Rock'n'Roll Frankenstein

Director: Brian O’Hara
Writer: Brian O’Hara
Producer: Sean O’Hara
Cast: Jayson Spence, Graig Guggenheim, Barry Feterman, Hiram J Segarra
Year of release: 1999
Country: USA
Reviewed from: VHS screener

There have been some damn strange takes on Mary Shelley’s tale over the years, variants that would make even her liberal eyes pop out of their sockets, which just goes to show how universal and adaptable the Frankenstein story is. But few have been as far from the original - or as entertaining - as Brian O’Hara’s Rock’n’Roll Frankenstein.

Cigar-toting music mogul Bernie Stein (Feterman) falls out once again with his latest signing and decides that what he really needs is a pop star that he can control completely. He needs to build one for himself. Fortunately, he has his nephew Frankie (Spence) on hand, replete with well-equipped Mad Scientist Lab, necrophiliac tendencies and stoned, oddball assistant named (great touch!) Iggy (Segarra).

Iggy and accomplices are sent out to raid the cemeteries of the world for parts of deceased rock giants which Frankie can then patch together into what will surely be the ultimate rocker. They get Jimi Hendrix’s hands, Buddy Holly’s feet, Elvis’ head - finally all that’s missing is, well, a schlong. Who else’s could they use but Jim Morrison’s legendary trouser snake, apparently preserved in a jar in a bizarre collection of such things? But, in the grand tradition of useless assistants, Iggy drops the jar and grabs another one instead, belonging to someone called Ace. Unfortunately, that’s ‘Liber’ Ace!

The resultant creation, known as simply ‘The King’ (Guggenheim), is a triumph of the unholy arts and is trained to be a rock star. Gradually his fame takes off, but he does seem to prefer the piano to the guitar. Worse than that, he prefers men to women! Confused and scared, the King tries to make it with chicks but instead starts hearing voices - voices from down there.

Of course, Uncle Bernie is only interested in making money from The King, while Frankie is distracted by his, um, tendencies - and Iggy is still zonked out of his skull. This would be a touching, sad story of loneliness and confusion - if it wasn’t so funny. In an era when even mainstream films are attempting to gross-out their audiences, many film-makers have forgotten that grossness alone isn’t enough. Grossness has to be presented with intelligence, even wit, to actually be funny, and that’s where Rock’n’Roll Frankenstein scores.

This is not a film for the easily offended, but nor is it just mindless stupidity. Written, directed and produced with care and skill, R’n’R Frankie is laugh-out-loud funny while retaining the core element that makes the Frankenstein myth such an enduring tale. A largely neophyte cast are excellent, playing the comedy straight and thereby making it all the funnier; special mention to Segarra who makes Iggy, potentially a one-note stoner, into a fully realised, sympathetic character. Hugely enjoyable, deeply politically incorrect (good!) and highly recommended, this is a film that everyone should see at least once.

Rock’n’Roll Frankenstein was released as a Collector’s Edition DVD from EI Independent Cinema, including a ‘making of’ featurette and commentary from O’Hara and friends.

MJS rating: A
Review originally posted 7th December 2004.

Totem

Director: “Martin Tate”
Writer: "Benjamin Carr"
Producer: Kirk Edward Hansen
Cast: Marissa Tait, Jason Faunt, Tyler Anderson
Year of release: 1999
Country: USA
Reviewed from: R1 DVD

Totem has three sets: the inside of a cabin, the outside of a cabin and a very tiny cemetery. It has six young, largely unknown actors. And it runs a grand total of 57 minutes (or 68 if you include the opening and closing credits). This is a small film in every sense.

The basic premise is brilliantly simple and surprisingly reminiscent of The Exterminating Angel in places. Six youngsters who don’t know each other find themselves in an isolated cabin. Each has the same story to tell: they felt a sudden, inexplicable compulsion to stop whatever they were doing (lunch, sex, automobile repairs) and get to the cabin by any means possible. None of them know where they are, none of them have told anyone where they were going (because they didn’t know, obviously) and each of them knew that there would be six people in total.

Alma (The Bold and the Beautiful star Marissa Tait) is the last to arrive. Paul (Jason Faunt, a sort of low-rent Brad Pitt who was the Red Ranger in Power Rangers Time Force) takes it upon himself to introduce the others: Len (Eric W Edwards), Robert (Tyler Anderson: Microscopic Boy), Tina (Alicia Lagano: All About Us) and Roz (Sacha Spencer: Spy High). Len makes sexist comments about the girls and Robert is brooding and mysterious but that’s about as far as the detailed characterisation goes.

The five kids already present have each made an attempt to leave the cabin and found that they can’t - they just can’t get further than about a hundred feet before grinding to a halt. This is described as a ”magical, invisible wall” but it’s not like a force field, it’s just that their movements slow down and stop, like walking through mud. Alma has a try anyway and discovers that there is one path away from the cabin, down through the woods to a mysterious (and very small) cemetery, replete with mysterious (and very small) gravestones and wooden crosses.

And here they find the ‘totem’ of the title, except that it’s not like any totem pole that I, or they, (or anyone) has ever seen. It’s basically a stone column, square in cross section and about two meters high. In one side are three box-like recesses which house three very European-looking statues, each about 18 inches to two feet in height. The four-minute opening title sequence included numerous shots of these things moving slightly or their eyes glowing so it should come as no surprise that they somehow become animated later in the picture.

After all, this is a Full Moon movie, executive produced by Charles Band, and what would a Charlie Band film be without some killer dolls?

Tina is the first of the group to die, killed by something mysterious while she and Paul are alone in the fog-enshrouded cemetery. When her corpse, laid out on a table back at the cabin, starts spouting some ancient Native American language, Robert is somehow able to translate it - he can’t explain how - and from this the nature of the curse which has fallen on the youngsters is decoded. (Robert is supposedly Native American, and recognisably so, giving rise to an argument with Paul in which he makes it clear that, despite his heritage, he knows nothing about any tribe other than his own and he knows almost nothing about that one. It’s an interesting angle on a stereotypical situation which is let down by only a couple of points: Tyler Anderson looks about as Native American as I do, and he plays this role with an accent which most closely resembles Swedish...)

The basic premise of Totem, as here presented, is actually a pretty neat set-up: three of these people are destined to kill the other three but there is no indication of who may be victim or (unwitting) killer and the only way to ensure one does not become the former is to take action and become the latter. That’s a really interesting psychological/supernatural concept which could be milked for real tension on a low budget, especially as the cabin where the sextet are imprisoned is devoid of food (although it does have a 19th century Bible which holds some clues).

Unfortunately, this subplot gets mixed up with the other one that we were all expecting as the three mini-statues come to life and attack. It’s never entirely clear - not to the characters and certainly not to the audience - whether the statues are implicit in the murders or whether the murders are bringing the statues to life after the fact. There is a curious couple of minutes late in the film when an uncredited male voice recites a load of vague and incomprehensible stuff about the origin of the totem, playing over a montage of clips from old Viking movies (no one film in particular, the footage all comes from a compilation of public domain trailers). This does rather look like padding, suggesting the original cut of the film was even shorter than this one.

Then, shortly before the end of the movie, there is a surprisingly clever bit of plotting which turns the whole story (the curse one, not the killer dolls one) on its head. Unfortunately, this is followed by the inexplicable and unnecessary appearance of a couple of dodgy-looking zombies which rather deflate things.

I really, really don’t know what to make of Totem. The movie is competently directed by a pseudonymous David DeCoteau and photographed by the prolific Howard Wexler (a DeCoteau regular whose lengthy CV includes Phoenix 2, Legend of the Mummy 2, Voodoo Academy, Leather Jacket Love Story and second unit on Puppet Master II, Spiders II and Revenant). But the script by Neal Marshall Stevens (Hellraiser: Deader, Thir13en Ghosts) under his regular Full Moon pseudonym 'Benjamin Carr' (Frankenstein Reborn!, Zarkorr! The Invader, Kraa! The Sea Monster, Hideous! - and a number of films without exclamation marks in their titles) from a story by Band just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Some of the individual scenes are actually pretty good and effective, including those exploring the mysterious inability of the occupants to depart which could so easily have been a laughably transparent piece of convenient plotting, but they never begin to gel into a cohesive plot. And with less than an hour of actual running time, they are never given the chance.

The cast all perform adequately. Tait and Faunt seem to be the nominal leads; they are the only two of the six with more than a handful of ultra-obscure credits and had previously worked together for DeCoteau on the first Witchouse film. Producer Kirk Edward Hansen has made about three dozen pictures for Band, from 1992’s Seed People through to 2001’s Train Quest (The Dead Hate the Living was, curiously, dedicated to his memory the year before). He seems to have started out as assistant to Band’s own gloriously named assistant, Bennah Burton-Burtt, and progressed through production assistant, production manager, co-producer and line-producer until eventually becoming a full-blown producer. Most of his credits seem to overlap with Benjamin Carr’s, including Frankenstein Reborn! and Voodoo Academy.

The music is provided by Richard Kosinski whose genre credits include vampire pictures (the Subspecies series), Celtic kid-fantasy (Leapin’ Leprechauns! I and II), Italian shorts (Langliena) and sasquatch movies (erm, Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw). Production design is by Helen Harwell (Hybrid, The Dentist 2) and the costume designer - not that there are too many costumes to design - is Edward Hibbs (The Brotherhood I and II, Final Stab, Leeches!). The most notable monicker in the credits however is post-production supervisor Eric Cartman (also credited as accountant on Hell Asylum) who is either an unsubtle pseudonym or a very unfortunately named individual who probably loathes South Park with a vengeance.

Special effects duties are shared between Christopher Bergschneider (Vampire Journals, The Halfway House, Decadent Evil) and Jeffrey S Farley (Scanner Cop II, Babylon 5, Deep Freeze). The usual 15-minute Videozone ‘making of’ (directed, I believe, by an uncredited Dave Parker) shows some behind-the-scenes shots which give much clearer views of the three killer statues than there are in the film. This is our only chance to see that the puppets had some limited degree of movement (rod and cable controlled) as their attacks in the film are so frenetically edited as to eradicate any chance of seeing the inanimate become animate. Such editing may well be to disguise the puppets’ limitations, I suspect.

Totem is available on its own and also on a double-bill disc paired with Jigsaw, which is the version that I watched. There is also a trailer for the film on this disc, including a full-frontal shot of a zombie which we never see clearly in the actual film. The Videozone featurette kicks off with Charles Band plugging Retro Puppet Master and promising that the following year (2000) would bring not only Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (eventually produced by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2004 with Band unattached and receiving only a courtesy credit) but also Subspecies V (still unproduced).

MJS rating: C

The Ugliest Woman in the World

Director: Miguel Bardem
Writer: Nacho Faerna
Producer: Francisco Ramos
Cast: Roberto Álvarez, Javivi, Elia Galera
Country: Spain
Year of release: 1999
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Nucleus Films)

I saw La Mujer Más Fea del Mundo at Fantasporto in 2000 (where it won the Silver Mélies) but it has taken five years or so to make it to Britain as one of the first releases from Marc Morris and Jake West’s Nucleus Films label.

On New Year’s Eve 2010, police detective Teniente Arribas (Roberto Álvarez: Nos Miran, Between Your Legs) sits alone in his Madrid apartment watching a movie about spaceships (a clever bit of misdirection which briefly fools us into thinking that this sci-fi movie is going to be something else entirely). Shortly after midnight he is called to the scene of a particularly gruesome murder in an old people’s home, where he meets up with Sergeant Pelayo (‘Javivi’ - aka Javier Gil Valle: Los Lobos de Washington).

What could become a simple Euro-cop movie set in the near future becomes more involved when we (reasonably swiftly) discover that the prime suspect is the mysterious and glamorous Lola Otero (Elia Galera, later a presenter on the Spanish version of Pop Stars). A few years earlier this statuesque beauty had appeared from nowhere and become a regular feature on magazine covers as she dated and became engaged to Spain’s most eligible bachelor, Luis Casanova (Alberto San Juan also in Between Your Legs and Los Lobos de Washington plus comedy horror flick Cosa de Brujas) - until he was discovered to be having an affair with that year’s Miss Spain.

After the Casanova wedding, Lola disappeared from society and the happy couple were discovered murdered.

Through flashbacks to Lola’s childhood we discover her dark secret: she was born hideously, hideously ugly - bad enough to make people vomit when they saw her. Teased mercilessly by her schoolfriends who nicknamed her ‘the Malaysian foetus’(!), but befriended by a blind nun, she became understandably embittered. But help was at hand in the shape of Dr Werner (Héctor Alterio: Scarab, Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and Blood) whose revolutionary and controversial treatment transformed the ugly girl into the beauty who graced the society pages. However, Lola requires regular injections of Werner’s genetics-altering drug to remain as she is.

As Arribas and Pelayo investigate the case further they discover that the latest murder is one in a series, some previously recorded as fatal accidents, and that all the victims are former Miss Spains. The film climaxes at that year’s pageant with the cops trying to figure out which of the girls is the killer in disguise.

A very funny near-future black comedy, The Ugliest Woman in the World suffered slightly from unfair comparison by being released around the same time as the Sandra Bullock starrer Miss Congeniality which has a similar plot to this film’s final act (without the SF elements). Arribas and Pelayo make an appealing double act and the latter supplies a subplot; when we first meet him he has come from a fancy dress party where he was ‘Clark Gable’ and met a very lovely lady lion tamer who subsequently turns out to have a secret.

The actual SF elements of the movie are slim but essential to the plot. Young Lola’s face is always kept hidden and it is only right at the end that we get to see her in all her hideous glory. Though this scene is a triumph of prosthetics and bladder effects, augmented by a little CGI, the finished result can never live up to the ugliness that we have been promised because nothing could.

Thoroughly enjoyable, wickedly comic and unashamedly Spanish, Ugliest Woman is a smashing movie which, like so many other recent European genre movies, has been unfairly ignored internationally. It’s great to see it finally made available in the UK, nicely packaged with some great extras as one would expect from Nucleus.

The cast also includes Saturnino Garcia (Acción Mutante, Rojo Sangre), Ramón Barea (Acción Mutante, La Madre Muerte), Alicia Agut (Almodovar’s The Flower of My Secret) and Luis Ciges (The Dracula Saga, Vengeance of the Zombies, Horror Rises from the Tomb, House of Psychotic Women, The Vampires’ Night Orgy, Night of the the Seagulls, Island of the Damned, Human Beasts - blimey!). Quite a number of the actors were also in Alex de la Iglesia’s La Communidad and/or The Day of the Beast. The uncredited actor seen briefly on TV as the President of Spain is Santiago Segura (Blade II, Beyond Re-Animator, Hellboy and, erm, Killer Barbys). Reyes Abades is one of the credited special effects men; his extraordinary CV includes Abre los Ojos, Tesis, The Devil’s Backbone, Tie Me Up! Time Me Down!, The House of Bernardo Alba, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Rowing in the Wind and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom.

MJS rating: B+

Wild Zero

Director: Tetsuro Takeuchi
Writers: Tetsuro Takeuchi, Satoshi Takaki
Producers: Tetsuro Takeuchi, Kaichie Furata
Cast: Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, Drum Wolf, Masashi Endo
Year of release: 1999
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: advance UK DVD (Artsmagic)

This is mighty crazy rock’n’roll zombie jet movie super ace, yes? Yes, very much so indeed OK!

Wild Zero has no pretensions. It is not great art, not great cinema, it is simply unadulterated fun, filled with zombies, guns, motorbikes and constant cries of “Lock’n’loll!” It’s bonkers and it’s brilliant.

Guitar Wolf are a (real) three-piece Japanese band who play Ramones-esque punk rock. The three members are called Guitar Wolf (who rides a souped-up motorbike), Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf (who follow him in a car). All three are deeply cool - all quiffs and leather jackets - though there is a wonderfully understated subtext in this film that Bass and Drum both think Guitar is faintly embarrassing.

Anyway, we kick off with an enormous fleet of golden flying saucers heading for Earth, a fairly blatant crib from Mars Attacks!, and we see Guitar Wolf’s biggest fan, Ace (Masashi Endo, who does the voice of Scorpos in the original Japanese version of Beast Wars) grooving away at one of their gigs. Ace wanders into a tense, armed stand-off between Guitar and a crooked promoter named Captain (Makoto Inamiya: Zero Woman Returns) and in return for his help is given a whistle that will summon the band whenever he is in trouble.

Shortly afterwards, Ace stops his small motorbike at a service station where he accidentally foils a hamfisted hold-up and meets a cute girl named Tobyo (Kwancharu Shitichai). Further down the road he comes across a bunch of zombies attacking a yakuza boss and roars back to the service station to rescue Tobyo before she suffers the same fate. Ace summons Guitar Wolf, and also mixed up in the action are a geeky young couple who were two-thirds of the attempted hold-up team, and a sexy arms dealer who has the most extraordinary arsenal of automatic weaponry (the yakuza boss was on his way to meet her when the zombies attacked).

There is no real attempt at explaining the zombies. Presumably it is connected in some way with the golden UFOs which reappear briefly at the end before being defeated by a sword(!), but there is also talk of a crashing meteorite. In fact, there’s not much attempt to explain anything. What there is, is hordes of zombies in pretty good make-up and subjected to plenty of highly enjoyable digital head-exploding effects. And fast cars, motorbikes and the occasional Humvee. And leather jackets, quiffs and lock’n’loll!

To add to the chaos, the enraged (and injured) Captain tracks down the band - and Tobyo reveals a rather surprising secret. There is also a significant, if somewhat unexpected, plea for tolerance and love

Wild Zero is a hilarious, nonsensical ride through sci-fi and rock’n’roll cliches with its tongue not so much in its cheek as ripped out and waved around. It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s gory, it’s sexy, it’s crazy and somehow - don’t ask me how - it all works.

Grab yourself a slice of Wild Zero now, say goodbye to all your critical faculties, and wallow in an hour and a half of LOCK’N’LOLL ZOMBIE JETU MOVIE!!!! Yes!!!

MJS rating: A-

Nang Nak

Director: Nonzee Nimibutr
Writer: Nonzee Nimibutr
Producer: Visute Poolvaralaks
Cast: Indhira Jaroenpura, Winai Kraibutr
Year of release: 1999
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: HK VCD (Ocean Shores Ltd)

I had heard good things about Nang Nak: I knew it had won some prizes and I was very impressed with Nonzee Nimibutr’s contribution to Three, so this was a film I went looking for.

The story, based on an ancient Thai legend, is very simple. Mak (Thai heartthrob Winai Kraibutr: Snaker, Krai Thong, The Hotel!, Kaew Kon Lek) and Nak (19-year-old Indhira Jaroenpura) are a young couple, split up when Nak is called up to fight in a war. He is almost killed but nursed back to health by monks. Nak was pregnant when her husband left and she gives birth while he is away, not knowing whether he is alive or dead, but she has sworn to wait for him.

Eventually, Mak returns to their little house beside the river, away from the village and there is a tearful reunion with his wife and their baby Dang. But why do the villagers, including his best friend Um (Pracha Thawongfla), shun Mak? The answer, as shown in a flashback, is that on the stormy night when Nak went into labour, she died. Nak and Dang are both ghosts.

This is a heart-wrenchingly sad and romantic, as well as occasionally scary, movie. Nak has no reason to think that his beautiful wife is anything other than normal, and he rejects attempts by Um and others to persuade him that he is living with ghosts. Nak is feared throughout the village and people are dying through her supernatural intervention. One group wants to burn her house down, while others are bringing in an exorcist (rather unfortunately called a ‘ghost banister’ in the generally okay subtitles - that could be a corruption of ‘ghost banisher’ or ‘ghostbuster’!).

But Nak isn’t evil, just dead. She has sworn to stay with her husband and her only crimes are loyalty and love that reach from beyond the grave. The film culminates not in the usual magical battle between good and evil but in a goodbye scene between two tragic lovers, just as it started, but with even less hope of salvation. Along the way, there are some horrific images, from the mutilated bodies of Mak’s regiment to a desiccated old woman’s body being eaten by lizards. One of the few major special effects sequences is a dream when Mak sees his comrade Prig crumble and die, which only just works, suggesting that Nimibutr was well-advised to concentrate on horror that emanates from character and situation.

On the basis of this and Three, there’s no doubt in my mind that Nimibutr is the hottest Thai director at the moment, especially as he was also producer of Tears of the Black Tiger, the first populaist Thai film to get UK theatrical distribution since, well, probably ever. What is particularly gratifying is that his work is true to its origins. He’s not imitating western or Japanese cinema but making genuinely Thai films that explore the feelings and fears of people living in the Thai countryside. The forests and rivers of Thailand are as much a part of his work as the people. The limited settings of this film don’t give cinematographer Nattawut Kittikhun much of a chance to shine however, although the night-time scenes are well handled.

Unfortunately this Hong Kong VCD (in Thai with Chinese and English subs) is lousy quality, an overly dark transfer with far, far more and worse artefecting than I have ever seen on a disc before, which distracts from the film. Maybe I should have invested in the DVD. The work of production designer Ek Eiamchurn (who conceived the story with Nimibutr and scriptwriter Wisid Sartsanatieng) and art directors Akkadej Kaewhod and Ratchanon Kayunngan is severely hampered by the poor image quality, although Pakawat Waiwittaya and Chatchai Pongprapapun’s evocative music is unaffected.

The biggest loss however is a crucial scene when Mak sees his wife reach through the floorboards of their house-on-stilts, stretching her arm to retrieve something several feet below, which finally proves to her horrified husband that she is a supernatural entity. I only know this scene is included because other reviews mention it. On the Ocean Shores VCD it’s completely impossible to tell what Mak is looking at.

There is a movie called Nang Nak Part 2, as yet unavailable with subtitles, but it seems to have no direct connection with this one. Unfortunately the website at www.nangnak.com appears to have been taken down but the Thailand Life website has some useful info about the legend which has been filmed more than twenty times. Nonzee Nimibutr’s version was a massive domestic hit, grossing more at the Thai box office than Titanic, and has been rightly compared to The Sixth Sense in terms of not just its serious, thoughtful, character-led approach to horror but also its enormous success with both audiences and critics. Nang Nak won four awards at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival; Nimibutr took home the Golden Elephant from the Bangkok Film Festival as well as scooping a prize at Rotterdam.

Kraibutr and Jaroenpura are the only two cast members credited in the English opening titles. The rest of the cast includes Manit Meekaewjaroen and Montree Katekaew as priests, and also Pramote Suksatit, Patchariya Nakboonchai and the gloriously named Boonsong Yooyangyeng.

So - who is Nonzee Nimibutr? Born in 1962, he was raised by his grandmother after his parents abandoned him. When he was 17 his mother re-entered his life and told him to become an engineer but instead he studied Audiovisual Communication at the University of Silpakorn alongside Wisid Sartsanatieng (aka Wisit Satsanatieng) with whom he would later collaborate. Nimibutr made his name as a director of TV ads and music videos, working for a company called Music Train for four years before founding his own company, Buddy Film and Video Productions in 1988. To date he has directed more than 180 commercials and more than 70 videos.

In 1997 he moved into feature directing with 2499 Anthaphan Khrong Mueang (various spellings exist!) which was well received at festivals under its English title Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters, but more importantly it was a massive domestic hit and is generally credited with kickstarting modern Thai cinema. The records set by Dang Bireley were then broken by Nang Nak, which was Nimibutr‘s second feature and raked in 150 million bhat at the box office, equivalent to 3.9 million US dollars. Nimibutr has also directed for Thai television, receiving a Gold Award for the miniseries Monday Short Story.

As a producer, Nimibutr oversaw Bangkok Dangerous, the award-winning first film from Danny and Oxide Pang who went on to make the international smash The Eye. He also gave his old friend Wisid Sartsanatieng, who had written the screenplays for Dang Bireley and Nang Nak, his first directing job. The result was the internationally acclaimed Tears of the Black Tiger, possibly the first ever Thai western.

Nimibutr was credited as co-producer on Tanit Jitnukul’s war epic Bangrajan - a sort of Thai Braveheart - in 2000 and also produced the 2001 romantic comedy Monrak Transistor, directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. That same year he returned to directing with the controversial erotic drama Jan Dara, the first production from his new company Cinemasia, which was based on an infamous 1966 novel. Even though Nimibutr himself was by then sitting on the Thai Film Censorship Board, the film still had to be trimmed before its domestic release. Last year he directed ‘The Wheel’, the Thai contribution to the three-way co-production Three, and he is now reportedly at work on a movie set in a monstery called Mai Hed Prated Thai (which translates as something akin to ‘Footnote, Thailand’).

Nimibutr is divorced with one daughter, born in 1995. There is a January 2000 interview with him, conducted by Canadian film-maker and festival organiser Mitch Davis (Divided Into Zero), in the excellent FAB Press book Fear Without Frontiers.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 15th February 2007

Kingdom

Director: Kenneth D Barker
Writer: Kenneth D Barker
Producer: Kenneth D Barker
Cast: Simon Kirk, Manouk Vandermeulen, Andy Moore
Year of release: 1999
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK VHS
Website: www.wotr.co.uk

Kenneth Barker’s ambitious debut feature is a children’s film which tells us three things we didn’t know about dragons: they’re real; they’re invisible; and they live in Leeds city centre.

A prologue set 2000 years ago sees beardy chieftains Duretus (bad) and Vortigern (good) sent to sleep by two glowing entities called Necrellians, but Duretus somehow wakes up in 1789 and promptly imprisons Vortigern, who is ‘the Keeper.’

Scoot forward to 1999 and we meet accountant Troy Franklin, who wears a suit but has long hair and a beard. He is sent by his oddball bosses to investigate a wealthy financial partner named Mr Duretus, in the grounds of whose stately home he encounters trespassing oddball amateur scientist Aristotle Wood and his children Spartacus and Ophelia. Aristotle is looking for ‘cryptomorphs,’ for which read dragons.

Duretus, in order to take over the whole of Britain using a frozen army kept in the 2,000-year-old cellar of a Leeds office block, has to eliminate the few remaining dragons, and to this end calls in a dragon hunter, Mademoiselle Celine. Armed with an outrageous French accent, a dwarf sidekick in a bowler hat, and a sophisticated telescope, she sets out to hunt down the five remaining dragons, known as War, Wisdom, Vanity, Greed and Naivetë. Aristotle and Troy rescue Vortigern and brace themselves to defeat Duretus.

For a kids’ film, the script is pretty complicated, and the two youngsters have relatively little to do, though that’s fair enough as eccentric Aristotle and incredulous Troy are the interesting characters. The acting, it must be said, is mostly no great shakes, though Simon Kirk plays Troy well, reacting with the right mix of cynicism and pity to those who believe in dragons until he meets Wisdom herself. Manouk Vandermeulen as Mlle Celine has the best part, hamming up a villainous role and making the most of her many costume changes (including one very odd moment when the film becomes a 1920s silent for a minute or two...). Graham Hughes is also excellent as her sidekick (who is revealed in the end credits to be called Ismail Beard); he looks and sounds remarkably like the late David Rappaport.

And what of the dragons? Well, they’ve been created on a desktop computer so don’t expect Jurassic Park, but they’re well animated and well-integrated with the backgrounds. Unfortunately they are mostly seen static in profile or head-on, which rather defeats the purpose of rendering them in 3D animation. The designs (by director Barker and Arif Majothi: The Witches Hammer) are interesting, especially War with his two pairs of wings, and the characterisations fit their names. However, they do need to be seen in terms of the film’s tiny budget (and the state of desktop animation a few years ago) - or through the eyes of a small child.

A tighter script and tighter editing would have helped. Dialogue is a little leaden, not helped by pauses between lines. Kids and adults alike would enjoy this more with more zip to the dialogue and, to be brutally honest, more wit. Mlle Celine is great fun in her pantomime way and some of Troy’s background reactions to Aristotle and Wisdom are priceless, but Vortigern and Duretus are bland characters with no real sense of mission or conflict.

Kingdom is an interesting curio and is recommended to fans of independent cinema interested in seeing what can be achieved on a tiny budget (£30,000 for the whole thing!), especially those fans with small children. Artistically it doesn’t achieve the standards that it reaches technically, but Barker and team are to be congratulated on their ambition and dedication. Why not take a chance on an independent British production which is trying to do something a bit different?

MJS rating: B-
review originally posted 17th December 2005

King Cobra

Directors: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Writers: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Producers: David and Scott Hillenbrand
Cast: Scott Hillenbrand, Pat Morita, Casey Fallo, Hoyt Axton
Year of release: 1999
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK TV screening

It takes a lot to make a Big Animal Movie that disappoints this reviewer. As a general rule of thumb, you can pick any animal you like, make it abnormally large, have it threaten a cast of unknowns and has-beens - and I’m as happy as Larry. But King Cobra is, unfortunately, a stinker.

An explosion in a research lab, caused by an over-zealous, drug-taking assistant, frees some snakes. These turn up much later outside a small town which is just about to hold its annual beer festival, on which its tenuous tourist trade depends. Once the existence of a giant snake is discovered, and before you can say “Jaws rip-off”, the mayor is demanding that the festival goes ahead, despite the number of people who will be camping in the woods and thus in great danger. And in another less-than-subtle steal from the 1975 classic, a group of completely useless, unsuitable hunters set off to hunt the thing with whatever weapons they can find.

The local sheriff (Fallo) and doctor (Hillenbrand, S) - who were an item but he’s about to leave town - team up with snake expert Nick Hashimoto (the always reliable Pat Morita) and track the thing down. But nothing makes any sense and set-pieces exist in their own right, without fitting into a coherent story, as when a couple of deputies are attacked in their car, and sit there radioing for help instead of - hey! - driving off...

The snake itself is sensibly kept off-screen for a long time, though when it appears it’s a not too bad creation by the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space). However, the budget clearly wouldn’t stretch to a snake that could actually attack people, so every single tussle happens just off-screen. There are also far, far too many POV shots which are supposed to be the snake but - goodness me - are actually just somebody else.

For some reason this cobra has a rattle, something not normally found in that species, and it’s well into the movie before this anomaly is explained as due to this snake being a cobra/rattler hybrid! (Or, more obviously, because a cobra by itself doesn’t make a scary, threatening noise.)

Rather than using the limitations of their obvious tiny budget, the Hillenbrand brothers exhibit them embarrassingly. A ‘crowd’ at an outdoor pop concert is clearly about two dozen people. There is also, for ‘name value’, an otherwise pointless cameo appearance by Erik Estrada as a massively camp marketing executive.

King Cobra has all the faults of a typical low-budget Big Animal Movie - but none of the charm, wit or fun that the subgenre usually exhibits.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted before November 2004

Junk

Director: Atsushi Muroga
Writers: Atsushi Muroga, JB Baker, Kuzuki Youko, Terao Emiko
Producer: Kurosu Isao
Cast: Nobuyuki Asano, Osamu Ebara, Kaori Shimamura
Year of release: 1999
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

Junk is a slice of low-budget zombie nonsense which is fast-paced and fun and contains some of the worst acting you’ll ever see. It has some clever bits, some clicheed bits and some very cheesy zombie make-up, but it all whizzes along at such a rate that it’s impossible to dislike.

Our opening scene sees Dr Kinderman (Richard Jones) and his assistant Sharon (credited on-screen as Debolar Joy Vinall, listed in most sources as Debra J Binarl) testing a drug called DBX that can reanimate the dead. Dr K injects the goop into a nude, female corpse, who to nobody’s surprise sits up and bites a lump out of his neck.

Our main protagonists are a quartet of aspiring crooks whom we meet as they rob a jewellery store. They are brash leader Jun (Nobuyuki Asano), man-hating Saki (Kaori Shimamura: Moon Angel), cowardly Akira (Osamu Ebara: Score) who gets stabbed in the foot, and making-up-the-numbers Kabu (Keishi Shigemura). With their haul of necklaces, they head for an empty factory to rendezvous with their employer, yakuza Ramon (a cracking performance by Tate Gouta).

But of course, this ‘empty factory’ is actually the industrial complex where Kinderman and his Japanese colleagues, in collaboration with the US military, were carrying out secret reanimation experiments, and it isn’t long before our gang run into a bunch of zombies (including Kinderman) and Jun is rather messily killed. Outside, they find Ramon and three goons who laugh at their tales of zombies, take the jewels without paying and then shoot Kabu. At which point a zombified Jun appears and chows down on one of the goons. After this, we’re into a free-for-all gangsters-vs-zombies chase’n’fight with Ramon and his other two goons eventually succumbing, but not before their automatic weaponry has shattered containers of DBX, spilling the contents all over some neatly stored corpses...

Into this mess come Sgt Davis (Patric/Patrick Jones) and Dr Takashi Nikada (Yuuji Kishimoto: Mechanical Violator Hikaida) who have been assigned to deal with the situation by Col. McGriff (Mark C Morehouse, not Moorehouse as credited on many sources). An attempt to remotely set the factory’s self-destruct system(!) failed when the three-minute countdown was replaced by the message ‘I Love You - K’ and a tinny, electronic rendering of ‘My Darling Clementine’, which strangely unnerves Dr Nikada.

The countdown was stopped by Nude Dead Girl Zombie from scene one, who looks very much alive, unlike the pasty-faced, rapidly decomposing, shambling hulks that now populate the building (including of course Jun, Ramon and the others). She turns out to be especially troublesome, togged up in a rubber mini-dress and thigh boots (which I guess she just, um, found somewhere). She has superhuman strength and agility, a tendency to turn her hair white to look scarier, and even chopping her in half doesn’t stop her. None of which makes a lot of sense but at least imparts some originality to a film which otherwise could have been made in Italy 20 years ago.

The Japanese acting is okay, but the American acting is truly terrible; in particular, Morehouse is staggeringly, hilariously bad. That’s because these aren’t actors at all, not even amateur ones: Morehouse, Jones and all the other Americans, including several of the zombies, actually are US marines stationed in Okinawa. And whereas Jones (who looks a bit like Ryan Stiles) is just a poor actor, speaking his lines in a flat monotone as he stares blankly ahead, Morehouse is that most awful thing - a bad actor who thinks he can act. Every word is misemphasised, every sentence broken halfway through, as he recites by rote what is frankly piss-poor dialogue anyway. Jesus, he’s bad!

Despite the presence of three Japanese writers and one American, the script here really isn’t up to much, though that doesn’t really matter with undead hoopla of this calibre. The zombie make-up and gore effects are cheap and cheerful, the photography and direction not bad.

Curiously, despite the fact that about a third of this film’s dialogue is in English (subtitled in Japanese), Artsmagic have chosen to subtitle the whole thing, laying English subs over the Japanese ones for these scenes. While that might be useful sometimes for Kishimoto, who speaks English with a very thick accent, it’s just puzzling for the American ‘actors’.

The film is the expected nice, widescreen transfer and includes some of the best extras so far on an Artsmagic release. There are trailers for this film, Evil Dead Trap and Uzumaki; the Junk trailer is in much worse shape than the film, but does include different dialogue and a shot from at least one unused scene. There are also a couple of dozen or so stills, Japanese video sleeves for a couple of Muroga’s other, very obscure films (his best known movie is Score) and the Japanese video sleeve for Junk with - very nice idea, this - translation of all the various text thereon. Oh, and bio-filmographies for the director and principal cast, courtesy of Yours Truly.

Junk is cheap, trashy, undemanding, very silly zombie/yakuza fun - I mean, who puts a self-destruct system in a factory? - and Mark C Morehouse has no idea how entertaining he really is...

MJS rating: C+

13th October 2006

The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu

Director: Andrew Coats
Writer: Andrew Coats
Producers: Hilary Evans, Vicky Konieczny
Cast: Steven Wren, James Bryce, Kulu
Country: UK
Year of release: 1999
Reviewed from: screener VHS

Fu Manchu was once a stock character of literature and, to some extent, cinema. Boris Karloff played the oriental mastermind and so did Christopher Lee, but in recent decades he has faded from sight. Scheming oriental masterminds determined to enslave the white race are not exactly politically correct. The last Fu Manchu feature was a Peter Sellers spoof in 1980 (directed by Piers Haggard). Since then there has been a Spanish comedy short in 1990 and this unjustifiably obscure gem.

Evocatively shot in black and white by cinematographer Martin Radich and featuring smashing Edwardian set design by Radich, producer Konieczny, Tom Gauld (who now draws comics) and Martin Sorensen, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu is both a loving homage to - and a cruel satire on - the novels of Sax Rohmer.

Sub-Holmesian Commissioner Nayland Smith (a terrific performance from Steven Wren), with his Watson-lite assistant Dr Petrie (James Bryce: Cry for Bobo) in tow, is on the trail of Fu Manchu, evil megalomaniac leader of the oriental cult known as Si-Fan. Only three other men, besides Smith, know the identity of Fu Manchu. One by one, Sir Crichton Davey (Jimmy Barbour), Sir Lionel Barton (Alan Jefferies) and Sir Gregory Hale (Michael Coats) are found dead by the duo. Nayland Smith concocts outlandish - but not silly - explanations for each death and tracks the culprit down to Limehouse.

Intercut with these scenes are meetings between three Whitehall mandarins (John Shedden - who was in The Mad Death and an episode of Z Cars - Alex Purves and John Somerville), discussing what they can do about Nayland Smith who, we gradually see, is in fact a paranoid racist. “It’s not just the Chinese,” he tells Petrie at one point. “It’s the Arabs, Gypsies, Negroes and Jews.” ‘Fu Manchu’ himself (Kulu) and his daughter (Linda Wan) are the innocent proprietors of a Limehouse laundry, represented by a magical set full of billowing white banners emblazoned with Chinese characters.

Where Andrew Coats’ script works so brilliantly is that he knows Sax Rohmer’s work and quotes liberally - and directly - from it, not least in Petrie’s narration. The film does not spoof, parody or lampoon Nayland Smith but cleverly hangs him by his own petard. It’s a marvellous conceit which is brilliantly carried out. Which leaves me puzzled as to why this short is not better known. There are a handful of references on the web but no actual reviews or discussion. Let me change that now!

Andrew Coats now mostly works with community groups, making short films with young people. His only other credit as director seems to be his graduation film, which I believe was called Twelve. His collaborator Martin Radich actually won a BAFTA the year that this was made for a short documentary/drama, In the Memory of Dorothy Bennett. His other films include Such is Life, Sara, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Eric Redrobe.

Steven Wren has worked on stage in productions of Little Shop of Horrors, The Beggar’s Opera etc, was a baddie in an episode of Taggart, does voice-overs for BBC Scotland and is also a singer and choreographer. Much as I would like it to be the same guy, I suspect the 1st AD on Project: Shadowchaser 3 was a different Steven Wren - but you never know.

The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, meanwhile remains one of my favourite ever short films.

MJS rating: A+

review originally posted 10th May 2006

Hypnosis

Director: Masayuki Ochiai
Writers: Yasushi Fukuda, Masayuki Ochiai
Producers: Shibata Touru, Harada Toshiaki
Cast: Goro Inagaki, Miho Kanno, Ken Utsui
Year of release: 1999
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

This is a real horror movie. I mean horror. Not repulsion (although if you don’t say “Eurgh! Gross!” at least half a dozen times you’re not human) and not fright. Just real terror at what can happen to people.

Veteran actor Ken Utsui stars as Police Chief Sakurai, investigating three curious suicides which all occurred on the same day. Apart from all being bizarre deaths - an old man who jumps out of a window, a bridegroom who throttles himself and an athlete who literally runs herself to death - there is one other link. All the victims were heard to mention something about “the green monkey” before they died.

Sakurai teams up with a young psychoanalyst named Toshiya Saga (Goro Inagaki) who is convinced that the victims were all influenced by post-hypnotic suggestion. A TV hypnotist looks a likely suspect.

From this intriguing premise, the plot builds, and though it drags a little during the second act which is a bit too much police procedural, the final half hour will have you gasping for breath. There are some hideous deaths, depicted via some briefly-shown (but all the more effective for it) prosthetics and the occasional CGI effect. There’s a tense scene in a concert hall, which is astounding in its audacity but pulled off with aplomb - something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Naked Gun movie is here made genuinely gripping. And the finale - I won’t spoil it by saying whether the resolution is psychological, supernatural or science fictional (in fact I’m not entirely sure myself). But it’s terrific.

Director Ochiai (Parasite Eve) is a real artist with the camera - helped by cinematographer Osamu Fujiishi (Evil Dead Trap 2) and there are some beautifully framed shots: overhead, through doors, and a stunning play on the English word ‘terror’. A Kubrickian fondness for symmetry shows up occasionally, and in fact there’s a nod to A Clockwork Orange towards the end. Though the plot, based on a novel by Keisuke Matsuoka, is quite convoluted and confusing in places, it rattles along and never lets up.

A fantastic film, with the usual impeccable transfer from Artsmagic, though the extras aren’t up to much, with not even a trailer. Nevertheless, a mind-bogglingly good film which is wholeheartedly recommended. (The film’s US title is The Hypnotist and in Japan it's Saimin. The American Psycho-style image on the sleeve has no connection with the film.)

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 11th May 2005

House of the Damned

Director: Bosco Lam
Writer: Bosco Lam, Jessica Chan
Producer: Lee Siu Kay
Cast: Wan Tin Chiu, Teresa Mak, Chapman To, Law Lan
Year of release: 1999
Country: Hong Kong
Reviewed from: HK VCD (Universe)

Here’s a reasonably entertaining ghost story from the director of A Chinese Torture Chamber Story. Kiki and ‘Big Bust’ are two friends who move into a scuzzy but cheap bedsit, owned by a creepy, wheelchair bound old lady. What they don’t know is that the previous occupant was a prostitute who was raped by an invisible ghost then thrown out the window to her death.

Big Bust, being something of a naive bimbo, invites a self-proclaimed ghostbuster, Chow Tung, back to their room and consents to have sex to help ward off the ghost she senses there, but Chow Tung scarpers when he realises the room actually is haunted. Kiki, being a practising Christian, is unaffected by - and doesn’t believe in - ghosts.

The two girls are actresses, which gives us a chance to see them filming a horror movie. As they shoot a scene where they run from a hopping vampire (played by their nerdy friend Chak, who also claims to know about ghosts) who is in turn chased by a priest (played by Chow Tung), a driverless car hurtles towards them and Chow Tung is killed. Fortunately, despite Chak and Chow Tung’s bullshit, there is a genuine ghostbuster on hand - the unit driver, Chiu.

It turns out that, in a reversal of Psycho, the old lady keeps her son’s rotting body in the house. He committed suicide after being betrayed by his wife, and now his ghost punishes loose women.

For the most part, House of the Damned is a comedy, with topless female nudity and sex-mad nerds making it almost like Confessions of a Chinese Exorcist. The acting is passable, the direction workmanlike and the English subtitles barely literate, although the effects - largely limited to spooky lighting and handheld POV shots - are nicely effective. The last twenty minutes or so, in which Chiu and Chak attempt to save the girls, up the effects quotient and the tension, leading to a denouement which is both scary and fun.

MJS rating: B

review originally posted before November 2004

Camp Blood

Director: Brad Sykes
Writer: Brad Sykes
Producer: David Sterling
Cast: Jennifer Ritchkoff, Michael Taylor, Joe Hagerty
Country: USA
Year of release: 1999
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Film 2000)

From Film 2000, your sign of cheapo-cheapo crap, comes a film which even that label should be ashamed to release. Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe that we may have found a feature-length motion picture even worse than The Blair Witch Project.

Comparisons with The Blair Shit Project are inevitable. Both films involve a small group going into the woods, both were shot at least partly on cheap video tape, both cost about five bucks to make, both are as short on artistic talent as they are on technical skill and neither is even remotely scary or entertaining. Sadly, the makers of Camp Blood didn’t think to create a ludicrous hype around their film which would enable it to make a huge profit by having a strong opening weekend in each territory before being killed off by word of mouth.

No, these chaps just sold their film to a bargain basement video label and left it at that. And you know what? I don’t hate Camp Blood as much as I hate Blair Witch, because although it’s rubbish, I wasn’t the victim of a con. I expected a not very good film; maybe a tad better than this, but still my expectations were low. Also, although I have just wasted an hour and a half of my life, at least my only monetary outlay was a quid to a charity shop.

The story is formulaic in the extreme: five young people in an isolated situation being killed off one by one, the murderer being a non-speaking lunatic wearing a rubber mask and toting a machete. To see how this cliché can nevertheless produce a worthwhile film, check my review of The Pool. To find out how bad it can get, read on.

Steve (Michael Taylor: Lethal Seduction) and Tricia (Jennifer Ritchkoff, also in a David Mamet movie!) are the sensible couple. He owns a hunting knife, manufactured by his grandfather and handed down via his father, though it looks like it was bought yesterday. Jay (Tim Young: the actor who was in Scarecrow, not the carpenter who shares his Inaccurate Movie Database entry) and Nicole (Betheny Zolt: Alien Arsenal, Serum) are the slightly crazy ones. He loves to swear at people on his mobile phone, she goes hiking in a mini-skirt, both are prepared to make out at the drop of a hat.

In a prologue we see Sally (Meredith O’Brien) and Vic (Vinnie Bilancio, who wrote, directed and produced Azira: Blood from the Sand after handling both sound and cinematography on Stephanie Beaton’s Evil from the Bayou, and can also be seen in Things 3, Tales from the Grave, Witchcraft XI and Blood Gnome) out looking for a rare bird, the Aquarius anthropophagous. Sally recounts facts about this thing, of which there are “only a couple of hundred left in North America”, as if reading them from a text book. I have never ever met a birder who refers to birds by their scientific name in casual speech and, while the name may be a great in-joke for fans of old video nasties, anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of Greek knows that ‘anthropophagous’ means ‘man-eating’. So they’re looking for a man-eating bird. Good start.

At this juncture, and indeed on a few other occasions, it did cross my mind that Camp Blood might be a very silly spoof of crappy slasher movies. I eventually dismissed this theory on the grounds that I only laughed in about three places and I don’t think I was supposed to.

Anyway, Sally hears this bird midway through making out with Vic, and he promises to go and photograph it (even though he doesn’t seem to know what it looks like). While attempting to get a picture (using an SLR with a standard 50mm lens!), he comes face to face with a guy in a clown mask who kills him. And then attacks Sally.

We are introduced to Tricia as she reads a newspaper with the headline ‘Famous wildlife photographer killed’ rather inexpertly added by sticking a piece of white paper on the front page. Presumably this refers to Vic. Tricia recounts to Steve how a woman has gone missing (presumably this refers to Sally) at Camp Blackwood - which is where they are off to with their pals Jay and Nicole. From this we can surmise that Vic’s body has been found but not Sally’s. Subsequent events will suggest that no police investigation is happening around Vic’s death and that no-one is searching for Sally. Or possibly the film-makers just decided to forget about the prologue.

Actually, we do see Sally one more time. Two comedy relief hunters, Gus (Ron Ford, director of Dead Season) and George (Tim Sullivan, director of Eyes of the Werewolf), with only one rifle between them, find a blood-caked but still breathing Sally lying in a stream and are promptly decapitated by the Clown. Why did he not kill Sally straight off? Who knows? Who cares?

So anyway, Steve, Tricia, Jay and Nicole head off for Camp Blackwood. Soon they are in the middle of nowhere, with Jay unable to even get a signal on his mobile phone, and only the houses clearly visible through the car windows give doubt to the believability of their isolation. On a lonely road they encounter a mad old guy named Bromley Thatcher (Joe Hagerty: Deadly Scavengers, Witchcraft IX and XI) who warns them not to go to Camp Blood and, if they do, to beware of the Clown.

The quartet arrive at the campsite, identified by a wooden sign on which the word ‘blood’ has been painted over the word ‘Blackwood’, about an hour late and are annoyed to find that their guide, Harris, is not there. So they trudge off into the woods themselves. Here we see one of the many, many problems with this script, which can never decide what it wants to be. Are they going trekking in the uncharted woods, requiring a guide to avoid getting lost, or are they going to stay at a clearly marked location named Camp Blackwood? I don’t see how they can do both and, to be honest, they never look like they are more than about twenty yards from a main road.

Harris turns up and proves to be a girl (Courtney Taylor: Sins of the Night, The Dragon Gate) which annoys and surprises Jay even though he is the one who spoke with her on the phone. She carries no tent but the others have small bags and Nicole carries a large, impractical (but clearly empty) case. Nevertheless when they set up camp (“It’s getting dark,” observes Harris as the sun beats down from a cloudless sky) two tents appear from nowhere and later Steve turns out to have an acoustic guitar with him. It must be a spoof, surely...

Suddenly it is dark and our five characters are sat around a camp fire telling ghost stories. Harris recounts the tale of Stanley Cunningham (presumably an in-joke reference to Friday the 13th producer Sean S Cunningham) who discovered his girlfriend doing the nasty with some other fellow: we see this in flashback, with Ivonne Armant (allegedly Placido Domingo’s granddaughter!) as the girl, Randy Rice as the boy (a name so obviously pseudonymous that I wonder whether that is actually writer/director Brad Sykes) and the camera as Cunningham’s POV. Armant’s character is identified, incidentally, as ‘Mary Lou Maroney’ which is the character that Courtney Taylor played in Prom Night III.

As the narrated flashback continues, we see Cunningham, replete with clown mask, march the two lovers into the woods and kill them with a machete. Why is he wearing a clown mask? Who knows? Who cares?

After a night spent making out in their tents, the two couples awake to find Harris dead, her head and shoulders charred and unrecognisable in the remains of the camp fire. And so we come to what we were expecting all along which is a series of very tedious attacks by the Clown on the foursome, killing them off one by one.

The Clown is a pretty crappy killer, it must be said, with body language that suggests he has better things to do than make low budget horror films in the woods. He generally moves at a slow jog; faster than the Mummy but still easy to run away from. At one stage he threatens Steve who then chases him away, leading to a desperately unthrilling fight among some rocks, several of which have unexplained and unreadable white writing on them.

To comply with international law, there is a single female survivor (not too difficult to work out who that will be) who makes it back to the car where she encounters Thatcher, who initially tells her that the Clown is just a story made up by the locals to scare folk away (what locals? they are supposedly in the middle of nowhere) and then tries to kill her, assisted by the Clown who is unmasked as...

Well, frankly if you can’t work that one out, you’re living up a very tall tree. The Clown actor is credited as ‘Shemp Moseley’ (presumably a joint tip of the hat to the The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) and it is clearly not the actress (oops) who plays the named character under the mask, not least because with mask in place she is about a foot taller. In fact it would appear to be a role played by whoever was on set that day and didn’t have much to do.

A lengthy epilogue finds Tricia (oops) in a mental hospital (represented by a couple of white painted wooden flats) where the doctor, nurse and policeman talking to her are played by the actors who were Steve, Nicole and Jay. Once again, the script tries to cover two mutually exclusive bases. On the one hand Tricia is accused of murder because she did actually kill Thatcher and Harris (oops) and the authorities think she killed her friends too, but on the other hand the recasting of actors makes this a Caligari-esque framing story which means that everything else was in her head and nobody was really killed. Oh, and the Clown comes into her room with a machete as a final ‘shock’ that makes no sense whatsoever.

I don’t like to be overly critical and I try to find something good in everything but Camp Blood is dreadful. God bless Brad Sykes and his cast and crew for having the wherewithal to make a feature film but something like this should never be shown in public, let alone sold or rented for money. This is amateur hour, a home movie with pretensions, the Dad-can-I-borrow-the-camcorder school of film-making. I mean, good luck to Sykes and producer David Sterling for finding somebody who would distribute this, but shame on the person who paid good money for the rights.

Jeff Leroy is credited as cinematographer and editor; his other credits include Witchcraft XII, The Bagman, The Crawling Brain, Near Death and, as director, Hunting Season, The Witch’s Sabbath and Creepies I and II. But quite what he did with the photography on this film defies explanation. I have no objection to low-budget films shooting on video tape but this seems to have been shot on the cheapest tape possible and then given some bizarre ‘washing out’ of the colour that renders backgrounds almost monochrome and gives all the characters pale green skin. This is probably a result of the bargain basement 3D process that was used to film some or all of the film; apparently there is a stereoscopic version available in the USA though Christ only knows why anyone would want to add extra dimensions to this rubbish.

Film 2000’s video box manages to omit Leroy’s name from the credit block, listing Sterling as editor and DP and not citing a producer. Music is credited to somebody called ‘Clark Ely’ on the box which may or may not be the real name of the person/group named Ghost who gets the on-screen credit. Just to make the packaging special, the sleeve blurb changes from past tense to present tense halfway through. Apart from special effects artist Justin Nelson (The Coven) there are no other credits on screen or sleeve and I suspect that’s because no-one else worked on the film.

Producer Sterling was ultimately responsible for pretty much every film mentioned in this review so far. This was the first film from writer/director Sykes after a spell as an effects assistant on a couple of Brian Yuzna pictures (The Dentist II and Progeny) and another as production assistant on a couple of Charles Band films (The Killer Eye and Phantom Town). Incredibly, he followed this with Camp Blood 2 in which Ritchkoff returned as Tricia (just to confuse matters, the 3D version of the first film uses the sleeve artwork from the second one). However, he has since directed at least a dozen films which are not Camp Blood sequels, including B-Witched, Witchcraft XII, Demon’s Kiss, Scream Queen and Lord of the Vampires. Though I haven’t seen any of it, it’s reasonable to assume that his more recent stuff is better than this.

To be fair, it’s not badly directed and some of the acting is quite reasonable. But the characters are one-dimensional (even in 3D), the story makes no sense and the film piles cliché on cliché. It’s not as bad as The Blair Witch Project - nothing could ever be - and at least it doesn’t have pretensions of adequacy like, say, The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical. It’s just unremittingly cheap-looking and boring and pretty much guaranteed to disappoint anybody who buys or rents it.

MJS rating: D
review originally posted 13th September 2005