Sanctimony

Director: Uwe Boll
Writer: Uwe Boll
Producers: Uwe Boll, Shawn Williamson, Paul Colichman
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Eric Roberts, Michael Pare, Catherine Oxenburg
Year of release: 2000
Country: Germany/Canada
Reviewed from: Festival screening (Cannes 2000) and UK rental tape (Metrodome 2001)

Seattle detectives Renart and Smith (Michael Pare - Space Fury, Lunar Cop - and Jennifer Rubin: Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Little Witches, Last Lives) are on the hunt for a serial killer dubbed the ‘Monkey Maker’ by the press. So far he has killed an impressive 15 times(!): the first six had their eyes gouged out, the next six had their ears cut off, and the most recent three had their tongues cut out. That’s one sick puppy.

Meanwhile yuppie stock trader Tom Turner (the far, far too good-looking Van Dien: Starship Troopers, Sleepy Hollow, Revenant, Dracula 3000), who works in an extraordinary, ultra-modern, darkened office with only a bank of high-tech monitors and a telephone headset, is getting bored. He visits an underground fetish club where a select few can, in a back room, watch snuff movies being made. Renart has a tip-off about the snuff studio but arrives just too late to catch anything or anyone, so he returns to his heavily pregnant wife (Oxenburg, who is of course Mrs Van Dien in real life and played Princess Diana in at least two telemovies).

The Monkey Maker claims another victim, and this time there’s a witness - Tom Turner - whose story is full of obvious holes but who has a good lawyer. Despite being warned off by their boss (Eric Roberts: The Shadow Men, that Doctor Who TV movie), Renart and Smith investigate further into Turner’s world - but who is controlling the game? Them or him? Sanctimony builds to an extraordinarily nasty third act, which sees one of the main characters hideously murdered, another almost murdered in a staggeringly sadistic trick, another murder shown live on TV and a poetically filmed two-gun rampage in a restaurant.

It would be very easy (and lazy) to see this as a lower-budget spin on American Psycho, which came out around the same time, but the only similarity is that the killer is a yuppie, and we know his identity pretty much from the start. Sanctimony is a gripping detective thriller with a side order of serial killer horror; not a whodunnit but a willtheystophimfromdoingitagain? Boll had previously made a German serial killer movie, Run Amok, and subsequently directed the zombie-packed movie of the Sega game House of the Dead.

Also in the cast are David Millbern (Slumber Party Massacre, Deep Freeze), Crystal Lowe (Children of the Corn: Revelation), Dolores Drake (who was also in that Doctor Who TV movie) and Ken Camroux who has the bizarre claim to fame of having made two movies in 1999, both called Y2K.

A minor gem, Sanctimony is exciting, scary and highly recommended.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 3rd March 2005

Spiders

Director: Gary Jones
Writer: Stephen Brooks
Producers: Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner
Cast: Lana Parrilla, Josh Green, Mark Phelan
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: Festival screening (Cannes 2000)

Spiders holds a special meaning for me, as it was seeing this Nu Image movie at Cannes 2000 that led to my two interviews on British breakfast TV that week. It’s a very enjoyable giant bug romp and let’s face it, you simply cannot go wrong with giant bug movies. Even the bad ones are good and Spiders is actually a pretty decent movie.

Intriguingly, the publicity fliers distributed at Cannes carried a synopsis for a story entirely unrelated to the finished film, all about an Incan mummy and a ‘proton interferometer’. What actually happens is that a space shuttle crashes near a military base, releasing a spider which was being used in orbital experiments but has become mutated. The title Spiders is, incidentally, a bit of a misnomer as there’s only ever one spider - well, one at a time.

Lana Parrilla (Spin City) and Josh Green (Curse of the Puppet Master) are the young people investigating what’s going on, while Mark Phelan (who has a healthy career playing cops, doctors and security guards in the likes of MANTIS, Doctor Mordrid and 12:01) is the government agent opposing them. Some of the spider effects are, frankly, embarrassing, as hapless actors struggle with largely inanimate puppets like a 1950s Tarzan wrestling a rubber alligator. But stick with the movie, because once the spider becomes large enough to render in CGI it’s absolutely awesome! The giant arachnid rampages through the town, crushing cars and knocking down lamp-posts - that’s what we want to see!

Spiders has a decent script by Stephen Brooks (a former Visual Effects Supervisor who also wrote the otherwise unconnected Spiders 2) and is smoothly directed by Gary Jones, helmer of Mosquito (another giant bug romp), Crocodile 2 (another Nu Image nature-amok flick) and various Hercules and Xena episodes. Cinematographer Jack Cooperman was responsible for the underwater footage in Star Trek IV and also worked on Hill Street Blues. Also in the cast are Billy Maddox (Deep Freeze), Jack Ott (Night Wars) and Jonathan Breck who played the title role in Jeepers Creepers and its sequel.

The US DVD sleeve image has no discernible connection with what happens in this film.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 22nd May 2005.

They Nest

Director: Ellory Elkayem
Writer: John Claflin, Daniel Zelman
Producer: Frank Hildebrand
Cast: Thomas Calabro, Dean Stockwell, Kristen Dalton
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: Festival screening (Cannes 2000)

Ellory Elkayem must have a real love of bug movies. He first came to attention with a highly acclaimed short film about giant spiders, Larger Than Life, and is currently shooting another oversized octoped story, Arach Attack (later retitled Eight-Legged Freaks), for Devlin and Emmerich's Centropolis Entertainment. Inbetween, he made his feature debut with this smashing TV movie about killer cockroaches.

The little fellas in this case are an unpleasantly large and particularly nasty African species which turn up on an island off the coast of Maine. Not only are they killers, but they lay eggs inside their victims. Unfortunately the only person with a clue about what is going on is Dr Ben Cahill (Thomas Calabro: Chill), a man deeply distrusted by the rather inbred islanders as a 'summer home' interloper. Only the local teacher (Kristen Dalton) and the town sheriff (Dean Stockwell from Quantum Leap) are prepared to trust him.

In a subgenre which might seem to have been done to death, the script by John Claflin and Daniel Zelman finds new and clever ways to scare the heck out of the audience, mixing gross-out imagery with genuine tension and fear, while Elkayem's direction is far better than one would expect on such a minor title. Among a largely unknown cast, Stockwell is his usual reliable self, and Calabro does a great job of playing an outsider battling the dual threat of ignorant locals and deadly invertebrates.

They Nest (aka Creepy Crawlers, not to be confused with They Crawl aka Crawlers) delivers scares, shocks and squirms in equal measure. It won't ever be a cult classic, but it's well above average and shows that a committed director with a good script can inject new life into hokiest of cliches. And though the film is played seriously, watch out for the scene in the hamster maze - possibly the funniest spoof of Aliens ever filmed.

MJS rating: A-
Review originally posted 11th February 2005.

Sacred Flesh

Director: Nigel Wingrove
Writer: Nigel Wingrove
Producer: Louise Bass
Cast: Sally Tremaine, Simon Hill, Moyna Cope
Country: UK
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Redemption)

Once upon a time, Salvation/Redemption was the most important British label for horror videos. They released a mixture of Euro-sleaze (such as Lips of Blood), British horror (such as Virgin Witch) and old classics (such as The Vampire Bat). All the tapes came packaged in those black and white stylish covers, most of which had photos of Eileen Daly looking suitably gothic. You could spot a Redemption video at a hundred yards and the company had a reputation for caring about their product. Redemption developed a whole franchise around itself, even to the extent of having its own magazine, The Redeemer, about all things vampish and gothic.

And then Redemption sort of faded away. They repackaged old product at lower prices but there didn’t seem to be much new stuff emerging and the excitement of a new Redemption video became rarer. I don’t profess to know the business side of things but the impression given was that there were commercial as well as artistic factors involved. The UK cult video market has changed dramatically in recent years, with the advent of DVDs, a slew of new specialist labels, greater international availability and the emergence of the web requiring complete reinvention of sales and marketing techniques.

I’m not saying Redemption ever really went away, but they were quiet for a while. Well now here’s a couple of blood-spattered new releases landing on my doormat, requiring me to ensure that TF Simpson is sound asleep before I pop them into the DVD player. One disc is the first uncut UK release of Night of the Bloody Apes. The other is Sacred Flesh which is, I believe, Redemption’s only foray (so far) into actual film-making.

It’s British, it’s sleazy, it’s nunsploitation at its most nunsploitational. It’s sexy but, er, it’s pretty dull I’m afraid.

Let me be clear. If you’re Redemption’s ideal target customer - a corset-wearing goth with a library of vampire novels, a bathroom cabinet full of eye-liner and hairspray, an eye-watering collection of tattoos and piercings, a subscription to Skin Two magazine and far too many Gene Loves Jezebel albums (ie. one) - then you’ll love this. As for the rest of us...

The film revolves around a nunnery where the Mother Superior is having visions which cause her to describe the other nuns indulging in sexual shenanigans. The Abbess (Moyna Cope) calls in a local Abbot (Simon Hill) whose scarlet cassock and wide-brimmed hat is probably ecclesiastically and historically accurate but unfortunately can only make one think of Monty Python’s Cardinal Fang. With his servant Richard (Moses Rockman), a straight-talking, lusty peasant lad, the Abbot sets off from wherever he is (an abbey, I suppose) towards the nunnery.

I couldn’t help noticing that the Abbot tells Richard to pack his bags as they will set out first thing tomorrow but in the scenes of them travelling - one on horseback, one on foot - the only luggage is Richard’s tiny satchel which is far too small to contain the cooking pot that they use when they stop for a meal. (A peasant girl spies on them and then steals some of their food although this has no bearing on, or connection with, anything else and seems to have been added just to pad the running time.)

When they reach the nunnery, the film breaks up into a number of strands. One is simply the Abbess and the Abbot walking through the gardens, discussing the matter in hand and its bearing on Christian teachings. An adjunct to this is Richard chatting up Marion (Louise Linehan) a local girl who works at the nunnery. This sub-subplot is presumably supposed to show their healthy sexuality in contrast to the repressed lust of the nuns, which it does to some extent - but then Richard and Marion just disappear from the film.

The Mother Superior (Sally Tremaine) appears in three strands of the ‘plot’. On her own in her cell she talks to herself about what she believes the other nuns are doing. In another strand, in some sort of limbo, she debates religion and sex with Mary Magdalene (Kristina Bill: The Affair of the Necklace) who has a red-painted ‘succubus’ sitting beside her throne. This was evidently shot green-screen and the background is a constantly moving montage of medieval writing. Thirdly, the Mother Superior faces a skeletal nun (Rachel Taggart, who had a small role in Cronenberg’s Spider) who is credited as ‘Catechism’ and whose electronically treated voice is quite difficult to make out. Dear old Eileen Daly is also in these scenes as ‘Repression’. Clad in an extraordinary green rubber cape and an even weirder green rubber wig, she scampers around behind the skeleton, impishly spouting odd phrases and little poems.

I’m tempted to say, ”Christ alone knows what’s going on” - but He surely doesn’t watch stuff like this.

The final part of the film is the bit with the naughty young nuns getting up to all sorts of malarkey because they are so sexually repressed, do you see? There are four sex scenes, the first one being a full 25 minutes into this 73-minute film. First a single nun rubs one out, then two nuns go at each other. Then a nun is groped by two randy priests and finally there’s an odd three-(or possibly four-) way. A lesbian trio take revenge on a nun who reported one of them, ‘ambushing’ her and tying her to a wooden cross. The scene cuts between the three nuns having their way with each other and one of them having her way with the nun on the cross. Both these intercut sequences seem to follow on from the same scene but they can’t both be happening because that would require five nuns - and there’s only four. My head hurts.

All the nuns, by the way, look identical, with or without their clothes on. Fortunately none of them appear to have any piercings, tattoos or obviously fake breasts.

Eventually the film just ends. Oh, there’s some final weirdness about a lesbian nun groping a female Christ or something but that’s not really explained.

The sex scenes are nicely shot and yes, quite erotic. This is certainly several steps above the sort of lesbo antics that one finds in Surrender Cinema titles although it shares those films’ determination to show everything except actual sex. There’s nothing hardcore but the original release (on one or two cinema screens in London in 2000, then on DVD that same year) required about 19 seconds of genital close-ups to be replaced with less salubrious shots in accordance with the wishes of the BBFC.

But to get to this good stuff you have to sit through all that pontification by the Abbot and Abbess which just ladles up boring, sixth-form discussion of moral issues and Christian dogma. It’s like listening to two people reading out their essays. This film doesn’t just have infodumps, it has infodumps that are clearly labelled with big stickers that say ‘infodump’ and are easily found by following all the signs that say ‘infodump this way’. Dear God it’s boring.

I can’t see what this film is trying to do. Well, I can see the basics: it’s trying to criticise religious repression of sexuality and be as blasphemous as possible (although thankfully not quite as childishly as crap like Hellraiser III). But who wants to watch something like this, apart from British horror completists and those Salvation/Redemption fans so in thrall to the company/franchise that they spend their hard-earned money on postcards of ‘Satanic sluts’?

This is not well-written enough to be intellectually stimulating (in fact, let’s be honest, the script is lousy) but neither is it trashy enough to be entertaining. Granted, it’s arousing on a basic level: what sort of heterosexual man isn’t going to feel stirrings in the Y-fronts while watching two young women sixty-nining on a stone floor, clad only in stockings and wimples? But is it enjoyable? Not really.

The nuns include several actual porn actresses: Sarah McLean, who seems to specialise in ‘wet’ porno films (whatever they are - don’t tell me); Hannah Callow from Bosom Buddies 4 and 6; Majella Shepherd, who apparently starred in Barely Legal 18 when she was 22; Cindy Read and Amanda Dawkins, who were both in another indie horror feature, Sentinels of Darkness; and Michelle Thorne, who was in Cathula 2: Vampires of Sex and has also done voices for UK anime releases. Other nuns include producer Louise Ross (who was also in a certain Silence of the Lambs rip-off) and Swedish actress Anneka Svenska who was presenter ‘Eden’ on the first series of weird filmclips show outTHERE. (The role of Eden was subsequently taken by Emily Booth who has a non-speaking blink-and-you’ll-miss-her role as a peasant girl being groped by Richard when we first meet him.)

Christopher Adamson (The Last Horror Movie, Lighthouse, Evil Aliens) plays one of the randy priests while Nucleus Films’ Marc Morris is one of two red-robed inquisitors in a scene which features in the stills gallery but not the film. Marc’s business partner Jake West gets a credit for additional editing and for editing the blood-dripping title sequence. The rather nice cinematography is shared between Chris Herd, James MacDonald and Geoff Mills. Dena Costello (Razor Blade Smile, Warrior Sisters) designed the costumes which fall to the floor with alarming regularity.

There’s a couple of dozen photos (stills and behind-the-scenes shots) in the DVD extras - although it would have been nice to see them full-frame instead of cramped in a corner of the screen - plus a selection of storyboards, two trailers, a commentary and information on assorted Redemption merchandise. The sleeve blurb has three typos; I do wish Redemption would proof-read their sleeves before sending them to the printers. Why go to the trouble of designing a classy DVD package then not check which way round the accent goes on ‘exposé’?

Sacred Flesh is a soft porn film with pretensions but ultimately it’s still a porn film, in that a significant portion of its running time consists of sex scenes with no narrative purpose whatsoever. To be fair, the sex doesn’t drag on enough to become boring but it doesn’t need to because the dialogue scenes - between the Abbot and Abbess, between the Mother Superior and Mary Magdalene, and between the Mother Superior and the unintelligible skeleton nun - drag on more than enough to drag the film down, down, down. There’s no narrative here and certainly no characterisation. If you’re looking for a film that actually has a story and is about something, you’ve come to the wrong place I fear.

Watching Sacred Flesh is like listening to a staged debate on the nature of sexuality which is interrupted every five minutes to allow members of the audience to lick each other’s tits. It’s just thoroughly unsatisfying. Either give me a drama (preferably one with a much, much better script and less wooden acting) about psychosexual turmoil among medieval nuns - or give me 73 minutes of sexy lesbians. I don’t mind which.

MJS rating: C-

Review originally posted 14th March 2007

Uzumaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MJS rating: B+

Review originally posted 6th May 2006

Voodoo Academy

Director: David DeCoteau
Writer: Eric Black
Producer: Kirk Edward Hansen
Cast: Debra Mayer, Riley Smith, Kevin Calisher
Country: USA
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Prism)

It doesn’t take long to spot that this is a David DeCoteau film (from his later period). Six young men, all of whom look like they are auditioning for the lead role in a TV movie called The Jude Law Story and who spend a considerable amount of time shirtless. Hey, why not? If it was a half dozen young ladies wandering around in their skimpies, no-one would bat an eyelid - but the film would be indistinguishable from a million others.

Besides, there’s the gorgeous Debra Mayer (Prison of the Dead, Hell Asylum, Decadent Evil) to distract those not interested in the masculine eye candy.

Riley Smith (Alien Arsenal, Eight Legged Freaks) stars as Christopher Sawyer, a young man who enrols in the mysterious Carmichael Bible School which has a maximum of six students and two staff: glamorous thirtysomething widow Mrs Bouvier (Mayer) and the eponymous Reverend Carmichael (Chad Burris, not a great actor and apparently now working as an agent). Her late husband, we learn, investigated zombies in Haiti and discovered the scientific basis behind them. The Rev has founded his own weird church and has devised a form of confessional booth which draws out its occupants’ sin by some pseudoscientific means.

Sawyer joins his five almost identical room-mates in the small dorm which they share. (Frequent stock establishing shots show the building to be very large, so you have to wonder what goes on in the parts that aren’t the dorm, the classroom/chapel, the dining room and Mrs B’s quarters. Carmichael, we are told, lives down the road.) Anyway, we have hunky Rusty Sankervitch (Huntley Ritter: Wishcraft), blonde, rebellious joker Billy Parker (Kevin Calisher, who seems to have no other screen credits apart from an episode of Roswell), plus Mike McCready (Ben Indra: Raising Dad), Paul St.Clair (Drew Fuller: Vampire Clan, Charmed) and Sam Vollero (Travis Sher) who are somewhat short on identifying characteristics but make up for it by being abnormally good-looking.

The previous sixth student was Blake Godfrey (Rhett Jordan: Crocodile) whom we saw in a lengthy prologue being seduced by Mrs B while Carmichael looked on, rubbing his chest in lustful excitement (he’s not that much older than the boys in his charge). Some sort of weird magical ritual was attempted but it evidently failed, Blake was ‘disposed of’ and his schoolmates were told that he had been summarily dismissed after being found smoking a joint.

During class, Rusty is invited into the confessional booth. At dinner that night, he appears wearing a white vest, straining somewhat to contain his pecs, instead of the customary shirt and tie. Mrs Bouvier doesn’t seem to mind and allows the boys to drink a glass of wine each, which Christopher declines. That night Christopher sees the others tossing and turning and then moaning as, still asleep, they rub their hands all over their firm young torsos.

This goes on for some time.

Apparently the VHS version is about 20 minutes shorter than this 92 minute DVD, most of the missing material (snipped by executive producer Charlie Band for being too homoerotic) being from the prologue and this very, very long sequence. To be honest, even if nubile young nymphets had been doing exactly the same thing I would have got bored after, I don’t know, eleven or twelve minutes of it.

While Sam, Paul, Billy and Mike are writhing semi-naked on their beds, Rusty stands up and sleepwalks upstairs to Mrs B’s apartment, furtively followed by Chris who witnesses the unholy and weird ritual that the school’s only two staff are perpetrating. The next morning, Rusty has disappeared and the others have adopted his ultra-casual look. Can Chris save his friends from succumbing to the satanic practices of the Reverend and Mrs B?

Voodoo Academy was shot in four days (even quicker than Decadent Evil) and that shows in the limited cast, limited sets and lengthy scenes. There is a half-decent story buried in there and DeCoteau’s direction (under his own name) cannot be faulted; most of the acting is good too. The story doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense, completely ignores huge questions (there is, for example, only one passing reference to the boys’ parents) and requires great leaps of logic. But there is some sort of sense there: it seems that Mrs Bouvier requires six completely pure souls in order to achieve... whatever it is she’s attempting to achieve. I think she mentions at one point that if she is successful she will have the power to raise a zombie army and rule the world. Or something. The script is by Eric Black who also wrote Bikini Goddesses and co-wrote and co-directed (with Matthew Jason Walsh) The Witching.

Opening with a ‘Cult Video presents’ caption, this is nevertheless identified in the closing credits as a Full Moon film although curiously the only appearance of Charlie Band’s name is the credit for Bennah Burton-Burtt (“assistant to...”). DeCoteau went on to direct more homoerotic horrors for his own Rapid Heart company and used his ‘Richard Chasen’ pseudonym on the shortened version of this which, according to some sources, was retitled Subhuman. This was one of the last credits for producer Kirk Edward Hansen (The Vampire Journals, Frankenstein Reborn!, Witchouse, Totem, The Dead Hate the Living).

Cinematographer Howard Wexler also lit Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy, The Brotherhood, Totem and Leather Jacket Love Story for DeCoteau and now spends most of his time working on ‘erotic thrillers’ such as Sapphire Girls, Visions of Passion and Model Lust. (‘Model Lust’? ‘Sapphire Girls’? It’s like they’ve run out of sensible two-word titles and now just open the dictionary at two random pages). Though the photography is good, the image itself is incredibly grainy in many places though this may be a transfer fault. There are also some noticeable scratches on the print which is unusual for a straight to video movie!

Regular Charlie Band effects guy Christopher Bergschneider (Totem, Witchouse, Blood Dolls, Leeches) and Jeffrey S Farley (Babylon 5, Leeches, Scanner Cop II and the Red Dwarf US pilot) together provide ‘prosthetic and puppet effects’ - and yes, they do involve dolls. David Lange (Ozone, Jigsaw, Bad Movie Police) is credited with ‘special visual effects’. All the significant effect shots are featured heavily in the trailer which should probably be seen after the film. However, one cannot avoid knowing that Mrs Bouvier turns into a sexy horned demon because that is how she is depicted on the front of the bloody DVD sleeve.

Not a terrible film by any means, Voodoo Academy is a brave attempt to subvert the genre by substituting gorgeous guys for sexy gals. It raises the questions of what the film would have been like if the students were female. The seducer would probably still have been female and there might have been some actual lesbian fondlings whereas, for all its homoeroticism this movie’s hunks are as pure as driven snow and limit themselves to fondling their own muscles, never even sneaking a hand inside their bulging Calvin Kleins. Nevertheless, you can kind of see why Band snipped the film down to 70-odd minutes: not just to reduce the homoerotic content but also to give the thing some pace and stop it getting bogged down in endless (well lit, well shot) sequences of young men rubbing their chests.

MJS rating: B-

Pyrokinesis

Director: Shusuke Kaneko
Writers: Kodai Yamada, Masahiro Yokotani, Shusuke Kaneko
Producers: Toru Shibata, Toshiaki Harada, Kaori Momoi, Hidenori Tokuyama
Cast: Akiko Yada, Hideaki Ito
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Artsmagic)

Films about pyrokinetics are few and far between. Firestarter of course (and its recent mini-series sequel), the under-rated Specimen and the dire Nice Girls Don’t Explode. Shusuke Kaneko’s Pyrokinesis (aka Cross Fire) is easily the best of the bunch.

For the first half hour this looks like it might be another Carrie-esque tale of a lonely girl with unusual powers. Junko (Akiko Yada: Mai in the TV versions of Ring and Rasen) is befriended by her colleague Tada (Hideaki Ito: The Princess Blade) and meets his younger sister Yukie - who is kidnapped and murdered by a gang of youths. A lawyer’s arrogant son, Kogure (Hidenori Tokuyama: Oshikiri) is accused but let off, and Junko offers to help Tada take revenge using her special power.

As killings continue - both by the gang (for, it transpires, snuff movies) and of the gang members, the police attempt to make some kind of sense of the situation. Detective Makihara (Ryuki Harada: Izo) suspects psychokinesis; his colleague Detective Ishizu (Kaori Momoi: Kagemusha) is initially sceptical but gradually comes to believe.

But there are wheels within wheels and fires within fires in this story, as Junko is approached by Kido (Yu Yoshizawa) ,a young man with his own, non-pyrokinetic, ESP powers, and a young orphan girl Kaori (Masami Nagasawa: Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, Godzilla: Final Wars) is discovered to have similar abilities. It transpires that Makihara has his own personal agenda for believing in pyrokinesis and investigating Junko - but more than that, there are multiple levels of police corruption at work, possibly involving a mysterious secret organisation called The Guardians.

The excellent script is supported by Kaneko’s superb direction. He sensibly holds back on the effects for the first part of the story, but gradually introduces bigger and bigger fire effects - and some truly grizzly deaths. Yet water is also a key motif and a brief romantic scene in the snow is shot magically from above as individual snowflakes melt a few feet above Junko’s head. Possibly because of his experience on giant monster movies (the 1990s Gamera trilogy and 2001’s GMK: All Monsters Attack), Kaneko is as adept at moving the camera in the vertical plane as the horizontal and there are some beautifully composed crane shots. It’s also interesting to see a squad of riot police moving like a giant reptile.

The effects never overwhelm the story but are sensibly used - both real fire and CGI flame effects - and integral. We care about the characters, even as some of them turn out to be not who we thought. Pyrokinesis is a fantastic modern horror film which should be watched by anybody interested in Japanese movies and, frankly, anybody who isn’t.

That said, Artsmagic’s presentation is sadly not up to their usual standard. The anamorphic picture is terrific but the disc’s extra features betray both laziness and carelessness. Filmographies for the principal cast have simply been cut and pasted from the notoriously inaccurate IMDB, reproducing that site’s inconvenient reverse chronology and predilection for nonexistent alternative titles. A bio for Shusuke Kaneko not only fails to mention his Godzilla movie but is apparently missing several paragraphs. It jumps from 1985 straight to 1999, thereby losing any mention of Necronomicon or the Gamera films. Even worse, the outer sleeve inexcusably misspells Shusuke’s name as ‘Kanedo.’ Some stills and promo material round out the extras; what, no trailer?

Despite this, Pyrokinesis is wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommended as one of the best serious horror movies of recent years. (Oh, and watch out for Kaneko’s friend, Fangoria’s Japanese correspondent Norman England, in a cameo as ‘suprised westerner in restaurant’!)

MJS rating: A

[Since first posting this review, Artsmagic have asked me to compile biographies and filmographies for their future releases! - MJS]

The Cabinet of Dr Calamari

Director: Newton Halifax
Writers: Newton Halifax, Andy Scrimpey
Producer: Clifford Quarry
Cast: Alan Pither, Soosan Thomson, Peter Dembery
Country: UK
Year: 2000
Reviewed from: Japanese VHS

When I wrote about this film in my book Urban Terrors: New British Horror 1997-2008, I said that it had never been finished. Imagine my surprise then to discover that not only was the film completed but it actually had a VHS release in the Land of the Rising Sun. I suppose, given that it was Japan which finally unleashed Queen Kong on the world, nothing should be a surprise now.

Also unsurprising is that The Cabinet of Dr Calamari was only worth the wait if, like me, you're a modern British horror completist. This is a cheaply made, hastily thrown together anthology, cobbled together from a few shot-on-video shorts, each competing to be worse than the last. Newton Halifax's website (long defunct but traceable through archive.org) indicates that he fair cranked these things out in the late 1990s, flogging them on VHS through small ads in Samhain, The Dark Side etc. This was his attempt to craft an ersatz feature out of his work, stringing unconnected shorts together with a framing story set in a restaurant.

Alan Pither, who played a drug dealer in Cradle of Fear, here plays the eponymous restauranteur, regaling his few customers with tales of horror that are unlikely to encourage return visits to his establishment. In the first of these, 'Spin Cycle' (video generated titles introduce each short but the original credits have been snipped) a woman faces off against a demonically possessed washing machine. Soosan Thomson is the woman - she presumably spelled her name that way to disguise her real identity (she could be the Susan Thomson who was in a couple of episodes of Brookside but I somehow doubt it). The voice of the washing machine isn't credited; Halifax implied on his site that it was a well-known pop star but if it is, they've done a good job of keeping their shameful secret, well, secret.

'The Curse of the Vampire's Curse' is the second story, and it's typical of Newton Halifax that one really can't be certain whether the title is meant to be funny or not. Three likely lads meet a vampire in a pub in this one, and there's a passable non-reflection effect which is probably the closest that Halifax ever came to competent. The vampire is played by Benedict Jolly (Unachievable, Virtual Terror) and one of the others is Peter Dembery, who was in an episode of Blake's 7.

The third and longest story is 'Deadly Blue Balloon', an absolutely unfathomable attempt at sci-fi about a malevolent alien represented - I kid you not - by a blue balloon with some paper fangs stuck on. This just drags and drags and drags as assorted people encounter the balloon/alien, scream and fall down dead, liberally swathed in ketchup (the balloon itself seems never to get touched by a drop of the stuff, despite the implication that it is ripping people's throats out). Andy Lewisham, later director of Zero Degrees Below, crops up as either a policeman or a traffic warden (honestly, it's hard to tell) and the other victims include Lucy Spillbrass (Sword-Death), Zack Felton (Dead Man's Shoes) and Billy Hershey, a veteran midget actor who seems to have done nothing of note between this and The Flesh and Blood Show!

Barely feature-length, The Cabinet of Dr Calamari finishes with Dr Calamari (Is he a restauranteur or a doctor? Make up your mind...) going into his kitchen where, for some reason, he finds the alien/balloon, the washing machine and the vampire (played by a different actor).

Well, I'm glad I've seen it and can tick it off the list. But good heavens, this is really indicative of how desperate the turn-of-the-millennium Japanese market was for product. Allegedly there was a single UK screening at the Grand Cinema, Skegness, although I doubt if anyone turned up who wasn't actually in the film, and even most of them probably gave it a wide berth. Somebody would have to be a Fool, an Absolute Fool, to want to watch something like this.

MJS rating: D-

Octopus

Director: John Eyres
Writer: Michael D Weiss
Producer: David Verod, Danny Lerner, Boaz Davidson
Cast: Jay Harrington, Ravil Issyanov, David Beecroft, Carolyn Lowery
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Hollywood DVD)

Nu Image are very much the Ronson’s Woodseal of film production companies: their movies do exactly what it says on the tin. Hence there are spiders (well, a spider) in Spiders, a crocodile in Crocodile and - quelle surprise - a bloody great octopus in Octopus (and for those of you still confused, there is of course Spiders 2, Crocodile 2 and Octopus 2).

After a prologue in which a Russian nuclear submarine is sunk by a US sub off the coast of Cuba, Octopus leaps forward a few decades. Terrorists (well, a terrorist) attack the US embassy in Sofia for no more reason than Nu Image have a studio in Bulgaria so it’s not far to carry the cameras (and it’s easier than trying to find bits of Sofia that might pass for other cities). This is the evil Casper (Ravil Issyanov: The Omega Code, Doomsdayer, Arachnid) who is captured by handsome young CIA agent Roy Turner (Jay Harrington from the US remake of Coupling).

Turner has to accompany Casper back to the States to face charges, and they are transported - for no obvious reason - on a submarine, commanded by Captain Shaw (daytime soap heart-throb David Beecroft, who had a small role in Creepshow 2). It’s really not clear why Casper isn’t simply being flown to the States, nor why a sub travelling from Sofia to the USA has to go via the waters around - guess where - Cuba. Also a passenger on the sub is sexy scientist Lisa Fincher (Carolyn Lowery: Candyman, Tales of the City). The only other discernable character is a crewman named Brickman, played by Ricco Ross (Aliens, Wishmaster) who also worked with director Eyres on Project Shadowchaser I and III.

Off Cuba, Casper somehow escapes (he shouldn’t be too hard to find - it’s a submarine for Heaven’s sake!) but worse than that, the ship is attacked by a giant octopus, presumably mutated by the spilled nuclear fuel from that old Russian sub, and sinks to the ocean floor. It must be said that the CGI octopus is not only pretty well-animated but also sensibly underused by Eyres, who has plenty of experience of this level of movie-making. That said, there is one deeply stupid sequence when a tentacle somehow gets inside the sub without depressurising the hull!

Eventually our heroes (and villain) escape in a mini-sub and are picked up by a passing luxury ocean liner which is promptly hijacked by Casper’s associates, who have come looking for him. But the octopus which they thought had been destroyed by the sub’s self-destruct mechanism is still around and rises to the surface.

Let’s be honest, Octopus - like most Nu Image films - is pure B-movie nonsense from start to finish. Characters are paper-thin, effects are adequate, the script (by Michael D Weiss, who subsequently worked on the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan Around the World in 80 Days) makes no sense whatsoever. But Nu Image films are also unpretentious and fun, suitable for a late-night screening with one’s brain in neutral. There are plenty of better films than Octopus, but there are also many, many films which, despite huge budgets, name directors and stellar casts, are far, far worse.

It’s called Octopus - it’s a movie about a giant octopus. You were expecting perhaps something else?

MJS rating: C+

Leatherface Speaks

Director: Jim Moran
Producers: Jim Moran, Tony Earnshaw
Cast: Gunnar Hansen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2000
Reviewed from: VHS screener

In 2000, Gunnar 'Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Hansen and David 'Him out of Last House on the Left' Hess toured the UK with prints of these two notorious films. TCM had recently been passed 18 by the BBFC after being banned in the UK for 24 years, while LHOTL is still in fact banned to this day although UK law allows it to be shown in specific venues if local authorities give permission (Leicester and Bradford are two such places).

Tony Earnshaw, film programmer for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford (and author of Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon) invited Hansen, Hess and the movies to his venue and, in partnership with Jim Moran, recorded this 21-minute interview (Tony can be heard asking the questions, Moran was holding the camera).

This is simply Hansen, sat in front of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster in a public area of the museum, discussing the film that made him famous. Chatter and music can be heard in the background and at one point there is a brief off-screen interruption (which Hansen handles with an ironic, "Excuse me, I'm a star."); in fact this gives the impression of having taken not much longer to film than it does to watch. There are a few cutaways (possibly to cover edits) to TCM posters or stills and a brief shot of Hansen signing autographs, with Hess visible in the background. But for the most part this is a talking head, starring a big, scary, Icelandic version of Kenny Rogers.

It works because Hansen is a very erudite and eloquent speaker who doesn't fumble or hesitate and takes every question in his stride, even the ones when he has to preface his reply with "I don't know...". It goes without saying that Earnshaw knows his subject and probably already knew the answer to every question he asked - it's not like Gunnar Hansen hasn't been interviewed plenty of times before - but the two of them quickly settle into a comfortable interviewer/ee relationship that allows the anecdotes to take centre stage.

I've never met Hansen but he comes across as a genuinely nice bloke who is not only appreciative of the opportunities which his limited fame has given him (and of the fact that it is indeed limited and he is rarely recognised in public) but has also bothered to do his own research over the years into the origins and influences of his first and best-known screen role. This simple format works perfectly in allowing his memories and his opinions to be expressed simply and clearly.

Apart from a couple of screenings at small festivals, Leatherface Speaks has very rarely been seen (this tape was personally leant to me by Tony Earnshaw). A similar interview was conducted with David Hess at the same event but this has apparently never been shown anywhere. This would make a perfect extra on a DVD and should definitely be sought out as a supporting short by any cinema planning a special screening of TCM (unless of course they are lucky enough to have Hansen there in person). Perhaps Earnshaw and Moran could track down a few more horror icons (Doug Bradley? Robert Englund?) and edit four or five such informal interviews together into a feature-length documentary.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 17th June 2005

Juvenile

Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Writer: Takashi Yamazaki
Producers: Hadome Yasuo, Sawabe Nobumasa, Kushino Takahito, Ando Oyahiro
Cast: Endo Yuya, Suzuki An, Katori Shingo, Sakai Miki
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: Hong Kong Video CD (IVL)

I wrote the first English language preview of this film for the old SFX site in 2000, based on a promo reel I saw at Cannes. Having finally gotten hold of it (albeit on an unsubtitled VCD) I’m pleased to say that my initial enthusiasm was warranted. This is a really good, fun film.

At first glance, it appears to be a rip-off of ET, with a small, silver ball substituting for the wrinkly alien (rather ironic, given that ET was itself “influenced” by Harley Cokeliss’ Glitterball!). In fact there’s a melange of influences, with nods - whether intentional or not - to The Last Starfighter, Independence Day, Replicator and Star Kid (which was itself basically The Guyver meets Power Rangers), plus the most blatant product placement since Mac and Me. But this is no simple clone - it’s a hugely enjoyable kids film with plenty of ideas of its own.

Ten-year-old Yusuke Sakamoto and his three pals - Toshiya, Hidetaka and Misaki (on whom Yusuke has a crush) - discover a small, spherical robot which has apparently crashed to Earth. The robot introduces itself as Tetra and somehow recognises Yusuke. Tetra builds himself a small body and has fun with the kids, who hide him from adults. Then they befriend Soichiro Kanzaki, inventor and electronics-shop owner, whose experiments even include a very crude form of time travel (he transports a drawing of Pikachu from Pokemon!).

Meanwhile, a huge alien armada is approaching Earth and a shape-shifting ET attacks and cocoons first Soichiro’s sister-in-law Noriko and then the inventor himself. The duplicate Soichiro is immobilised but later escapes, kidnapping Misaki. Tetra meanwhile has appropriated some parts from a local robotics firm and constructed a bloody great mecha, which Yusuke pilots to rescue his friend (having already piloted a version on a video game which Tetra programmed into his Playstation 2!).

The showdown between the semi-organic alien craft and the mecha is exciting and fun, and ends with the destruction of the entire alien fleet using, of all things, a swimming pool, but Tetra is damaged beyond repair. If you don’t cry at this point, you have no soul. That would be the end, but there is a fairly lengthy epilogue, set 20 years later which explains exactly where Tetra came from and how he knew Yusuke.

This was the directorial debut of FX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and he did a terrific job, mixing action and excitement with some more emotional scenes, never allowing the subplot of young love to get in the way of cool explosions and robots. The CGI effects are pretty good, and the production design is terrific, both among the alien hardware and in Soichiro’s untidy workshop.

This Video CD is not only lacking subtitles but has been dubbed into Chinese without removing the Japanese dialogue track (as I speak no Chinese and very little Japanese, it made little difference) but the story is easy to follow anyway. The picture quality isn’t fab, but the image is at least letterboxed. Also includes a movie-related pop video by a singer called Zoie.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 4th February 2005

Horror Net

Director: Ma Hwa
Writer: Ma Hwa
Producer: Pyng Gwo-Huei
Cast: Suen Yaw-Uei, Lei Yen-Yang, Chen Yea-Huey
Year of release: 2000
Country: Hong Kong
Reviewed from: VCD

Sometimes I like to give myself a surprise. Browsing through a selection of VCDs in a shop in London’s Chinatown, I came across one which appeared to be some sort of supernatural tale but which had no English title on the packaging. A sort of Hong Kong lucky dip.

Many months later I eventually got round to slipping the disc into the old DVD player and discovered that I had bought something called Horror Net. Fortunately, it was subtitled. Unfortunately, the subtitles were very hard to read as they were not only badly translated but also frequently disappeared into a white background. The film itself proved to be very difficult to follow and features the absolute cheapest, tattiest ‘special effect’ ever seen. I mean, straight up, if you can show me any attempt at a special effect which is as woefully cheap and stupid as this, then I will buy you a very large drink.

Chen Yea-Huey (‘introduction new star’) is Chang Pao Shan, wealthy teenage orphan whose millionaire parents stare down from photos on the wall of her expensive home. She is looking for Mr Right, relying on the predictions of internet fortune teller Dr Wei (the very western-looking Lui Yu Yeung aka Simon Lui, credited as ‘Lei Yen-Yang’, whose prolific genre CV includes ICQ Ghost, Cyber War, the lengthy Troublesome Night series, New Dead Project I and II, Last Ghost Standing, 24 Hours Ghost Story and Nightmares in Precinct 7 plus Raped by an Angel III: Sexual Fantasy of the Chief Executive(!) and Viagara Madness(!!) - and he also dubbed one of the voices for the Chinese release of Monsters Inc!).

Distracted by the attentions of his flirty bimbo wife, Wei makes some sort of error which matches Pao Shan up with Wu King Yuen (also identified in the inconsistent subtitles as ‘Wu Ching Yuen’ and ‘Chin Yuen Wu) played by pop star Suen Yiu Wai aka Eric Suen (Deathnet.com, Freaking Spicy Killer) credited here as ‘Suen Yaw-Uei’. He is the son of one of Hong Kong’s ten richest men but it’s only later, when Pao Shan and King Yen have got together, that Wei discovers that the young man was actually killed in a car crash five years earlier, so he has matched the eligible Miss Chang up with a ghost. He later blames this on the millennium bug...

The credits boast a ‘special appearance’ by Ngai Chau Wah (Last Hurrah for Chivalry; credited as ‘Wey Chiou-Huah’) who plays another ghost, dressed in a Peking opera-style red costume. I think she has been unleashed from the afterlife along with King Yuen and in one sequence - shown twice, though both occasions seem out of context - we see her torch his car. Being a rich young man, he drives an expensive looking vehicle and the shoestring production could never afford to scratch it, let alone set it alight. So first we see the car though foreground flames, which is cheap but we can see what they’re trying to do. Then, as the viewer’s jaw hits his chest, we see that they have cut to a fake car - I’ll just say that again because I’ll probably never have another chance: a fake car - made from sheet metal.

Frankly it looks like cardboard but card or wood would burn quicker than that. It’s basically several sheets of metal, bolted together to make a box and crudely painted with a windscreen, doors and radiator. Even the wheels are simply four circles of metal bolted on underneath, which might work if the car was shown only in profile but they’ve shot it from a front angle so that it is balanced on ‘tyres’ which are clearly only a centimetre or so thick. What the hell were they thinking? Did they imagine anybody would be fooled for a nanosecond? Is it meant to be ironic? It just beggars belief. When you think you’ve seen everything...

Anyway, back in the plot, Pao Shan’s personal trainer, gym owner Ma Chi, carries a torch for her but she just wants to be friends. Descending into a spiral of drinking and gambling, he embarrasses himself in a nightclub where Pao Shan and King Yuen are dancing with Pao Shan’s best friend A-Mei (Miss Asia 1990 runner-up Yeung Yuk Mui aka Strawberry Yeung - I Will Eat You, Something Incredible: Blood Curse, The Floating Body - credited as ‘Yang Yu-Mei’) and her beau Pen Wei. Ma Chi borrows money from his friend, hairdresser Lee Shu, but this is not enough to prevent a beating from those to whom he is already in debt. There is also a subplot about Pao Shan’s Filipino maid Dina Hwa (who looks about as Filipino as I do), who sees her employer talking to herself, realises that King Yuen is a ghost, and quits. Oh, and there’s a long-haired tramp who chases Pao Shan through a park and later sneaks into her house to gorge himself in her kitchen, though he seems harmless enough.

Dr Wei confronts the female ghost and his spying wife thinks he’s having a supernatural affair. The ghost wants to take King Yuen back to the Netherworld with her but is prevented from doing so when she becomes enveloped in a large glowing ball of energy which battles against a similar ball containing the spirits of Pao Shan’s parents, who have stepped down from their photographs.

One bizarre thing which I haven’t mentioned is that, when Pao Shan and A-Mei are throwing a masked party in Pao-Shan’s house, a bunch of people apparently step out of her computer screen, don masks and join in, stuffing themselves with food. They all stalk around with their arms out in scary claw-poses, apart from a couple of little kids made up in Peking opera costumes, and nobody notices them; as the party winds down, they go back into Pao Shan’s bedroom and into her computer. What on earth is going on there?

Eventually, and without explanation except that Dr Wei has told her that King Yuen is a ghost, Pao Shan is discovered dead on the beach, apparently murdered by Ma Chi, who is found hanged in his gym. Then there is a romantic montage of earlier Pao Shan/King Yuen scenes - and, um, that’s it.

This does not make a jot of sense and parts of it almost seem to have wandered in from another film. There’s no real horror and the only way that the internet is involved is that Dr Wei uses it for matchmaking research, so the title - even after I had found it - proved to be supremely irrelevant.

Also in the cast are Hwang Wei-Der, Lin Yea-Jing, Lu Cherng-Shyang, Luo Chyi, Hwang Guan-Shiun, Su Sheau-Lan, Hei Long, Lin Ming-Liang and Chen Yea-Chyan, and the credits include someone listed as ‘procucer manager’ which looks like a simple typo for ‘production manager’ until you find there’s two of those listed as well. The film was made by Kingshop International Motion Picture Co. Ltd and distributed by Gold Yes-Shen (Hong Kong), for what it’s worth. I can find out nothing about writer-director Ma Hwa at all.

The picture on this VCD - which is dubbed without removing the original voices - is pretty bad and makes me think that this was shot on video.

MJS rating: D

review originally posted 29th November 2004

The Darkness Beyond

Director: Ivan Zuccon
Writer: Ivan Zuccon
Producer: Valerio Zuccon
Cast: Michael Segal, Emanuele Cerman, Roberta Marrelli
Year of release: 2000
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: VHS screener
Website: www.ivanzuccon.com

I first met Ivan Zuccon at Cannes in 2000 through one of those utterly meaningless but ultimately beneficial chains of events. I was at a bar one evening when I got talking to someone (no idea who - sorry!) who asked if I wanted to meet Tiffany Shepis. Tiffany was then the hottest starlet on the block, having appeared in Tromeo and Juliet and the Spanish artflick Shampoo Horns as well as hosting some Troma stuff for TV. Plus she is way cute, so I agreed to meet this bloke at a time and place the next day and he would introduce me to Tiffany Shepis.

And indeed he did. Tiffany was at Cannes in her capacity as a producer/distributor, having set up a company called Prescription Films - and it turned out that her business partner was none other than Jennifer Kennedy, whom I had first met back at the 1998 AFM when she was working for Troma.

So that was all very nice. It was great to catch up with Jennifer, and to meet Tiffany, but the important thing (in retrospect) is that in the Prescription Films office at that time was a young Italian chap named Ivan Zuccon who was showing Tiffany and Jennifer his first feature, L’Altrove aka The Beyond. We swapped cards and stayed in touch and he sent me a copy of the film - and it just blew me away.

L’Altrove - which was swiftly retitled The Darkness Beyond in its subtitled version, to avoid confusion with Fulci’s The Beyond/L’Aldila - is simply one of the best Lovecraft movies ever made. Though merely ‘inspired by the visionary genius of HP Lovecraft’ rather than adapted from any specific story, it perfectly captures the nightmarish horror of HPL’s work.

A prologue in Baghdad in 1571 sees the philosopher Al-Caleb translating the Necronomicon for Dr John Dee - until something unseen attacks him and drags his limp body away like a child’s doll. Flash forward 500 years to Arkham, where a radio informs us that there is massive civil unrest by ‘violent and insane’ sections of the community and that some of the army units called in have mysteriously vanished. Roberta Marrelli plays Elena, a student of the occult who has somehow come by Al-Caleb’s blood-spattered fragments of translation. She performs a rite, puts on a mask - and plunges herself and us into a world of nightmare.

Running through the empty countryside, she comes across a lone soldier - Private Randolph Carter(!) played by Emanuele Cerman - in a ruined building. Behind him is a low tunnel into which the rest of his six-man patrol have vanished and in his satchel is the book which they found earlier: Dee’s original Necronomicon. Later that night, Elena is lured into the tunnel by mysterious voices and when Carter follows her, he sees her brutally killed by a mysterious figure in a white coat. Running for his life, the soldier passes over ‘the threshold’ into ‘the beyond’ where the rest of his squad are trapped, hunted by one of their number, Warren (Giuseppe Gobatto, who also played Al-Caleb in the prologue), who entered the tunnel first and now believes the ancient, unnamed ‘Old Ones’ to be God.

The plot then becomes a surreal nightmare, with the Old Ones seeking the return of the book. The CO, Lieutenant Michael Salgari (Michael Segal), suffers through terrifying hallucinations, including his former lover Sonia (Laura Coratti), and a teenage girl (Catarina Zanca) who claims to be the unborn baby that Sonia was carrying when she died 15 years ago. Throughout it all, the white-coated figure and the insane Warren stalk their prey. How much is real? How much a dream? No way to tell. What there is, however, is vast quantities of blood - from bullet wounds, from rough surgery, from hideous torture - and some truly terrifying imagery.

By any standards, The Darkness Beyond is an astounding debut from a major new name in horror cinema - as evidenced by Ivan Zuccon’s subsequent features Unknown Beyond and The Shunned House. Shot on digital video by Ivan himself, the cinematography is beautiful - coloured lights, swirling smoke, scenes lit by electric or flaming torches - and the editing (also by the director) is stunning. It is very easy, when a film is designed to be dreamlike, to be self-indulgent or to just throw random images together, but every jump-cut, every twisted angle, every cut-away is just right here.

But Ivan is not a one-man band and there is some sterling work here by others, not least the excellent cast. Cerman and Segal, who are also in both of Ivan’s other films, carry their roles superbly, and Marrelli (also in Unknown Beyond) is amazing in her depiction of genuine, uncomprehending fear. One of the ways in which the film constantly trips up the viewer is in the passing of the central role from one character to another - just as we think we know who the ‘star’ is, they’re killed. Though that doesn’t necessarily preclude them from still being in the film! An epilogue sequence, set far in the future, is reminiscent of the opening scenes in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil.

Massimo Storari (who appears briefly as a monk) contributes some superb make-up, tearing the soldiers’ flesh and splattering them with blood. Mention must also be made of sound editor Fabrizio Vitali’s contribution. Because so little is seen - there’s neither tooth nor tentacle spotted of the old ones themselves, as it should be - the sound effects are vital and help to create a truly frightening atmosphere.

Ultimately Prescription did not pick up L’Altrove, but I was able to get both this film and its sequel screened to general acclaim at the Festival of Fantastic Films the following year. Gradually the word on Ivan Zuccon’s work has spread and I am absolutely delighted to see his films now getting the distribution that they deserve.

The Italian horror tradition is alive and well in the capable hands of Ivan Zuccon.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted before November 2004

Crocodile

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Michael D Weiss, Adam Gierasch, Jace Anderson
Producer: Boaz Davidson, Frank DeMartini, Danny Lerner
Cast: Mark McLauchlin, Caitlin Martin, Chris Solari
Year of release: 2000
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD

Although Nu Image’s range of one-word-will-do, nature-amok creature features might seem to be much of a muchness, they do vary enormously, and this one immediately stands out by virtue of its name director and it effects credit for the KNB FX group. And while many critics regard this as Tobe Hooper ‘slumming it’ at the bottom end of the production pile, the truth of the matter is that this is a taut and scary horror thriller with rounded characters and a suspenseful storyline. Who will survive - to quote the poster for one of Hooper’s slightly better-known movies - and what will become of them?

Okay, fair enough. They’ll be gobbled up by a bloody great crocodile. But still: who will survive?

Let’s meet the team: eight kids enjoying Spring Break by spending five days on a houseboat on Lake Sobek. There’s Brady Turner (Mark McLauchlin aka Mark McLachlan: Blood Feast 2) and his irresponsible, joke-playing friend Duncan McKay (former USC student Chris Solari) who has red streaks in his hair and who once got Brady expelled from High School. Then there’s Brady’s long-time sweetheart, sensible Claire (Caitlin Martin) but also multi-coloured-hair bimbo Sunny (Sommer Knight) who has a crush on Brady that was once secretly fulfilled.

Goatee-wearing, relatively sensible Kit (Doug Reiser) is the one whose family own the houseboat, while his short-haired girlfriend Annabelle (Julie Mintz) has brought her poodle Princess along with her from New York. Rounding out the octet are shaven-headed party animal Foster (Rhett Jordan: Voodoo Academy) and skinny goof Hubs (Greg Wayne).

After a run-in with the local sheriff (veteran actor Harrison Young), the boisterous but ultimately good kids set off up the lake and find a mooring spot to spend time partying. What they don’t know is that a couple of drunken anglers have destroyed a nearby ground-nest of large eggs, incurring the bloody and fatal wrath of something unseen.

Hooper knows how to scare us and our first few sightings of the massive title beast are short, sharp and out of nowhere, effectively combining a ‘cat scare’ with the lingering shock of a violent and terrifying attack. Later we see close-ups of an eye or a tail - excellent work from KNB which really emphasises how important a realistic monster is to something like this. In later long shots we get a CGI croc which - while it’s not quite on a par with the beast in Lake Placid - is nevertheless impressive for a film of this scale.

With one of their number having disappeared (we know where - they don’t) the seven remaining youngsters wake from a night of serious drinking to find their houseboat has drifted to another part of the lake and become stuck. Attempts to refloat it come to naught and eventually the titular beast puts in an appearance. It’s a big fellow (actually, given the eggs, a big gal) and soundly trashes the houseboat, leaving the gradually diminishing party to make their way back to civilisation along the lake shore.

The explanation of how and why this croc is there has at least had some thought put into it: this is ‘Flat Dog’, a 100+-year-old Nile crocodile which was originally an exhibit at the now derelict Nile Hotel. She is now mad because her eggs have been smashed. Sheriff Bowman suspects that his quarry may have escaped from ‘Shurkin’s Gator Farm’ but redneck gator farmer Shurkin (Terrence Evans: Curse II, Phantom of the Mall, Terminator 2, The Pumpkin Karver, Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake - curiously credited as ‘T Evans’ in the end credits but with his full name in the opening titles) graphically shows the difference in size between gator eggs and croc eggs.

Shurkin is out to get Flat Dog, who killed first his grandfather and later his father. Ironically he could just have asked his inbred assistant Lester (screenwriter Adam Gierasch as ‘Adam Redmond’) who - in a subplot which goes preciely nowhere, suggesting that it was a last-minute steal from Lake Placid - has actually been feeding Flat Dog, possibly because he hates his boss so much.

To go into any more detail about who becomes croc-feed and in what order would be to spoil what is a surprisingly enjoyable and above-par B-movie.

Standing out among the cast, most of whom have few if any screen credits but all of whom are talented actors, is the vastly experienced Harrison Young as Sheriff Bowman. Michigan born and army-trained, he only started acting when he was 38 but since then his career has included roles in Taxi Driver, Waxwork II, Children of the Corn IV, Saving Private Ryan (as the old Private Ryan), The Opposite of Sex, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bubba Ho-Tep, House of a Thousand Corpses - and even Yonggary! - as well as episodes of Buffy, Sabrina and Sliders. Also in the cast are stand-up comic Kip Addotta (Watchers II is his other horror credit), assistant props master R Vern Crofoot and ‘Crystal Atkins’ as ’blonde bikini girl’ despite the fact that not one single blonde in a bikini is seen anywhere in the entire film.

Shooting second unit work on this film led to Sam Firstenberg (Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2) being asked to direct Spiders 2 for Nu Image. Composer Serge Colbert also wrote scores for that film plus Shark Attack, Shark Zone and four of the five Operation Delta Force movies. Cinematographer Eliot Rockett photographed The Specials, Nightstalker and A Gun for Jennifer. This was editor Alain Jacubowicz’s fourth film for Hooper, following Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Night Terrors and Invaders from Mars. Production designer W Brooke Wheeler worked on Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Silent Night Deadly Night 5 and Project: Metalbeast - am I the only one who finds resumes like these impressive and interesting?

If you only want to buy one Nu Image film, this is probably the one to get, but as you can often buy seven or eight of them for the price of a normal movie, you may want to invest in some of the others too.

MJS rating: A-
review originally posted before November 2004