co-ordinating it with the plates.”<br />
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<b>Are you finding that some monsters are popular enough that they might come back for other episodes?</b><br />
“Well, they keep hinting at that, yes. At first, when they wanted an ape in the show, Bulgani: well, everyone is afraid of using any sort of animatronic character for television, because nobody believes you can do it well in the amount of time. So they said, 'We're going to use an ape in one of the first episodes, and it's going to be something where he's in the shadows, you're not going to see that much, so it doesn't have to be that good.' Then they saw the ape suit that I'd provided, out there in broad daylight in every episode!<br />
<br />
"So Bulgani has become a major character in the series, and is utilised a lot, which makes me really happy. I also think we're going to be using the Mahars again, because they're very popular characters anyway. There's something we've created called the Mangalor, which we'll probably see again. Obviously we're going to see the Oparians. We're going to see a lot of recurring characters. Perhaps we're going to get into some characters that we haven't even drawn from the Burroughs universe yet.”<br />
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<b>There's a long history of bad ape suits. How have you got round the problem of apes' and humans' different proportions?</b><br />
“I think you hit it right on the head. The fact of the matter is that we have been doing this for a very long time, and as we've been doing this, we've been seeing bad examples of ape-suits get better and better looking as time wears on. By the time we got to <i>Greystoke </i>and all the wonderful things that Rick Baker did, there are people that will look at those photographs and say, 'Hey, this is a real monkey.' You learn quite a bit as you build these things. In my case, <i>Congo </i>had just been made, and that is an achievement certainly in realistic looking ape proportions and creature effects. So you build on what has already been done. You don't have to start from scratch. You look at how everything has been done that preceded you.<br />
<br />
"I think the only modification that I really made in terms of what had been done before was that I insisted on doing mechanical eyes in the animatronic heads of the apes. Because I think when people wear contact lenses, they have a tendency to look like people wearing contact lenses. So we created a broader neck crest on the body suit under the hair, which essentially gorillas have. They have this large crest on their skull and these mammoth neck muscles that go into their trapezius. They also have by proportions very short legs and a very long torso and very, very long arms.<br />
<br />
"First of all, a talented mime who doesn't walk around like a human being but who has studied ape movement, is essential in getting it to be real, to begin with. Then you play with the proportions: you build the shoulders up higher; you extend the neck up almost beyond the head - in this case, our actor looked out through the nostril, just to make it work; we gave him arm extensions that he could walk on, or gloved hands so he could articulate, depending on what the shots were. There's been wonderful breakthroughs in different synthetic fabrics and lightweight urethane that you can make the muscle suits out of. All in all, it's not a trial and error process any more. You see what has not worked in the past, you try to discard it, then you go for what has worked and try to improve on it.”<br />
<br />
<b>Do the suits get knocked about a lot and need repairing?</b><br />
“Oh heck, yeah. But I think you'll find that even with people who wear normal costumes in movies and television. They'll rip a sleeve or crumple a shirt collar. The same is true of these things. I would say that some of the materials we use are reinforced in areas that are going to go through more stress. Areas which obviously need more movement need to be more flexible and therefore are perhaps less durable, and those elements will have to be replaced from time to time.”<br />
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<b>Did you enjoy directing an episode?</b><br />
“Oh, I loved it. My best time in South Africa was directing an episode. It's kind of neat really. I got to do a lot of things in my show that I wanted to happen in the series anyway. And being essentially one portion of the creative entity that had nothing to do with story or direction previous to that, I had to pretty much keep my mouth shut. But getting an opportunity to do it, I put a little bit of the old goshwow into it. I wanted to see a Jules Verne-looking device tunnel through the Earth; I wanted to see winged Mahars flying around; I wanted to see the temples of Mahars filled with Shagoths and cages filled with people screaming; I wanted to see beautiful women transform into hideous creatures. I think that a show like Tarzan should have lots of fantasy and lots of adventure and lots of action, and it was an opportunity to really put my stamp on it. I enjoyed it a lot.”<br />
<br />
<b>It must have been nice going out to South Africa.</b><br />
“I was in South Africa anyway. I was going back and forth from the States, getting designs approved, working with the creature effects unit, coming back, starting up new designs, packing the finished ones, throwing them in a box, jumping on a plane, getting off the plane, getting through customs and getting them on set.”<br />
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<b>Are the writers over- or under-estimating what you can do?</b><br />
“I think by and large, on a show like this you will find people who are not used to doing high-concept visual fantasy, so they have a tendency to think in terms of cop shows or westerns. When you deal with fantasy characters, they need a logic and a sense about them, and you shouldn't be afraid to show them, because that's what the show should be about, really. I think sometimes there's a tendency to poo-poo the magic area and just go for people talking. I think story is essential, and part of the story, particularly in high-concept fantasy, are the magic characters that are there. We've created some wonderful stuff that has hardly been seen.”<br />
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<i>RIP JCB, 1952-2019</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-72895579637813606122017-10-10T19:15:00.003+01:002017-10-10T19:16:08.078+01:00interview: Gerald Scarfe<i>I interviewed Gerald Scarfe at the old Museum of the Moving Image in London in September 1997. The reason was because he had provided design work for Disney's (greatly under-rated)</i> Hercules, <i>and MOMI was showing an exhibition of his work to tie in with the release. He was a lovely guy to interview and just a generally all-round nice bloke. When he saw a little kid pointing at him, he went over and asked if he would like an autograph. I'm posting this here because it's 20 years since </i>Hercules <i>was released.</i><br />
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<b>How did Disney first contact you?</b><br />
"I was over in Los Angeles doing <i>The Magic Flute</i> with Sir Peter Hall. I’d done the designs and the costumes for that. And one of the Disney artists rang me up and said, ‘Would you like to come round the Disney studios?’ I said yes. His name was Rik Maki, and he said he’d been a fan of my work and that sort of thing and he’d like to show me round. So I had the tour of Disney, which was fascinating, and towards the end he said, ‘Would you be interested in doing anything?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sure.’ He said, ‘Because I think someone might ring you at some point.’ I went back to the opera where Peter Hall was rehearsing and I told him this and he said, ‘Well, you’re alright now then’!<br />
<br />
"But then nothing happened. I never heard any more about it for nine months or a year, then suddenly there was a fax or phone call or letter - I can’t remember which one it was now - saying: ‘We are developing a film called <i>Hercules</i>. We would very much like your involvement if you would like to come in as a sort of design consultant. What do you think?’ I thought: ‘Wow!’ They took me on at the beginning on a very sort of impermanent basis. Because at the beginning of all these movies they have designs from anybody just to get ideas flowing and going. I think they asked me for a dozen or so designs but I sent them 40 or 50 - I was so desperate to get the job!<br />
<br />
"One of the heads of the studios, Tom Schumacher, came over to my studio where I’d plastered all these drawings on the wall. He was bowled sideways by (a), the size of my drawings, which were about two foot by three foot, and secondly by the colour of them, which was very, very immediate and vibrant. He liked the energy of the drawings and all of that. So he took them back to LA and got the same reaction. I hear all this because I wasn’t there, but apparently they all gathered around and looked at them for hours and said, ‘Wow. Very interesting but we’d never get it into a movie.’ Anyway, the directors, Ron and John...<br />
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"Just to go back a little bit, John Musker was growing up in Chicago in the ‘70s - I suppose he was at art school - at the time when I was having exhibitions of my sculptures there. I worked for <i>Time</i> magazine and he’d seen my <i>Time</i> covers and he’d cut those out and kept all my work. He was kind enough to say he’d been a fan over the years. Anyway, Ron and John - John especially, I think - wanted to make it work. So bit by bit they persuaded the artists that this would work. I sent more and more work and actually became very excited myself and more and more involved. It’s difficult for them, who’ve been trained in the Disney method, to step outside that. As John said in one article I read, it’s like suddenly having a tennis coach that tells you the exact opposite of what you’ve been doing for the last 13 years. Your grip’s different, or whatever.<br />
<br />
"So they had to relearn. They covered the studio in things saying ‘This is the Scarfe line’, ‘This is how to draw like Scarfe’ - there was someone who was almost like my interpreter who was telling the others how to draw. Some of them adapted to it very quickly, others didn’t. There was some resistance, I read afterwards, but they were all incredibly charming to me. I did about a year’s work over here on my own, going back and forth to LA and showing it to the directors and Peter Schneider who’s the head of the studio. Then after about a year, all these animators came on from other projects - they’d just finished <i>Hunchback</i> and various other things they were working on there - and they took them on holiday with me up to Santa Barbara for about three or four days at the seaside."<br />
<br />
<b>That sounds alright.</b><br />
"Yes, it was alright. Everybody enjoyed that very much, in this very nice Four Seasons hotel. There we had this conference room, where I spread all my work out and explained to them what I was after. How I’d gone back to the Greek vases and looked at the linear quality of those. And how I felt that the keynote of Greek art was its strength and its elegance. I said that I would very much like this to be an elegant film - as well as a funny cartoon. They were very enthusiastic. Then each of my characters that I’d devised - and I designed every one in the film, I didn’t want one to get away because I thought it wouldn’t look like my world. If you had the main characters by me and the other ones by someone else, the two worlds wouldn’t fit together.<br />
<br />
"So I designed everything. Each animator takes one character. So I’d be handing over what I thought of as my babies, which I’d been working on for a year, to these animators. One would take Hades, one would take Phil, another would take Hercules. Then they would come to me with their particular problems, like how does Hercules look from the back? Or if Hades hair is going to catch fire, how would this happen? What sort of ears has he got? A million questions about the character. Then they’d put their input in. And if I thought it was getting a bit too Disney or whatever, I would say, ‘Can’t we make those feet a bit smaller?' Or those eyes a bit smaller? Or something, so it wasn’t too ‘cute-y’. I was all the time pressing the directors to just go for it. If you have a bad character or a wicked character, make him truly wicked and carry it through. Don’t say halfway through, ‘Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s a good bloke really.’ If he’s wicked, let’s make him truly wicked. He can still be funny.<br />
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"So the first year was me designing alone; the second and third years, after I met them, was really dealing with them. I did a lot of that by fax. Every week they would send me a huge pack of drawings by FedEx and I would select certain ones of those drawings that I thought were indicative of what I wanted to happen and I would go over them with my pencils. Then I’d fax back their drawing and my drawing alongside, so they could see what I’d done. It was mainly making this a bit more elegant, or not quite so obvious, and giving he line a certain look. By this time I was no longer one of the consultants or whatever they call it, I was then production designer. They’d taken me on board completely by then and decided to go with it. To the extent also of not only doing the characters but trying to get the line right, trying to get my look into the movie. I think there was a breakthrough when some of the animators began to achieve it. Then we projected some of my drawings and they looked very clean and clear and immediate. The images were very clear to see. They weren’t diffused in any way.<br />
<br />
"I worked with them for about a year with this FedEx and fax system, so it was in many ways designed by fax, or directed by fax. Then the last year was when the animators had finished their drawings, they then pass them to a department called ‘clean-up’. Whereas an animator might do a rough, fuzzy line, the clean-up people have to do the line which actually appears in the film which has to follow through naturally otherwise it would jump about all over the place. I decided that that was another important spot for me to stand, when it was coming from animators and going to clean-up, it could have gone wrong there. So I stood in the middle and went over a lot of examples of the animators’ drawings for clean-up to follow. That was really the way it was done over those three years."<br />
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<b>In creating the characters right at the start, were there descriptions in the script?</b><br />
"No, there weren’t. There was just a script, like any script. The directors had some ideas. They knew that Phil, for instance, was half-man, half-goat. And he was the only person who we knew was going to play it, so he had to look a bit Danny DeVito-ish. He couldn’t be tall and thin. But there were various things. Like on that, I did loads of drawings and suddenly I realised: if he’s half-goat, why not give him a goatee beard? Well, it’s obvious when you see it, but it isn’t until you think of it. Some of the characters when I was reading the script immediately jumped into my mind, like Zeus and Hera and even the centaur, Nesus. Others, like Hades and Hercules, I had to work on a bit to get them right. Partly because they were the main characters and I knew they’d carry a lot of weight.<br />
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"So of course there was some input from the directors, but not a lot. They never ever drew one for me and said, ‘This is what it looks like.’ I sent many, many interpretations. There are about 600 large drawings and literally thousands and thousands of faxes. So there were many interpretations that didn’t get to the screen. For instance in the case of the Hydra, which had to be computerised so they wanted that very early on, I remember I did about 20 drawings of the Hydra, all different, complete variations. So I gave them the choice of what to choose. In Burbank they’d all stand around these drawings and decide. When the Hydra was chosen, it was just one single drawing, ultimately. Then this guy called Kent Melton makes these three-dimensional sculptures of them, and its fed into the computer. You take the points and put it in."<br />
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<b>Did the fact that the Hydra was being done by computer affect the way you designed it?</b><br />
"No, not at all. I didn’t even think of the computer, because I thought that’s their problem. And it was a problem too, because having achieved their computer image, they naturally had to ‘Scarfe it up’ as they called it. They had to make it linear. A computer fist, if it comes forward, it comes forward looking real and not getting that much bigger, but if you draw a punch in cartoon terms, it gets much much bigger until it fills the whole screen, much more than in reality. So you have to cheat the computer to make it do unreality, otherwise the punch would have come forward and it wouldn’t have had the same sort of animated feel."<br />
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<b>What was the organisational set-up with the 900 or so animators? Was there a sort of pyramid structure?</b><br />
"Yes. Peter Schneider is the head of the whole organisation, then there was the the producer, Alice Dewey, then there were Ron and John the directors. Then I worked under those four people, and I would show all my stuff to them. Then it was my job to go to these 15 major animators, highly skilled, top of the field, Disney animators, the guys I met in Santa Barbara. I would talk to one about, say, Hades. He then had a team of, shall we say, ten people working on Hades under him, then they had people under them and so on. So as long as I told the main guy what’s happening, he would hopefully convey it to all the rest. But it’s a bit like Chinese Whispers; the more it goes on, the thinner it gets. It’s very difficult to maintain control over 900 people, but that’s the way it’s done. It’s like the army: you tell the various sergeants what you want and hopefully they tell the privates."<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-62F5ihKIpoU/Wd0MojikCvI/AAAAAAAAQSI/yb4RX6eA-LYNre9HooUPurWiajVNOBzGQCEwYBhgL/s1600/hades.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="236" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-62F5ihKIpoU/Wd0MojikCvI/AAAAAAAAQSI/yb4RX6eA-LYNre9HooUPurWiajVNOBzGQCEwYBhgL/s400/hades.jpg" width="291" /></a><b>In the exhibition you say that you learnt a lot about your own style from doing this. What did you learn?</b><br />
"Well, it was these things they kept writing about me on the wall, about the ‘Scarfe curve’ and the ‘Scarfe reverse’. Apparently, when I’m drawing I draw a line and go back on it, or something like that. And there’s the ‘Scarfe scallop’. It’s rather like being psychoanalysed."<br />
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<b>Was it like being back at art school?</b><br />
"No, it wasn’t so much like that. It was just: I didn’t know I did that. It’s like someone saying, ‘You’ve got funny handwriting’: ‘Have I?’ then they say, ‘Yes, look. That’s a funny sort of H.’ And you go, ‘Oh yes, maybe it is.’ A style is something that comes to you naturally."<br />
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<b>In terms of the influence of original Greek art on this, did you do a lot of research in museums?</b><br />
"Yes, I did. I’ve always been a bit of a Grecophile or whatever they call them. I’ve always loved Greek art. It’s a very weird thing, but it’s true: I love Disney, I love Greek art, and I love mythology. All those three elements were in my life early on. Disney very early, and mythology and Greek art around about the age of 15 or 16. I studied on my own, I didn’t go to classes or anything. I bought books on Greek art and just admired its simplicity and shape. At the beginning of this I went to the British museum to look at the Greek vases and studied them and discovered they had this beautiful serpentine line and very, very simple shapes. Which is very close to my style.<br />
<br />
"Maybe I’ve been influenced by Greek art way, way back. When I first started drawing in my early days, I used to put every damn thing in: every pimple, every wart, every nostril, every nipple. Every little thing that I could do. Now I tend to go for the overall shape and put the detail in afterwards. It’s rather like some of the Italian painters like Piero de la Francesca. He draws a man in a gown or a cloak, you just get the simple cloak shape, almost like a block. Then he puts all this beautiful Florentine design all over the cloak so it looks extremely complicated, but in actual fact the shape itself is quite simple and straightforward. And all that of course reads very well on film. Because it’s moving fast, the simpler the image is, in a way, the better understood it is. So all that, I think, helped. I really did try to get a Greek influence into the film. But I didn’t go out and slavishly copy across. It was just an assimilation of Greek thoughts and ideas. Artists are sort of like computers themselves: you feed in all this stuff and then it hopefully comes down their arm and out of a pen."<br />
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<b>With your experience of caricature, were any of these characters loosely based on real people?</b><br />
"No, I decided not to. Some of them ultimately swayed towards... Hades for instance. After I’d designed him as a mercurial figure, James Woods, who’s quite a mercurial actor, came in, and the animator Nick and I changed the eyes to look a bit more like James Woods. We changed the lips: James Woods has rather fleshy lips. Little adjustments like that, but only in the case of James Woods and Danny DeVito, a slight leaning towards who they are. But the rest of them, no. I did try a couple of real people, but they didn’t look right. They’ve got to come out of your imagination, really. There’s an artist in the film that everybody’s convinced is me, and probably subconsciously it is me. It’s a painter who’s painting Hercules when he’s extremely famous."<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q4rSzICu3Qs/Wd0MtqgQBfI/AAAAAAAAQSg/DQ3agsXpKRQAZnWB3Gkb64WNtKeepN9kQCEwYBhgL/s1600/s%2Btimes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="192" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q4rSzICu3Qs/Wd0MtqgQBfI/AAAAAAAAQSg/DQ3agsXpKRQAZnWB3Gkb64WNtKeepN9kQCEwYBhgL/s1600/s%2Btimes.jpg" /></a><b>Were you consciously trying to draw stuff that wasn’t Disney style?</b><br />
"No, I was just trying to draw my stuff, the way I draw. And I must say there was absolutely no effort on their part to say, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit much’ or, ‘Can we make it a bit more rounded and Disney-ish?’ If anything, they encouraged me to go for it and the more extreme my drawings, the more they seemed to like it. Because it was a thrill for them to see something so much outside their style. I kept saying to the animators, ‘Please don’t think that I don’t respect your work. You are the top of your field. You are Disney animators. Don’t feel that I am saying my way to draw is the best way to draw. I’m simply saying that my way to draw is the way the directors would like this film to look. I’m here to help you achieve that if you want to.’ So I was trying to be diplomatic and respectful to them.<br />
<br />
"So every effort was made to draw like me. However, in the interpretation, some achieved it better than others, and in some areas it has naturally slipped back to Disney. It’s a strange mixture, Scarfe and Disney, I can see that. In the book, they’ve written that they were after - what’s it called? - ‘Disney-Scarfian-Greco style’. But I think they really tried, I really do. There was definitely no effort to say, ‘Oh, he’s a bit on the dodgy side’ or, ‘That’s a bit much’. Never. Which I expected. I thought, as soon as I went into this project, that I was going to be extremely disappointed at the end. Because Disney is a very, very strong influence, and to arm-wrestle Disney, you don’t have a lot of hope. But I’m quite pleased with the amount I’ve won in this ‘battle’, which it was to a certain extent."<br />
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<b>Do you remember when we met at the exhibition launch, there was that woman from the <i>Sunday Times</i>, who wanted to do a piece on you provided you had something bad to say about Hollywood?</b><br />
"Oh yes! Well, that’s newspaper, isn’t it? It’s crazy. I said to her, ‘Well, if you want a story that isn’t a cliche, this is something that really worked well.’ That’s all they want to hear about Hollywood: it’s a bloody awful place. Which it is, I know. Perhaps I’m lucky. As I said to her, perhaps I’m the only happy person to come out of Hollywood."<br />
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<b>Were you drawing turn-around sheets or single drawings?</b><br />
"I was drawing single drawings initially. Then if they liked that, I did other views. But I never did a model sheet - side, back - they did that. And some of them, Ken Melton did models of - so you could turn that model and look at it. The major characters are done in three-dimensional model form so that the animator can just turn them and see what happens at the back. Some of them are a bit tricky from the back, or from above or from down below. I had to answer some questions. For instance, the guy who drew Zeus, I remember him coming to me and saying, ‘I’ve got his face right’ - I showed him how to draw the face - ‘But I’ve got this real problem. Because Zeus is so big I’m looking up under his chin. What does his beard look like underneath? How does it join his neck?’ So then I had to think about that myself, because it’s not an angle you normally see. But once a character is created, I would know what goes on. It’s like people who are writing books say, once they’ve invented a character, ‘Oh he wouldn’t do that. That’s not possible for this character.’ And I would know, once I’ve invented or designed these characters, what is possible under there. He wouldn’t have a thin neck - he’s Zeus - but I would know how it joins and so on."<br />
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<b>Did you design the colours for the characters as well?</b><br />
"To a certain extent. All my work is coloured and the palette we went for was influenced by the land of Greece itself: the olives and browns and rust-colours of that country. So I had a couple of sessions on the computer colouring things with the art director, and influenced it. I said, for instance, ‘These are gods. They haven’t got to be pink-faced.’ They’d done Pegasus in a sort of dull colour. It didn’t look like I’d imagined it. So I immediately made him white with a blue mane, which made him look something unusual. So yes, I did have an interest. But partly because I wasn’t there all the time, a lot of stuff had to go on without me, naturally. They sent as much as they could to check, but it’s just a huge locomotive once it gets moving. You know how many drawings there are and how much work goes into it. It just gets steaming down the track in the last year and it’s very difficult to turn certain things round."<br />
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<b>Can any figure that’s drawn be animated?</b><br />
"Well, I think anything can be animated but that’s because it comes from my imagination. I think my drawing of my imagination was sometimes very difficult for them to realise because I draw in a very graphic way. When I do a couple of lines, I imagine those lines enclosing a volume. Rather like Matisse, towards the end of his life, he could draw a naked woman with a line that side and a line that side. That contained the volume of that woman’s body, her full fleshiness. And I tried to do that with my drawings, but I think in the interpretation some people found it difficult to see what I mean, graphically. But I can see what I mean. The Hydra, for example, when it turns, is like a lot of snakes, so that was difficult, but that was on computer so that’s how you sort that out I suppose."<br />
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<b>Is there any difference between designing human, non-human and semi-human characters?</b><br />
"Very much so, yes. Especially for me. Most easy I found the monsters and the wicked characters. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s just me."<br />
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<b>They’re the most fun to play.</b><br />
"Maybe that. The most difficult ones were the human beings. Hercules and Meg were difficult for me because not only were they human beings, but they were the lead characters. He had to be hunky and handsome, she had to be pretty and attractive. They had to be all these things, and yet still fit into the world we’d created of these mythological beasts. I had difficulty I must say, with Hercules. At one time we thought he should be like the young Paul Newman, or even the young Elvis. That kind of Greek look: the straight nose, the wide-spaced eyes, the strong jaw, the thick neck. But the animator who came onto that, Andreas, is very, very experienced. He’s the guy who did Scar in <i>The Lion King</i>. I think this is the first time he’s done a hero - he’s usually done the villain. And he helped tremendously with that. With the human beings I was a bit at sea. I was fine with the wicked characters and the monsters."<br />
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<b>Was it because Hercules and Meg are sympathetic characters and your drawings tend towards the grotesque?</b><br />
"Yes, caricature is a grotesque art, and one couldn’t really caricature Hercules and Meg too much because once you caricature a good-looking person, all you can say about a good-looking person is not so much that they are not good-looking but that they are vain, they are stupid, they are empty-minded. You can say those things about them but you can’t really distort their nose right out there because they don’t have a nose right out there. You couldn’t do that and still make it look like them. So they had to look reasonably human.<br />
<br />
"Yes, I’m known for tending towards the grotesque, but there’s acres and acres of my work which is not generally known. I think I’m mostly recognised for my political caricature in which I deal with politicians and those in power. I don’t like politicians so I really go for them. But if I’m designing an opera or a theatre piece - or indeed the Disney piece - it’s a complete world. They’re not all wicked: there are goodies and there are baddies. So if I’m designing a whole world, I have to design reasonable people as well as bad people. So I’m quite used to doing that, but that’s not what I’m generally known for. For instance in <i>The Magic Flute</i>, the one that I did with Sir Peter Hall, all the goodies looked quite nice. They’re not going around all distorted with club feet."<br />
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<b>So was designing this similar to designing for an opera?</b><br />
"Yes, I suppose it is. I think I approach everything exactly the same. When I was given my first opera, which was <i>Orpheus in the Underworld </i>- the ENO gave me that - I thought, ‘Ooh, hello: opera. This is smart, this is intellectual.’ And I started looking rather stupidly at opera design. It seemed to be huge drapes and great big black girders, lots and lots of monotone. I did a series of designs influenced by that, and David Powteney of the ENO looked at them and it was a very difficult moment. I was trying to do something else, and suddenly I got it. What they wanted from me was what I do anyway. They had come to me for what I do, not for what somebody else does.<br />
<br />
"And so, having learnt that lesson, 25 years ago or whenever it was, I now know that if people come to me, they come to me for what I do. When I worked with the Pink Floyd, when they first sent me their tapes I tried to do something that was ‘from the cosmos’, that was out there and unknown. In actual fact, I realised much later that what they wanted was what I do all the time: fat grotesque businessmen or whatever. So I’m not influenced by the job. I do try and find a way of varying it, not making it always look the same."<br />
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<b>How different was this from working on the animated sections of<i> The Wall</i>?</b><br />
"Well, the animated sections of <i>The Wall</i> I had much more control over because I was directing. I designed it and wrote it really, and directed it - the animated bits. Whereas on this I was just a production designer and in charge of the animators. <i>The Wall</i> was very much smaller, a much smaller crew. I should think, tops, that was about 40 people. I had probably five main artists I had to work with. And I managed to convince them that you don’t have to draw like <i>Tom and Jerry</i>, you don’t have to draw like Disney. There is another way for animation to go.<br />
<br />
"Not that I’m against <i>Tom and Jerry</i> and Disney, but I wanted to make them relearn. It’s very difficult to make people relearn. They think, ‘Why should I?’ All of us, when we’re in trouble, we fall back on what we know, we don’t really want to try something new. I think everybody’s tempted by something new - ‘That would be fun. It’s a real challenge.’ - but whether they can achieve it is another matter. Then if they can’t achieve it, they fall back on the way they’ve always done it because that’s comfortable and they know where they’re going."<br />
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<b>Was the experience of animation useful in knowing how these characters were going to be treated?</b><br />
"Oh yes. I really learnt from <i>The Wall</i>. First of all, back in the ‘70s I went to Los Angeles and did a film called <i>Long Drawn Out Trip</i> which I drew the whole thing myself on 70mm film."<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YW6ZODjpE1s/Wd0OGqSxTuI/AAAAAAAAQSw/y72GVI1Y_CsKq3IoBq26LS0mqZIGoakGACLcBGAs/s1600/pf-judgeinarena.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="424" data-original-width="669" height="252" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YW6ZODjpE1s/Wd0OGqSxTuI/AAAAAAAAQSw/y72GVI1Y_CsKq3IoBq26LS0mqZIGoakGACLcBGAs/s400/pf-judgeinarena.jpg" width="400" /></a><b>Good lord!</b><br />
"It was supposed to be for BBC television, they were the ones who sent me to use a sort of computerised system. And to my horror when I got there it was not computerised at all. What I’d heard was that you drew one frame and then another frame and then the computer would fill in, say, three to four frames in the middle. I thought, ‘That’s not possible. How’s it going to do that?’ Of course you can now. But when I went there I discovered it was really a system of dissolves. They would dissolve between this image and that image, so it was really a series of melting images, one coming and one going all the time.<br />
<br />
"When I discovered that I got very despondent and thought about coming home. But I thought No, I’ve come all this way. I’ll really try and make a go of it.’ So I drew every frame myself, and I started making them closer together, because I realised with this dissolve system you couldn’t make them too far apart otherwise it jumped. So I stayed there and I drew this stream of consciousness about America at the time. What was happening in the '70s was black power, Coca Cola, <i>Playboy</i> magazine, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse... I did Mickey Mouse on drugs, which I showed to the Disney people. There was then a hushed silence."<br />
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<b>You’re probably one of the few people to have got away with something like that.</b><br />
"Yes, and the BBC showed it too, so they’ll probably come steaming in for a huge commission now. So I haven’t really much done animation myself, but I’m not a professional animator. I couldn’t animate like the Disney guys do. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have that patience to be able to sit there hour after hour doing that. I discovered when I was directing <i>The Wall</i> that animators must go at their own pace. Because I used to think, ‘We’re not getting enough footage in. Can’t we speed up? Can’t we do this?’ I would go in and give them this pep talk about getting more done and pushing on, and it would just upset them all. They’d all get jangled nerves, and at the end of the week I’d find I’d achieved less than I normally would, by upsetting them. So eventually I thought ,‘Well, they’ve got to sit there with their ear-pieces listening to Radio One or Radio Four or whatever it is, and doing it at their speed.’"<br />
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<b>Do you have any influence on the spin-off TV series or any of the merchandise?</b><br />
"No, I haven’t had any influence on that. They tell me that they’re going back to my drawings to take other characters from those. There’s a whole mass of characters that didn’t appear in the movie. People who were planned. And there are those I did quite elaborate drawings of, like Medusa, who’s in the exhibition: she’s in the movie about two seconds. You’ve got to be very quick to spot her. She doesn’t look much like that. But I’ve done something on the website. I’ve taken part in as many things as I can, but I haven’t had anything to do with the spin-offs or the TV series."<br />
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<b>If they offered you another film like this, would you take it?</b><br />
"Yes, I think I would. Partly because I’ve enjoyed it so much and everybody was so incredibly kind to me. And I did think (a) they would alter my work tremendously, and (b) I’d heard so many horrible stories about Hollywood. But they were all extremely nice. They were all very laid back and very Californian, walking round in jeans and T-shirts all the time. There was no feeling of hierarchy over there. Just a feeling of trying to achieve the best art possible. I don’t feel any cynicism there - going for this or going for that for any particular reason. But then I suppose to a certain extent I’ve benefited from being in England. I didn’t get too much caught up in the system. Every time I went over there with a new batch of drawings, I was welcomed because I brought new stuff. Maybe if I’d been on the spot all the time it might have got little more tired."<br />
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<b>Are you completely happy with the way the film’s turned out?</b><br />
"Yes. But having said that, I’m never completely happy with anything that I do, even if I’ve got complete control over it myself. It’s just part of being an artist - or anybody of a creative nature. You just always see the worst bits, when you look at something. I’ve done it many times. Sometimes I can look at a drawing of mine and there’s just one line out of place, but that one line jumps out at me. It looks like a California tree trunk rather than a tiny line. You always tend to be self-critical. If you’re going to push on and try things, you are self-critical. But I’m incredibly flattered that they asked me. It’s the first time they’ve ever asked an outside designer in, and the first time the designer’s been allowed to stay around for the whole movie and have that much influence, and altered the look of the movie. So I’ve achieved a lot more than I though I would achieve."<br />
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<b><i>website: <a href="http://www.geraldscarfe.com/">www.geraldscarfe.com</a></i></b>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-49990282314494184662017-09-25T18:04:00.000+01:002017-10-10T19:16:32.774+01:00Here’s why I won’t be reviewing films any more This isn’t a fit of pique and I’m not upset about anything. I love writing reviews on my website and I would love to carry on writing them. It’s just that I want to do something else. I want to write something else.<br />
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When the original version of my website was launched in January 2002, the web was still in its first decade. YouTube wouldn’t be invented for another three years, Twitter a year after that. There were only four Harry Potter books. It was less than a year since Douglas Adams passed away. The BBC had no plans to revive <i>Doctor Who</i>.<br />
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Since then, lots of other movie review websites have come and gone. To the best of my knowledge, no single author film site has lasted as long as mine.<br />
<br />
Since 2002 I have written 709 reviews and posted 321 interviews. Total wordcount: 1,655,073. That’s an average of 105,000 words every year. Or one book. If I had been working in print instead of on the web, I could potentially have 18 books with my name on instead of three. Or maybe 16 books and a couple of movie scripts.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l8A2PQEo-IM/WXUHgZwwDJI/AAAAAAAAQRI/91sC9rl4MXEmwZ2Qdd-Kmtb74xDksWIKgCLcBGAs/s1600/UrbanTerrorsCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1022" data-original-width="680" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l8A2PQEo-IM/WXUHgZwwDJI/AAAAAAAAQRI/91sC9rl4MXEmwZ2Qdd-Kmtb74xDksWIKgCLcBGAs/s200/UrbanTerrorsCover.jpg" width="132" /></a>This, my friends, is why I’m regretfully packing in the film reviewing. I will be 50 next February, and while I am incredibly proud of my three published volumes, it irks me that I haven’t written more. I have several in various states of completion, not least the long gestating biography of Elsa Lanchester, which I would love to get finished in time for the 2019 remake of <i>Bride of Frankenstein</i>.<br />
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I'm also working on a massive catalogue of all 21st century British horror films (so I’m still writing reviews, but in 200 words not 4,000). I also have several non-film-related books I want to write.<br />
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What irks me even more than my lack of literary production is that, as I approach my half century, I don’t have a feature film writing credit. Ever since I was at primary school, I have written scripts. Back in 2002 I was finishing off my Masters Degree in TV Scriptwriting – but in those pre-<i>Who </i>days there was no market for sci-fi, fantasy or adventure.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f1G1DesKfYI/WXUGzqz2bMI/AAAAAAAAQRA/aQvXIyvXb8kJYuzXM2GZBBmrXLyVfCBzgCEwYBhgL/s1600/site2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="1269" height="160" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f1G1DesKfYI/WXUGzqz2bMI/AAAAAAAAQRA/aQvXIyvXb8kJYuzXM2GZBBmrXLyVfCBzgCEwYBhgL/s320/site2.JPG" width="320" /></a>My scriptwriting ‘career’ has been one of near misses: an episode of <i>Urban Gothic</i> (promptly cancelled); an unmade episode of the <i>Captain Scarlet</i> remake (stories about Gerry Anderson turned out to be true, though I did at least squeeze some money out of him); a version of <i>Xtro 4</i> for a guy who claimed he owned the rights but didn’t; an adaptation of <i>The Beetle</i> which <i>Variety </i>claimed I had sold to Hammer (I hadn’t); and so on. The only script of mine that ever got made was <i><a href="https://vimeo.com/13525226">Waiting for Gorgo</a></i>, a 17-minute film that spent two years in post and then wasn't submitted to any genre festivals. Sigh.<br />
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I have spent 15 years analysing what does and doesn’t work in films, particularly low-budget independent British horror films. Theoretically, I should be the go-to guy for screenplays. But not once has anyone come to me and said, “Mike, I need you to write a script for me.” (Actually a couple of people did, but neither worked out and they joined the near-miss pile.)<br />
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I know some people who want to write meaningful, artistic works, or aspire to one day write the next Hollywood blockbuster. I don’t. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write some silly microbudget monster movie that people will complain about on Amazon. That’s what I love watching, that’s what I want to write, instead of writing <u>about</u>.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pazs0Ak57g0/WXUHkgF2v7I/AAAAAAAAQRM/FbtvY8d01VExk3MsrEO5RLbsGyyf5sN4gCLcBGAs/s1600/413PE33SSEL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="310" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pazs0Ak57g0/WXUHkgF2v7I/AAAAAAAAQRM/FbtvY8d01VExk3MsrEO5RLbsGyyf5sN4gCLcBGAs/s200/413PE33SSEL._SX308_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="130" /></a>And if you’re thinking: go out there and make the films yourself. I appreciate the sentiment, but I have no desire to direct, and have neither the business skills to produce nor the technical skills to do anything else. All I do is write. I pick the right words and put them in the right order. It’s all I’ve ever done, all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve been told I’m quite good at it. It’s paid the rent, in one way or another, for 22 years.<br />
<br />
But it seems to me that what has stopped me from writing the books and screenplays I want to write is spending all my spare time (outside my writing day job at Leicester University) writing my website. While I’ve been reviewing <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/zombiesaurus.html">Zombiesaurus</a></i> and its ilk, I’ve not been finishing <i>Elsa Lanchester: Bride of the Hunchback</i> or <i>My Big Fat Zombie Wedding</i>.<br />
<br />
This website will stay live, and I’ve got a handful of reviews I’ve promised people that I’ll get up over the summer, but as of now I’m not accepting any more review copies. If you care to send me a screener, I’ll certainly appreciate it and will tweet about it enthusiastically. But there will be no more reviews. Sorry.<br />
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I’m also knocking my <a href="http://british-horror-revival.blogspot.co.uk/">British Horror Revival blog</a> on the head. Hardly anyone ever looks at it anyway. I’ll keep both Twitter accounts going. I’ll also keep writing my column for <i>Scream</i>.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TDX_LvICA2M/WXUGziT1KyI/AAAAAAAAQQ8/HZ6B8OmOzFcCAy9MacDcdV_VmfWczSAnQCEwYBhgL/s1600/site3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="1270" height="146" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TDX_LvICA2M/WXUGziT1KyI/AAAAAAAAQQ8/HZ6B8OmOzFcCAy9MacDcdV_VmfWczSAnQCEwYBhgL/s320/site3.JPG" width="320" /></a>It’s been a great 15 and a half years. Coincidentally that’s exactly how long I’ve got to retirement (if I make it that far..., cough cough) so now seems a perfect time to change direction.<br />
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Finally, I want to thank absolutely everyone who has helped me: people who sent me screeners, or invited me to screenings, or agreed to interviews, or commented, or tweeted or contributed in any way. Cheers, folks!MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-42349724817809441362017-09-25T17:59:00.001+01:002017-09-25T18:03:26.592+01:00interview: John Williams<i>In January 2017 <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/15-years-on-web-announcement.html">I sent four questions to 100 movie legends</a>. Composer John Williams responded in June, sending me a print-out of questions he often gets asked. I thought fair enough, at least he was kind enough to respond. Three months later, I was puzzled to receive another envelope marked 'Boston Pops', containing the same printed FAQ. Then I noticed that some of the answers were highlighted in biro - and realised that John Williams had updated his FAQ by adding my four questions! So here's my interview with the man who has received more Oscar nominations than anyone ever (except Walt Disney):</i><br />
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<b>Which technological or social development during your career has changed cinema the most?</b><br />
"The use of synthesizers and of layered pre-recordings in film scores is now prevalent, but I'm still writing for orchestra. Technology has had very little influence on me. However, thanks to the computerization of post-production work such as editing, it goes much more quickly now."<br />
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<b>Which deceased film-maker or actor do you wish you could have worked with?</b><br />
"Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn."<br />
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<b>What is the one question you’re fed up with answering in interviews?</b><br />
"What was it like to succeed Arthur Fiedler?"<br />
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<b>What would you rather be asked instead?</b><br />
"It depends who's asking!"MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-51561093662585164802017-07-23T17:14:00.001+01:002017-07-23T17:15:55.549+01:00interview: Martin Landau<i>In the summer of 1999, my pal Omar Kaczmarczyk invited me to Luxembourg to visit the set of </i>The New Adventures of Pinocchio. <i>Unfortunately Martin Landau, who reprised his role of Geppetto from the first film, had wrapped when I was there but Omar kindly arrange a phoner when I got home. In 2000 I finally met Martin Landau when I was in Cannes and spotted him in a restaurant. I approached him, explained who I was and thanked him for this gracious interview. I’m posting it now in tribute to this great actor who passed away last week.</i><br />
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<b>What attracted you to the role of Geppetto in the first Pinocchio film?</b><br />
“To begin with? Well, it is a classic book and the Collodi book is something that I think everyone has grown up with. And I felt that the technology had finally caught up with the ability to do it as a live-action movie with a wooden actor. I’ve worked with a lot of wooden actors in my time and this was one of the better ones! But I guess I read the script and I found it charming, I found it moving, I found it sweet. I knew the Henson group as well were very gifted, and other laboratories of that kind were extant at the moment. It intrigued me. I felt there was something classical about it. We’d all grown up on the Disney cartoon which is charming but deviated more. Pepe the cricket was Jiminy Cricket and so on. This was truer and closer to the original piece and I felt it was something I wanted to do it.<br />
<br />
“It’s a classic part and I also found it moving and sweet. Here’s a man who has avoided marriage and avoided his love. He’s a man who would never actually have a family because he’s past that. He’s run away from life. He’s spent his time talking to inanimate objects and puppets and created a life for himself that makes him comfortable. And suddenly here this strange event happens where he is thrust into fatherhood and isn’t really ready for it emotionally. This is how I looked at it. He has this love of his life who’s crazy about him that he’s ignored his entire life, which is added to the script. There’s a nice arc and a catharsis that occurs where he becomes a much rounder, fuller, better human being through this experience that takes him by surprise.”<br />
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<b>Given that the first film was close to the book and had that closure, what did you think when you were approached about a sequel?</b><br />
“Well, I said ‘Let me see the script.’ Obviously any time something works pretty well, they want to do a second one, and usually it’s the idea of doing it as opposed to doing what. The ‘what’ is very important. When they sent me the script I said this is kind of fun, because what a turn: Geppetto becoming a puppet and Pinocchio basically on the other side of the fence. But Pinocchio still misbehaving and creating the problems that cause this strange occurrence. But again the idea of a puppet coming to life is just as whimsical and fantastic as a character like Geppetto becoming a puppet.<br />
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“So I said, ‘Well, this is in keeping with it in a certain sense. And again it is a morality piece. It’s about not paying attention and being penalised forbeing remiss in life. I also found it kind of fun and cute and again it’s a switch, particularly at the end when the two of them are puppets and have to be reconstructed into human beings. But Geppetto is also kind of enjoying the experience. I just sort it was kind of whimsical and sweet.”<br />
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<b>What did you find were the biggest differences between the two films?</b><br />
“I do pictures with different directors all the time, and different cinematographers. Also though the fact that it’s a different period historically. I don’t know whether you know that or not - this is a much later time. This is 19th century and the other one I guess was 18th century. So, jokingly I say this, Genevieve Bujold’s character didn’t manage to last that hundred years! So it’s still a period piece - it’s not a modern piece - but they felt it would be truer to the Collodi piece in a way if they brought it into that century. So there were differences in wardrobe and differences in design, by and large, but not radically.<br />
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“<a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/interview-michael-anderson.html">Michael Anderson</a> is a wonderfully professional director. He did <i>Around the World in 80 Days</i> among other things. So it’s not like going into a black hole. There’s a solid core to this production. Of course, a first-time director I would have qualms - because it’s complicated. It’s not an easy picture, when you’re dealing with these special effects. In terms of today, you think of car crashes and explosions and fireballs. But this is a very subtle kind of thing; it has to be believable and done well. And you need a director who can handle it because it’s really character driven. <i>Pinocchio 1</i> was a character-driven movie, albeit that one of the characters is a wooden puppet, but very human. And it’s a human tale. And I think that’s why they wanted to have someone who can recognise the humanity as well as the technical areas at the helm of this. You need a good skipper. So when I heard it was Michael Anderson I was very pleased.”<br />
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<b>Had you worked with him before?</b><br />
“No, I’d worked with his son on <i>The Greatest Story Ever Told</i>, Michael Anderson Jr, as an actor. But I knew Michael. We’d met on a number of times but I hadn’t worked with him. I’d worked with a lot of ‘classmates’: people like Hitchcock and a lot of his contemporaries.”<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-40-bWqe2VQk/WXTKI99YhfI/AAAAAAAAQQU/-3uPXggEU7IfTJS1U3C2ulMDyWrPFOd-wCEwYBhgL/s1600/newad%2Bdvd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="314" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-40-bWqe2VQk/WXTKI99YhfI/AAAAAAAAQQU/-3uPXggEU7IfTJS1U3C2ulMDyWrPFOd-wCEwYBhgL/s320/newad%2Bdvd.jpg" width="225" /></a><b>Did you find that the technology had advanced much since the last film?</b><br />
“Clearly technology continues to grow and people are working on all kinds of things. The technology was pretty damn good in the first one. It’s probably made some positive steps since then but we’re not talking about George Lucas’ company. It’s close-ups on puppets. In the first film, that puppet had a lot of expression, a lot of subtlety, a lot of sweetness and wickedness, and all the things necessary. So I think maybe things are a little better in that area, but it was pretty good the first time around is what I’m saying.”<br />
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<b>Have you advanced the character in the second film from what he was in the first?</b><br />
“Well, I think he’s essentially the same guy. I don’t want to do anything radical that would disturb people; he is the same guy. It’s a hundred years later but he’s still very much the same guy. The script allows for different areas to emerge in terms of where he’s ‘coming from’. You see different sides of Geppetto but it’s the same guy allowing other colours to come into his behaviour.”<br />
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<b>How did you find working in Luxembourg?</b><br />
“I liked it. I found it very clean and clear and pleasant. It’s not very big and if you’re in a long train I think the front of it is in one country and the back of it’s in another. But I found the people friendly. I found that the crews at the studio were very professional, and the studio itself. I think Gertrude Stein said ‘a sound stage is a sound stage is a sound stage’: you don’t know where you are until you walk outside and see a street with foreign signs.<br />
<br />
“I worked at Pinewood for years on<i> Space: 1999</i> and I felt very much at home there. Having done as many films as I have and shot in as many countries as I have, I’m quite adaptable. Because when you’re inside a sound stage you really don’t know where you are. You’re in that world. It’s only when you go back the hotel that you realise other languages are being spoken.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2Jdykkbip1g/WXTKH4_E4aI/AAAAAAAAQQE/Fuq-aXFqGng1Yn7kG3emnE6Pu-2UtIcagCEwYBhgL/s1600/26911Landau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="632" height="303" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2Jdykkbip1g/WXTKH4_E4aI/AAAAAAAAQQE/Fuq-aXFqGng1Yn7kG3emnE6Pu-2UtIcagCEwYBhgL/s400/26911Landau.jpg" width="400" /></a><b><i>Space: 1999</i> is quite topical because the Moon gets blown out of orbit in about four weeks.</b><br />
“I know. A year from now it will be a period piece!”<br />
<br />
<b>When you made that series, 1999 was way in the future.</b><br />
“Well, it was 25 years ahead exactly.”<br />
<br />
<b>As the date approaches, what are your thoughts on the series now?</b><br />
“It was a valiant effort. It’s not easy to do that kind of a show on a weekly basis, and I also think that our special effects at the time were really amazing. If you look back they still hold up very well. Star Trek was a wonderful series but their effects were certainly much more primitive than ours. People like Brian Johnston wound up working with Lucas on projects. Our unit at Bray was really doing miraculous stuff and tying it into the main stuff we were doing at Pinewood, and I felt it was quite seamless and quite well done. Some of the stories of course were not as dramatic or little lacking, but some of them were excellent little movies. Again, I don’t know any series that’s consistent and wonderful all the time, but I think it was a valiant effort to do something on a different level than had been done before.<br />
<br />
“When I say ‘hadn’t been done before’, the concept of the Moon being blown out of orbit and not being able to affect your trajectory and being at the whims of fate. In other words these 300 people from different countries not actually in control of their destiny, and able to stay alive because of hydroponics but not being able to procreate until they found a planet - this was the concept initially - that was compatible with our needs so we could continue the human race. And that idea is a good idea.<br />
<br />
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“Everybody’s a critic and people compared us to <i>Star Trek</i>. We didn’t intend to be <i>Star Trek</i>. It was a differently textured show, and there were episodes that I would proudly screen for anybody. I just think it was time well spent and we did some very, very interesting work at that point in time. Again, it’s 25 years ago. If you look at those shows they don’t look as if they were made 25 years ago; they look as if they were made yesterday. We don’t suffer from the styles of the day.<br />
<br />
“Last night I hosted a screening of <i>North By Northwest</i> at a theatre here because Warner Brothers is re-releasing the movie with brand new sound and a restored print. It’s impeccable and beautiful. I did a question and answer and I did some anecdotes on the stage for about an hour last night before the screening. Well, that picture holds up. The cars are old and the suits are ‘50s suits and the hairdos too, and the ties are skinny, so you’re reminded continually of the ‘50s when you watch it. Whereas in <i>Space: 1999</i>, you’re not. It’s as new and futuristic today as it was then.”<br />
<br />
<b>The fans often cite a big difference between the two seasons of <i>Space: 1999</i>.</b><br />
“Definitely, because Freddie Freiburger came in and as I say, everyone’s a critic and everyone was second-guessing the show. I liked the first season better. I felt if it could have evolved from that point it would have become a much, much, much richer and better show. I felt there were things in the second season that were inconsistent and sometimes the characters were made inconsistent because they did things unilaterally that they wouldn’t have done - to accommodate the storyline as opposed to the storyline accommodating the characters.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8fRvO86Zck/WXTLBY87tcI/AAAAAAAAQQk/JWu0s9bQV_oLxA-tvhsPa5nyCIqA7xCKQCLcBGAs/s1600/ca36cfad9b1c748a05ea466d9ddaa7d4--tv-radio-mission-impossible.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="236" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8fRvO86Zck/WXTLBY87tcI/AAAAAAAAQQk/JWu0s9bQV_oLxA-tvhsPa5nyCIqA7xCKQCLcBGAs/s1600/ca36cfad9b1c748a05ea466d9ddaa7d4--tv-radio-mission-impossible.jpg" /></a><b>A lot of old shows have been revived. Do you think there’s room for<i> Space: 2099</i>?</b><br />
“Well, I’m not in charge of that. I’m sure there’s always room for something that’s well done. There’s a nucleus of followers of that show who would be interested in that show and those people could introduce their kids to the show because of the nostalgic aspect to it. But it takes a certain amount of money. <i>Space </i>certainly didn’t have the success that <i>Star Trek</i> had - though <i>Star Trek</i> was a failure when it was first on the air.<br />
<br />
“Because I was doing <i>Mission: Impossible</i> at the same studio at the same time, and we were very successful and they were a struggling show. They only did three seasons and we did many more. And I was offered Spock before Lenny and passed on it to do <i>Mission</i>, so I understand, I’ve been close to that. I knew Gene Roddenberry because Gene Roddenberry’s office was right next to Bruce Gellar’s office at Desilu Studios which ultimately became Paramount. So I sort of grew up there: we were on stages 7 and 8 and they were on 9 and 10. Those numbers have changed because of Paramount’s acquisition of Desilu, but we were side by side. We had the two stages next to the <i>Star Trek</i> stages, and Lenny’s dressing room was in the same building as mine. I knew Bill Shatner and all of them very well; we’d see each other all the time in the commissary and visit each other’s sets and the like.<br />
<br />
“So I’m aware of the <i>Star Trek</i> phenomenon but it took a long time to happen, remember. It wasn't overnight. And the show barely stayed on the air from season to season. It was on the basis of a lot of letters and very zealous fanatical fans - that’s a little redundant, but... - that kept that show on the air. It just scraped by, whereas we were riding high. It was a wonderful concept and well done, but when it comes to special effects it couldn't hold a candle to <i>Space</i>.”<br />
<br />
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<b>When both shows were prepping for their first seasons, what attracted you to Rollin Hand over Spock?</b><br />
“Well, I’m an actor who likes a wide range of stuff, and to play a lobotomy, which is what Spock was to me, someone without emotion, did not interest me. It’s not why I became an actor. I could see the fact that it could be very successful: pointy ears, and a guy who knows all the answers in the 1960s is like a pothead of a certain kind, and I felt that would be very successful. Whereas on <i>Mission </i>I played everything from Adolf Hitler to Martin Boorman, to myself younger, older, every accent. I was a one-man rep company actually, and that interested me. To this day I would not want to do Spock if you handed it to me and offered to pay me a million dollars. I wouldn’t do it. The character does not interest me. My answering machine has more expression.”<br />
<br />
<b>What did you think of the <i>Mission: Impossible</i> movie?</b><br />
“I thought it had nothing to do with the series. The series is a team of people who get in and get out, having accomplished what they did without anyone ever knowing they were there. In the movie, the team is killed early in the picture, the Phelps character is turned into a double agent, and everyone knows Tom Cruise is there because he’s announcing it all the time. It’s a different idea. Tom basically played the same character I played, but the idea was not to let them know we were infiltrating. When you’re a movie star I guess you have to let people know you’re there.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rjPyDB2Xo8Y/WXTKI9YMpiI/AAAAAAAAQQQ/tU-X9UPt0NkoQjmYc8YggLmNLN8rsWZHQCEwYBhgL/s1600/Martin_Landau_2010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rjPyDB2Xo8Y/WXTKI9YMpiI/AAAAAAAAQQQ/tU-X9UPt0NkoQjmYc8YggLmNLN8rsWZHQCEwYBhgL/s320/Martin_Landau_2010.jpg" width="213" /></a><b>One of my favourite films is <i>12:01</i>. What do you remember of that?</b><br />
“I remember Jonathan Silverman and Jack Sholder, I remember working on it. Jack Sholder: I had done his first picture ever, a picture called <i>Alone in the Dark</i>, which was one of New Line’s very first pictures. I got to know Bob Shea and all of those people. I just remember that I had a good time. Helen Slater and Jonathan. I also did an HBO movie with the same director called <i>By Dawn’s Early Light</i>, in which I played the President. Kind of a catastrophic event, with Washington blown up by atomic bombs.”<br />
<br />
<b>Thanks for this. I’m looking forward to <i>Pinocchio</i>.</b><br />
“I think it’s going to be quite charming, and I know Michael Anderson is very happy with it. I’m going into a dubbing studio for the next little bit to post-synch a bunch of stuff with the puppet. It’s the first time I’ve done that with a puppet, but as I say I’m not generally thought of as a wooden actor.”<br />
<br />
<i>RIP Martin Landau 1928-2017</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-33699651475699410042017-06-30T19:13:00.001+01:002017-07-01T19:19:12.447+01:00Zombiesaurus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Milko Davis</i><br />
<i>Writer: Michele Pacitto</i><br />
<i>Producers: Michele Pacitto, Andy Haman</i><br />
<i>Cast: Andy Haman, Mia Klosterman, Cooper Elliott</i><br />
<i>Country: USA</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: UK DVD (101 Films)</i><br />
<br />
When I first encountered <i>Zombiesaurus </i>it was just a listing on Amazon. Just a title. But what a title. Boy, that’s how you sell a movie. I knew I had to see it.<br />
<br />
A little later, the sleeve image appeared. It was obviously misleading and hyperbolic in the grand tradition of B-movie marketing. After staring at the design, wondering why it rang a bell, I realised that 101 Films had used exactly the same stock library dinosaur illustration that 88 Films (who are presumably either 13 places higher or lower on some sort of arbitrary scale) had already used for <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/interview-steve-lawson-2015.html">Steve Lawson</a>’s <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/killersaurus.html">Killersaurus</a></i>.<br />
<br />
This week I was in Morrisons, browsing the video shelf as is my wont, and there it was. <i>Zombiesaurus</i>. Five quid. Into the basket it went. It had only been released that very day. Bought it on Monday, watched it on Tuesday, started the review on Wednesday, finished it on Thursday, posted it on Friday and I’ll stop now before people mistake me for Craig David.<br />
<br />
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I’m not going to lie to you. <i>Zombiesaurus </i>is not a good movie. However you measure it, this is pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. Genuinely entertaining. Not in a snide, so-bad-it’s-good, mocking way. Regular readers know that I would never approach a film like that. No, <i>Zombiesaurus </i>is considerably entertaining in a bizarre and strangely fascinating way, and frankly it’s not without its occasional moment of genuine cinematic cleverness and quality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty much exactly as bad as you expect, just not in the <u>way</u> that you expect.<br />
<br />
I think the people who made this can be proud of what they have created. I’m just not sure they know what it is they have actually created. Because it certainly beats the hell out of me.<br />
<br />
The core of the story is pretty simple and straightforward, and original too. There’s a bunch of people being chased around a sort of military/scientific/industrial building by a fiercesome, hungry dinosaur. The unique schtick is that this dino can’t be killed because it’s already dead (hence the green, glowing eyes). Furthermore, anyone unlucky enough to become dino-chow returns from the dead as a zombie, also with the green, glowing eyes. That’s pretty much the second half of the film right there.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m36sDVY-ffQ/WVaSY6eAfcI/AAAAAAAAQMU/u__7en2HbYYgqyr9hIO1gaKtsGj-BWcdACEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="854" height="172" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m36sDVY-ffQ/WVaSY6eAfcI/AAAAAAAAQMU/u__7en2HbYYgqyr9hIO1gaKtsGj-BWcdACEwYBhgL/s400/Capture2.JPG" width="400" /></a>I have no problems with the second half. Well, I do in fact have a whole bunch of problems, but we’ll come to them in due course. But let’s start with the first half, which really makes very little sense.<br />
<br />
We start with a man we will come to know as Dr Wojick Borge (Cooper Elliott) – bearded and bald with a rather alarming cauliflower ear – who is making a shady deal in a car park in the middle of the night, for some reason, with some guy. The guy gives him a box containing some hypodermic needles, each of which has some sort of green, glowing liquid inside it (green and glowing is a recurring motif in this motion picture). Borge accepts this consignment and has, for no apparent reason, a living dinosaur under a tarpaulin on a trailer.<br />
<br />
Wait, what?<br />
<br />
Never mind because one year later Dr Borge, resplendent in lab coat and bow tie, is teaching a (small) class at a university. Let’s just listen in to some of the lecture he delivers to a dozen or so bored-looking students:<br />
<br />
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<i>“Why not break the chain? The chain that causes the expiration of life. Why not expand on Darwin’s theory of evolution – and push further? I stand before you today, representing and educating the idea of progressing life. I want to eliminate the thought that forces us to believe that life must end. Remove the gauge.”</i><br />
<br />
Anyone? Anyone got any ideas? Any suggestions what on Earth any of this is supposed to mean? No? Oh well. At least it’s not just me.<br />
<br />
It’s not exactly clear what subject Borge is teaching, but it involves a dead cat at the front of the lecture theatre. He injects this with some of the green, glowing stuff and it comes back to life, to the shock and horror of the students. For this misbehaviour, Borge is chewed out by the Dean (Mary Jo Mauro) and given the boot. He will return to our story later. But for now, he’s crossing the road, getting hit by a car and swearing vengeance on humanity.<br />
<br />
Cut to a shot of an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, with the curious caption ‘0515 HRS ZULU TIME’. I looked this up and apparently ‘Zulu Time’ is what the US Navy calls the time at the Prime Meridian, so they have a single reference for their ships around the globe who don’t have to wonder whether a given time is ten o’clock in New York or ten o’clock in San Francisco. Except there’s already a perfectly good name for this. It’s called Greenwich Mean Time. Silly Yanks.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5GrPSjTPQ14/WVaSZKHJ4mI/AAAAAAAAQMU/N1sePM_D72Ui8-rOtbkUlrybE04yKvX2ACEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="855" height="171" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5GrPSjTPQ14/WVaSZKHJ4mI/AAAAAAAAQMU/N1sePM_D72Ui8-rOtbkUlrybE04yKvX2ACEwYBhgL/s400/Capture5.JPG" width="400" /></a>Ten minutes in, we finally get the opening titles, which introduce us to five quasi-military types in a Humvee, driving through the desert accompanied by a CGI helicopter. There’s Duque (professional bodybuilder Andy Haman), the muscle mountain leader who someone later says looks exactly like Duke Nukem. There’s Spivey (Shale Le Page), the cocky, slightly crazy one. There’s Stick (Ruselis Aumeen Perry) the thankfully not wisecracking or hiphop-loving black one, Cuchilla (UFC fighter Raquel ‘Rocky’ Pennington) the taciturn, sword-wielding, kick-ass female one and Swat (Juan Gonzalez) the other one. The titles provide the lead actors’ names and tell us ‘Screenplay by Michele Pacitto’ but in defiance of tradition don’t mention either the producer(s) or the director(s).<br />
<br />
A bizarre caption now appears – on screen and read aloud – which I think is worth reproducing in full (complete with incorrect apostrophe):<br />
<br />
<i>During a great time of peril on Earth, a deranged scientist emerged and took control of a secret military bunker deep in the desert…</i><br />
<i>Evil would unleash it’s monstrous secrets to destroy Earth…</i><br />
<i>Five commandos set out to eliminate the threat…</i><br />
<i>Out of the five commandos…</i><br />
<i>Two survived…</i><br />
<i>Out of the two…</i><br />
<i>One told the story…</i><br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jUsBs-aKtSo/WVaSZa7GvmI/AAAAAAAAQMU/DkFatwzfX1U7RAcXUI7LYSt36kkpH4WigCEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture6.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="855" height="168" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jUsBs-aKtSo/WVaSZa7GvmI/AAAAAAAAQMU/DkFatwzfX1U7RAcXUI7LYSt36kkpH4WigCEwYBhgL/s400/Capture6.JPG" width="400" /></a>What? I mean, what? I mean, right at the start: “a great time of peril” – do you mean a time of great peril? Has this been translated from Japanese?<br />
<br />
Now we meet yet another set of characters: four young people in a car, also driving across the desert. Roxanne (Nicole Goeke) is a bimbo, her boyfriend Gunnar (Ben Johnson, who has played Superman in several Justice League fan films) is a jock. In the back seat are Sadie (Mia Klosterman) and her boyfriend Cameron (Adam Singer) who are kind of stoner gamer nerds.<br />
<br />
Despite the somewhat simplistic descriptions that I’m using here, one thing the movie has going for it is characterisation. There are nine main characters and they are all different and distinctive. They all speak in different ways and act in different ways and have enough depth to them that they feel like individual, semi-real people, not just off-the-peg cardboard cut-outs.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E0vyv8E3IMo/WVaSZ8j8TKI/AAAAAAAAQMU/n7si3Of_0vsOy-YAha230-ZIdrQYsE3ZACEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture9.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="851" height="170" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E0vyv8E3IMo/WVaSZ8j8TKI/AAAAAAAAQMU/n7si3Of_0vsOy-YAha230-ZIdrQYsE3ZACEwYBhgL/s400/Capture9.JPG" width="400" /></a>Except for Swat. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about him. But that’s okay because – fuck spoilers – he’s the first to get killed.<br />
<br />
As the kids’ car is overtaken by the commandos’ Hummer, Spivey waves a gun at them and throws something horrible onto their windscreen. And another shot of that asteroid assures us that there’s just three minutes to impact. And whaddaya know, exactly three minutes later – in both real and movie time – it does indeed hit Earth. Causing untold devastation and destruction and…<br />
<br />
Nah, it causes a bright, large, quiet explosion in the background which the kids in the car don’t even notice. It also causes an electromagnetic pulse which takes out their phones – and the car (which is not, as far as I can tell, electric). But evidently it doesn’t affect the Humvee and its occupants who overtook them three and a half minutes ago.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JE59vty3Dgc/WVaSYTJ6oaI/AAAAAAAAQMU/eYJ_zZTgXyY5N7JE3FEt2KGzGnZDbrwGwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture10.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="852" height="171" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JE59vty3Dgc/WVaSYTJ6oaI/AAAAAAAAQMU/eYJ_zZTgXyY5N7JE3FEt2KGzGnZDbrwGwCEwYBhgL/s400/Capture10.JPG" width="400" /></a>Somewhere up ahead the Hummer has stopped, the commandos get out, the CGI helicopter lands in the background and promptly explodes. Spivey’s rant at this (“Are you fucking kidding me?”) contrasts with his oppos’ insouciance in one of those genuinely clever and enjoyable moments which I referenced above.<br />
<br />
Leaving their vehicle, the four youngsters trudge off across the desert (Sadie has an R2-D2 rucksack!) until they come across a CGI bunker in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a security fence. The EMP has evidently cut off the electricity to the fence. Apparently it has also cut off the barbed wire around the top since they climb over with nary a scratch. The door is slightly open, so in they go.<br />
<br />
There’s then a considerable amount of creeping around, intercut with shots of the five commandos also creeping around, plus shots of someone (it’s Dr Borge – remember him?) wearing a hooded cowl and a mask that makes him look like the missing link between Bane and Palpatine. For some reason he’s listening to an old vinyl record.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gM4xX46JKvg/WVaSYM51-GI/AAAAAAAAQMU/NaYPtychTEsX6jvglGjtTNCn-11VO90qgCEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture11.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="854" height="165" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gM4xX46JKvg/WVaSYM51-GI/AAAAAAAAQMU/NaYPtychTEsX6jvglGjtTNCn-11VO90qgCEwYBhgL/s400/Capture11.JPG" width="400" /></a>There are canisters of something, labelled in Arabic. There’s a digital countdown timer with 47 minutes still to go. A green gas emerges from some pipes, which prompts Cameron’s helpful instruction “Back up. Don’t inhale that gas.” After which he and his three companions avoid its toxic effects by putting their hands over their mouths.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, poor old characterless Swat, who has somehow become detached from his team, omits to put his hand over his mouth when similar gas pumps out at him – and becomes our first actual zombie. Meanwhile, Duque and co find an old scrapbook, which Stick identifies as “Arabic codex pentagram (something)”, which contains drawings of dinosaurs and some convenient newspaper cuttings:<br />
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<i>“Infamous for accidentally releasing toxins into the Colorado River during a stint at the Environmental Protection Agency, Dr Wojik Borge’s government career ended when he was terminated by the US Department of Energy for mental instability and obsessive claims of conspiracy.”</i><br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VCIvUmWhgGo/WVaSYjRIBZI/AAAAAAAAQMU/IhCExACr7WgPFPOnqia7UuajZsMWrOBmACEwYBhgL/s1600/Capture12.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="854" height="170" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VCIvUmWhgGo/WVaSYjRIBZI/AAAAAAAAQMU/IhCExACr7WgPFPOnqia7UuajZsMWrOBmACEwYBhgL/s400/Capture12.JPG" width="400" /></a>Spivey identifies this as “more of that Illuminati mumbo-jumbo” while Stick avers “I’ve seen some messed-up stuff but this is off the chain.” And the viewer just comments: “What?”<br />
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<i>“Borge says,”</i> continues Stick, reading with ease some tiny handwriting in a dark room, <i>“that he has calculated the impending hit location, approximate date and time of impact, but government authorities have repeatedly warned the public to avoid his apocalyptic workshops and events as opportunistic fear-mongering.”</i><br />
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What’s really great here – and it’s only just occurred to me – is that this is an infodump scene which, because of the obtusely unfathomable script, completely fails to dump any actual info.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0lh6LB4gVXw/WVaTPD7QqpI/AAAAAAAAQNI/wFxw3QAdN60GGB9CH31-Q2FbltXYWc-fwCEwYBhgL/s1600/zrex2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="960" height="272" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0lh6LB4gVXw/WVaTPD7QqpI/AAAAAAAAQNI/wFxw3QAdN60GGB9CH31-Q2FbltXYWc-fwCEwYBhgL/s400/zrex2.jpg" width="400" /></a>After Gunnar shoots zombie Swat, the two groups meet up. Then a hologram of a coughing Borge appears to tell them that a meteorite has hit, just as he predicted, and “every major electrical grid in North America will be down for months. There will be mass hysteria and the tartans will be released.”<br />
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Listening to that again he possibly says ‘toxins’, but given how little sense this all makes, it might well be ‘tartans’. He also assures them that “the Jurassic monster will be reanimated and America will destroy itself.” Throughout the past ten minutes or so we have had recurrent cut-aways to a large metal crate suspended on a chain being slowly lowered to the floor. Now the hatch on the front of the crate slowly opens. A pair of green, glowing eyes can be seen within. Out emerges… zombiesaurus!<br />
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And you know what, I’m going to give some serious props here. This film may have cost about ten bucks and change, it may have a script written by someone who had smoked way too much weed, it may feature large amounts of over-acting so ripe that it just falls off the tree… but the dino effects are pretty damn good. Not<i> Jurassic Park</i> good obviously, but better than SyFy movie crap. It’s a therapod, about eight feet high at the hip, portrayed by an effective mix of puppetry and CGI. Much of the time it seems to be a full-body costume (inhabited by Jason Hagan). Honestly, it’s way better than you expect in something like this. There are nice, <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/interview-ray-harryhausen.html">Harryhausen</a>-esque movements: the tilt of the head, the swing of the tail. I really dug the dino.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GMvOazteHDU/WVaTPbWep_I/AAAAAAAAQNI/q-QPfLwq_rIgiQ_18qgpAlJ26UIbMTYbwCEwYBhgL/s1600/zrex3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GMvOazteHDU/WVaTPbWep_I/AAAAAAAAQNI/q-QPfLwq_rIgiQ_18qgpAlJ26UIbMTYbwCEwYBhgL/s400/zrex3.jpg" width="300" /></a>But not as much as I dug what happens next, which is that Duque, cowering behind oil drums with the others, decides to stand up, put down his big-ass gun and walk right up to the beast. He then proceeds to punch it repeatedly around the head until it falls unmoving to the ground, spilling a handful of teeth.<br />
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This is my absolute favourite thing I’ve seen in a film this year! It’s only a few seconds but it is awesome in its audaciousness, reminiscent of the gag when Mongo lays out a horse with one punch in <i>Blazing Saddles</i>. Honestly, it’s moments like this which elevate a film like this from crap to ‘Holy crap!’<br />
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That’s at the 40-minute mark. It’s followed by 26 minutes of the characters trying to escape the building while avoiding (or not) the not-as-dead-as-they-thought dinosaur and their zombified friends. Highlights include a touching moment between Roxie and zombie Gunnar, an unexpected gunshot fatality in the gents’ toilets, Stick sliding between the dino’s legs then shooting it up the arse, and the astoundingly bloody and protracted destruction of zombie Duque. The pace is well maintained while the editing and camera-work in the fight sequences are genuinely well-handled.<br />
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Eventually our three survivors burst out of the building in a (different?) Humvee, just as the countdown timer reaches zero, unleashing a chain reaction of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads across the cities of the world. There is a final incomprehensible, rambling monologue from Dr Borge which I can’t be bothered to transcribe here. Hopefully by now I have whetted your appetite enough that you are determined to view this surreal masterpiece for itself. I want to leave you a few unspoiled moments.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UHt-lel2XW4/WVaTP4d_HAI/AAAAAAAAQNI/mEIKbn5eAd8FP6_YRsQxaxZ8qs2Ym9X1ACEwYBhgL/s1600/zrex5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="360" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UHt-lel2XW4/WVaTP4d_HAI/AAAAAAAAQNI/mEIKbn5eAd8FP6_YRsQxaxZ8qs2Ym9X1ACEwYBhgL/s400/zrex5.jpg" width="300" /></a>The final scene is these three driving across the desert, only now they all have zombie eyes and voices. Except that they have black and white contact lenses, not green glowing eyes. Now I’m really confused. The whole film lasts 69 minutes before the end credits appear under an extremely autotuned song, starting with a shot of each character that freezes and turns into a comic-book image.<br />
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But wait, just as you’re expecting ten minutes of glacially slow, Full Moon-style credits, there’s an extra scene of Stick being interviewed by TV host Cara O’Nightly (Julie Crisante) about a book he wrote about what we have just seen. Or something. Even in and of itself, this little coda makes no sense. She says, “I’m speaking of the fact that the journals had been stolen in the aftermath and were sold for profit.” He replies, “Cara, no-one really knows the full story. I am a soldier and I can say this with confidence: everything written in my bestselling thriller <i>Z Rex</i> – available in hardcover and paperback – is true.”<br />
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Seriously: what?<br />
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And that is indeed followed by nearly seven minutes of glacially slow, Full Moon-style credits. Director Milko Davis is credited with ‘story’ (and with ‘miniatures’) but not, so far as I can tell, with directing. A bizarre snafu on the Inaccurate Movie Database means that his name is listed there as ‘Milko Davis Main Director’! Davis has two previous features to his credit: <i>Raiders of the Damned</i> and <i>Tsnambee: The Wrath Cometh</i>.<br />
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As per Stick’s book referenced in the epilogue, before release this film was variously titled <i>Z/Rex: The Jurassic Dead</i> and also<i> Z-Rex: Jurassic Apocalypse</i>. But fair play to 101 Films, their new title is both more commercial and just plain better. <i>Zombiesaurus</i>. Love it. Filmed in Colorado in February 2016, the movie had a local premiere screening in April 2017, then this 101 Films disc on the other side of the Atlantic seems to be its first actual commercial release. It is, incidentally, an utterly vanilla DVD without even a trailer or chapter selection.<br />
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So let’s cut to the chase here: why does <i>Zombiesaurus </i>work as a movie, despite all expectations (and a fair bit of evidence) to the contrary? First, although it’s not a comedy or spoof it certainly doesn’t take itself seriously. Second, although it doesn’t take itself seriously, one can see that cast and crew took the making of it seriously.<br />
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But mostly I think it’s that the film has – more by accident than design, I suspect – found a perfect balance between on the one hand unpretentious, well-made, lightweight scifi-horror action and on the other a batshit insane scenario/context. What the hell is all that about the meteorite and its strangely selective EMP? Why does the helicopter explode? What are all the oil-drum canisters and why are they labelled in Arabic? In what sense does any of this take place in a “time of great evil” (or even a “great time of evil”)? Why do the survivors have different scary eyes to everyone else? What’s all that stuff about Stick writing a book? Why does Dr Borge reanimate a dead cat in front of his students? What is the Arabic Codex Pentagram (something)? What happens when the tartans are released? And above all, <i><u>where the hell has that dinosaur come from</u></i>?<br />
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I really, really don’t understand the story of this film. I understand the bit in the middle, the bulk of the second half when the dinosaur and zombies are chasing them – that’s cool. But I honestly don’t know what bigger story the film-makers were trying to tell. And I really honestly do have to wonder whether they do either. What were they trying to make? What do they think they’ve made? What have they actually made? I don’t know the answers to those three questions but I’m pretty sure they’re all different.<br />
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I get sent a lot of films for free, and pick up others cheap on eBay or in charity shops. Only occasionally do I buy a brand new film on DVD, and when I do the question to be asked is: do I want my money back? Or did I get good value? In the case of <i>Zombiesaurus </i>I can state with certainty that I got way more than five pounds’ worth of entertainment. Just the literary enjoyment of spending two evenings writing this review has been worth a fiver.<br />
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Somehow, in some way, <i>Zombiesaurus </i>transcends simple dichotomous concepts of good/bad or sense/nonsense. It's an extraordinary, amazing film. Should you buy it and watch it? Hell yeah.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-12362438527772097862017-06-29T19:33:00.001+01:002017-06-29T19:33:18.805+01:00interview: Warren Dudley<i>In June 2017, Warren Dudley kindly answered some questions about his film </i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cage.html">Cage</a>.<br />
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<b>What are the practical pros and cons of shooting a film with one actor on one set?</b><br />
"I have to say the best thing about working in one location and with one actor on screen is that you can shoot the whole movie in order. You NEVER get to do this usually. It makes telling the story so much easier because you can see it happening right in front of you. The downside I suppose is that you can all get a bit stir crazy after ten 12-hour days in a damp warehouse with just a cage in it - so you need to really get on with your crew... this was put to the test a few times!"<br />
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<b>I’m assuming you wrote this with Lucy-Jane Quinlan in mind. What did she bring to the role and the film? </b><br />
"I worked with Lucy on <i>The Cutting Room</i> and thought she was massively talented... and almost as importantly a right laugh. I didn’t audition anyone else for the role which probably goes against all the rules a bit but it just seemed right. Luckily for me her performance was incredible. To bring so much emotion to the part whilst also pulling off an immaculate US accent is quite an achievement. In short - Lucy-Jane Quinlan should be famous and it confuses me as to why she isn’t yet."<br />
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<b>What did you learn on <i>The Cutting Room</i> that you were able to use when making <i>Cage</i>?</b><br />
"Write to your budget. The budgets on both films were similar (about £20K) but with <i>TCR</i> we had multiple locations and a big cast so it gets spread a bit thin. Saying that I am still really proud of it – it still gets some nice reviews around the internet. With <i>Cage </i>I wanted to put all the money on screen. So between Lucas (DOP), Lucy, the talented crew and myself I think we succeeded in making something that looks like it has a bigger budget.<br />
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"One Amazon viewer, attempting to be rude, said – ‘If this is all that Hollywood can come up with we’re in trouble’... I took this as a massive compliment! Little did they know it was shot in rainy Newhaven in an old warehouse."<br />
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<b>There are two endings on the DVD. Why did you decide on the ending you chose? (I will spoiler-protect your answer!)</b><br />
<span style="background-color: red; color: red;">"Lucas and I talked and debated for hours on which ending to use and went with the one we did just because we both felt the film may lose some of its impact if you suddenly introduced lots of other characters at the end. I think of all the people who have mentioned the endings it’s about 50/50 so I still don’t know if I made the right decision!"</span><br />
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<b>What aspect of the film are you most proud of? What would you change if you could?</b><br />
"I like to think that it stands up as a legitimate piece of film-making and not a well-meaning low budget effort. The twist at the start of the third act is something I am pleased with but has really split the audience – some thinking it’s a stroke of genius others informing me that it’s incredibly offensive... often in not such polite terms. I think it’s the former obviously!<br />
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"What would I change? I think if I could I would have gone for a metal cage. Once again, we toyed with it for ages but decided that the wood would be so much more beautiful on film... and it is. A lot of people (yourself included) have mentioned that she could have tried to escape with a bit more vigour so in hindsight I would have added a couple of scenes early on with Gracie attacking the cage..."<br />
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<b>What are you working on now? </b><br />
"I wrote a screenplay called <i>The Bromley Boys</i> which was made last year and stars Alan Davies and Martine McCutcheon. It’s about a young lad in the early '70s who supports the world’s worst football team. I’ve seen the film and it’s amazing – I really hope the footballing public agrees. I think they are hoping for a cinema release late in the year... very exciting.<br />
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"Personally, my next one will be another low budget horror called <i>Prankz</i> starring Betsy-Blue English – a film about a pair of YouTube pranksters who get in to all sorts of horror film trouble. We start filming in late August."<br />
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<b><i>website: <a href="http://www.sixty6media.co.uk/">www.sixty6media.co.uk</a></i></b>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-16152071813296527742017-06-24T11:52:00.001+01:002017-06-29T19:33:41.070+01:00Cage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/interview-warren-dudley.html">Warren Dudley</a></i><br />
<i>Writer: Warren Dudley</i><br />
<i>Producer: Warren Dudley</i><br />
<i>Cast: Lucy-Jane Quinlan, Patrick Bergin, Jake Unsworth</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: UK DVD</i><br />
<i>Website: <a href="http://www.cage-movie.com/">www.cage-movie.com</a></i><br />
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<i>Cage </i>is not the first British horror film to have a single on-screen actor. For accuracy’s sake, it’s worth noting that there was <i>Cam Girl: The Movie</i> and <i>Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampir</i>e. However, they were both Philip Gardiner joints. Despite <i>Cam Girl</i> being an early, atypically not completely terrible effort, neither is what you could call good. Or adequate.<br />
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Warren Dudley’s <i>Cage</i> on the other hand, starring Lucy-Jane Quinlan, is pretty damn brilliant. An impulse buy in Morrisons, where it is currently on sale for a princely three quid, why wouldn’t I take a chance on this? The boy is at his drama club, the wife is at her mother’s, I have a couple of hours to myself. Hell yeah, let’s pick up a bargain-priced new British horror about which I know little more than that I plugged the Amazon release on Twitter and added it to my master list recently.<br />
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The premise is simple. Gracie Blake is a 27-year-old in Seattle, earning a crust as a chat-line girl. It’s 2001, before the technology existed for cam girls to be a thing (even YouTube was still a few years away). Back in those days, it was all done over the telephone. Or so I’m told.<br />
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Unwisely, Gracie agrees to meet a client named Peter (voice of Patrick Bergin). She knows she shouldn’t, but he offers her a lot of money. When she wakes up, she’s in, well, a cage. Stout wooden two-by-fours. Whole thing about ten by ten by ten feet so room to stand up and walk about a bit. Five-digit combination lock on the door. Chain on her ankle. There’s a camp bed, a bucket and a week’s worth of food, water and bog roll. Plus Gracie’s bag, containing her cellphone.<br />
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The reason this needs to be set 16 years ago is because it enables Gracie to talk with Peter, and other folk, but she has no other communication (except texting). If she had a smartphone, she could pinpoint her location, she could email, she could take photos, all sorts of plot-inconvenient convenience. Plus: dumbphones – and I speak as the proud owner of a phone that cost me £2.99 from Tesco – have batteries that last for ever. I charge my phone about once a month.<br />
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Other film-makers would do well to notice how this benefits the plot. Perhaps we’ll start to see a rash of horror films set in the early noughties, recent enough to not worry too much about clothes, cars and hairstyles but just before the personal communication event horizon when everyone suddenly decided they had to be in constant contact with everyone else all the time.<br />
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Except me.<br />
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Sheeple.<br />
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Any road, Gracie is a prisoner. The cage is inside some sort of warehouse and her only clue to the location is the occasional sound of an aeroplane, so she’s somewhere quite near an airport. But there are a lot of airports in the US. Is she even still in Seattle?<br />
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She receives occasional phone calls from Peter (number withheld of course) who warns her not to call the police. She also sends and receives calls from her mum (voice of Sharon Drain) and her boyfriend Eddy (voice of Jake Unsworth: <i>Eden Lodge, The Awakening</i>). The former she has to lie to, because explaining her situation would mean explaining how she earns money by talking dirty to men whacking themselves off. The latter knows about her income stream so she can tell him. He does call the police, but Gracie counts as a ‘missing person’, and then only after 48 hours. People go missing in America all the time. It’s not a priority. Gracie, who is on some sort of medication, also has a young daughter from a previous relationship, currently in foster care.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sAMJNtAlUPQ/WU5BZSkF6CI/AAAAAAAAQKg/uwZRcn7ZDnMh9VlBkllY0iaO6Pxx3D1WgCEwYBhgL/s1600/cage4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="960" height="166" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sAMJNtAlUPQ/WU5BZSkF6CI/AAAAAAAAQKg/uwZRcn7ZDnMh9VlBkllY0iaO6Pxx3D1WgCEwYBhgL/s400/cage4.jpg" width="400" /></a>After the initial ineffective screaming and yelling, she becomes resigned to her fate. Peter tells her he’s flying around the country and he will visit her soon, before her supplies run out. We never really find out anything about Peter, and that’s a strength of the film. Bergin plays him as a calm, rational, organised man. No creepy voice, no bouts of anger. He won’t say why he’s locked Gracie up but he assures her it’s not sexual. The fact that he’s not an obvious nutter makes him far more scary and disturbing than he might have been if he was frothing at the mouth.<br />
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Things take a turn for the worse when Gracie’s father (voice of Andy Costello) has to go into hospital. At this point she does call the cops, but then wakes up to find her food, water and phone outside the cage as a punishment.<br />
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And then, an hour into this eighty-minute feature, as Act Two turns into Act Three, there is the most audacious plot twist I have encountered for a very, very long time. A real ‘shout at the screen’ game changer that will leave your jaw on the floor. I’m not even going to give you a hint what it is. Some other reviewers have, which I think is unfair.<br />
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The film’s ending, which obviously I’m not going to spoil for you, is commendably ambiguous. The disc also includes an ‘alternate ending’ which doesn’t contradict the existing one but puts an entire new spin on the whole story, a final narrative jab in the guts that works brilliantly as a coda to the main film. (I recommend avoiding the movie’s IMDB page before watching as that gives a clue about what you’ll see.)<br />
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<i>Cage </i>is very good indeed, thanks to a fine script and adroit direction by Mr Dudley and an absolute belter of a performance by Ms Quinlan. Warren Dudley’s first feature was <i>The Cutting Room</i> which, entirely coincidentally, I watched last week. And it’s a measure of the difference between these two films that, when I checked his filmography and spotted that title, I couldn’t remember a damn thing about it. It is a thoroughly generic and forgettable found footage, and it’s genericity and forgettableness were literally all I could remember. Fortunately, I wrote a capsule review (for the next book) so could read what my week-ago self thought.<br />
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It has three students – one played by the busy Lucy-Jane Q – making a documentary about cyber-bullying for their A-level media studies. They talk to the father and ex-boyfriend of a local missing girl and then somehow end up in an abandoned army barracks where a masked psycho spends the final acting chasing them up and down dark corridors. The film’s only notable moment is the final reveal of the killer’s identity which is well-handled (albeit completely obvious).<br />
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I guess <i>The Cutting Room</i> is the sort of movie that a young film-maker has to get out of their system before progressing to better things. Rest assured that <i>Cage</i> is definitely better things. Obviously the budget has been kept very, very low. One location. One costume. One actor. Patrick Bergin’s a name but it doesn’t cost much to get even a name actor into an audio studio near their house for a day. When actors play a ‘phone voice’, sometimes they can even literally do the role over the phone.<br />
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Despite the constraints of the set and minimalist cast, Dudley never lets the film feel static or repetitive. He uses the geometry of the cage and its shadows to create impressive effects, including a stand-out spinning shot where the bars behind Quinlan whizz past like a zoetrope.<br />
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Of Lucy-Jane Quinlan, the first thing to note is that for an actor to take on a role like this, alone on screen for 80 minutes, takes extraordinary confidence and courage. LJQ steps up to the bat magnificently, imbuing Gracie with real humanity and with a range of credible emotions from determination to despair and all points inbetween. I first encountered Quinlan when I watched and reviewed <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/weaverfish.html">Weaverfish</a></i>. I see that my comment was “Quinlan gives a particularly fine performance, balancing Charlotte on a fine line between vulnerability and resilience.” So (a) I’m slightly proud to have spotted this talent early and seen my critical assessment confirmed with <i>Cage</i>, and (b) I think we’ll see a lot more of this actress.<br />
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Quinlan has an extensive IMDB page already, with lots of short films, some of them fantasy/scifi/horror. She is in mega-anthology <i>60 Seconds to Die</i> (but then, who isn’t?) and she has an ‘additional voices’ credit for Anthony Woodley’s virus-on-a-plane feature <i>The Carrier</i>. We’ll see her soon in the remake of <i>Unhinged </i>and in Warren Dudley-scripted football comedy <i>The Bromley Boys</i>. She is also attached to <i>Kindred</i>, an upcoming horror feature from David Bryant (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/dead-wood.html">Dead Wood</a></i>) alongside Jane Asher and Mark ‘cast MJ Simpson if he’s unavailable’ Benton.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S0oAXKhaBU4/WU5CYUVSPqI/AAAAAAAAQKs/Kr0kZfslaaYYlqH0tim9icRLatCQ58UFgCLcBGAs/s1600/cage7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="220" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S0oAXKhaBU4/WU5CYUVSPqI/AAAAAAAAQKs/Kr0kZfslaaYYlqH0tim9icRLatCQ58UFgCLcBGAs/s1600/cage7.jpg" /></a>A quick aside on the old Inaccurate Movie Database folks. First, it’s clear that Warren Dudley has really, really pissed off someone because the User Reviews page for <i>Cage </i>has a series of one-star reviews, mostly by people who have never reviewed anything else, and most of them with suspiciously similar style, language and tone. I surmise that Dudley has made an enemy of someone whose childish idea of revenge is to troll his film with bad reviews. In terms of user rating, <i>Cage </i>is 4.0 from 149 votes while <i>The Cutting Room</i> is 3.9 from 310 votes, which just shows that such things are arbitrary and not reflective of actual quality. Apparently a couple of months ago the IMDB nerks managed to delete <i>Cage </i>from the system entirely, which hasn’t helped matters, wiping out early positive votes from festival audiences. Good grief.<br />
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More to the point, at time of writing, the IMDB lists the current state of <i>Cage </i>(which played a festival in Toronto in November 2016 and is currently on sale in UK supermarkets, remember) as ‘post-production’. Meanwhile on Patrick Bergin’s page, <i>When the Devil Rides Out</i> is also listed as ‘post-production’ while <i>Grindhouse 2wo</i> is apparently ‘completed’ – despite neither of them existing outside the fevered imagination of Richard Driscoll. Bergin has been in a lot of stuff over the years (including Driscoll’s magnum opus <i>Eldorado</i>) but to me he will always be Victor in the early 1990s David Wickes version of <i>Frankenstein</i>.<br />
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Cinematography and editing are credited to Lucas Tucknott, who should take significant credit for his contribution to the film’s success. His other genre gigs include <i>Cruel Summer</i>, kid-friendly cryptozoology flick <i>Young Hunters: The Beast of Bevendean</i> and unreleased horror oddity <i>301 Troop: Arawn Rising</i> (which the IMDB confidently describes as ‘announced’ even though it was at least partly shot back in 2013). Also important is the make-up job which convinces us that Gracie has spent two weeks stuck in one place without washing. Full marks to Sophie Brown (<i>Blood Moon, World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen, The Carrier</i>) and Ruby Lonsdale (<i>Carnivore: Werewolf of London</i>) for that.<br />
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If I’m going to pick a hole with <i>Cage </i>(because no film is perfect) it seems a little unlikely that Gracie doesn’t put more effort into attempting to escape. The cage is solid (not ‘flimsy’ as that IMDB troll would have us believe) but nevertheless it is wooden, and wood can be chipped. If I was her I would have been at one of the bars with a fork, picking away. But to be fair, she’s in a bad place mentally, not helped by missing her meds. Who can say what any of us would really do in such a situation? We can only say what we would like to think we would do.<br />
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Shot in November 2015, <i>Cage </i>was released on Amazon Prime and other VOD platforms in April 2017 and came out on DVD the following month. There was a one-off screening (with director and star Q&A) in Seaford (East Sussex, apparently) in March 2017 to raise funds for a local theatre.<br />
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A gripping, clever horror-thriller with a bravura central performance, <i>Cage </i>is a fine film that deserves more attention than it has received. Get yourself down to Morrisons or Asda (or Amazon) and grab yourself a copy now.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-67331064234384264702017-06-18T20:24:00.003+01:002017-06-22T08:36:33.739+01:00Grave Tales<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Don Fearney</i><br />
<i>Writers: John Hamilton, Mike Murphy</i><br />
<i>Producer: Don Fearney</i><br />
<i>Cast: Brian Murphy, Edward de Souza, Damien Thomas</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2013</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: DVD</i><br />
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“This British, feature-length, anthology horror film is the first one of its kind in over twenty years” says the DVD blurb of this exercise in cinematic nostalgia, which obviously isn’t true. Shot in 2011, copyrighted 2012, released (sort of) in 2013, this was preceded (albeit not by much admittedly) by <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/bordello-death-tales.html">Bordello Death Tales</a></i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/nazi-zombie-death-tales.html">Nazi Zombie Death Tales</a></i> and <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/little-deaths.html">Little Deaths</a></i>. Even if Don Fearney wasn’t aware of those movies, and assuming that he had no knowledge of the work of Jason Impey, Kemal Yildirim or Tom Rutter (not many folk do, to be fair) he has still contrived to pretend that <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/cradle-of-fear.html">Cradle of Fear</a></i> doesn’t exist.<br />
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What this tells us is that this is a film made by – and for – people whose knowledge of British horror movies kind of peters out after <i>To the Devil a Daughter</i>. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Know your audience and all that. But it does contrive to make <i>Grave Tales</i> a curiously anachronistic film of very limited appeal.<br />
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There are four stories, plus a linking tale in which a young woman (Heather Darcy: <i>Till Sunset</i>) exploring a graveyard meets an aged gravedigger (or is he? da-da-dum!) played by the somehow still living legend that is George Roper, the one and only Brian Murphy. Murphy was 79 when he made this and he shows no sign of slowing down. His actual horror credits are pretty much limited to a small role in <i>The Devils</i> and, um, this… although the feature film version of <i>Man About the House</i> was a Hammer production of course (and remains one of the most enjoyable sitcom spin-off features of the 1970s). More recently Murphy was in the brilliant, long-gestating <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/room-36.html">Room 36</a></i>, which shares several cast and crew with this film. He is a national institution and we love him and why isn’t he at least an OBE?<br />
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Anyway, the gravedigger tells the young woman the stories behind four nearby graves. The first of these, 'One Man’s Meat', stars the sadly missed Frank Scantori (<i>Witchcraft X</i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/kill-keith.html">Kill Keith</a></i>, <i>May I Kill U?, Room 36</i>) at his oleaginous best. He plays Norman Elliot, an alcoholic butcher who accidentally murders a homeless girl (Johanna Stanton: <i>Nightmare Box</i>). Riven with guilt, he disposes of the body in the obvious way, putting down to the booze the vampire fangs which seem to appear briefly in the girl’s mouth as he chops her up.<br />
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There is simply too much crammed into these 20 minutes for the story to work, despite Frank’s sterling performance. It would have been better without the doctor, who delivers no useful info and basically just bleats on the same “Have you seen her?” schtick for five minutes. But Frank is great because Frank was Frank, and the neck wound after the first cleaver chop is an impressive prosthetic.<br />
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The second story (and they’re none of them particularly memorable so it’s a good job I made notes) is called 'Callistro’s Mirror'. Damien Thomas (<i>Twins of Evil, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger</i>) stars as Mr Baxter, a collector who spots a mirror in an antique shop, instantly identifying it as having once belonged to a notable sorcerer, four centuries earlier. It’s not for sale so he kills the shopkeeper (Edward de Souza: <i>The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Vampire</i>) and sneaks back to his flat where he discovers – <i>quelle surprise</i> – that he can see something in the mirror.<br />
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What he sees is a bald guy (Ric Truman) being pawed by two topless lovelies (Katie Langford and blogger/poet Jade Moira Lawrence). Baxter is pulled into the mirror and, after some tussle, the previous incumbent escapes, taking over Baxter’s body, leaving the poor bloke to face centuries of torment at the hands of the two young ladies (who are vampires, apparently, possibly because there were some spare teeth left over from the first story).<br />
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It’s another pretty obvious and basic story, which is at least in keeping with the Amicus tradition towards which <i>Grave Tales </i>aspires. There’s some irrelevant stuff about Baxter’s late wife, and Don Fearney himself plays a tramp outside the shop. The highlight of this story – and arguably the whole film – is Kiki Kendrick (<i>Sanitarium</i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-stomach.html">The Stomach</a></i>) having a ball as Baxter’s blousy landlady. It’s a rare moment of enjoyable characterisation in a film which is for the most part pedestrian and prosaic. More Kiki Kendrick in stuff, that’s what we need.<br />
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Tale number three, 'The Hand', is slightly shorter than the others, giving the whole film a running time of 75 minutes. Porn actor Mark Sloan (who also played a barman in the first story) is Stanton, a prisoner on the run who has legged it while handcuffed to another jailbird, Duggan (composer/pianist Marc Forde). Peter Irving (moderator of the <i>Kiss of the Vampire</i> DVD commentary) is a nightwatchman – though it’s not clear what he’s actually nightwatching – among whose equipment Stanton finds an axe. And when the handcuffs prove impermeable to the axe blade, an alternative solution presents itself.<br />
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Stanton heads off through some woods and hides in a small lake, for some reason. Four police officers (one of whom looks about 12) spot him from a summer house, but he goes underwater and doesn’t come up. Subsequent investigation by a police frogman finds Stanton’s drowned body chained to Duggan’s hand. Is it gripping that underwater branch, or just wedged? (It’s gripping the branch. There’s nothing subtle here.) For the record, the coppers are played by Marcus Taylor, Russell Barnett (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/whatever-happened-to-pete-blaggit.html">Whatever Happened to Pete Blaggit?</a></i>), Adrian Annis (<i>Dark Rage, Survivors, My Guardian Angel</i>) and Josh Parris; the frogman is Ross Ericson (writer of <i>The Unknown Soldier</i>, a play which was a big hit at Edinburgh in 2016).<br />
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The final segment is 'Dead Kittens', starring British horror favourite <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/interview-marysia-kay.html">Marysia Kay</a> (who gets an ‘And…’ in the opening credits). She plays Vicky, who is (without explanation) selected to be the new lead singer of pop trio the Dead Kittens. Louise Houghton (<i>Wilby Park</i>) and Nieve Hearity (whose name is spelled wrong in the credits) are the other two. Celia Carron (who sidelines as a Pilates coach) is record producer Sadie and Aubrey Wakeling (apparently now in the States making things like <i>Jurassic Wars</i>(?)) is Mr Varley, the talent scout – or manager or something – who finds Vicky.<br />
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After a quick bash in the recording studio, they all head off to Varley’s massive country house to shoot a pop video, directed by none other than dear old Norman J Warren, helmer of <i>Satan’s Slave</i>, <i>Prey </i>etc. Rhiannon Ellison Sayer (who had a bit part in Burton’s <i>Sweeney Todd</i>) is Varley’s posh daughter, who tries to warn Vicky that something is up. The video involves Vicky lying down on a stone altar while everyone else pretends to be Satanists. Wait a minute…<br />
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A coda suggests it was all a plot to sell more records because dead pop stars shift units. Which doesn’t make sense because Vicky hasn’t had a chance to become a pop star, has she? Marysia turns in her usual reliable performance but, like most of the actors in this movie, she doesn’t exactly have a lot to work with. Scripter John Hamilton is one of the Satanists, along with George Hilton (<i>Beyond the Rave, Cockneys vs Zombies</i>), Moyb Ullah and Tom Levin.<br />
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One of the strengths of 21st century British horror is its diversity and the scope for every sort of movie, however unlikely. So I suppose it’s only fair that there should be a movie which tries to recreate the days of old. But that’s the film’s biggest problem: it is a recreation. It’s not an old 1970s Amicus anthology, just a pastiche of one. Technically it’s competent, though the sound recording (also credited to John Hamilton) isn’t consistently brilliant. But there’s nothing special here, nothing celebratory, nothing to impress (unless you’re enough of an oldtime Brit horror fanboy to just get wet at the thought of a new Edward de Souza movie – there are people like that). <i>Grave Tales</i> is the cinematic equivalent of a pub band playing 1960s covers, featuring a guy who used to be in Herman’s Hermits.<br />
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Don Fearney, the motive force behind this film (as well as producing and directing, he is also credited as production designer) is a name in Hammer fan circles. He has organised numerous fan events and also produced several DVD documentaries, often narrated by de Souza. The script is jointly credited to Mike Murphy (editor of the excellent <i>Dark Terrors</i> Hammer fanzine back in the 1990s) and John Hamilton, author of such hugely impressive horror history tomes as <i>Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Films of Tony Tenser</i> and <i>X-Cert: The British Independent Horror Film 1951-1970</i>. Murphy wrote the first tale, Hamilton wrote the other three plus the framing story.<br />
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Except that’s not strictly true, is it?<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lOG0g8J_Pso/WUbRA_NsvpI/AAAAAAAAQJk/bRq9X-Gle3ksH8mMm4hqCAeQOITY2CAFwCLcBGAs/s1600/1mm2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="286" data-original-width="372" height="246" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lOG0g8J_Pso/WUbRA_NsvpI/AAAAAAAAQJk/bRq9X-Gle3ksH8mMm4hqCAeQOITY2CAFwCLcBGAs/s320/1mm2.JPG" width="320" /></a>'One Man’s Meat', 'Callistro’s Mirror' and 'The Hand' all started life as <i>Van Helsing’s Terror Tales</i>, the back-up comic strip that ran in most issues of <i>House of Hammer</i> magazine in the 1970s, a fact which goes completely unacknowledged in the credits of <i>Grave Tales</i>. Which is odd, because the very specific audience this is aimed at – ageing Hammer fanboys – are precisely the sort of people likely to own old copies of <i>House of Hammer</i>, and quite possibly have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the magazine’s content. If you don’t have any old copies of <i>House of Hammer</i> lying around, fear not. You can find <a href="https://archive.org/details/HOUSEOFHAMMER">digitised versions of all 30 issues</a> on archive.org. 'One Man’s Meat', written and drawn by Martin Asbury, was published in issue 5. 'Malvoisin’s Mirror', written by Chris Lowder, art by Brian Lewis, was in issue 6. 'The Hand of Fate', written by Parkhouse, art by Goudenzi, was in issue 22. The settings and other details are different, but the basic stories are identical.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UOFrH0k9u20/WUbRCexD-xI/AAAAAAAAQJo/1bIQQFeJ5cYw_CDYYOyts36Ii0DrlEd-gCLcBGAs/s1600/mirror.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="294" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UOFrH0k9u20/WUbRCexD-xI/AAAAAAAAQJo/1bIQQFeJ5cYw_CDYYOyts36Ii0DrlEd-gCLcBGAs/s320/mirror.JPG" width="207" /></a>Whatever else one might say about the strengths or shortcomings of this film, for Fearney, Murphy and Hamilton (all of whom I believe to be honest gents) to simply lift someone else’s creative work wholesale and base their own on it without any hint of acknowledgement is reprehensible.<br />
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Martin Asbury drew strips for <i>TV Century 21</i>, <i>Countdown</i>, <i>Look-In</i> and <i>TV Comic</i>, and took over <i>Garth </i>in the <i>Daily Mirror</i> after Frank Bellamy died in 1976, drawing and occasionally writing that strip until it ended in 1997 (the current version, running since 2012, is a reprint of Asbury’s strips). Nowadays he is one of the UK’s top storyboarders with credits that include Bonds, Potters and Batmans. I wonder whether he has any idea that his IMDB page should also list a ‘story by’ credit on this obscure indie flick.<br />
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Chris Lowder wrote for <i>Action</i>, <i>Tornado</i>, <i>Starlord </i>and <i>2000AD </i>under various pseudonyms. He also edited several anthologies of dark fiction and even wrote some Sexton Blake stories. Nowadays he’s a freelance editor/writer/bibliographer and seems happy pottering about in amateur theatricals and running his local parish council. Again, I wonder if he knows anything about this film and his uncredited contribution to it.<br />
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Parkhouse is Steve Parkhouse, another prolific name in British comics with extensive credits in <i>2000AD </i>and <i>Doctor Who Comic</i>, for whom he wrote Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Doctor adventures. He has also worked for Marvel and, slightly bizarrely, wrote a graphic novel about the Sex Pistols. It’s probably safe to assume he is likewise in the dark about one of his old stories having been adapted for film.<br />
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Given the minuscule budget of <i>Grave Tales</i> and the nature of British comics – which, historically, paid writers and artists a flat fee with no rights and fuck you – I’m not for a moment suggesting that any of the above three writers have been ripped off and should have been recompensed. Who knows who owns the rights to the original comic-strip content from <i>House of Hammer</i>? If indeed anyone does. But it does seem very remiss not to acknowledge the source material and the original writers. (Slightly complicating matters, there was a short-lived horror anthology comic called <i>Grave Tales</i> in the early 1990s, published by Hamilton Comics. However that was Bruce Hamilton, not John, and has no connection with this film.)<br />
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Among those whose contributions do get acknowledged on screen are editor Jim Groom (director of <i>Revenge of Billy the Kid</i>, <i>Room 36</i> and various Hammer DVD extras), composer <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/interview-scott-benzie.html">Scott Benzie</a> (<i>Room 36, Soul Searcher</i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/ten-dead-men.html">Ten Dead Men</a></i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/fear-eats-seoul.html">Fear Eats the Seoul</a></i>) and DP Jon Nash. Make-up is credited to Gemma Sutton, now one of the top wedding make-up artists in the UK, with ‘special FX make-up’ by Ben Brown. Richard Dudley and Don Fearney are listed as executive producers in the credit block but only Dudley gets name-checked on screen.<br />
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<i>Grave Tales</i> was first screened at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington just before Halloween 2010 and had an official festival premiere at Southend-on-Sea the following April. At both those screenings, there was a clip of <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/interview-christopher-lee.html">Christopher Lee</a> (as himself) included in 'Dead Kittens' but this was removed before the film appeared on (uncertificated) DVD.<br />
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In June 2013 <i>Grave Tales</i> was made available from Hemlock Books, where I was employed as a monthly blogger. I bought a copy with part of my pay-cheque but have only just got round to watching it.<br />
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It’s just a curio really, of principal interest for its ageing cast list (and a nice role for the late Mr Scantori), but loses a point for not crediting Asbury, Lowder, Parkhouse and <i>House of Hammer</i>.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: B-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-3079523825637403722017-06-15T21:55:00.003+01:002017-06-15T21:59:09.875+01:00The Autopsy of Jane Doe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: André Øvredal</i><br />
<i>Writers: Ian B Goldberg, Richard Naing</i><br />
<i>Producers: Rory Aitken, Fred Berger, Eric Garcia, Ben Pugh</i><br />
<i>Cast: Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Olwen Kelly</i><br />
<i>Country: UK/USA</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: DVD screener</i><br />
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<i>The Autopsy of Jane Doe</i> was directed by a Norwegian and is set in the USA, but most sources – including the US distributor – list it as a British film. The IMDb disagrees and says it’s a UK/US co-production, while Wikipedia describes it as fully American (as do, interestingly, the BBFC).<br />
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It is a joint gig between two production companies. The minimalist and Adamsian 42 is certainly a British company, based in London, comprised of producers Eric Garcia and Ben Pugh. They were also involved in the production of <i>Monsters: Dark Continent</i> and <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-other-side-of-door.html">The Other Side of the Door</a></i>. Impostor Pictures is based in LA so yes, this is an Anglo-American feature. Should I include it in my British horror master list? Well, I think it feels more British than American – possibly because of the European director – so I’ll consider it a British film made with some American investment rather than the other way round. Plus it was shot over here and it stars veteran Scottish actor Brian Cox. Sold!<br />
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With all that malarkey out of the way, what is it about?<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-prcQJaXvfcc/WULz2p_PqaI/AAAAAAAAQIg/8RUCnqEg1tMehnYvOxqS9yipcooqT6Q7QCEwYBhgL/s1600/large_large_k1rYWZdfvvHRDQxsqonx3jj2P0B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-prcQJaXvfcc/WULz2p_PqaI/AAAAAAAAQIg/8RUCnqEg1tMehnYvOxqS9yipcooqT6Q7QCEwYBhgL/s320/large_large_k1rYWZdfvvHRDQxsqonx3jj2P0B.jpg" width="238" /></a>Tommy Tindell (Cox) and his son Austin (Emile Hirsch) run a family crematorium/morgue/autopsy service from the converted basement of their house. Is this a thing? Are there places like this in America? Over here, any autopsy is going to be done in an NHS hospital and crematoria are usually managed by the church. But apparently in the States the two are combined in a business that runs effectively out of somebody’s parlour.<br />
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The local Sheriff (Irish actor Michael McElhatton: <i>The Hallow, Ripper Street</i>) brings in an unidentified body. She was found naked, half-buried in the basement of a house, the occupants of which have died in gruesome ways, with no sign of forced entry. Bereft of distinguishing features and with no fingerprint match, this Jane Doe body is the best clue as to what happened, and the Sheriff would like cause of death determined tonight so that he can face the press tomorrow (a premise which doesn’t exactly sound believable; murder investigations take as long as they take).<br />
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So autopsy technician <i>pere et fils</i> set to examining the body, taking us through the four stages of clinical autopsy: external examination; heart and lungs; digestive system; brain. What they find makes no sense. The woman hasn’t a scratch on her, yet she has some horrific and bizarre internal injuries, as well as certain foreign bodies inserted into her.<br />
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While they’re doing this, spooky things start happening. Which get spookier and scarier and more violent and dangerous and swiftly pass the point where they can be dismissed as anything other than supernatural. These phenomena must relate in some way to the mysterious dead body, but how and why? I won’t go into any detail, just say that the revelation of what is happening is quite clever and original, albeit kind of a spin on a very old horror trope.<br />
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Though I enjoyed the film, I have a problem with it, which is this. All the spooky, scary stuff is kind of random. There are indistinct figures in reflections, doors open by themselves, strange noises. There’s no pattern and it’s all just general spooky weirdness which doesn’t specifically relate to anything either on screen or subsequently resolved. In short, it’s impossible to tell from what’s going on… what’s going on. It’s all done a lot better than, say, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-haunting-of-radcliffe-house.html">The Haunting of Radcliffe House</a></i> which was just daft. But I would have liked to have seen a pattern, something which gave us and/or the Tindells a clue as to what is actually happening.<br />
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It’s not a spoiler to say that the Tindells do eventually work out what’s actually happening, although I’m not sure there wasn’t something of a leap of logic there. Plus some of their actions are less than logical. At one stage they start a fire. This gets quite scary because of the supernatural stuff that happens to the flames but there didn’t seem to be any justification for starting the fire in the first place. When you’re in an enclosed, underground environment, a fire is the last thing you want.<br />
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That said, the script (by two guys who wrote episodes of <i>The Sarah Connor Chronicles</i> and <i>Once Upon a Time</i>) and direction (by the guy who made <i>Troll Hunter</i>) are both pretty good. The father and son relationship is well-handled by both script and the two actors, although an early bit about Austin talking with his girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond: <i>Guardians of the Galaxy</i>) about wanting to leave home rather than continue the business goes precisely nowhere and has no effect on the narrative. I spy the stump of an excised subplot.<br />
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Brian Cox is very good, as one would expect. His genre CV goes all the way back to <i>The Year of the Sex Olympics</i> and takes in <i>Hammer House of Horror, The Ring, X-Men 2, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Trick ‘r Treat</i>, the 2009 <i>Day of the Triffids, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Pixels</i> and of course the original Hannibal Lecktor (<i>sic</i>) in <i>Manhunter</i>. He played Sydney Newman in <i>Doctor Who</i> drama <i>An Adventure in Space and Time</i>, he narrated <i>The Colour of Magic</i>, and he was Daphne’s father in a couple of episodes of <i>Frasier</i>.<br />
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Emile Hirsch starred in the swiftly forgotten 2008 <i>Speed Racer</i> movie and has been in a bunch of other stuff including, at the start of his career, episodes of <i>Kindred: The Embraced, Sabrina the Teenage Witch</i> and <i>Third Rock from the Sun</i>. Video game voice artist Jane Perry and Parker Sawyers (<i>Monsters: Dark Continent</i>) play supporting cop roles.<br />
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But the break-out star, as it were, is Irish actress Olwen Kelly who plays the naked body on the table, remaining utterly motionless throughout every shot. Apparently she drew on her experience of yoga and meditation. She is now making Dom Lenoir’s serial killer thriller <i>Winter Ridge</i>. As the autopsy progresses, a mixture of astute camera angles and superb prosthetics by special effects supervisor Scott McIntyre (<i>Tank 432, Estranged, White Settlers, The Quiet Ones... Pudsey the Dog: The Movie</i>), presumably assisted by some digital doodaddery from VFX supervisor Stephen Coren (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/ghost-machine.html">Ghost Machine</a></i>, <i>28 Weeks Later</i>), enables us to see Ms Kelly opened up on the table.<br />
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With production design by Matt Gant (<i>Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes</i>) and cinematography by Roman Osin (<i>The Rezort</i>).<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JgCvCNue5_0/WULz15G1TVI/AAAAAAAAQIY/trtVufHWxbEiQUouC2-41NyNz5dppNsjwCEwYBhgL/s1600/janedoe_670.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="670" height="149" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JgCvCNue5_0/WULz15G1TVI/AAAAAAAAQIY/trtVufHWxbEiQUouC2-41NyNz5dppNsjwCEwYBhgL/s400/janedoe_670.jpg" width="400" /></a>After a premiere at Toronto in September 2016, <i>The Autopsy of Jane Doe</i> was theatrically released in the States (and Latvia, apparently!) in December. In March 2017 there was a one-night only UK release co-ordinated by Frightfest. DVDs appeared on both sides of the Atlantic three months later.<br />
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I enjoyed the film but possibly the effusive praise it received from festival screenings may have raised my hopes too high. As for some of the comments warning of how visceral and gory this is, one does have to wonder whether some critics have seen any horror films before. Nevertheless this is an original and enjoyable 80-odd minutes of supernatural horror, worth a watch.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: B+</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-53822473299613654132017-06-03T15:37:00.001+01:002017-06-03T21:21:24.469+01:00The Demonic Tapes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/interview-richard-mansfield.html">Richard Mansfield</a></i><br />
<i>Writer: Richard Mansfield</i><br />
<i>Producers: Richard Mansfield, Daniel Mansfield</i><br />
<i>Cast: Darren Munn, Alice Keedwell, Daniel Mansfield</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: online screener</i><br />
<i>Website: <a href="http://www.mansfielddark.com/">www.mansfielddark.com</a></i><br />
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The title, the brief POV prologue and the logline (“In 2007 a series of tapes were found in the basement of a London home”) all suggest this could be more found footage rubbish but, Jove be praised, it’s not. What it is instead is a genuinely terrifying ghost story in the true James-ian tradition. Which should come as no surprise because this is the latest feature from Richard Mansfield, card-carrying MR James fan and one of the UK’s most consistently impressive horror film-makers.<br />
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Darren Munn gives a largely solo, largely wordless, completely engrossing performance as the unnamed lead (we’ll call him The Man), spending Christmas alone in an old Victorian townhouse. His two flatmates have headed off for Chrimbo so there’s just him and the cat. There are a few one-sided phone conversations and a brief scene about an hour into the 72-minute feature with a visitor, but for the most part this is Munn on his tod, reacting to things. Subtle reactions to subtle things.<br />
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The titular tapes are a box of microcassettes, plus a Dictaphone, which The Man finds in the cellar and listens to out of interest. What he finds are recordings of a medium visiting the house in 2003 in response to the then tenant’s request for help. So in a sense the story largely plays out as an audio drama, except that creepy things start happening on screen. A door opens. A shrouded figure appears briefly.<br />
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The tapes include both the medium’s comments and occasional distorted horror voices, on the cusp of intelligibility. Sometimes the tape audio is diegetic, as The Man listens to what we hear, but often it’s a counterpoint, visual story and audio story perfectly complementing each other as Mansfield uses his impeccable understanding of cinematic horror pacing to incrementally ramp up the terror.<br />
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A little diligent research on the web reveals that the medium has died but her twin sister is accessible, so The Man invites her round and offers her the box of tapes, leading to the single two-hander scene. (Both sisters are ably played by Alice Keedwell.) On two other occasions the story wisely escapes the confines of the house as The Man sets out into London for a montage of fairground rides, Christmas markets and tube trains. Otherwise, this is basically Darren Munn wandering around a house looking puzzled, and it is a testament to the man’s acting that he conveys so much credible emotion. The Man becomes unnerved, but only very slowly and slightly. Most of what we see, he doesn’t.<br />
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What really, really, really makes this work – and it’s something obvious which regular readers will know is a frequent bugbear of mine – is the soundtrack. Specifically that when something spooky appears or happens there isn’t an accompanying music sting. I’ve written before, at length (not least in my review of the otherwise generally very good <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-other-side-of-door.html">The Other Side of the Door</a></i>) about how a crashing chord every time a ghost appears makes things less scary. Richard Mansfield, student of the MR James School of Unnervingly Ambiguous Horror, understand this perfectly. The fact that neither the character on screen nor the film itself acknowledges what we just saw (or think we saw) makes what we saw (and what we might see next) far more terrifying than anything with a blaring, jarring ‘look at the scary thing’ <i>leitmotif</i>. Our attention is focused on the whole screen, not just young Mr Munn, as we scan the rooms and doorways behind him for unnaturally moving shadows or a hint of a white sheet.<br />
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This is Munn’s third collaboration with Richard Mansfield, having previously appeared in <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-mothman-curse.html">The Mothman Curse</a></i> and <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/video-killer.html">Video Killer</a></i>. He was also in two films directed by Richard Mansfield’s husband Daniel, who provides additional tape voices here. (Munn’s other horror credit is the very odd <i>Paranormal Sex Tape</i> which is structurally similar in featuring lots of wordless scenes. I don’t think either of the Mansfields was involved with that, although perhaps one of them could be the pseudonymous director ‘Dick Van Dark’…?) As for Alice Keedwell, making her film debut here, she is half of award-winning cabaret duo House of Blakewell. Back in 2013 Richard Mansfield used his distinctive shadow puppet style to animate a video for House of Blakewell’s morbidly witty song ‘The Truth is…’ which you can find on YouTube.<br />
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The effective soundtrack is credited to Pig7, an “experimental, improv electronics duo” whose music, according to their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Pig7-178645005553890/">Facebook page</a> “can be described as soundscape, dronescape, filmatic, ambient horror, spacerack, hambient, sconescrape, stonecrop with a hint of Cronenberg.”<br />
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Shot in late 2016, in a few days for a few hundred quid, <i>The Demonic Tapes </i>was given a <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B071F4D2T4">VOD release on Amazon Prime</a> in May 2017, making it Richard Mansfield’s fifth live-action horror feature in three years (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-secret-path.html">The Secret Path</a></i> and <i>Scare Bear</i> are the other two, plus he’s still making his shadow-puppet shorts). The working title was <i>Fright Christmas</i> and it was briefly known as <i>House of Christmas Evil</i> before Mansfield settled on a less festive but more commercial and direct title. The film is set at Christmas but that's largely incidental. <i>Fright Christmas</i> would still be an awesome title for something though!<br />
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A little less <i>avant-garde</i> than his previous movies, <i>The Demonic Tapes</i> shows a maturing of the director's style and an increased, well-deserved confidence. It is also – and I really should stress this point before you tootle off to Amazon and watch the movie – extremely scary. Really very, very frightening indeed. I watched it early one morning, sun shining in through the windows of my own large, Victorian house. I was seriously creeped out. Had I saved my viewing for the evening when I was alone (Madame at her mother’s, young Sir at his theatre club) I would have been crapping myself and would certainly have had great difficulty sleeping that night.<br />
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This is a dreadful film – literally. In that it is absolutely jam-packed full of dread. No fancy special effects, no stupid cat-scares (though there is a cat), no plot-hole riddled script, no big budget hype, just unexplained supernatural imagery and ideas woven into a quietly terrifying tale of a man spending Christmas alone in an old house. The implicit horror revealed by the tapes plays on The Man’s mind as it plays on the viewer’s. He doesn’t know he’s in a horror film, we know we’re not, but in both cases there’s a dread of what might be happening just beyond the mortal realm.<br />
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Powerful, gripping, expertly crafted, <i>The Demonic Tapes</i> is, in this viewer’s humble opinion, the scariest British haunted house film since <i>Ghostwatch</i>. I can give no higher praise. As I have said before in relation to other of my favourite indie film-makers, the only reason I’m not giving this A+ is because I want to see what Richard Mansfield makes next.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-78907179216643700162017-05-14T17:55:00.001+01:002017-05-14T17:55:49.253+01:00interview: Mark J Howard<i>I reviewed Mark J Howard's debut feature</i> <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/lock-in.html">Lock In</a><i>, a tale of corporate coulrophobia, in 2014. Three years later, the film was released on DVD on both sides of the Atlantic as </i>Clown Kill<i>, so I took the opportunity to ask Mark for an interview and he provided these great, detailed answers.</i><br />
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<b>What was the original inspiration for <i>Lock In</i>? How well do you think you achieved what you set out to do?</b><br />
"We’d been renting a huge business suite in a modern office block at the foot of Pendle Hill (home of the infamous Pendle Witches in the 17th Century), to serve as production office and edit booths while we were working on a series of TV ads and other advertising films, and it was a bit creepy at night, to say the least. Pipes would expand and contract, floors creaked, dodgy electrics made the lights flicker and go out and the regular winds barrelling down Pendle Hill would howl around the corners of the building, which kind of puts you on edge when you’re in the building on your own. When you’ve been working at the office for 48 hours straight to meet a deadline, your mind doesn’t always think straight. Then, on the way out, the lift got stuck, and I hate lifts, almost as much as I dislike clowns, so the seeds were already starting to grow.<br />
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"The story developed over the next few months as we workshopped ideas with the already-cast actors. I think we achieved our goal by introducing a creepy new clown, and I was happy with the comedic chemistry with the security guards, but we dropped a major bollock and didn’t notice until we were in the edit. In the original script the clown breaks the fourth wall as he regularly addresses the audience between kills, which makes more sense once you’ve seen the end scene and know where the character of Jenny is at, but in the edit it suddenly looked like we were trying to rip off <i>Funny Man</i>, and not doing it very well. So, at the last minute I brought in my long-term collaborator, actor and comedian Peter Slater, we sat down at the editor and chopped things away, reduced or removed all of Charlie Boy’s one-liners and pieces to camera, heavily toned down Jenny’s drunken pub attack scene, and added more security guards stuff for balance. The end result is one huge compromise.<br />
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"During filming one of the leads had serious personal issues going on, and she became difficult to nail down, so that brought a whole slew of new problems that had to be addressed during the shoot. We’d only budgeted for a 21 day shoot, and we managed to shoot it in exactly 21 days, but it was one nightmare after another. I’m happy with the finished film, but if luck and circumstance had been on our side on the day, it could have been so much better."<br />
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<b>What aspect of the film do you think works best, and what aspect would you change if you could?</b><br />
"The personality clashes between shop-steward Gobby Karen and John the Boss are my favourite performances in the film, Rachel was an absolute revelation, her sense of timing is better than any comedian I’ve ever worked with. She hit every beat, delivered every time, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before. If I could change anything I’d have found a way to reinstate some of the excised clown footage, Roy’s amazing in the role, and some of my favourite scenes are the ones we had to cut out. That’s usually the way though."<br />
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<b>How did you assemble your cast, and what effect has Jessica Cunningham’s subsequent reality TV career had on awareness of your film?</b><br />
"Apart from Rachel (who plays Gobby Karen) and Holly (Sally), the script was written personally for the actual actors who starred in the film. Rachel and Holly were late additions to the repertory company I’ve been building over the last 20 years; so I knew who would be playing what character as I wrote the script. We’d just come off a series of TV commercials with Jessica, and I’d had a big public row with her in a Costa, and I knew I’d found my feisty office worker that day.<br />
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"Two hours after Jessica was confirmed as an <i>Apprentice </i>contestant, my phone went absolutely crazy, as the press bombarded me with questions. All of the major tabloids had found out about her 'clown rape' past and wanted to know more. It was actually my very significant birthday that day and I was pissed up. My wife banned me from speaking to the press in case I got carried away or said something I might later regret, so I had to let Roy (Basnett) do the talking, and as a result we got some great sensationalist headlines in the national tabloids. I imagine some of her fans might be curious enough about the film to watch it, but other than that I doubt her rapid rise up the greasy celebrity pole would benefit the film.<br />
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"She’s been really busy these last few months with her fashion brand and new-found fame, so we haven’t managed to catch up on things, but before she hit the limelight we had a chat and she did agree to do the sequel. We had two huge fans of Jessica, who are also top-flight footballers from a famous northern club, make an offer to finance a sequel under the Enterprise Investment Scheme, but a week later the Inland Revenue started cracking down on footballers investing in fake films to offset their taxes, and they got cold feet. Got a great script out of it, though, featuring Charlie Boy’s Undead Army of Clowns. If this first film is well received, and if there’s a market there, the sequel might just happen."<br />
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<b>What are your favourite slashers and/or clown horror movies?</b><br />
"I was never a fan of the <i>Halloween </i>films (though I’m a big fan of the third one), but I loved the first couple of <i>Friday the 13th</i>’s. I abandoned that franchise when I went to see <i>Part 3</i> in 3D on its initial release, and the projectionist got the lens assembly on wrong and completely ruined the presentation. Huge fan of European slashers, especially love <i>Stage Fright</i> and <i>Amsterdamned</i>, but don’t watch clown films. Like I say, clowns and lifts, not my bag. I don’t think I was abused by a clown as a child, but I think something must have happened to fuel my unease about them. The new adaptation of <i>It</i> looks fun, though, but Tim Curry’s a hard act to follow."<br />
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<b>What have you been working on since finishing <i>Lock In</i>?</b><br />
"Adverts and pop promos have been the bread and butter that keeps the wolf at bay, We’ve shot a big zombie film set in Liverpool, about a terrorist attack on Ellesmere Port petro-chemical plant, just at the moment they are destroying an experimental battlefield biological weapon developed by the Russians and seized in Syria. The resulting gas cloud threatens an extinction-level event as it slowly creeps across the UK in real time, turning the victims into blood-crazed zombies. The film is called <i>Undead Air</i> and will hopefully be ready by the end of the year. It’s quite heavy on visual fx, but I’ve a great team doing some amazing work.<br />
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"At the moment we’re just prepping our new docu-drama <i>American Psychopath – the Ripper of Whitechapel</i>, which is a period piece bringing a post-modern, fresh perspective on the Jack the Ripper case. We’re shooting this in 4K and Super 16, with the murders being covered by raw and grainy Super 8 on my trusty old Beaulieu, filming begins second week of May for three weeks. Because we’re still having to work on promo films for clients, our more narrative films tend to take forever to complete, but we’ve a delivery deadline for the Ripper film so it’s all hands on deck. Both films will feature the same cast and crew, with a few additions, that made <i>Lock In</i>."<br />
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<b>Finally, can you tell me a bit about the super 8 films you used to make with <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/interview-tony-luke-2003.html">Tony Luke</a>?</b><br />
"I miss Tony so much, and it doesn’t feel like fifteen months since we lost him. We got to know each other in the very early '80s. We were the same age, both at secondary school, both making animated super 8 monster movies, and we both contributed to <i>Junior Filmworld</i>, a magazine/newsletter for wannabe junior super 8 Spielbergs. Tony lived in the North East and I lived in Manchester, so hundreds of miles apart, but he used to ring regularly and we’d post our only prints of our latest films to evaluate each others work. We’d swap ideas, script notes, designs and special fx techniques we’d discovered, and generally encourage each other.<br />
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"He found a supplier in the States who could provide T rex latex skins, all ready for you to insert an armature into, and he was off. His films always had more pazzaz than mine, my always came back with the note 'Sorry, your splices didn’t go through the projector too well'. Tony was my first animation collaborator, albeit long-distance, and somewhere I’ve got a box of photos of his animation creations, including his first Satannus puppet. I need to find it and pass it on to his sister Fran for the archive.<br />
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"When we premiered <i>Lock In</i> I spoke to Tony, he asked me if I’d be interested in directing a project he had in mind. I was busy, I said if he could postpone a few months I’d be able to discuss it further and commit. It never happened. A few months later Tony started with his back and neck pain, and he had to focus on getting better. I was sure he’d beat it again, he was a real fighter. It’s a weird thing when someone you’ve known since you were kids dies, makes you put things into perspective. Facebook hasn’t been the same since he left."<br />
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<b><i>website: <a href="http://www.clownkill.com/">www.clownkill.com</a></i></b>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-20012676533918107042017-05-01T21:59:00.000+01:002017-05-07T09:19:04.247+01:00Hunters of the Kahri<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Ali Paterson</i><br />
<i>Writer: Ali Paterson</i><br />
<i>Producers: Ali Paterson, Pip Hill</i><br />
<i>Cast: Marc Goodacre, Jon Bennett, Doug Booth</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2006/2016</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: <a href="https://youtu.be/lOCtwp-Z8rQ">YouTube</a></i><br />
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This is the first time I have ever reviewed a movie without watching the whole thing. This is not something I intend to make a habit of, but <i>Hunters of the Kahri </i>is literally unwatchable. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of films before which, for one reason or another, were effectively unwatchable. For most people. But I’ve stuck with them, for your sake. I provide a service here. I take pride in my work.<br />
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<i>Hunters of the Kahri </i>is 104 minutes long. I suffered through the first 44 minutes; the final hour can frankly go fuck itself. (I did skip through the rest of the film, just in case there was any evidence of a major change in direction or quality. There wasn’t.)<br />
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I had this film on my list of never released British horror pictures. It was shot in 2005, had a single cast and crew screening in June 2006, then disappeared. In April 2017 I spotted that Ali Paterson had posted the whole movie onto YouTube the previous October. So I gave it a spin. All I really got out of my viewing experience was confirmation that this isn’t a horror film. It’s a sub-sub-sub-Tolkien fantasy of swords and quests and suchlike but there are no demons or other elements that might make it borderline horror.<br />
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It is also – and let’s make no bones about this – a home movie. Not just an amateur film made by a group of friends (there are plenty of those reviewed on my site) but literally just something cobbled together in somebody’s garden.<br />
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Which runs for 104 minutes.<br />
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I think it’s set in a post-apocalyptic quasi-medieval fantasy world, rather than a historical quasi-medieval fantasy world, which just about excuses the fact that most costumes are obviously just muddied-up T-shirts and similar 21st century garments. What it doesn’t excuse is the neatly trimmed hedges, fishpond and patio. Bizarrely, some of the film is set in open countryside, so your guess is as good as mine why Paterson didn’t shoot everything away from suburbia. It really seems like he either didn’t care about, or possibly didn’t notice, anything that was in the background of his shots. In one shot, two bicycles are leaning against a tree. In another, a character who has just been killed is sitting up, apparently unaware that they are in view.<br />
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It’s all incredibly talkie, with just the occasional brief, dull swordfight. There is a woman narrating the film with lines like “After the slaughter of the Woodpeople, Xenos fled, leaving Narata to take on the rest of Tenzing’s horde.” After a bit she slips into the present tense so it’s like she’s just reading from the script descriptions of scenes that they couldn’t afford to film.<br />
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The whole thing has been shot for zero pence, without even the most basic concern for things like character, story, photography, sound or audience. It looks like no-one was expected to watch this who wasn’t also in it. Like I say: a home movie. But why make a home movie that’s 104 minutes long? Especially when that is 104 minutes of stuff that makes Stephen Donaldson novels look interesting and well-written. Why not make a 14-minute home movie, show it to your mates who made it with you, and then you’ve got an extra hour and a half to get drunk and come up with daft ideas for the next one. Or just one idea would be good, and would be a step in the right direction.<br />
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Of particular note is the sound, because one of the things that makes this unwatchable is that it is mostly inaudible. Paterson apparently got hold of some outdoor sound effects – basically birdsong – and added this to most scenes, over the top of the dialogue (which looks like it may have been looped). But because he either didn’t know what he was doing or didn’t care, he’s got the sound mix all to hell so that the dialogue is drowned out by the music which is in turn drowned out by these bloody birds. It’s like watching the film inside a particularly well-stocked aviary and means that only occasionally can we make out the terrible dialogue that the non-characters are statically spouting.<br />
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There really is no reason for anyone to ever watch this, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even have bothered with a review. But there is one aspect of this film which means that it is worth recording, so that it’s not just a title on a filmography, and so that people don’t get overly excited and think they’re missing something.<br />
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Most of the cast, as you might expect, have no other IMDB credits. One of them is called Christian Lloyd and the IMDB thinks that’s a British-born, Canadian actor who has numerous film and TV credits since 2001 including Jude Law-starring sci-fi feature <i>Repo Men</i> and Cronenberg’s <i>Maps to the Stars</i>. No, I don’t think that’s the same guy. Perhaps he came over to the UK in 2006 to make a film in Ali Paterson’s back garden, but I have my doubts.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fJ5d8sSo95w/WQeguZk0-lI/AAAAAAAAQEY/8z22tzDsLX4NCUP9I3zV9dG48MvbgzQJgCEw/s1600/k10.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fJ5d8sSo95w/WQeguZk0-lI/AAAAAAAAQEY/8z22tzDsLX4NCUP9I3zV9dG48MvbgzQJgCEw/s320/k10.JPG" width="320" /></a>However, Calum Narata’s son Sagar Narata is played by 14-year-old ‘Doug Booth’ who, as Douglas Booth, has gone on to not just a genuine career but considerable critical acclaim. Being somewhat out of touch with popular culture I wasn't familiar with Mr Booth's work myself, but a look at his IMDB and Wikipedia pages indicates that he’s quite the hot young thesp. His first proper acting job was in Julian Fellowes’ ghostly fantasy <i>From Time to Time</i>, but his filmography starts with <i>Hunters of the Kahri</i>, which is consequently cited in various features about him. A good-looking, talented young lad like Booth undoubtedly has a small army of fangirls by now who may want to seek out this film. Ladies, if you come across this review, let me assure you that although the film is available to watch on YouTube, its only purpose is as somewhere to get screengrabs of Boothy-babe when he was a teenager.<br />
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Booth played the lead role in a 2010 BBC drama about Boy George, which brought him to the attention of critics, and also modelled for Burberry. He was Pip in the BBC’s <i>Great Expectations</i>, he was Romeo in a version of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> scripted by Fellowes, and he was in <i>Jupiter Ascending</i> which, you know, it’s not his fault. Big sci-fi epic by the … siblings who made <i>The Matrix</i>. A young actor’s going to take that, isn’t he? Anyway, Sean Bean was in it and he really should have known better.<br />
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You can look up the rest of Douglas Booth’s credits for yourself. In a few months he’ll be seen as Dan Leno in Juan Carlos Medina’s <i>The Limehouse Golem</i>, which might be okay but the script has been written by the seriously over-rated Jane Goldman who made such a hash of <i>The Woman in Black</i>, so we’ll see. He has also recently wrapped a role as Percy Shelley in historical romance <i>Mary Shelley</i> (aka <i>A Storm in the Stars</i>). Plus he was in <i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i>. So borderline horrors with fancy frocks seems to be his genre of choice right now.<br />
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Everyone has to start somewhere, and here is where Douglas Booth started. In years to come, maybe when he’s picking up his third Oscar, people are going to be saying: "What’s this on his IMDB page? <i>Hunters of the Kahri</i>, starring lots of people who never made another movie? Must be the Inaccurate Movie Database up to its old tricks." But it’s not. Is there evidence of Booth's talent here? Well, he can clearly act, which many of the cast equally clearly can't, but frankly Kenneth Branagh couldn't make a script like this work, especially with these production values and the abundant non-direction.<br />
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As for Ali Paterson, he made a second feature, the snappily titled <i>The Third Testament: The Antichrist and the Harlot</i>. This is a biblical epic which looks like it might be horror and the appearance of <i>Hunters of the Kahri</i> on YouTube gives me hope that <i>The Third Testament</i> may finally appear one day too. Kevin Leslie, who starred in <i>The Third Testament</i> before going on to be 50% of <i>Fall</i>/<i>Rise of the Krays</i>, also starred in <i>N-Day</i>, a half-hour short that Paterson made with, by the looks of it, a budget. This is about four people trapped in a submarine while the world is hit by a nanobot virus (or something) and the cast also includes Jemima Shore herself, Patricia Hodge.<br />
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Since when Paterson seems to have concentrated on corporate stuff about finance. Which is where the money is, in more ways than one.<br />
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<i>Hunters of the Kahri</i>, according to Paterson’s page on Casting Call Pro, features “horses, CGI creatures, battles and choreographed fight sequences”. Just to be clear, there is one shot of someone (dressed in white so it might be bathrobe guy) riding a horse. There are indeed several choreographed sword fights. In at least one of these, the sounds of battle have been added to the soundtrack to try and give the impression of a larger conflict. (It doesn’t work, but at least those bloody songbirds shut up for a bit.)<br />
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Watching these things so you don’t have to. And thanks for sharing, Mr P. Genuinely appreciated, just so I can knock this off my list.<br />
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Oh. If you’re wondering, the Kahri is some sort of precious stone they’re all after. I think.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: E-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-13958355810370548632017-04-21T19:01:00.003+01:002017-04-21T19:01:34.297+01:00Bella in the Wych Elm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Thomas Lee Rutter</i><br />
<i>Writer: Thomas Lee Rutter</i><br />
<i>Producer: Thomas Lee Rutter</i><br />
<i>Cast: Lee Mark Jones, Sarah L Page, 'Tatty' Dave Jones</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: online screener</i><br />
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I love Tom Rutter’s stuff. Right from his early teenage movies like <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/full-moon-massacre.html">Full Moon Massacre</a></i> and <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/mr-blades.html">Mr Blades</a></i> Tom has always wanted to do something different. Not for young Master Rutter anything as simple as a generic slasher or zombie picture – there was always something offbeat, something unique and distinctive. Something new and unapologetic.<br />
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Since those days he has made a fair number of oddball shorts, from hallucinogenic clowns to stop-motion animation to Ancient Greek drama. Some of these have been assembled into flatpack anthologies such as <i>Quadro Bizarro</i> and <i>The Forbidden Four</i>.<br />
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The one thing you can be sure of when you watch a Tom Rutter film is that you can’t be sure of anything. You can confidently expect that it’s pointless to expect anything. The man’s range and nonconformist approach is his auteurial signature. Tom is a cinematic maverick, the original ‘unable to label’.<br />
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The latest movie from Tom’s outfit Carnie Films is a half-hour dramatised documentary about a very curious event which happened in the Black Country during the Second World War. It’s such a bizarre tale that I had to check to see if it’s true – and indeed it is. Which makes the film no less fascinating and enjoyable.<br />
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Here’s the basic gen: Some boys discover human remains hidden inside the hollow trunk of a tree (a wych elm, not a ‘witch elm’). The police investigate and find the skeleton of a woman who must have been crammed in there shortly after she was killed. Attempts to identify her came to nothing – and to this day no-one knows for sure who she was, although various theories have been put forward. Some of these relate to black magic, some relate to WW2 espionage. And just to make things even weirder, a recurring graffiti has been inscribed around the area over the years asking: “who put Bella in the wych elm?”<br />
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I won’t go into any more detail. If, like me, you’re not familiar with this story then Tom’s film is an excellent summary of events. If you are familiar with it then you’ll enjoy the way it is presented. If you want to find out more, there’s tons of stuff all over the web. It’s exactly the sort of local Forteana that people love to document.<br />
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Fascinating story aside, the strength of Tom’s gorgeous little film is in his use of the image and the sound. A cast represent the players in this tale but they’re all shot silently as the story is narrated, in a glorious accent, by someone named ‘Tatty’ Dave Jones. As the story – and one possible explanation – progresses, Tom Rutter turns the visuals into poetry, mixing and cutting and overlaying and using all manner of techniques so that what we have is something very, very much more than just dramatised, narrated scenes.<br />
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This is film as art, without sacrificing narrative. It is film as dreamstate, without sacrificing reality. Together, Jones’ voice and Rutter’s camera-work and editing create an unnerving atmosphere resonant of English folk tales much older than 1943. An alternative version exists, with Jones’ narration replaced by intertitles.<br />
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I really, really enjoyed watching <i>Bella in the Wych Elm</i>. It’s not a straightforward documentary on the subject, and if someone made one (mayhap they already have) no doubt we the viewers would learn more facts (or at least, more speculation and theory). Neither is this a straightforward dramatisation; the story could bear one but the lack of a definite, satisfying conclusion to the mystery would require some fictionalisation on the part of the screenwriter. This is something between and separate, something special. I heartily recommend it to you because it’s different and beautiful and intriguing and mind-expanding.<br />
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Which is not to say that if you like this you will also necessarily like <i>Full Moon Massacre</i>, which is cheesy as hell and has me in it. But you might.<br />
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The cast on screen includes Lee Mark Jones (<i>Theatre of Fear</i>, <i>Spidarlings</i>). Some of the cast are also in <i>The Forbidden Four </i>and/or Tom’s next movie, now in post, the hallucinogenic western <i>Stranger</i>, which I. Cannot. Wait. To. Watch.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A+</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-63004366439026434022017-04-02T12:37:00.004+01:002017-04-02T12:37:46.581+01:00Bigfoot vs Zombies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Mark Polonia</i><br />
<i>Writer: Mark Polonia</i><br />
<i>Producer: Mark Polonia</i><br />
<i>Cast: Dave Fife, Danielle Donahue, Jeff Kirkendall</i><br />
<i>Country: USA</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2016</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: TubiTV</i><br />
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Despite a filmography of 42 features since 2000 (plus a few earlier ones), this is the first ‘Polonia Brothers’ picture I have watched. I do view a lot of odd stuff but I’m pretty sure I would remember if I had seen <i>Preylien: Alien Predators</i> or <i>Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast</i> or <i>Peter Rottentail</i> or <i>Curse of Pirate Death</i> or<i> Jurassic Prey</i> or <i>Snake Club: Revenge of the Snake Woman</i> or any of the three dozen or so other titles in that list. And boy, do these guys do titles.<br />
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I say ‘guys’ but since 2008 when John Polonia passed away, ‘Polonia Brothers’ has been a solo project by his twin Mark. I suspect that’s why there’s a two-year gap between <i>HalloweeNight </i>(listed as 2009) and <i>Snow Shark</i>, after which Mark Polonia returned to his hugely impressive output of two to four features every year.<br />
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Unfortunately that’s going to be the only usage of the term ‘hugely impressive’ in this review. <i>Bigfoot vs Zombies</i> is watchable, if you’re in the mood for lacklustre micro-budget tosh, but I’d hesitate to call it enjoyable. Nevertheless it deserves to be noted, if only for its status as a crossover between two otherwise utterly disparate subgenres.<br />
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The one thing that the film has going for it is an original setting, which is a body farm. If you’re not familiar with the concept, don’t worry, it’s explained about ten minutes in. A body farm is where dead bodies are placed under controlled conditions in order to be studied by forensic experts. It’s a clever (if gross) concept. If you leave three corpses on the ground and examine one after a month, one after six months, one after a year – then when the cops discover an actual dead body somewhere, the forensics dudes can judge how long it’s been there by the state of decomposition.<br />
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Obviously any body farm has to be well away from habitation and protected by a stout metal fence to keep out both intruders and wildlife. The object is to see what happens when a human cadaver is eaten by bugs, not by foxes or bears.<br />
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A body farm would be a place where there were lots of dead folk just waiting to walk again, although in real life they would more likely by in shallow graves or ponds than just lying around. And this premise does at least justify why the zombies here appear different to each other, with some merely grey-faced and others having stiff, skull-like masks. Although that may be more the result of there being dozens of zombies but only 11 actors playing them. Even then, we see the same zombies killed multiple times. Also, it pains me to say it, but the quality of this film can be judged by the fact that one of the ‘skull-face’ zombies has been so shoddily created that we can clearly see the actor’s beard underneath the skull…<br />
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This particular zombie farm is run by mad scientist Dr Peele (Jeff Kirkendall) and his long-suffering, bored lab/admin assistant Renee (Danielle Donahue). There is a truck driver named Andy (Bob Dennis) who drives around the farm, delivering cadavers to requested locations. And there is a security guard (Todd Carpenter) on the main gate who has no character name. Rather cruelly, the others refer to him throughout the film as ‘the security guard’ despite the fact that he is 25% of the farm’s entire workforce and they must all see him at least twice a day.<br />
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Stu (James Carolus) and Ed (Dave Fife) are delivering a couple of new corpses in their van. Stu’s an old hand at this, Ed is the new guy. Stu and Andy both constantly hit on Renee who is repelled by their unsubtle advances but takes a liking to nice guy Ed. So, you know, characterisation.<br />
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The problem is that Dr Peele has been working away in his ‘secret lab’ (which is literally an office with a microscope and a couple of bottles on the desk) to develop a serum which will deteriorate the bodies faster. The idea being that he can then process more corpses through his body farm and thus make more money from the local hospital that supplies them. Don’t look too closely at that plan, it maketh not one lick of sense.<br />
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Actually the real problem is that, far from deteriorating the cadavers, this serum brings them back to life. Although it is unclear whether this is due to the injections that Dr Peele has given the dead bodies or leakage from the barrel of the stuff which drops off Andy’s truck near the start of the film. Much later, it is discovered that an overdose of this stuff will actually kill a zombie but this is never followed up on, as if both the characters and the director simply forgot this ever happened.<br />
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As the dead start to rise, one more character arrives at the farm. Duke Larson (Ken Van Sant) is a big game hunter called in by Dr Peele because Andy has reported that one of the shallow graves has been dug up, presumably by a bear that has somehow got into the compound.<br />
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Well, strictly speaking two more characters arrive because here comes Bigfoot. We have already met him in a prologue where he spies on a hiker/photographer (Greta Volkova) who is later munched by a zombie after somehow getting past the security fence. For no reason at all, Bigfoot hides in the back of Duke Larson’s Jeep to get into the farm, where he starts fighting zombies.<br />
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The last part of the preceding sentence sounds very exciting and is the nub of this high-concept film whose title basically is it plot. And kudos to Polonia for the amazing sleeve art showing a giant, fearsome sasquatch hurling itself at a shuffling army of the undead.<br />
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But you won’t be at all surprised if I tell you that there ain’t nuttin like dat on show here at all, no sir ma’am.<br />
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This film’s Bigfoot is, well, it’s an ill-fitting, tatty gorilla suit with a long, shaggy wig over its face. It’s really one of the very worst Bigfoot costumes you’ll ever see. I know the movie isn’t exactly taking itself seriously but nevertheless this is just kind of embarrassing. Uncredited on screen, the actor inside the suit is Steve Diasparra according to the old IMDB and he does at least attempt to give the creature some characterisation, establishing a mute, somewhat touching relationship with Renee.<br />
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At various points in the film we do get Bigfoot fighting zombies but it’s all really half-hearted and lame. Basically they shuffle towards him and he pushes them away. In fact, that’s the film’s biggest failing: it is utterly devoid of even the slightest hint of action. There’s gore, certainly. Or at least, there’s fake blood in some scenes as people scream. But obviously they couldn’t afford to get any of that on the gorilla suit as the dry-cleaning bill would have trebled the film’s budget. So we have lackadaisical shuffling scenes, and shots of bloody terror, but nothing inbetween. No actual fast or emphatic movement. Even in dialogue scenes, people just stand around talking. Then they walk somewhere. It’s like they can’t do both at the same time.<br />
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There are a few nice bits of dialogue but the quality of the acting is generally poor. Most of the cast have been in various other Polonia pictures and some have other credits at a similar level, but nothing notable. And, for all his experience in film-making, Polonia’s direction remains thoroughly pedestrian. Cut to Renee; Renee says line; cut to Ed; Ed says line; cut to Renee, Renee says line... and so on. There’s no flair here, but there’s also no real sense of storytelling or atmosphere. It certainly kills any potential comedy moments stone dead. There’s no verve, no pizzazz, no oomph in any scene in the entire 79 minutes. And if there’s one thing that a film called <i>Bigfoot vs Zombies</i> should have it’s oomph. I don’t think anyone ever actually runs anywhere in the entire film.<br />
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A sequence in which Duke Larson drives his Jeep across the farm, shooting at zombies with a pistol, is probably the closest we get to any action - but there again the direction hobbles the potential enjoyment. We have close-ups of Van Sant in his jeep, and cutaways of zombies falling over, but no shot of the Jeep actually driving past zombies as Larson blasts them out of the way.<br />
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Yes, budgets (or lack thereof). Yes, shooting schedules. Yes, lots of other limitations on micro-budget indies. But there are plenty of micro-budget indie pictures which manage to stage action sequences, which manage to film exciting scenes, that demonstrate oomph or just where characters, y’know, run.<br />
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The film carries a 2014 copyright date, is listed as a 2015 picture in the sales agent's publicity, and eventually appeared on DVD and VOD in February 2016. Mark Polonia's subsequent films have been <i>Sharkenstein</i>, <i>Land Shark</i> and <i>Amityville Exorcism</i>. You've got to give the guy props for coming up with titles (and commissioning great sleeve art).<br />
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I can’t say that Polonia’s movie is the worst zombie film out there, not by a long chalk. Neither am I convinced that it’s the worst bigfoot movie ever made. And certainly within that tiny lozenge at the centre of this previously unconsidered Venn diagram, <i>Bigfoot vs Zombies</i> holds its own – primarily because of the absence of any other pictures that tick both boxes.<br />
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But I can’t help feeling that this could have been better, without too much additional effort. It honestly doesn’t look like anyone had fun making it. Maybe they did, but that doesn’t come across at all. And with a film like this, if it doesn’t seem like it was fun to make, sadly it’s not much fun to watch.<br />
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Still, it hasn’t put me off watching other Polonia Brothers productions. And boy, do I have a lot to choose from.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: D+</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-48194861816702151362017-04-01T09:37:00.001+01:002017-06-11T21:58:29.062+01:00Cryptic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Directors: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills</i><br />
<i>Writers: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills</i><br />
<i>Producers: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills</i><br />
<i>Cast: Ed Stoppard, Vas Blackwood, Ray Panthaki</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2016</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: DVD</i><br />
<i>Website: <a href="http://nextlevelfilms.co.uk/">http://nextlevelfilms.co.uk</a></i><br />
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<i>Cryptic </i>is an amazingly good film. By which I don’t mean that the quality of the actual movie is staggering. Yes, it’s good – but it’s not perfect and it won’t blow you away. What I mean is that the fact that <i>Cryptic </i>is a good film – is amazing.<br />
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Because of who made it. This is the third horror film from the team of Bart Ruspoli and Freddie Hutton-Mills. They also wrote/produced the middling zombie time-waster <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/devils-playground.html">Devil’s Playground</a></i> and wrote/produced/directed the ridiculously titled <i>World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen</i> which, in a crowded market-place, manages to stand out as one of the very worst found footage pictures ever made in this country.<br />
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<i>World War Dead</i> was actually made after <i>Cryptic </i>but released first. My understanding is that the executive producers approached Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills, asking them to quickly bang out a zombie picture that could tie in to the centenary of the First World War (tasteful…). Can’t really blame the guys for taking the money and running, and the number of people who have suffered through <i>WWD:ROTF</i> must be pretty minimal, but still it’s not a good film to have on your CV. So it’s fortunate for the duo that <i>Cryptic</i>, which is significantly better than <i>Devil’s Playground</i> and infinitely better than the execrable <i>World War Dead</i>, is now out there to be viewed.<br />
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This has certainly revised my opinion of BR and FHM. I was genuinely surprised not just by how much I enjoyed <i>Cryptic </i>but by how skilfully it had been constructed. Where <i>World War Dead</i> was utterly devoid of characterisation or plot, <i>Cryptic </i>is a tightly structured narrative which relies almost entirely on characterisation.<br />
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So what I really meant to say, back up at top there, was: <i>Cryptic </i>is, amazingly, a good film. All the right words, not necessarily in the right order.<br />
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This is a classic gangster set-up: eight people, one room, loyalties and conflicts ebbing and flowing, tension building until someone lets fly with a shooter. There is a brief discussion about how similar the situation is to “that film, the one with dogs in” to acknowledge that the film-makers understand the territory wherein they are currently working.<br />
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The location is a crypt underneath a church (in, presumably, London). Our first two characters are ‘Sexy’ Steve Stevens, a dapper and rational crooked banker (Ed Stoppard: <i>Upstairs Downstairs</i> redux, <i>The Frankenstein Chronicles</i> and Dan Dare audio dramas – rocking a very fine set of threads) and ‘Meat’, a nervous and not terribly bright gangster (typically superb performance by the great Vas Blackwood: <i>Lock Stock</i>, <i>Creep</i>, <i>A Room to Die For</i>). Both have been sent to the crypt by a local Mr Big, as have the next to arrive, brothers Jim and John Jonas.<br />
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The Jonas Brothers (presumably named as a gag about the soulless boy band from a few years ago, which fairly accurately dates when this script was written) are both psycho idiots. One is slightly less idiotic than the other and one is slightly more psychotic. But you wouldn’t trust either of them to cat-sit for you or to count to 20 without using their fingers. They are played by Philip Barantini (<i>World War Dead</i>, <i>Young High and Dead</i>) and Daniel Feuerriegel (<i>Spartacus</i> TV series, <i>Pacific Rim 2</i>).<br />
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Completing the sextette are Cochise (Ray Panthaki: <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-feral-generation.html">The Feral Generation</a></i>, <i>28 Days Later</i>, <i>World War Dead</i>), an arrogant fellow with intricate designs cut into his beard, and his moll Alberta (Sally Leonard). All six have been sent to the crypt with instructions to locate and guard – but not open – a coffin. Their employer will be with them in due course but has been delayed by illness.<br />
It’s a very Beckett-ian set-up and once again Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills acknowledge their debts with the name of the godfather behind all this is. Meat, Cochise and the others are all… waiting for Gordon.<br />
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Two other people show up. One is Ben Shafik as Walter, a posh junkie looking for some drugs he stashed in the crypt. (Shafik was in not only <i>World War Dead</i> and <i>Devil’s Playgroun</i>d, but also the Bart Ruspoli short that the latter was based on, <i>The Long Nigh</i>t.) The other is Gordon’s crooked lawyer (Gene Hunt’s brother, Robert Glenister: <i>Spooks</i>, <i>Hustle</i>, <i>Law and Order UK</i>) who knows all the others (except Walter, obviously) though they don’t know him.<br />
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Five gangsters, a lawyer, a banker and a junkie.<br />
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The coffin, when located, proves to be a curious metal construction, solidly locked. What – or who – is in there? Meat has an idea, because he has invested in a vampire-slaying kit.<br />
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Over the course of the film we learn about the gradual decimation of organised crime in the area, a series of gangland murders which some are saying is the work of a vampire, or at least, someone pretending to be a vampire.<br />
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Because, as Steve Stevens assiduously points out, there are no such things as vampires.<br />
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But then, if there are no such things as vampires, what is in that coffin and why has the frustratingly delayed Gordon assembled this team to guard it. Guard it against what?<br />
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As the plot develops – through dialogue but without being talkie – the characters find themselves in groups of two or three, often discussing the others. Unable to find his junk, Walter is getting withdrawal symptoms. And attempts are made to resolve an unpleasant situation caused by the slightly more psycho of the Jonas brothers having recently raped and murdered a 17-year-old girl.<br />
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Eventually somebody cracks and lets off a shooter. Which punctuates the dialogue but thankfully doesn’t tip the film into general mayhem. By now the door is locked and no-one is getting out until Gordon lets himself in. And eventually, inevitably, one of the group, in a dark corner of the crypt, unseen by the others, is killed – with subsequent examination revealing two puncture wounds in the neck.<br />
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Five gangsters, a lawyer, a banker and a junkie. And one of them is – possibly – a vampire. Well, you’re spoiled for choice there, aren’t you?<br />
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It is a measure of how carefully plotted <i>Cryptic</i>’s script is, that each act of this 90-minute film is exactly 30 minutes long, the inciting incidents for acts two and three occurring dead on the half-hour and the hour. You could set your watch by it. And there’s some lovely, lovely dialogue in the script, some real zingers, many of them delivered by Steve Stevens whose masterful calm clearly infuriates the psycho Jonas Brothers. It’s a cracking script that, while it doesn’t unfold in exactly real time, could probably be adapted into a stage play without too much difficulty.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wo0URVq5gsY/WN9mDsXwM-I/AAAAAAAAQBg/xFvU0-ngwd0uWf7PbFEW39-vx823Y7p2gCEw/s1600/vlcsnap-2016-07-09-00h43m31s436.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wo0URVq5gsY/WN9mDsXwM-I/AAAAAAAAQBg/xFvU0-ngwd0uWf7PbFEW39-vx823Y7p2gCEw/s400/vlcsnap-2016-07-09-00h43m31s436.png" width="400" /></a>Notwithstanding all the above, the film falls down in two respects. One is the sound mix. As the group fragments, people hold whispered conversations in corners of the crypt. And sometimes the dialogue just isn’t audible – especially when Ray Panthaki is speaking. You can pump up the volume on your telly but you’d better remember to turn it down again before the next round of shouting and shooting.<br />
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The other problem is the character of Alberta, whom you may notice I have barely mentioned. And that’s because she doesn’t really have a character. Which is no reflection on the actor. It’s not that she isn’t given stuff to do. There’s a couple of very funny scenes where two male characters discuss matters while, in the background, Alberta struggles to lift a dead body on her own. And when it is revealed that she is from Transnistria there is debate over whether that is where Dracula comes from.<br />
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But there’s just no depth to Alberta, a situation heightened by the seven well-rounded characters surrounding her. Even the junkie has more personality. She is defined by her skin-tight, cleavage-flaunting black leather outfit, her flame-red hair and her eastern European accent. None of those elements define character. She might as well be somebody at Comic-Con pretending to be Black Widow. Maybe Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills suffer from the traditional British male writer’s inability to create realistic female characters. Or maybe they just couldn’t work out what to do with her, beyond using her as a sounding board so that Cochise doesn’t have to talk to himself.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wO0LZ-hxo-o/WN9mBlya3pI/AAAAAAAAQBs/eNRdwpFm7HAwIgPD9DMgpgM9a93KLWQWACEw/s1600/640x480-cryptic-tmb243.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wO0LZ-hxo-o/WN9mBlya3pI/AAAAAAAAQBs/eNRdwpFm7HAwIgPD9DMgpgM9a93KLWQWACEw/s320/640x480-cryptic-tmb243.jpg" width="320" /></a>Those cryptic, whispering corners – and indeed the rest of this small but adroitly used set – come courtesy of top production designer Caroline Story (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-seasoning-house.html">The Seasoning House</a></i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/vampire-diary.html">Vampire Diary</a></i>, <i>Its Walls Were Blood</i>). The excellent hair and make-up is by Emma Slater whose British horror CV includes <i>The Borderlands</i>, <i>Stormhouse</i>, <i>Evil Never Dies</i>, <i>Blood Moon</i>, <i>World War Dead</i>, <i>The Rezort</i> and <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/47-meters-down.html">47 Meters Down</a></i>). There’s some fine cinematography by Sara Deane (<i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-horror-of-dolls.html">The Horror of the Dolls</a></i>, <i>World War Dead</i>) and a sympathetic score by Emma Fox. But I think what really stands out is the costume design (not least Ed Stoppard’s terrific coat, which I craved throughout the entire film) courtesy of Raquel Azevedo (<i>The Seasoning House</i>, <i>Truth or Dare</i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/scar-tissue.html">Scar Tissue</a></i>). It’s somewhat ironic that a movie with so many female department heads should fall down so badly in its non-characterisation of the only woman on screen (a big fat zero on the Bechdel test here).<br />
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Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills, whose other feature was prison drama <i>Screwed</i>, are currently in post on sci-fi picture <i>Genesis</i>, which uses many of the same cast and crew as <i>Cryptic</i>. The website for their Next Level Films company says their fourth feature will be called <i>Dark Web</i>, but that’s out of date – it was a comedy thriller that got shelved when they were unexpectedly asked to make <i>World War Dead</i>.<br />
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Shot in 2014, <i>Cryptic </i>was released on UK DVD in February 2016 but doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else yet. The IMDB lists Chinese and South African releases in September 2014 which we can take with a pinch of salt.<br />
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My expectations when I picked up this DVD were low, which only heightened my delight when <i>Cryptic </i>turned out to be such a whip-smart, carefully structured slice of gangster/vampire cinema. It’s a long, long way from the over-the-top bullets’n’bloodsuckers action of <i>From Dusk Till Dawn</i> or <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/dead-cert.html">Dead Cert</a></i>. Give it a spin and I think you’ll really enjoy it.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-89127166275599648562017-03-16T22:34:00.000+00:002017-04-07T08:35:31.040+01:00Di Gal Bite Mi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: Jc Money</i><br />
<i>Writer: Jc Money</i><br />
<i>Producer: Jc Money</i><br />
<i>Cast: Jc Money, Sharan B, Roll Out</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2013</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: <a href="https://youtu.be/9GgIyljfrRE">YouTube</a></i><br />
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When I came across – quite by chance – this amateur, feature-length, British vampire movie I thought I had found something completely unknown and unrecorded. I subsequently discovered a review on specialist bloodsucker website <i>Taliesin Meets the Vampires</i> but this is still a staggeringly obscure film. There’s no IMDB page, no mention of this anywhere except YouTube, plus that one review and now this one.<br />
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In North London, a seductive young woman is actually a vampire, preying on flirtatious, cocksure men. A young man whose friend was killed by the vampire is told by his grandmother (who raised him) the truth about what happened to his parents. He always believed they left when he was eight but actually they were killed by vampires, sacrificing themselves to save their baby (shades of Harry Potter). Grandma says the man who can tell him about vampires is a wheeler-dealing Rastafarian who wears a permanent oxygen mask and reads from (I assume) the Holy Piby. At the end of the film, our hero and a friend discover the house where the vampire sleeps, sneak in and destroy her with a combination of stake through the heart and ripping down the curtains to let the sunlight in.<br />
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On an objective level, the film is solidly amateur. Camera work is wobbly and handheld with no real attempt at grading or anything fancy like that. There are lots of characters, many in only one scene. Actors wear their own clothes, improvise their dialogue, and for the most part can't act. Outside scenes are shot guerrilla-style so that quite a few people are in this movie without realising it. The whole thing is either a home movie or a dogme masterpiece – you decide.<br />
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But listen, I absolutely don’t care about the lack of basic film-making elements like script, acting, make-up or ‘vampire fang effects that weren’t bought at Poundland’. <i>Di Gal Bite Mi</i> has one big thing going for it, which makes it (I believe) unique in the history of British horror cinema, and the clue is in the title. <i>Under the Shadow</i> was in Persian, <i>The Passing</i> was in Welsh, and this, my friend, is a British horror movie with dialogue in Jamaican Patois.<br />
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Filmed in, by, among and for the African-Caribbean community in North London, most of the film is delivered in a Patois – and with accents – so impenetrable to this white Midlander as to be effectively unintelligible. But not to worry because the film is subtitled. Admittedly the subtitles have their own curious take on grammar and syntax, and frustratingly they stop 15 minutes from the end of this 69-minute feature (although by then you’ll have the gist of what’s happening), but nevertheless they make the narrative (such as it is) understandable. And hence they make this film hugely enjoyable.<br />
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Some characters do speak more clearly and there are a few white folks, notably a young (Polish?) woman who has a scene where she implores the vampire to come and bite her. She is fed up with her miserable life and wants to become a glamorous immortal. However, a mysterious male voice explains that the vampire (spelled ‘vampier’ throughout the film) only ever bites men. Thirty years ago, she was wronged by a man who cheated on her, and now she returns every three decades to take revenge on arrogant, sexist men. (This of course slightly contradicts the bit about that guy’s parents being killed by vampires, although to be fair his grandma doesn’t say it was this vampire who killed them, just <i><u>a</u></i> vampire).<br />
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There is a (literally) running gag about a Rasta who sees his friend killed in the prologue, runs off – and keeps running. Every so often we cut to shots of him running along assorted pavements, and characters sometimes mention that they saw a scared Rasta-man haring along the road. Eventually, as the final gag of a light-hearted movie, he reaches Manchester(!) where he sees another vampire and starts running back down south again.<br />
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Apart from the above and a couple of vampire attack scenes – surprisingly well-shot with judicious use of fake blood – most of the rest of the film is simply two or more characters discussing the recent vampire attacks. There’s not really what you might call narrative development.<br />
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But none of that matters a jot. This is something strange and special. Here we have a horror film, made by people with a basic awareness of the standard genre tropes, but set within a distinctive community: genuine, indigenous black British horror film-making. I’ve never seen anything like it.<br />
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Notwithstanding that this is a horror-fantasy romp, this film reflects the community where it’s set and where it was made in a genuine, unforced way. This is not some right-on, Lottery-funded, serious exploration of London Jamaicans by a pretentious, if well-meaning, film school graduate. This is real. This one movie can tell external audiences far more about this community than a dozen serious dramas with budgets and trained actors and proper equipment – and it does so precisely because it was not made for external audiences.<br />
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What <i>Di Gal Bite Mi</i> reminds me of most is Nollywood. Though clearly British – and identified on YouTube as Jamaican (which it is, in an ex-pat sort of way) – this feels very much like a West African film. There is the same focus on reflecting the real lives of the audience, but within a fantastic storyline full of action, thrills and laughs. There is the same defiant determination to simply not worry about limitations or restrictions, to just plough ahead and make the film. But whereas such determination in a European or North American context can often be self-indulgent, this is not a self-indulgent film. This movie has been made to be seen. It has been made for audiences. Audiences beyond the amateur actors on screen and their immediate friends and families, but audiences like these actors, who identify with the characters, the settings, the attitudes, the dialogue, the jokes, the sex, the beliefs, the haircuts.<br />
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If you enjoy Nollywood films that were never meant to be seen outside of Nigeria, if you love old Mexploitation movies that were never expected to play North of Guadalajara, if you get a genuine thrill from discovering some Thai or Filipino obscurity that has never been subbed or dubbed into English, if you somehow combine this international eclecticism with a determination to seek out the most obscure and esoteric elements of 21st century British horror - so if you're me, basically - then you will derive great pleasure from watching <i>Di Gal Bite Mi</i>.<br />
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The man behind this movie is Jc Money whose YouTube channel is full of music videos, short films, animation, trailers and a couple of other features, all produced under the banner of Wah Gwan Family Entertainment (I don't speak Patois but even I know what 'Wah gwan?' means). His ‘ghetto action movie’ <i>Murder Job</i> and ‘ghetto movie’ <i>135 D Street</i> were posted to YouTube in April 2013 and January 2014 respectively; <i>Di Gal Bite Mi</i> was posted between them in July 2013.<br />
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Money is a one-man band: writing, directing, producing, photographing and editing as well as playing the nominal hero whose gran sends him on a quest that ends in the eventual destruction of the vampire. Judging by the order of the cast list, in which everyone uses either a single name or a nickname, I would guess that Sharan B plays the vampire (under a selection of wigs) and Roll Out is probably the running Rasta-man.<br />
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While it’s pretty much impossible to google anyone involved in this film – and they’re certainly not on the old IMDB! – I have managed to dig up a little bit of info on Jc Money, or Devon Spence to use his real name. His primary interest is music: he studied music engineering at CONEL (The College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London) and has been performing since 1995. When Jamaican dancehall stars visit London he sometimes gets support gigs and has appeared on bills with the likes of Beenie Man, Bounty Killer and Mavado. As a film-maker, Money is entirely self-taught. He watched other people making videos and hence learned how to shoot and edit, leading eventually to his three (so far) feature-length films.<br />
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I was absolutely amazed and delighted to discover <i>Di Gal Bite Mi</i> and can definitely recommend it for anyone who is (a) open-minded and (b) bored with sitting through formulaic horror films.<br />
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If you want something different, try a vampire with a reggae beat.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: B+</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-78418517042711239262017-03-13T20:56:00.000+00:002017-03-13T20:56:44.069+00:00interview: Grant McPhee<i>After I reviewed arty Scottish vampire chiller</i> <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/night-kaleidoscope.html">Night Kaleidoscope</a><i>, director/producer Grant McPhee very kindly answered a few questions by email.</i><br />
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<b>In what way do you consider <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> to be ‘punk rock cinema’?</b><br />
"It's more an attitude. We took the 'don't need permission' and DIY approach from punk, rather than the spikey haired three-chord version. And I think that's an attitude that every indie filmmaker should take. Just get out there and do it.<br />
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"Additionally, it was a pretty rocky production. I had fantastic production support. I like controlled chaos, so there is always a strong semblance of structure - just with an ability to improvise within that. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong went wrong and it became very much an adapt-to-survive approach. All very seat of your pants. There was no script as such. I was shooting a feature for a friend that finished on the Saturday, we filmed on the Monday and I went onto another feature the following Monday. Just picking up a camera and making it up - which you can tell in a fair few places! It's more an attitude of production - as the film is really a bit prog rock! You can achieve special things working this way, but it does not always work out and what you gain in places you lose in others."<br />
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<b>Why has it taken three years to be released?</b><br />
“Due to the shear amount of other work I had on, the film just sat on the shelf. I just had no time to look at it, or even think about it until I could squeeze in one day in 2015 for a pickup. My day job was taking about 15 hours a day and I had a documentary to finish - we had a TV and large festival slot for that but had not actually finished the film, so every second was taken up. A few days without sleep.<br />
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"Without knowing what we had in the can we managed another pickup at the end of 2016, for what we assumed was needed. It was edited fairly sporadically from mid 2016 as our editor had to work on it in between jobs. This was the first time we really saw it, and realised we needed an extra couple of scenes. Again it went a bit 'fly by the seat of your pants' and I ended up covering my hotel room in tinfoil, getting Patrick, Jason and Kitty around and throwing blood all over the place. Not sure what the other guests made of that, but we had no complaints. So, although it was started a long time ago it was only put together very quickly towards the end. <br />
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"There was actually very little post production work done. Nearly all the images were made in camera. I just held a couple of pieces of glass at angles in front of the camera. One with food dye on it and the other to reflect or project images onto it. The only real bit of post was a shot of eyes turning white."<br />
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<b>How satisfied are you with the way that the film turned out?</b><br />
“In some respects it's amazing there is a film there. But really nobody outside of your friends or other filmmakers care how little time a film took to make, or how small the budget was. Films only stand on how good they are. <br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dE3ClaplcZ0/WMcHSEs1lUI/AAAAAAAAP_k/2aMe4TqkyZUjFSd7q_3sNGwi-uj6nSXCgCLcB/s1600/grant1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dE3ClaplcZ0/WMcHSEs1lUI/AAAAAAAAP_k/2aMe4TqkyZUjFSd7q_3sNGwi-uj6nSXCgCLcB/s320/grant1.JPG" width="313" /></a>"The film is what I wanted to make; in that respect I'm happy. Overall I just wanted to try something different whether it was a failure or not. Some of it worked and some, well not as much. Mainly not having a story! I think you're certainly right about the repetition, though I was very keen on a visual art film with poetic flourishes. I just maybe put a bit too many in! But I'd rather have a film that got one star where we'd tried something that was different than three stars for something that's like every other film.<br />
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"I just have no interest to try and copy anyone, a style or a current genre. And if that means some people hate a film, I'm fine with that! I can see where the flaws are, but that's also something I'm happy with. it's a bit more human. People these days are not allowed to make mistakes and learn. Things are too neat and shiny. Rough edges can be good. I'm most satisfied with what I've learned. That's the way to progress. I'm not afraid of failure, what you learn from it is important to your next movie."<br />
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<b>What exactly is a ‘Digital Imaging Technician’?</b><br />
"Ha, a Digital Imaging Technician - also known as a DIT is a geeky guy who sits next to a DoP at a monitor and manipulates the image to suit the DP's intended look."<br />
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<b>What is Tartan Features?</b><br />
"Tartan Features is part of Year Zero Filmmaking. It's a bit like an indie record label where a collective of film-makers make micro budget feature films that share a certain vision. We've made about 13 so far - it's open to anyone in the world. It just happens to have started in Scotland but you don't have to be from there. We've had a few good successes. One film allowed the director to go on to have a well-funded next feature. At its heart it's just people who get up from their seats and make a film, help grow an industry and learn. Here's a link (click on the pictures for more info on each film) - <a href="http://www.yearzerofilmmaking.com/tartanfeatures">www.yearzerofilmmaking.com/tartanfeatures</a>"<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q1wFUlBQpZs/WMcHLKlfciI/AAAAAAAAP_g/_DSAXdEaDUkou_LqJNy1SnAIiV-sEkl0QCLcB/s1600/grant2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-q1wFUlBQpZs/WMcHLKlfciI/AAAAAAAAP_g/_DSAXdEaDUkou_LqJNy1SnAIiV-sEkl0QCLcB/s320/grant2.JPG" width="320" /></a><b>What’s next for you?</b><br />
"I'm a week away from shooting a new feature. This time something very different It has a story for starters. People do and say things without 15 minutes of trippy visuals (only five). We're taking two weeks to make it, the budget is more, we're paying everyone. We've got a great cast, script and crew, and I'm very excited. It's a little like <i>Blood on Satan's Claw</i>, <i>Picnic at Hanging Rock</i> and less <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i>. You'll definitely know it's one of my films though. I'll tell you all about it soon!"MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-54613158906920031162017-03-11T18:48:00.002+00:002017-03-13T20:57:09.209+00:00Night Kaleidoscope<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Director: <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/interview-grant-mcphee.html">Grant McPhee</a></i><br />
<i>Writers: Chris Purnell, Megan Gretchen</i><br />
<i>Producer: Grant McPhee</i><br />
<i>Cast: Patrick O’Brien, Mariel McAllan, Kitty Colquhoun</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: online screener</i><br />
<i>Website: <a href="https://kaleido-dog.com/">https://kaleido-dog.com</a></i><br />
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This ultra-stylish vampire/cop feature scores props from the start by restricting its opening titles to the first 50 seconds. Other film-makers please take note. We don’t want to sit through four minutes of titles with a separate screen for every single cast member, none of whom we’ve ever heard of. Do that for your premiere/cast+crew screening if you must, but recut the opening before anyone else sees it.<br />
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One thing which did occur to me during those 50 seconds: ‘Tartan Films presents’. Oh, it’s a Scottish production. That’s fine but, hang on, what do I do if/when Scotland becomes independent? Should I continue to regard Scottish horror films as British horror films? Not really thought about that before. Just geographically, Scotland can’t stop being part of Britain. That’s the name of the island that the English, the Scots and the Welsh all live on (except for folk on Anglesey, the Isle of Wight, the Scilly Isles and all the little Hebrides/Orkneys bits and bobs up north, obviously). But should cinema be defined geographically? <i>The Dead</i> was filmed in Africa, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-dead-2-india.html">The Dead 2</a></i> in India, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/my-little-eye.html">My Little Eye</a></i> in Nova Scotia, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/grave-matters.html">Grave Matters</a></i> in the Los Angeles, <i>Dog Soldiers</i> in Luxembourg and <i>South of Sanity</i> in Antarctica. They’re all of them ‘British films’.<br />
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I may be getting off track here.<br />
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So: <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i>. This is a very artistic, arty movie. It is not a narrative movie. There’s probably no more than about 15 minutes of actual story here; quarter of an hour tops of people actually doing and saying stuff. If you come expecting a gripping storyline, you’ll be sorely disappointed.<br />
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In a nutshell (so far as I can work out), there’s a guy in a sheepskin jacket who is psychic (at least, when he’s high) who helps a police detective investigate murders. He has a toke and sees visions of what happened. There’s a new killer in town, but it’s someone (or something) different. A vampire. Actually two. A dominant female vampire and her male acolyte. Sheepskin jacket guy teams up with a young woman (who I think may have lost her boyfriend to the vampires). He captures the male vampire and holds him prisoner in a bathtub. Then after that it kind of all gets a bit fuzzy. There’s some Molotov cocktails (prepared but unused). There’s a locket. I’m honestly not sure how it all ends.<br />
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But this isn’t about story. Or character. It’s about imagery.<br />
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After those 50 seconds, there’s a trippy, psychedelic, drug-induced montage. Then another one. Then another. By now we’re 12 minutes in and I’m thinking: is this film going to be nothing but trippy montages?<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VAD2mnI3C7o/WMRFrH9QJBI/AAAAAAAAP-o/Dp7sWaKP6NUtE35QsVUmadS0Ybr0Bm19gCLcB/s1600/nk3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="167" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VAD2mnI3C7o/WMRFrH9QJBI/AAAAAAAAP-o/Dp7sWaKP6NUtE35QsVUmadS0Ybr0Bm19gCLcB/s400/nk3.JPG" width="400" /></a>As it turns out: yes. Pretty much.<br />
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Actual dialogue scenes are few, far between and consistently brief. Then we’re into another montage. And don’t get me wrong: these trippy montages are terrific. The handheld photography and fast editing and extensive post-production work, all overlaid with a 1980s-style score, creates magical sequences of two to three minutes. Despite being set in an ugly, urban world where everything is made of granite or concrete, where locations look better at night only because you can see less of the crap they’re covered in, nevertheless this is a film full of colour. Not vibrant colour; it’s muted but it’s more than grey. The colour twists and turns as the camera moves. <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> is the perfect title for this film.<br />
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Any one of these montages, dropped into another picture, would be a highlight of the movie. But I’d be failing in my duty as a reviewer if I didn’t point out that, one after another after another, interrupted by ‘scenes’ which are often little more than a couple of lines of dialogue and a hefty pause, all these montages get a bit much. Let’s put it this way. I like mayonnaise. Everyone likes mayonnaise. There isn’t a foodstuff on the planet that can’t be improved with a dab of mayo. But the keyword here is ‘dab’. You wouldn’t want to just eat a jar of mayonnaise. Even if you occasionally nibbled on a biscuit between spoonfuls, you’d rapidly get sick of it.<br />
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And I’ve got to say that I did start to get bored of the endless succession of trippy montages. By the end of the first act (or at least, half an hour into this 82-minute movie; I’m not sure something this minimalist can be said to have acts <i>per se</i>) the technique had lost its initial impact and was just becoming repetitive, soporific, even somewhat tedious. It’s simply too much.<br />
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Bit of dialogue. Pause. Bit more dialogue. Then in comes the music. An electronic snare drum in a slow 2/4 rhythm, then a synth melody so subtle it’s basically just a repeated loop of rising and falling tone. Every single time. All the music sounds like the intro to a Blue Nile song. And listen, I absolutely freaking love The Blue Nile; they’re one of my favourite bands. But if they recorded an 82-minute instrumental album, I’m not sure I’d be so keen on it. Even if there was an accompanying feature-length video. With vampires.<br />
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All the above notwithstanding, this is an extraordinary film. Visual poetry. With some quite gruesome and nasty gory bits in several of the montage sequences. I’m criticising Grant McPhee’s film for achieving precisely what it set out to do, for which I feel a bit bad.<br />
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Eventually I twigged what I was watching, and it’s this: <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> is what you would get if Jean Rollin had directed <i>Trainspotting</i>. And once I understood that it was a Scottish Rollinade, I was able to relax a bit (though I did still find my attention frequently wandering, by that point an almost Pavlovian response to yet another synth snare drum intro).<br />
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Here’s what it says in the press release I was sent along with the screener. (Film-makers please note: I very much appreciate press releases, or just good website content, that can contextualise your work. But I usually read them after watching the film because I like to view things with an open mind.) Anyway, it says: “Bridging a fine line between the trashy 70s Euro Horror of Jess Franco, the British Art-House miasma of Nicholas Roeg and the underground experiments of Kenneth Anger <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> manages to become a unique film of its own.” And then it says: “The film is a treat for the eyes and ears – trippy, psychedelic imagery flashing against a pumping 80s synth rock score – story and logic come secondary to atmosphere and terror, a dreamy nightmare captured on film.”<br />
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And I cannae really disagree wi’ any o’ tha'!<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oxHJAvW2zOQ/WMRFryRwP4I/AAAAAAAAP-8/pJQ3zHfE9eEQB7kBpGdp-EfMGw09wABAQCLcB/s1600/nk8.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="168" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oxHJAvW2zOQ/WMRFryRwP4I/AAAAAAAAP-8/pJQ3zHfE9eEQB7kBpGdp-EfMGw09wABAQCLcB/s400/nk8.JPG" width="400" /></a>What I do disagree with is the headline ‘PUNK ROCK CINEMA!’ and the line “maintains a … punk rock attitude throughout”. If there’s one thing this doesn’t feel like, it’s punk rock. It’s about as punk rock as, well, The Blue Nile.<br />
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It may have been shot in a week (in 2014 under the curious title <i>Land of Sunshine</i>), but it has then spent the best part of three years being edited and graded and scored and colour-corrected and flimflammed and zimzammed and all the other digital malarkey that film-makers do in post nowadays. This is a film where every frame has been carefully selected and manipulated to create a specific, deliberate, aesthetic, audiovisual impression. It ain’t two chords and a pair of bondage trousers. I can kind of see what Grant McPhee means, and I have no doubt that he knows his musical chops, his previous feature <i>Big Gold Dream</i> being a documentary about post-punk bands like The Scars and The Jesus and Mary Chain. But some of us are old enough to remember real punk.<br />
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I mean, I don’t. I don't actually remember it because I was eight and living in a little village in south Nottinghamshire, a long, lomg way from the 100 Club. But I’m old enough to potentially remember it, had I been aware of it at the time. Which I was wasn’t. Jesus, I was barely aware of <i>Top of the Pops</i>.<br />
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Before <i>Big Gold Dream</i>, McPhee’s debut feature was <i>Sarah’s Room</i> aka <i>To Here Knows When</i>, a psychological drama three-hander. The reviews I’ve read of this seem to exactly describe <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> (except without the vampires), suggesting that McPhee is establishing a distinctive auteur-ial style. Before that he made a bunch of horror shorts. He has also done a lot of cinematography over the years, including his own features and also a lost British horror film, <i>Christmas Hear Kids</i> directed by this film's co-writer Chris Purnell. Shot in 2012 and premiered in 2014, that’s been in the MIA appendix to my British horror masterlist for a few years now. I wonder whatever happened to it.<br />
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In terms of actually paying the rent, McPhee does small jobs on big projects, as camera assistant or clapper loader or (increasingly) digital imaging technician. His IMDB page includes <i>Trainspotting 2</i>, <i>Game of Thrones</i>, <i>The Bad Education Movie</i>, <i>Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell</i>, <i>Sunshine on Leith</i>, <i>Cloud Atlas</i>, <i>World War Z</i> and a bunch of BHR titles: <i>Let Us Prey</i>, <i>Under the Skin</i>, <i>Outpost: Black Sun</i>, <i>Citadel</i>, <i>The Wicker Tree</i>, <i>The Awakening</i>, <i>Book of Blood </i>and <i>Doomsday</i>. Also <i>Jim Davidson: The Devil Rides Out – Live</i> (a lesser known Dennis Wheatley adaptation, that one) and <i>Eating with Ronnie Corbett</i>.<br />
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Thing is: I don’t know what a digital imaging technician actually does. But if ever a film looks like it was made by a digital imaging technician, it’s <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i>.<br />
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The small cast are excellent. The psychic guy in the sheepskin jacket is played Patrick O’Brien who has a widow’s peak and a Dan Dare jaw. Mariel McAllan is his associate. The vampires are corporate voice-over queen Kitty Colquhoun and Gareth Morrison (<i>Outpost 2</i> and <i>3</i>). Craig-James Moncur as the detective and Robert Williamson as a drug dealer provide impressive support. Alec Cheer is credited with the music; Ben McKinstrie with the editing; Eve Murray with the production design.<br />
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Often I find that I enjoy a film while I’m watching it but then, as I think on it more carefully while drafting a review, I find myself becoming less enamoured. <i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> is the opposite. While watching the film I found myself at times underwhelmed and distracted, but re-evaluating it through the process of writing these 1,700 words or so, I now appreciate it more and have realised that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I did.<br />
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<i>Night Kaleidoscope</i> was released on VOD, DVD and – why not? – VHS in March 2017.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: B+</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-13316594270524146502017-03-09T18:51:00.000+00:002017-03-09T18:51:43.268+00:00interview: Joe Dante<i>In January I <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/15-years-on-web-announcement.html">posted four questions to 100 Big Names</a> to celebrate my website's 15th anniversary. A few weeks later, I received these answers by email from the always awesome Joe Dante..</i><br />
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<b>Which technological or social development during your career has changed cinema the most?</b><br />
"The movie business I got into in 1975 was completely different from the one we have now. We don't shoot on film anymore for the most part, and we don't even project on film apart from a few venues in big cities. Theatrical movies now tend toward expensive spectacles and tentpoles, with the mid-range movies of the previous era moving to cable. And socially, the majority of films are no longer seen in theaters which means the vital connection between film and the communal experience has been lost."<br />
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<b>Which deceased film-maker or actor do you wish you could have worked with?</b><br />
"Orson Welles."<br />
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<b>What is the one question you’re fed up with answering in interviews?</b><br />
"When are you going to make <i>Gremlins 3?</i>"<br />
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<b>What would you rather be asked instead?</b><br />
"Why doesn't Criterion put out <i>The Second Civil War?</i>"MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-35347102281351779032017-03-07T21:27:00.000+00:002017-03-07T21:27:56.303+00:00Altre<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zrROiT57Nx8/WL8kslH9B8I/AAAAAAAAP9Y/gV6XSabRqdgOd_QmJZfTL3nchVZ3s8wWwCLcB/s1600/altre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zrROiT57Nx8/WL8kslH9B8I/AAAAAAAAP9Y/gV6XSabRqdgOd_QmJZfTL3nchVZ3s8wWwCLcB/s320/altre.jpg" width="179" /></a><i>Director: Eugenio Villani</i><br />
<i>Writer: Raffaele Palazzo</i><br />
<i>Producer: Eugenio Villani</i><br />
<i>Cast: Agnese Nano, Antonietta Bello</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Country: Italy</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: online screener</i><br />
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Bearing the parenthetical English title <i>Others Like You</i>, <i>Altre </i>is a 22-minute Italian short which is intriguing, thought-provoking and slightly disturbing. A thoroughly polished production, it looks great and is carried by a pair of very fine performances.<br />
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The opening two minutes will hook you, before we hit our main story. Ester (Antonietta Bello: <i>La Buca</i>, <b>The Space Between</b>) is a young woman who thinks she might be pregnant, despite a recent, unspecified operation. Greta (the hugely experienced Agnese Nano, who was in <i>Cinema Paradiso</i>) is a stern family doctor who says Ester’s perceived ‘symptoms’ of pregnancy are just a side effect of the surgery.<br />
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Disappointed, Greta adopts then loses a kitten. Searching for the missing feline, she discovers something dark and alarming, a secret that Greta has been keeping. More detail than that it would be unfair to reveal, except that the underlying theme is one of motherhood.<br />
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Now, I would be lying if I said that I fully understood the ending of this film. But that did not lessen my enjoyment. I like a movie that makes me ask questions, that offers unclear answers, that hints at ideas and suggests possibilities. This sort of open-ended, stylish enigma is something that Italian cinema has always done very well, and Eugenio Villani has done it very well here.<br />
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Villani has been making short horror films for about six years now, and you can find most of his earlier work on his Vimeo channel. This film’s script was written by Raffaele Palazzo, an actor who was in Villani’s earlier short <i>Haselwurm</i>.<br />
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<i>Altre </i>was kindly sent to me by Emiliano Ranzani whose own short film <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/langliena.html">Langliena</a></i> I reviewed a few years back. Emiliano is one of three credited associate producers on <i>Altre</i>, along with DP Carlodavid Mauri whose photography is a major part of the film's success.<br />
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The version I was sent was labelled as not quite complete but, apart from a couple of minor typos in the (otherwise very good indeed) English subs, it looked pretty finished to me. It was shot near Turin in November 2015.<br />
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The film isn’t yet out on the circuit (in fact it’s not even on the IMDB yet) but I expect that it will soon start popping up at festivals across the globe. Catch it if you can.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-26610483798753578832017-03-06T19:33:00.002+00:002017-03-06T19:33:53.462+00:00interview: Todd Jensen<i>I had the pleasure of interviewing the great Todd Jensen on the set of </i>Rampage <i>(aka </i>Breeders <i>aka </i>Deadly Instinct<i>), a British B-movie which was shot on the Isle of Man in January 1997, in which he starred alongside <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/interview-samantha-janus-1997.html">Samantha Janus</a>.</i><br />
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<b>How did you get cast in <i>Rampage</i>?</b><br />
“I was originally going to be in this movie. When they first came up with it, they offered me the lead. Then they were going to shoot in Wales. I guess the Welsh were going to put in some money. But in order to do that, they had to have a Welsh cast.”<br />
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<b>They've got an entirely Welsh crew instead.</b><br />
“Yeah, exactly. Then all of a sudden they changed it again, and the Welsh money fell out or something happened, so they ended up coming to the Isle of Man. So they phoned me and said, 'Do you still want to do it?' and I said, 'Yeah. I'm free in January.'”<br />
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<b>Are you based in Britain or in America?</b><br />
“I'm based in LA, but I'm hoping to spend some time in London on a regular basis and hopefully do some more work over here. My sister lives over here. She lives in Birmingham. She'll be here on Sunday; she's coming onto the set. She's met <a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/interview-paul-matthews.html">Paul</a> and Liz before.”<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D7VWwr7PsrE/WL242rbMlNI/AAAAAAAAP9A/YSYoskY7-qw05s1dRkZutt5mWNQsu4SqACLcB/s1600/todd5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D7VWwr7PsrE/WL242rbMlNI/AAAAAAAAP9A/YSYoskY7-qw05s1dRkZutt5mWNQsu4SqACLcB/s320/todd5.jpg" width="320" /></a><b>Is there much difference between a British production and an American production?</b><br />
“Um, no actually. It's pretty much the same wherever you are. Very knowledgeable people, great technicians. A great crew; this is probably the best crew I've ever worked with, as far as personalities and fun and hardworking. Everybody's been having a really good time.”<br />
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<b>This is what is coming across; that everybody's enjoying themselves.</b><br />
“Yes. That's a real positive thing. Especially something like this where it's cold. It's good that everybody keeps a positive attitude. And that's a rare thing. That everybody gets along and has fun and can laugh. That doesn't normally happen on film sets!”<br />
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<b>Are you enjoying doing the action sequences?</b><br />
“Yes, that's a lot of fun. Action is always fun.”<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lA5w98gfFUo/WL242676MiI/AAAAAAAAP9E/DDeZtHconoErqPRLGP7s30c_l4nBAtFRQCLcB/s1600/todd6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lA5w98gfFUo/WL242676MiI/AAAAAAAAP9E/DDeZtHconoErqPRLGP7s30c_l4nBAtFRQCLcB/s320/todd6.jpg" width="320" /></a><b>Have you had any training on that side of things?</b><br />
“I've done a lot. I've done about twenty films, and about 50% of them - maybe a little more than that - have been action films. Like the three films that are coming out this year. One's called <i>Orion's Key</i>, which they're renaming, I think they're calling it <i>Alien Chaser</i>, which is a sci-fi film. Do you know the <i>Shadowchaser </i>movies? Well, this is <i>Shadowchaser IV</i>, but they're going to call it <i>Alien Chaser</i>. That's a sci-fi kind of thing. So I'm the lead in that. Then there's another film called <i>Operation Delta Force</i> which is an action film, strictly, with Jeff Fahey and Ernie Hudson and myself and Frank, the guy who's in <i>Alien Chaser </i>with me, the man from the <i>Shadowchaser</i> films. So those'll be coming out very, very soon. There's a film called <i>Warhead </i>that'll be coming out soon, an action film.”<br />
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<b>Do you like doing the cyborg and monster stuff or the straight stuff?</b><br />
“It depends. Like, this was great to be on. This was great to do, because I'm not the cyborg. Believe me, when they talk about <i>Star Trek</i> make up and stuff, that is brutal, to go through that every day. Where you're sitting in a chair for two or three or even six hours.”<br />
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<b>How long did your cyborg make-up take?</b><br />
“Cyborg stuff was about an hour and a half to two hours I had to sit there. It just wears on you, you know? Then they're always messing with you on set.”<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lgxrQIE64ys/WL242CghOCI/AAAAAAAAP84/qTdrAvwGY444FSlXnRYllyojDAI-oK-YQCLcB/s1600/todd3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lgxrQIE64ys/WL242CghOCI/AAAAAAAAP84/qTdrAvwGY444FSlXnRYllyojDAI-oK-YQCLcB/s320/todd3.jpeg" width="320" /></a><b>Does it make it more difficult to act?</b><br />
“Not more difficult to act. It's just that it's very tiring. You've got to be in a chair every day, and you've got to do this stuff every day. It kind of wears you out. So when you're reading an action script you get, 'Oh man, I get shot, and for half the movie I've got this or that. And I'm in the water half the movie!' I'm hoping to do another film in March, back in LA, called <i>Blue Motel</i>, which is more of a dramatic, erotic thriller. I hope to venture that way a little bit, do more dramatic stuff, maybe even some comedy stuff. I'm dying to do comedy. I mean, I have on stage.”<br />
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<b>Have you done much stagework?</b><br />
“Yes, in the States. I lived in New York for about three years, and did plenty there.”<br />
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<b>Do you prefer doing that?</b><br />
“Yes, I love doing stage. It's just that, everywhere in the world, it doesn't really pay. Unless you're on Broadway or in a big show in the West End and you're The Guy or The Girl in the show. With TV and film, you can earn a nice living. But as far as a high, doing stage is by far the best. But I'm not a big enough name to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'll do Broadway and pay me $50,000 a week.' I'm not there yet.”<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G2KsPXMmz8Y/WL243QESSTI/AAAAAAAAP9I/8oazSFG1S4YWr8Bb9VaRO0QC1yyQK-L3wCLcB/s1600/todd4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G2KsPXMmz8Y/WL243QESSTI/AAAAAAAAP9I/8oazSFG1S4YWr8Bb9VaRO0QC1yyQK-L3wCLcB/s320/todd4.jpg" width="265" /></a><b>Are you aiming for that?</b><br />
“I would love to, yes. I would love to get back on stage. I almost did something last year, but I had a conflict with this film. A pretty well-known play from the States about Air Force men and the gay issue. Robert Redford's picked up the rights to that, to do a film of it.”<br />
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<b>Are you finding that, although you're not an A-list star, you're well-known enough for producers to come to you because they know what sort of films you tend to do?</b><br />
“That's tending to happen more and more. More people are becoming aware of who I am and what I do, and that's good. That's how it starts, and then hopefully you have one project that breaks away and makes your name more of a household name. So we'll see. I think this year is going to be a very good year for me. I've got a couple of things slated and I'm producing a film.”<br />
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<b>What's that?</b><br />
“It's a film called <i>Implications </i>which is an erotic thriller that a friend of mine wrote. He'll direct it it, and we've just had confirmation that Maria Conchita Alonso will play one of the leads. And Tia Carrere is looking at it. And I'll be in it. It's not a big picture. And Paul and Liz I'm hoping are going to executive produce on it, and be involved in that way, probably handle foreign distribution. When I go back to LA after this I'm hoping to tie that up and maybe get that shot this year.”<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5UUNr2aeJk/WL242J68wII/AAAAAAAAP88/fYeUkCdIPvMX6l1GFaUVvTW9KYs4yKV8ACLcB/s1600/todd1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5UUNr2aeJk/WL242J68wII/AAAAAAAAP88/fYeUkCdIPvMX6l1GFaUVvTW9KYs4yKV8ACLcB/s200/todd1.jpeg" width="133" /></a><b>Most of the things that you've made, in the UK tend to go straight to video. Would you rather have them go theatrical?</b><br />
“Oh, yes. Of course. It's really funny because <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/cyborg-cop.html">Cyborg Cop</a></i> did huge business in Japan and Korea. In parts of Asia it's seen a lot of cinema release. (They're just going to pour water on my head.) But yes, it'd be far better. We're hoping that this can do theatrical in parts of Europe and hopefully in the States. Because they're pretty impressed with what they're seeing, thank God. So we'll see what happens. But you never know. Even the big stars do films that never get to the screen. Although I guess Tom Cruise probably doesn't.”MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3734990207404232873.post-60877604864319133542017-03-01T18:46:00.000+00:002017-03-01T18:55:15.341+00:00The Chamber<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r8b3xdLH7EQ/WJYqhS5SuLI/AAAAAAAAP6c/z8xHSl6xoNEWgSyztfKpf8-sdhPgdqa6QCEw/s1600/The-Chamber-Movie-Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r8b3xdLH7EQ/WJYqhS5SuLI/AAAAAAAAP6c/z8xHSl6xoNEWgSyztfKpf8-sdhPgdqa6QCEw/s320/The-Chamber-Movie-Poster.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<i>Director: Ben Parker</i><br />
<i>Writer: Ben Parker</i><br />
<i>Producers: Jen Handorf, Paul Higgins</i><br />
<i>Cast: Charlotte Salt, Johannes Kuhnke, Christian Hillborg, Elliot Levey</i><br />
<i>Country: UK</i><br />
<i>Year of release: 2017</i><br />
<i>Reviewed from: preview screening</i><br />
<i>Website: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/TheChamberMovie">www.facebook.com/TheChamberMovie</a></i><br />
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The premise of <i>The Chamber</i> is beautifully simple: four people trapped in a mini-submarine. Water is seeping in, time is running out. It’s a scaled down <i>Lifeboat </i>with a ticking clock. It’s handled very well and is a cracking good tale founded on confident direction and a quartet of solidly impressive performances.<br />
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The pilot is Mats (Johannes Kuhnke), an experienced Swede working as part of the international crew on a South Korean vessel. The boat is near North Korea, just on the edge of international waters. The submarine, the <i>Aurora</i>, is a beat-up, third-hand old tin can. That seems reasonable. Brand new mini-subs are not cheap. Get a reconditioned one.<br />
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His three passengers are US Special Ops agents who have been winched onto the shop from a helicopter. The British Captain (David Horovitch, whose career stretches back to an episode of <i>The New Avengers</i>) has to give them what they want for political reasons that neither Mats nor the audience are privy to, and which frankly don’t matter. The important thing is that the <i>Aurora</i>, which normally carries two people, goes down below the waves at very short notice, with four people on board, one of whom has no idea where he’s going, what he’s doing or why. And the other three would prefer to keep it that way.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QO3-UKDcIAI/WJYqgOXDDzI/AAAAAAAAP6Y/R8-brydZ14MJP4NSPBuTmX636NOr7wcSgCEw/s1600/chamber-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QO3-UKDcIAI/WJYqgOXDDzI/AAAAAAAAP6Y/R8-brydZ14MJP4NSPBuTmX636NOr7wcSgCEw/s320/chamber-2.jpg" width="320" /></a>Of course what the Yanks are looking for is something American which shouldn’t be this close to North Korea. When they find it, they blow it up. And because they don’t retreat far enough away, and because the Aurora is an old underwater jalopy, this puts them in a bad situation.<br />
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Good news: the <i>Aurora </i>is in one piece. Bad news: the sub is upside-down. Good news: they’re all still alive. Bad news: one of the crew has been badly injured. Good news: they are only 300m down. Bad news: they have no way to contact the mother vessel. Good news: they have plenty of air. Bad news: water is leaking in. Good news: there are evac suits on board. Bad news: there are only two.<br />
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Yeah, that’s pretty much the balance sheet right there.<br />
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The lead Special Ops agent is Red (Charlotte Salt: <i>Casualty</i>, <i>The Hoarder</i>), who is a serious, no-nonsense operative, utterly dedicated to her work. The mission comes first. End of. The other two are Denholm (Elliot Levey: <i>Florence Foster Jenkins</i>), a quiet, studious, techie guy and Andy (Christian Hillborg: <i>The Bridge</i>), a more aggressive, intolerant type who nonetheless has an emotional core because he’s the only one of the four with a child, whom he obviously wants to see again.<br />
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Over the next hour or so, the sub’s crew explore their options. Not in a calm, let’s-think-about-this sort of way but in an understandably tense, anxious and at times violent way. All the while, the water is steadily rising, the cruellest and most terrifying of ticking clocks.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fgXJis5x1Bw/WJYqiFlxO1I/AAAAAAAAP6g/sTZjQDLyE8IK9ana24IzAo8IZ-CHe4dawCEw/s1600/CHAMBER_Quad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fgXJis5x1Bw/WJYqiFlxO1I/AAAAAAAAP6g/sTZjQDLyE8IK9ana24IzAo8IZ-CHe4dawCEw/s400/CHAMBER_Quad.jpg" width="400" /></a>Despite having played at both Frightfest and Grimmfest, <i>The Chamber</i> is not obviously a horror movie, though it is very much being marketed as one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s scary because these four people are pretty much guaranteed to drown, or possibly die from the bends in an escape attempt, and that’s assuming they don’t kill each other first. But it’s the tension, rather than the fear, which underlies the story and, marketing aside, I would have classed this as a thriller. But it’s being sold as a British horror film – and it will certainly keep horror film fans happy – so onto the master list it goes.<br />
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Ben Parker, who made an equally tense horror short called <i>The Shifter</i> in 2011, does a frankly terrific job of keeping the viewer’s attention despite the limited cast and single location, evidently aided by a top crew. Byron Broadbent (<i>Basement</i>, <i><a href="http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/resurrecting-street-walker.html">Resurrecting ‘The Street Walker’</a></i>) and Greg Shaw (much TV comedy including <i>Summer in Transylvania</i> and <i>Sorry, I’ve Got No Head</i>) are jointly credited with production design and I suspect their work will shine in the Making Of when this hits DVD. The sheer practicalities of creating a cramped, flooded set that allows enough movement of actors and camera boggles my mind. You can’t have fly-away walls if it’s waist-deep in water, so how was it done?<br />
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Props also to cinematographer Benjamin Pritchard (<i>The Ghoul</i>) who does a corking job on lighting the set from believable light sources. And Will Gilbey’s editing should win some sort of award. Once they’re underwater, I think the film proceeds in pretty much real time. I’m struggling to think whether there were any ellipses or lacunae in the narrative, but it doesn’t really matter because the point is that the water keeps rising inexorably and it all fits together. Gilbey is a very experienced horror cutter of course, having also edited <i>The Tapes, The Borderlands</i> and <i>A Lonely Place to Die</i> (which he co-wrote with his brother).<br />
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<i>The Chamber</i> was shot in Cardiff in May 2015 with Lottery funding from Ffilm Cymru Wales. It premiered at Frightfest in August 2016 with a UK theatrical release in March 2017.<br />
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One final name I must mention is the composer. I rarely discuss film soundtracks on account of having no musical knowledge (or ear) but it’s very much worth noting that this film’s cracking score is by James Dean Bradfield. I’m a big fan of the Manic Street Preachers and he doesn’t disappoint as he joins the <a href="http://british-horror-revival.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/eight-pop-stars-who-wrote-soundtracks.html">list of pop stars who have scored British horror films</a>.<br />
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Tense, taught and ultimately terrifying, <i>The Chamber</i> is definitely worth seeking out.<br />
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<i>MJS rating: A-</i>MJ Simpsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14693505217543976719noreply@blogger.com0