Doll in the Dark

Director: Alejandro Daniel
Writer: Alejandro Daniel
Producer: Alejandro Daniel, Linda Ayr Calvo
Cast: Amy Crowdis, Robin Lord Taylor, Josh Caras
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: https://www.facebook.com/dollinthedark

Doll in the Dark is an obscure US indie which was shot back in 2009 as The Melancholy Fantastic, played a few festivals in 2011 and surfaced on American VOD and cable in 2012. It generated some good reviews and a bit of fan appreciation then pretty much disappeared.

In November 2016, the film resurfaced under its new, more marketable title when Safecracker Pictures released it on UK DVD/VOD, exploiting the casting of a pre-Gotham Robin Lord Taylor. If you like Taylor’s portrayal of proto-Penguin Oswald Cobblepot, you will definitely also enjoy seeing him in this movie. It’s not one of those situations where a subsequently well-known name has a small role that renders a film inconsequential except for the most extreme fanboys/girls of that actor. Taylor here is 50% of what is essentially a two-hander and his character has the same sort of restrained craziness as Cobblepot. Just younger and less sociopathic.

[Update: Since posting this review, I have been told by the director that Doll in the Dark is a heavily re-edited version, not just a retitling. - MJS]

Amy Crowdis is Melanie Crow, a teenage girl living alone after both her parents died. She has a very creepy life-size doll which she treats as a real person. It’s a home-made, skeletal affair of stuffed limbs and torso surmounted with a cracked ceramic head. Sometimes it sits on the sofa, sometimes it’s in the kitchen, sometimes it rides shotgun in Melanie’s car. There is absolutely no suggestion that the doll is actually alive or possessed or has any independent life. This is not a supernatural tale.

The doll never moves, except for a couple of shots when an arm flops down. Noticeably, we also never see Melanie move the doll, except for one scene later on when she carries it upstairs. Removing that shot would have kept the creepy factor higher, but it’s already pretty high so no great loss.

Melanie meets Taylor’s skinny-jeaned emo character in a public library. It’s quite some time until we find out his name is Dukken, which I assumed was Dougan until the credits. Although it seems odd that we have no scene where he tells her his name, that lacuna is actually justified by a reveal near the end. Dukken and Melanie’s paths cross a couple of times and they start spending time together. Dukken is puzzled by Melanie’s doll but not freaked out by it because he thinks it’s just part of her ‘sick taste’, like decorating her Christmas tree with razor blades.

What we have here is an offbeat love story. Sort of. It’s what happens when someone whose freakish unconventionality is a deliberate choice meets someone whose idiosyncratic, individualistic behaviour and rejection of the norm stems from genuine mental health issues. Melanie is very, very cute but in a damaged goods sort of way. Somethin’ ain’t right.

There are other oddities of behaviour. Melanie seems to survive largely on pink ‘snowball’ marshmallows. When she does vary her diet to include a PBJ sandwich, she uses a large carving knife to spread the peanut butter. She watches 8mm public domain cartoons in a car in a barn, her own private drive-in. Although mostly she just talks to an ugly, weird doll. And occasionally the doll talks back.

This doll, we eventually realise, represents her mother.

Because we see everything through Melanie’s eyes, and because it’s obvious right from the start that she ain’t right in the head, she is effectively an unreliable narrator. As the film progresses, we will start to question exactly what is or isn’t real. All credit to Argentinian-born director Alejandro Daniel, this is well-handled and effective. What really sells this unnerving ambiguity is an absolutely bravura performance by Crowdis who has many solo scenes acting opposite just the doll prop. Taylor’s role is more reactive and his character necessarily shallower, since Dukkan’s persona is his own creation, but it’s a fine performance and I can well believe that this is what persuaded the producers of Gotham to cast him.

There are some areas where the film does unravel slightly, not least that it’s not made clear until well into the third act that this is actually happening around Christmas. Most scenes take place in Melanie’s home or open fields and roads so we don't get any confirmation that this is actually the holiday season and the decorations in her house are not a further represention of her detachment from reality.

This is only a short feature, running less than 70 minutes without credits, and thus doesn’t outstay its welcome, reaching its satisfying third act without resort to padding or unnecessary subplots. Though the final scenes offer some sort of resolution, even a happy ending, we know enough about Melanie (or little enough, if you like) to retain doubts about where this will go after the credits roll. What looks like resolution and catharsis could just be redirection and hiatus.

If that last sentence sounded a tad pretentious, then be aware that Doll in the Dark does on occasion steer dangerously close to the naively mannered angst of sixth form poetry. There are musings on death, there’s a (thankfully brief) discussion of Nietzsche, a copy of The Stranger by Albert Camus is a significant prop and there is a length quotation from Kierkegaard in the credits which seems random now but which originally explained and justified the title.

Fortunately, any time that it looks like Doll in the Dark might tip over into pretension some sort of narrative self-righting mechanism steers it back on course. This is an enjoyable, interesting film which is genuinely thought-provoking. You don’t have to be a loner goth to enjoy it.

Filmed in snowy Connecticut, the movie was offered for sale at the 2012 AFM under the title The Christmas Stranger but doesn’t seem to have been released as that. Director Daniel, who used the screen name ‘AD Calvo’ for the original release, previously made a supernatural romance variously known as The Other Side of the Tracks and The Haunting of Amelia. Since completing this picture he has made three more horror films – The Midnight Game, House of Dust and Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl – plus a comedy thriller, The Missing Girl.

Josh Caras, Geneva Carr and David Pirrie make up the solid, if sparse and sparingly used, supporting cast, with Shirley Knight as the voice of the doll.

Bizarrely, the film has ended up on the IMDB twice, listed as both 2011 and 2016. This may lead to some confusion, but it should be pretty obvious, just from the stills, that Robin Lord Taylor made this several years before the first season of Gotham in 2014.

Doll in the Dark is available to download from the Safecracker website.

MJS rating: B+

Harmony’s Requiem

Director: Mark McDermott
Writer: Mark McDermott
Producers: Mark McDermott, Paul Smith
Cast: Mark McDermott, Rosie Tratt, Christopher McAleer
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: Online

I really didn’t think I’d ever see Harmony’s Requiem. It was released online in 2011 but disappeared almost immediately, together with any trace of its creator Mark McDermott, including his Facebook page and his website. There was an IMDB page for the film, a British Council page and a trailer on YouTube but after that every mention was just those fake sites which claim to have free-to-view illegal copies of any movie you stick into Google.

The premise sounded intriguing. Here’s the British Council synopsis:

The peace of a City is shattered and fear spreads when the population becomes preyed upon at random. People begin searching for the rogue responsible as the intensity of the menace escalates, but the disturbing threat remains anonymous, creating widespread paranoia and panic. Can one person bring society to its knees?

And here’s the IMDB plot summary:

A reclusive composer struggling to arrange the most poignant score of his life emerges from his home in search of inspiration. However, his naive curiosity drives him to begin preying on unsuspecting people and tormented with inner turmoil he swings between right and wrong with increasing intensity. Can he find redemption before he goes too far?

All well and good but where was the film? Here’s what I wrote in issue 37 of Scream in 2016 in Part 8 of my ‘21st Century Frights’ series of articles:

Good luck seeking out Harmony’s Requiem, a film which seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. Directed by Mark McDermott in 2010 as Silent Terror, this Oxford-set chiller involves a composer who seeks inspiration in serial murder – and more than that I cannot tell you. It was available through Amazon Prime at one point but not any longer. McDermott made no further films and is nowhere to be found. His Facebook account has been deleted. No-one ever reviewed this movie when it was available. Aside from an IMDB page and a trailer on YouTube there is no evidence that it ever existed. Yet we are talking about a movie released only five years ago! This is why it is so important to document these movies now – because in the digital world reality is fleeting. If anyone ever saw Harmony’s Requiem, or knows how I might get to see it, please please get in touch.

I didn’t really expect anything to come of this plea but a little while later I received an email from a kind-hearted, observant Scream reader named Karen Van Dahlen with a link to an online version of the film on the Amazon Studios website. I think I had actually already checked this out but thought it contained only the trailer. I hadn’t realised that by clicking on ‘Show all work’ and then on ‘Video 1 – Director’s Original’ I could access the full 90-minute movie.

That very evening I sat down to watch Harmony’s Requiem. I was probably the first person to watch this ultra-obscure feature film in the past five years and almost certainly the only person to watch it who didn’t know a member of the cast or crew personally. And here is what I found.

Harmony’s Requiem is simply brilliant. It is a powerful, disturbing, frightening, gripping, intriguing, thought-provoking, genuinely clever and original slice of modern British horror. It is a lost treasure, an undiscovered gem. The sort of discovery that makes this passion of mine all worthwhile. Bear in mind that in recent weeks, as part of the research for my next book, I have sat through a cascade of cinematic shite-ola that includes The Coven, Crying Wolf, Exorcism, Fantacide, The Hike, Knife Edge, The Quiet Ones, The Reeds, Temptation, Voodoo Lagoon and more Philip Gardiner movies than I care to name. But I would sit through all that crap again if at the end of it I could discover another unknown feature of the quality of Harmony’s Requiem.

This movie has instantly marked out for itself a place in my top ten British horror movies of the 21st century. I haven’t stopped thinking about it for 24 hours. I really, really want more people to see this movie. It may be that other people will look at Harmony’s Requiem and think, well that was crap. Simpson up to his usual hyperbolic bollocks again. You can’t win them all.

But I am genuinely excited by this film. By both the movie itself and the fact that it has finally come to light and I have a chance to share it with others.

So what is Harmony’s Requiem actually about? Well, my summation that it is an “Oxford-set chiller [which] involves a composer who seeks inspiration in serial murder” was wide of the mark. I think only two people get killed in this film, both towards the end, off-screen and almost incidentally. The main character is not a serial killer, though he is an aspiring composer and the film is set in Oxford.

We’ll call the main character K. We do eventually find out his name, though it has no special significance. The reason why I’m assigning him a code-name is because he never speaks throughout the film. He grunts and occasionally roars or screams or whimpers but even when interacting directly with other people he has no dialogue. We’re never told whether he actually can speak. We also never see his face.

K lives in a flat with modern décor that has recently gone to seed. Some of his doors have been crudely boarded up and he is reduced to eating cold baked beans directly off the kitchen counter, among rotting food. When we first meet K he is attempting to create music on his electronic keyboard but it is awful and discordant and he knows it. He smashes a small toy piano and then, still furious with himself, smashes an actual upright piano. Then he storms outside where he walks the streets and parks, watching other people from a distance.

Most (but not all) of this is shot POV but it’s only a little way in, when an angry man challenges him, that we realise K is actually carrying a camera everywhere and filming what he sees. So yes, this is found footage but it is a rare example of how to use that most over-used of filming styles in a positive, effective way. This is not some stupid, lazily-constructed, cut-price movie about putting cameras everywhere in a haunted house or going camping and filming every single moment of the trip. K’s use of his camera is intrinsic to who he is and to the story we will see unfold. Mentally challenged, painfully shy, socially inept, his camera with its zoom feature is the only way he can interact – covertly and at a distance – with the world and with other people.

Back at home, K uploads his secretly filmed videos of strangers to YouTube (here called iTubeU to avoid any copyright problems). This aspect of the story fades away as the film progresses but is nevertheless important to the plot. Produced just five years after YouTube was invented, McDermott’s film is a remarkably astute take on the idea and its potential for unpleasant or unethical usage. When K follows a young woman (Victoria Tyrrell, now Victoria Fitz-Gerald) who has left her friends and is obviously angry and upset, he thinks she is about to jump off a bridge so grabs her. His POV footage of this incident ends up on his iTubeU channel but the woman discovers the clip and uploads her own clip talking to camera about how angry she is with this weirdo.

K continues to secretly film people around him, from a distance, often from behind foliage or a fence. Though there is nothing overtly sexual about his voyeurism, he does focus mostly on young women. It’s clear that his driver is idealised, lonely romanticism rather than lust or masturbatory fantasy – although that’s not going to change the views of those women who spot him (or their boyfriends). At intermittent points in the narrative we are reminded that K is also driven by his desire to compose music. Mark McDermott himself is K but in the scenes where K actually plays the keyboard it's Olly Hamilton, a professional pianist who does music arrangements for BBC religious programmes and has accompanied the likes of Lesley Garrett and Katherine Jenkins.

After a while, K starts to concentrate on a girl he first spots jogging. Jane (Rosie Tratt) lives in a smart mews house and unwisely keeps her front door key under a plant pot. After leaving some flowers on her doorstep, K returns and enters the house. His POV exploration of Jane’s home is genuinely disturbing, an invasion of privacy that can’t help but make us wonder if anyone has been in our own homes. But when K realises – and we realise with him – that Jane is not out jogging, she’s in, she’s upstairs, she’s in the bath, she’s completely oblivious to the stranger in her house, that’s when the film really starts to unnerve.

This scene (and others) reminded me of the home invasion sequences in The Last Horror Movie, but with the tension ramped up to eleven. We at least knew what Max Parry was going to do. We at least knew who he was, what he wanted. We knew he was sane and lucid if amoral. We really don’t know anything about K except that he is mad enough (and strong enough) to smash up an entire piano and has absolutely no idea how to relate to other people. We’re genuinely afraid for what he might do in this situation.

A great strength of Harmony’s Requiem, which stems from the POV/found footage approach, is that we empathise with K. Don’t go in there. Don’t go up there. She’ll see you. She’ll hear you. We’re worried about what will happen. Worried for naïve, innocent, mentally disturbed K as much as for Jane. Other films may place us in the position of the voyeur but McDermott places us inside the voyeur’s head, to the extent that for much of the film it’s easy to forget that we’re seeing the world through a camera. K is not a bad man. He surely doesn’t even realise that what he is doing is wrong. Though he does, I think, appreciate the potential consequences of his actions, which is that Jane’s boyfriend Mike (Christopher McAleer, also in time-travel fantasy Waiting for Dawn) is going to kick seven shades of shit out of the intruder if/when he finds him. But we feel sorry for K, a lost, lonely soul who just wants some human companionship and has no idea how to go about finding it.

We certainly don’t feel sorry for Mike, a manipulative arsehole. The film’s sole, perfectly judged, audacious moment of humour comes when Mike, angling to persuade Jane to move in with him, creates evidence of a second ‘intrusion’. When K, who has understandably taken a dislike to Mike, realises what is happening he sneaks into the house and confounds the boyfriend’s plan by tidying everything up!

But a subsequent intrusion convinces K that his pathetic devotion to Jane is unfounded (of course it is, although we never expected the evidence to be quite as shocking as what he finds). This sends K off the deep end, actively chasing women. Around this time I was thinking of Harmony’s Requiem as a modern take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame: the lonely social reject, pathetically fixating on a woman unaware of his existence. Then suddenly I found myself watching a modern take on a different classic horror tale of lost love as the bridge girl from earlier and two friends (James Portway and Ashley Harvey, now Ashley Bowden) spot K and give chase, hunting down the weirdo, seeking to unmask the ‘hooded loner’. Suddenly I was watching The Phantom of the Opera…

In another audacious plot development, while K escapes injury and unmasking, his pursuers steal his camera and for the next 15 minutes or so of the movie they film each other discussing the hooded loner. K has disappeared from his own POV story but at the same time he is still present in a way because if we are K and we are the camera then the camera is K. This is still his story. We don’t know how he copes without his technological comfort blanket but he eventually regains it – and by this point the film is starting to become nasty as well as creepy.

Yet we also take a step back into mundane reality. K’s visit to his GP (Ruth Curtis: Tormented) to obtain a replacement inhaler reminds us that he is, or at least was at one time, a normal member of society. His reclusive nature is a relatively recent development – and the revelation of what has caused, or at least contributed to, that personality change is one of the film’s simplest but most shocking ideas.

In the third act, after finding himself once again a hunted quarry but fighting back, K wanders far from home, trying to make sense of his fractured, lonely life. An act of kindness leads him into a situation where, through a combination of naivety, social awkwardness and moral confusion we witness him committing a crime potentially far, far worse than what has happened so far. Fist in mouth, we scream “Don’t do that!” but he does it anyway and our genuine fear for the repercussions of K’s action, an action which places him utterly outside of acceptable society, twists our guts as we watch events unfold.

I don’t want to go into any more detail. I’ve said enough already to hopefully intrigue you without spoiling the plot. There is a lot more to the story than what I have described above, and a great deal more to the character despite his faceless, inarticulate nature. K is both simple and complex, and neither good nor bad. He is a classic horror icon unable to cope with the world around him: as innocent and naïve as Frankenstein’s monster, as cruelly mistreated and unjustly feared as King Kong.

Rare indeed is the film which grips me like Harmony’s Requiem did. At first I had my doubts: was this going to be 90 minutes of a screaming man smashing a piano? But very swiftly I fell into an understanding of what this film was trying to achieve. I was carried along by the skilfully constructed story and the razor-sharp direction (and, it has to be said, quite excellent acting from the supporting cast caught by K’s lens). I felt myself bound up in K’s life, equally horrified by his transgressions of social acceptability and by the threatened consequences of society’s reaction to his faux pas. I can’t remember the last time I genuinely enjoyed a horror film this much: the twists and turns of the plot mirroring the way my stomach was twisting and turning as each revelation came to light, as each new event diverted in unexpected, unwelcome directions.

Wow.

So here’s what I know about Mark McDermott and Harmony’s Requiem.

The film was shot in Oxford between April and June 2010 with post-production completed in August of that year. Some of the cast have no other credits but one notable name is Helen Holman (as ‘Woman walking to church’), an experienced actress whose other British horror gigs include Jacob’s Hammer, Aggressive Behaviour and Spirital Phantoma. Max Van De Banks (Soul Searcher, The Dead 1 and 2, Siren Song) provided the make-up while the visual effects were by David Laird (UFO, Kill Keith, The Scar Crow, The Crypt).

Mark McDermott became interested in film-making while studying at Lancaster University where he made his first two short horror films, No Fear and Screaming Out Silently. After a few more shorts his first feature-length work was a drama called The Jigsaw of Life. Next was a short film called Perception, shot in one day in June 2009, starring the aforementioned Helen Holman and Paul Smith, who shares producer credit on Harmony’s Requiem. (Smith also shares a 'story by' credit with Mark and Victoria McDermott.) Perception premiered at the London Independent Film Festival in 2010 and a few weeks later McDermott started work on this, his masterpiece. The shooting title was Silent Terror which is misleadingly exploitative and anyway Harmony’s Requiem makes sense at the end of the film in a totally unexpected way.

McDermott’s next project was going to be a comedy, Inspector Dackery Investigates Zetland Street (which hopefully would also have undergone a title change) but this never appeared; he was also developing something called The Human Condition. He was very active on the Oxford film-making scene, running the local branch of Shooting People – but somewhere around 2011 Mark McDermott packed it all in. Possibly because of the two great bugbears of any creative person who also has to pay the rent – day-job and family. (The fact that his wife Victoria plays 'Pregnant woman in surgery' could be a clue!)

For a short while McDermott ran his own corporate video company then in 2007 he started work at Oxford University where he has remained ever since. He now works in the University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Clinical Health, which sounds like a pretty cool place to earn a living (certainly a bit more impressive than the Leicester University Marketing Division!). There are numerous people called Mark McDermott around the UK, but a little flexing of my journalistic investigation muscles has confirmed to me that this is definitely the guy who made Harmony’s Requiem, despite the complete absence of any reference to film-making in his current digital footprint. (And not just because of the Oxford connection.)

Harmony’s Requiem had a single cinema screening for cast and crew in Oxford in October 2010. In March 2011 it was made available online through the now defunct mcdermottmovies.com website, along with a director's video diary. The version on Amazon Studios was uploaded in June 2011. And has sat there, unseen and unknown, ever since. (Despite what I said in Scream, I don't think it was on Amazon Prime. I may have been getting my Prime and Studios mixed up.)

It really looks to me like no-one outside of Mark McDermott’s social/professional circle ever saw this film. Presumably he was planning to submit it to festivals and distributors before real life overtook him, as it overtakes so many of us. Harmony’s Requiem was orphaned and forgotten.

Well no more. I’m here to rescue this brilliant, hugely enjoyable British horror film from obscurity. Please take the time to watch it, discuss it, review it. If you agree with me that this is an absolute belter of a film, let’s make it better known. Programming a festival? Maybe we can get this screened. Maybe we can find a distributor. Harmony’s Requiem deserves to be seen and appreciated by anyone with a fondness for modern British horror.

I just totally, totally dug this film. I really, really hope you will too.

MJS rating: A+

The Rise of Jengo

Director: Joe Wheeler
Writer: Joe Wheeler
Producer: Joe Wheeler
Cast: Joe Wheeler, Natalie Graham, Meaw Davis
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: Online version (archive.org)
Website: joewheelerfilms.vhx.tv

The Rise of Jengo is an extraordinary film, a film you really should see if you have a genuine interest in contemporary British horror cinema. This is not, however, a film for everyone.

It’s not for you if you expect your horror to be sweetened with a dash or dollop of humour. It’s not for you if you are only interested in creaky Victorian gothics. It’s certainly not for you if you like cat-scares and 3D jumps. But, if you are interested in the limits of horror, in transgressive works that explore the very notion of horror as an artistic genre, then I think you’ll get a big kick of out of The Rise of Jengo.

Multihyphenate (or, if you like, one-man band) Joe Wheeler writes, directs, produces, photographs, provides effects and music – the whole bit. He also stars (as ‘Jake Weaver’) and really it is his incredible performance which makes this film so essential and fascinating.

Jake is possessed by a demon named Jengo. When Jengo takes control, Jake brutally murders people, wearing a mask made from the face of an earlier victim. And to be honest, that’s about it as far as narrative goes. This isn’t a film about plot and it’s certainly not a film about dialogue. For much of the time, Jake/Jengo/Joe is alone on screen (or shares it with a terrified, screaming victim). He grunts, he screams, he howls, he laughs, he cries, he leaps around, he screams some more. Really, this is the most amazing, intense performance I think I’ve ever seen in a low-budget horror film.

There’s no hint of embarrassment or reticence, but there’s also none of the theatricality that one might get from a professional ac-tor. Wheeler simply throws himself heart, body and soul into portraying an insane, amoral, violent lunatic. It’s powerful and disturbing and alarming and everything that good horror should be.

Jake/Jengo kills a plumber who comes to check the boiler. He kills a couple of ghost hunters invited round to the flat because of mysterious happenings. He kills a woman who comes for a photo session. Each in turn arrives at the flat, is let in, then finds themselves attacked from nowhere by this British Leatherface. All of this happens against a continuous soundtrack, ranging from choral to industrial, polyphonic to atonal, which barely lets up and drags us even deeper into the nightmare scenario on screen. Wheeler himself, hence also Jake, is shaven of head and baby of face; in scenes without the mask his innocent expression (among splashes of blood) makes the violence and screaming, demented anger all the more scary.

At some point amid the mayhem we have to take stock and ask the $64 million question: is any of this real? Is Jake really possessed, or is he an extremely disturbed young man with major mental health issues, acute schiozophrenia manifesting itself through extreme violence? Well, you can ask this all you like. You won’t get an answer, and that’s one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Jake shares the flat with his girlfriend, Jodie (Natalie Graham), who reveals herself, about half an hour in, as a Satanist who has summoned Jengo and conditioned the hapless Jake to submit to the Demon’s possession when triggered by key phrases. But does this really happen? Is Jodie actually one of Lucifer’s acolytes or is this sequence the product of Jake’s disturbed imagination, finding a rationale for his behaviour? Jodie disappears during the middle act but reappears near the end when her sister comes to stay. Eventually Jake and his sister-in-law flee to Mexico after having killed three police officers. But an epilogue sees Jake wake from a nightmare back in the flat.

What is reality? What is Jake’s reality and what is real reality? Is Jodie’s admission real? Is Jodie even real? Are any of the killings real? We’re left to make these decisions for ourselves. There are no easy answers here. The Rise of Jengo is a unique movie and one that you won’t easily forget.

Well, I say unique but actually, as far as I can tell, this is a remake of Wheeler’s first feature The Evil Outside Your Window which was self-released on DVD in October 2010. The Rise of Jengo was shot in September/October 2011 and swiftly released in December. Wheeler sold the disc through a now defunct website and also posted a lo-fi version online, which can still be viewed at archive.org. To be honest, the lessened quality ironically works in the film’s favour, in my opinion. The photography is a mix of close-up handheld shots that waver in and out of focus, and a few locked-off tripod shots where the focus is fine but obviously the framing is subject to the vagaries of the actors’ movements. Both of these are deliberate artistic decisions and both work, helping to disorientate the viewer. So a small, soft image doesn’t actually make me want to see this larger and clearer. (A one-off theatrical screening in December 2011 was announced but I'm not sure whether it actually happened.)

At the end of 2013 Wheeler remade the film a second time as Jengo Hooper, expanding on the idea to provide a framing story of Jake Weaver locked up in a mental hospital, further blurring the waters regarding whether this is a tale of demonic possession or mental illness (or indeed, both). This actually played a festival in November 2014 and picked up a couple of awards. The DVD is available from the director’s website, and the film is also available VOD via Indiereign.

The Curse of Jengo, a prequel to Jengo Hooper, is apparently in the can but hasn’t yet been released. Two further titles, Jengo Hooper Returns and Jengo Hooper’s Cannibal Café(!), are listed as future projects on Wheeler’s IMDB page. Among a number of documentaries that he has directed in the past few years is one non-Jengo horror film, The Curse of Ba’al, although I can’t find any evidence of that having a release of any sort.

A few of this film’s cast play the same roles in The Evil Outside Your Window and/or Jengo Hooper. Several actors have no other IMDB credit except this. One of the few with non-Wheeler credits is Meaw Davis who was also in Le Fear and Thugs, Mugs and Violence.

Joe Wheeler is one of those fascinating names that make the British Horror Revival so fascinating. He clearly has his own following (I can’t believe he’s just selling these films to family and friends) but even serious, hardcore British horror fans have never heard of him. Well, they should. The Rise of Jengo is made with passion, creativity and unwavering dedication and commitment, and the result is something artistic and worthwhile.

MJS rating: A-

Demons Never Die

Director: Arjun Rose
Writer: Arjun Rose
Producers: Jo Podmore, Rhian Williams, Arjun Rose, Jason Maza
Cast: Tulisa off X-Factor, Reggie Yates off Radio 1, have you had enough yet?
Country: I’m ashamed to say, the UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: DVD
Website: www.facebook.com/DemonsNeverDie

Demons Never Die is absolute rubbish and gets worse the more you think about it. It was filmed as Suicide Kids but the title was changed at the last moment, allegedly because it couldn’t be said on radio and TV (possibly also because there was a 2009 American indie film called that). I’m guessing that there may also have been fears about what the media might do if any young person did top themselves after watching this movie, which could easily have happened. I certainly contemplated jumping out of a high window a few times. Of course the title change doesn’t alter the (for want of a better word) plot which is all about teenagers forming a suicide pact, so it wouldn’t have saved them anyway.

Actually, the title is the best thing here. Demons Never Die is a great title. Or at least it would be a great title for a horror film about, you know, demons. There is however nothing supernatural in this formulaic, lazy slasher - although a few red herrings point that way (for example, one character claims to have never seen another character’s constant companion). The ‘demons’ referred to in a clumsy voice-over near the start are of the metaphorical kind. I don’t know if that opening voice-over was added late in post-production, but the brief reprise at the end which finishes with the words “…and demons never die!” has so obviously been tacked on at the last moment that you can see the drawing pins.

This is a film about, and potentially for, Millennials (or “the Skins audience” as one of the sleeve quotes has it). It’s about a bunch of whining, self-important, self-obsessed teenagers who have nothing to worry about but like to complain anyway and feel the world owes them something just for getting out of bed. There isn’t a single likeable or empathetic character in the entire film. Why should anyone care what happens to these kids? These are characters who are so shallow (in both senses) that for most of them we only learn their names after they die.

At a sixth form college, the Principal announces that one of the students has killed herself, which is met with a startling lack of response from her disinterested peers. A couple of plain clothes policemen are there, one of whom warns the youngsters about the dangers of copycat suicides, something I’m sure would never happen in real life because the natural response of any troubled teen would be: “Well, I hadn’t really thought of topping myself, but now that you come to suggest it…”

Despite this warning, a second teenager also kills herself shortly afterwards, while attending some sort of never explained photoshoot, after recording an equally unexplained, random video diary saying she has bulimia. (There are frequent other random uses of video cameras throughout the script, to such an extent that I’m left wondering whether this was conceived as found footage in an earlier draft. There is also a single bizarre sequence when the characters all talk to each other via webcams, shown on screen as coloured blocks that look like a bad game of Tetris.) The bulimia remark is typical of the sort of brief, half-hearted infodumps which are intended to show that these teens have ‘demons’. Another one later in the film goes like this: “Why do you live in that squat?” “My dad kicked me out because I got a girl pregnant.” Seriously, a whole bunch of people thought this was a filmable script.

It transpires that both these girls (the first one’s ‘demon’ was apparently that she had split up with her boyfriend – Jesus, get over yourself!) were part of a suicide pact, along with eight other stereotypes (the stoner, the nutter, the fat kid, the sensitive Irish lad, the Token Black Guy…). Not one of these people shows any actual evidence of suicidal tendencies: there’s no nihilism, no punk attitude, not even any emo moping. They’re all just as bland and boring as most Millennial teenagers. What is wrong with the world? Sid Vicious and James Dean both died for your sins, and all you can do is text each other on your fucking Blackberries.

The remaining octet are mildly concerned that their two dead pals have jumped the gun on the whole 'suicide pact' thing, but we know that in fact they were murdered by a hooded psycho with a shiny metal mask. Almost immediately a major problem presents itself. Because among a veritable motorway pile-up of stupid and illogical plot points, the most fundamental is that this entire film relies on the police being unable to distinguish between self-inflicted stab wounds and wounds received during a frenzied knife attack. Frankly a child of ten would be able to tell the difference, but not these two clueless coppers. Mind, given that one of them is Ashley Walters from laughably shit rap combo So Solid Crew and the other is personality-free Radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates, it’s no real surprise that they don’t know the first thing about policing. Or anything. (Walters was also in Outcasts, Anuvahood and WAZ. Yates was also in Top of the Pops and Rastamouse.)

The third victim (Jennie Jacques: Truth or Dare, Cherry Tree Lane) is a tentative item with Sensitive Irish Lad (Robert Sheehan: Misfits, Nick Cage turkey Season of the Witch and Irish horror Ghostwood) so already marked as our Final Girl. She somehow evades the masked killer, but not everyone is convinced she saw someone because her mother has split personality syndrome (which the script is agonisingly careful to avoid calling schizophrenia) and she might have it too. Further bodies mount up, including a teacher and his wife/girlfriend. In the real world the school would be closed and a massive police operation would swing into place. But in the shoddily amateur writing of debutante film-maker Arjun Rose, everything carries on as normal. No-one seems perturbed by the spate of violent deaths or the threat of further killings, and the investigation remains limited to two coppers in one car.

The teacher, incidentally, is seen downing whiskey (possibly that’s his ‘demon’, though once again there’s neither context nor comment) and telling someone on the phone that he wants out of whatever they’re involved in. Out of what? Who was on the phone? Why is he drinking? Is he the killer, or involved with the killer? This is just one more random red herring that leads nowhere and means nothing, never either explained or justified. Maybe that actually is the killer on the phone, but if so what is the teacher’s involvement? We don’t know, and if Arjun Rose knows he’s too incompetent a writer to explain.

Some of the remaining, still alive youngsters decide that they maybe don’t want to commit suicide after all because… well, there’s no more reason for them to change their minds than to decide on hara-kiri in the first place. Rose has no concept of characterisation or motivation. It doesn’t help that some of the cast are shockingly wooden actors, but even talented performers couldn’t make this work. Remember Harrison Ford’s famous comment on the set of Star Wars? “You can write this stuff, George, but you sure as heck can’t say it.” Well, Arjun Rose can’t even write it.

It all culminates at a massive party in a huge house where dozens of vacuous teenagers drink and chatter and snog but the most actually rebellious thing they can manage is a game of Twister. The one psycho teen who organised the original pact (pointlessly shadowed everywhere by an acolyte with a video camera – see note above re. found footage origins) is now determined to murder everyone instead, using his dad’s gun. He’s played by Jason Maza (Rise of the Footsoldier, Ten Dead Men, Truth or Dare) who also produced this and a few other features (including BHR obscurity The Tapes). There’s a stultifyingly awful dialogue exchange where he explains to his camera-toting chum that this will make him a mass murderer, not a serial killer, complete with dictionary definitions of each. Added to an earlier exchange between Final Girl and Sensitive Irish Lad about character arcs, this overt textual analysis of horror film tropes within a horror film underlines that Rose has watched Scream and, well, that’s about it. He watched Scream and decided to copy it.

Rapper Cop and DJ Cop have been invited to the party because… plot. Not likely to compromise the investigation in any way, that. (This is a party, bear in mind, full of people who have lost several friends/associates to a violent serial killer and who are all potentially in danger themselves as students at the College of Death, yet are all too thick - or written by somebody too thick - to care.) The plain clothes cops now have, for some reason, police-branded jackets on. And fire-arms. Because yes, British police officers just habitually carry automatic pistols around with them when they’re out of uniform and attending a teenage party.

In the end [spoilers on] it turns out that the killer is one of the cops, which makes no more sense than anything else in the film. So let’s see: he murdered a random girl at a random school, somehow making it look like suicide. Then got assigned to that case. Then started attacking other spoilt-brat students, somehow working his way through the members of a secret pact of ‘suicide kids’ that he couldn’t possibly have known about. [spoilers off] Then, oh, my brain itches just trying to justify this. It can’t be justified. This is one of the worst, most insultingly stupid scripts ever filmed. First draft dialogue strung around a make-it-up-as-you-go-along story based on half-arsed ideas.

Arjun Rose is a former city trader who apparently decided he wanted to make films instead of shuffling money so roped in some of his rich friends to finance what is, in effect, a vanity project. Which is why the four executive producers include Idris Elba and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. I can accept TPT wanting in; she’s just a posh totty socialite brain donor who knows no more about films than she does about work. But Idris Elba, man! He should know the difference between a good script and a pile of ill-thought-out clichés like this! He could be the black James Bond, for God’s sake! The other two ex.prods are Stephen Behrens (possibly the Morgan Stanley VP of that name) and Peter Delfgou, a former editor who now runs Soho Screening Rooms (not as naughty an establishment as it sounds!).

In interviews, Rose cited Donnie Darko as an influence on his script, and one can certainly see that, though only in the way that one can see Italian cuisine is an influence on a microwave lasagna. But here's something intriguing: I found another interview with Rose where he talked about having been inspired by an arty film called I Give You My Heart and it's clear from the description that he's actually talking about Tristan Versluis' 2008 short I Love You!

The cast - whose individual talents could be kindly described as 'varied' - is toplined by N-Dubz/X-Factor bimbo Tulisa Costacoffee, a piece of cynical stunt-casting mercifully killed off early on. Many of the real actors have worked with/for Noel Clarke in pictures like 4.3.2.1., Kidulthood and Adulthood. Among their notable credits: Jacob Anderson plays Grey Worm in Game of Thrones and was also in Comedown and Broadchurch; Emma Rigby was in Hollyoaks and Rentaghost spin-off Becoming Human; Andrew Ellis was in the various versions of This is England; Patrick Baladi played Dodi Al Fayed in a TV movie about Princess Diana; Jack Doolan was in May I Kill U?, The Facility and Cockneys vs Zombies; Nick Nevern was in The Tapes, Outpost: Black Sun and Strippers vs Werewolves; and Arnold Oceng used to be in Grange Hill. Most of the principle players - students and cops alike - were, not unexpectedly, in their twenties when they shot this. Hence the 'teenagers' look too old to be believable and the police look too young. Normally that would be a black mark but here it's the least of the film's worries.

Nathaniel Gleed, who has somehow previously played young versions of both Harry Hill and James May, plays a younger version of Sensitive Irish Lad in black and white flashbacks which, like everything else here, don’t make any sense. Rosalind Knight, whose career stretches all the way back to Carry On Nurse and Olivier’s Richard III, is in the cast apparently, but I don’t know where. And although I totally failed to spot her (probably because I wasn’t looking), comedy legend Morwenna Banks is in here somewhere too, probably as a teacher.

DP Toby Moore primarily works in television, shooting dramas such as Mr Selfridge and Law and Order UK (plus episodes of Torchwood and Young Dracula). Editor Tim Murrell cut Wake Wood, The Children, WAZ and The Day of the Triffids. Both put in fine work here which sadly can’t save the film itself from being crap on a stick. Likewise production designer Paul Burns (Piggy) and costume designer Robert Lever (Ra.One, The Tapes, Mirrormask). Possibly the only person who comes out of this shambles with anything to be genuinely proud of is Steadycam legend Roger Tooley whose work stands out on screen, especially in the title sequence as he moves around a lecture theatre. He’s not listed on the IMDB page and Rose managed to call him ‘Roger Avers’ in an interview.

Demons Never Die was shot over 18 days on a budget of £900,000. Rose called the film “real low budget” but just short of a million is obviously considerably more than most British horror films get and the results certainly don’t show up on screen. In fact, let’s just put that in context. Stag Hunt (almost entirely shot on location) cost £20,000. Blood and Carpet (packed with CGI post to remove 21st century background clutter) cost £3,000. Darkest Day and The House of Him cost £900 a pop. I’ve reviewed 15 new British horror features so far this year and only two might conceivably have had budgets anywhere near that of Demons Never Die. The total budgets of the other 13 films added together wouldn’t come to £900,000.

What the hell has Rose spent the money on? There are no big effects or action sequences, no costly locations, no expensive costumes or props, even the ‘gore effects’ are largely limited to throwing fake blood on fully clothed actors. For a man with a financial background, Arjun Rose (who was also one of four named producers) shows precious little evidence of how to manage money on a film production. He just knows how to raise money and then how to waste it, which I suppose is what you would expect from a city trader...

(Some sources cite a budget of '£90,000' so someone somewhere has either added or lost a zero, but even that is a hundred times what Rab Florence spent on The House of Him.)

Announced for a June 2011 cinema release under the original title, the film was promoted with a series of short-but-uninteresting videos in which various actor mates of Arjun Rose cited ‘3 reasons to live’. Retitled, the film was eventually released to theatres in late October - after a D-lister-packed West End premiere - and hit DVD the following February. I’m not aware of any festival play and frankly not surprised by that. The only other country where it seems to have been released so far is Turkey, for some reason.

Here’s the thing. It may seem like I have a problem with today’s young people, the so-called Millennials, the Skins audience. And indeed I do. But just because they’re boring and shallow, that’s no reason for people to make boring, shallow films about them. There has already been at least one perfectly good British horror film set within this generation of young people. Jon Wright’s terrific 2009 supernatural bully revenge saga Tormented is intelligent, well-crafted and even scary. So it’s not intrinsic that this sort of film is bound to suck. This is not a rubbish film because it’s about the youth of today. It’s a rubbish film and it’s about the youth of today.

It may be, as the quoted reviewer suggested, that 'the Skins audience' will indeed love it. I suppose we should draw a distinction between films about Millennials and films for Millennials. For someone with no imagination or perspective or ambition, who judges the quality of a film not on story or characters or evidence of creative talents but on how many people off the telly are in it, then maybe this picture is the business.

Speaking of things that suck, as we were, the film’s ghastly soundtrack (the licensing of which may account for quite a bit of that budget) is full of soulless, forgettable songs by soulless, forgettable artists like Jessie J, Chase and Status, Tinchie Stryder and Rizzle Kicks. If that’s your kind of music, then once again: you may enjoy this film.

Seriously? Jessie fucking J? What has become of the world?

MJS rating: D+

Chop

Director: Trent Haaga
Writer: Adam Minarovich 
Producers: Trent Haaga, Chad Ferrin, Jeff Hamilton
Cast: Will Keenan, Timothy Muskatell, Tanishaa Mukherjee
Country: USA
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: online screener

Chop is a Trent Haaga movie and what’s really scary about it is that it led me to realise that it’s nearly 15 years since I interviewed Trent. Back then he was just starting out, having got his first feature writing credit on The Toxic Crusader Part IV, acting in the film too. Since then he has written another dozen or so movies (including Hell Asylum, Deadgirl and American Maniacs) and acted in about 50 including Mulva Zombie Ass Kicker, Dead and Rotting, Dr Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots, Easter Bunny Kill! Kill!, Bonnie and Clyde vs Dracula and Killjoy 2, 3 and 4. Trent Haaga is the face and the voice of cool, trashy indie US movies that ordinary people have never heard of and we salute him.

But he hasn’t directed before. This film, originally released on US DVD at the tail-end of 2011 and now picked up for exclusive UK VOD distribution by the fine folks at TheHorrorShow.tv, is his directorial debut. The screenplay isn't by Trent but was written by Adam Minarovich who has previously made four films of his own. He apparently operates at the next rung down from Trent because I have at least seen some of Trent’s films and have heard of others. But Minarovich is way off the radar: Wiseguys vs Zombies, anyone? Buy Sell Kill: A Flea Market Story? Are these actual things?

The above notwithstanding, this feels like a Trent Haaga joint. It’s gory, it’s splattery, it’s darkly comic. It’s over the top but in a restrained way. It’s this side of Citizen Toxie, that’s for sure.

Will Keenan stars as Lance Reed, an ordinary guy who gets kidnapped by a never-named stranger (Timothy Muskatell). Forced to murder his own brother for no obvious reason, Lance finds himself returned to his ordinary life with the threat of discovery hanging over him and a resentful fear that The Stranger (thus credited) will enter his life again. Which he does.

With a relentlessly psychotic determination to make Lance apologise for some unspecified wrong, The Stranger takes away first the people that Lance loves, and then Lance himself, bit by bit. Starting with a finger. Hence the title. A seemingly bottomless supply of knock-out drug syringes leaves Lance repeatedly waking up with further bits of himself missing. Eventually, The Stranger kidnaps Lance again, ties him up in a remote workshop, and sets to work on what's left.

Lance’s problem – well, apart from gradually being chopped up into bits, obviously – is that he has absolutely no idea whatsoever who The Stranger is or what he’s supposed to be apologising for. In desperation, he digs up some memories of bad things he has done but nope, those weren’t this guy. So no end to the chopping. What is even worse, this guy then tracks down the people that Lance wronged and encourages them to chop bits off him. And to be fair, Lance does turn out to be a pretty awful human being.

A picture like this stands or falls on its lead performance and Keenan (who also started out working for Uncle Lloyd – he was the male lead in Tromeo and Juliet!) is simply awesome in the role, running through a full gamut of emotions, but stepping over the screaming terror that most people would feel. At various times there’s fear and trepidation, and pleading and bargaining, but also outright defiance and belligerent abuse and deep, dark sarcasm and eventually just weariness. Muskatell (who shares several acting credits with Haaga) provides a great foil: calm, polite, respectful but clearly a sociopath.

Tanishaa Mukherjee (more used to acting alongside global superstars like Amitabh Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai in blockbusters like Sarkar Raj) lends sterling support as Lance’s wife Emily, who has some secrets of her own. Writer Minarovich and Tamil T Rhee make a nice double act as the cops investigating Lance’s brother’s disappearance. The cast also includes Elina Madison (Curse of the 49er, Butchered, Creepshow 3, John Carl Buechler’s version of Jekyll and Hyde, Charlie Band’s Petrified and a number of Creep Creepersin pictures) as a hooker, producer Chad Ferrin as Lance’s brother, Camille Keaton from I Spit on Your Grave in flashbacks as Lance’s mother, and Caleb Emerson (director of Die You Zombie Bastards!) as the proprietor of a hardware store.

Chop is joyfully violent and bloody, and very, very funny. It’s nicely structured too as Lance finds himself descending into lower and lower levels of hell, stuck on a ride he’s completely unable to leave and which he has no idea how or why he is even on it. Being honest, the ending is a bit of a let down and I would have preferred something bleaker, nastier and vague – but that doesn’t spoil what is a very enjoyable horror film laced with the absolute blackest of humour.

Haaga, who has spent enough time writing and acting (fifteen years or so, as explained above) to know his way around a movie production, directs with aplomb and confidence, helped by the cinematography of Christian Janss and the editing skills of Jahad Ferif. The special effects were provided by Tom Devlin who since 2002 has worked on dozens of cool movies including The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, Poultrygeist, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Mega Piranha, Piranhaconda, Sand Sharks, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising and – I’m not making this up – a porno called Fuckenstein. Oh Jeez, and also A Wet Dream on Elm Street. Seriously? Matt Olivo, by day sound editor on the American versions of Total Wipeout and The Apprentice, provided the score.

Chop screened over here in 2011 at Dead by Dawn but has not previously had a UK release so it’s great to see the title turning up on TheHorrorShow.tv

MJS rating: A-

The Stone: No Soul Unturned

Director: Philip Gardiner
Writer: Philip Gardiner
Producer: Philip Gardiner, Nik Spencer
Cast: Andrew Gough, Craig Dalziel, Sarah Dunn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener (Chemical Burn Entertainment)

Who is Philip Gardiner? Looking back as I write this in December 2011, we see that one year ago Gardiner had no films to his credit, apart from documentaries. Now he has four - four! - movies available on DVD in the States, with another three in various stages of production. The man is a factory. But who is he? From whence has he sprung?

To judge from his own publicity, Gardiner is a legend among wackos. Now, I don’t really know any wackos, don’t really want to make the acquaintance of any wackos, and thus can’t judge how much of Philip Gardiner’s website - amusingly called Gardiner’s World, although I suspect Americans won’t get the joke - accurately reflects his standing in this field and how much is hyperbole. What I do know is that the fellow is incredibly prolific. He has written a bunch of books and made about 20 non-fiction DVDs.

Well, I say ‘non-fiction’ but absolutely none of this stuff is true. Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs, crop circles, freemasons, alchemy, dowsing and conspiracy theories of all stripes - there really doesn’t seem to be a looney tune that Gardiner hasn’t covered. You have to ask yourself: how come he knows this much about what’s really going on in the world, that greater forces are trying to keep secret, yet he is still not either ruling us all or dead at the bottom of the Thames? It just doesn’t add up.

Let me make it clear: I have no objection to people believing in nonsense and if someone can make a bit of money out of it by flogging them DVDs and books, good luck to them. There are all sorts of quacks, frauds and charlatans out there but just watching some dodgy DVD documentary about dowsing won’t do you any harm. I mean, it won’t help you to find water with a bent twig either, but it won’t hurt anyone.

Gardiner has also piggybacked a few pop-culture/literary phenomena, producing documentaries on Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Ian Fleming, Harry Potter etc., all apparently taking a mystical approach to their subject. Eventually he decided to go the whole hog and make his own narrative feature films, but again with a mystical bent. The first of these to cross my path is Gardiner’s debut picture The Stone: No Soul Unturned (onscreen title is just The Stone), kindly sent over to me by Chemical Burn Entertainment, who are releasing all of Gardiner’s works.

‘Filmed on location at Annesley Hall in Nottinghamshire, England, this film is a British paranormal thriller in true Hammer fashion,‘ sayeth the sleeve blurb. ‘Featuring real British Druids filmed on location at sacred and ancient grounds and a host of best-selling authors and musicians.’

We-e-e-l-l-l-l... f’starters, Hammer never made any ‘paranormal thrillers’. The closest they got was their brace of Dennis Wheatley Satanism movies. Even if they had made paranormal thrillers, The Stone is utterly unlike anything even remotely connected with Hammer in style, tone, approach or subject matter. It’s a British horror movie, that’s the only connection.

As for the ‘real British Druids’ presumably that refers to the long prologue of some folk in white gowns doing something in long shot that we can’t see. It could be that, even filmed this distantly, keen wackos can identify particular mystic rites going on here but to the rest of us it looks like a bunch of folks in the woods standing in a circle then walking off somewhere and standing in a circle again. My guess is that they are burying the titular stone, only because somebody later finds a stone and I can’t think what else might be going on. Another problem with this prologue is that, Druidic fashions not having changed much in the past couple of thousand years, we can’t tell if this is present day or taking place in ancient times. Not that it matters as none of it has any connection with the rest of the film.

Actually, even before the Druids we have a sort of pre-prologue in which five talking heads pontificate very briefly on the mystical significance of stones. The only one I have heard of is Nick Pope, a man who has made a healthy career out of wacko-dom, but I assume the others are similarly well-known in this field.

Nick Pope, of course, is the bloke who worked for the Ministry of Defence, supposedly ‘investigating UFOs’. Civil Service friends of mine assure me that if the stuff he has written about his time at the MoD was even slightly true, he would have been hauled over the Official Secrets Act coals; most MoD staff aren’t even allowed to divulge what biscuits are in the tea-room. The reality of Pope’s ‘UFO investigations’, as I understand it, is this. It was his job to field complaints about MoD activities, so if some irate Welsh farmer rang up to complain that low-flying jets were frightening his sheep, Pope had to record the details. One of the questions was: what type of aircraft were involved? Harriers? Jaguars? Tornados?

“I don’t bloody know, boyo! All I know is they were too bloody low and too bloody loud and they scared my bloody flock, look you!”

So the type of ‘flying object’ involved was recorded as ‘unidentified’! All of which qualifies Nick Pope to pop up at the start of dodgy B-movies talking about mystical stones, apparently.

Eventually - e-ven-tu-al-ly - we get to the main narrative, about five people who turn up at an old Manor House to look for ghosts, or something. I had quite enjoyed the Druids prologue because it was so ridiculously long and drawn out that it actually became entertaining, but ‘long and drawn out’ would be a mild way of describing the rest of the film. Most directors would show us the car sweeping up the driveway to the house, then cut to the group climbing out and looking around. But Gardiner takes about seven or eight shots to even get the car parked! Every time you think it’s parked, the driver manoeuvres it again. It’s the funniest parking sequence I’ve ever seen.

It’s followed by lots of extended, slow shots of the quintet disembarking, and then yet another drawn out sequence, this time of them putting their tents up! Throughout the film, there is just sequence after sequence that is achingly, hilariously over-extended like this, all set to music (some of which, I’ll happily admit, is quite toe-tappingly enjoyable). The movie is like a series of pop videos with the occasional line of dialogue inbetween.

Incredibly, some of these wandering-about-doing-nothing sequences are speeded up! Not quite to Benny Hill velocity but still fast - and they still drag. Gardiner clearly has no concept of economy of storytelling, possibly because there’s no real story here. And it’s not like the film needs to stretch itself out to be feature length. The sleeve (and Gardiner’s website) both reckon this runs 75 minutes but it’s actually 98 (the Inaccurate Movie Database scores a double failure by claiming it’s 89/80). All of which is odd, because normally film running times go the other way, claiming 90 minutes for things that are barely 70. The Stone could easily be trimmed of 13 minutes of nothing happening, to match its sleeve info, without affecting the film at all. In fact, it would probably still drag.

The leader of this team is Aleister (Andrew Gough, who was executive producer along with Gardiner and Chemical Burn head honcho Warren Croyle), a tall, middle-aged Yank with a foppish haircut, a double-breasted, unbuttoned dark jacket and a long white shirt he doesn’t bother to tuck into his trousers. Basically, he looks like the forgotten sixth member of Spandau Ballet. Gummo Kemp.

Aleister is clearly in this ghost-hunting lark for the chicks (on his own website, Gough describes the character as “an occultist of dubious authenticity, who is addicted to women and whisky and passes himself off as an esoteric guru”) and has two emo bimbos hanging off his arms: blonde Charlotte (Sarah Dunn) and redhead Helena (Layla Randle-Conde). Then there’s Craig (Wes Dolan), who has a silk top hat, a Jack Sparrow-esque goatee and virtually no lines. I wasn’t sure whether or not he was meant to be a stoner. The fifth member of the group, and the only interesting or sympathetic one, is Tony (Craig Dalziel, a white rapper who is credited under his stage name of ‘Dap-C’). And the reason he is interesting and sympathetic is that he can’t stand Aleister.

Tony has a small video camera and some scenes are intercut with footage shot on this, nudging The Stone to the borders of the ‘found footage’ subgenre. We can tell from Tony’s slightly surly attitude and wearied participation in the various activities that his heart isn’t in this. But what is really great is that, in the camcorder shots, whenever the camera points towards Aleister, we can hear Tony muttering under his breath “Tosspot.”

Which is just ace, because Aleister quite clearly is a tosspot of the first water. Frustratingly, however, absolutely nothing is done with this. It promises some real character conflict and character development. Will Tony have to abandon his cynical, sceptical attitude and call on Aleister’s knowledge of the occult to save himself from some supernatural threat? Or will Aleister have to firmly grasp the nettle of reality, accept that his ghosts and demons are nonsense and call on clear-minded Tony for help?

Nope, nothing like that. There’s no conflict, no development and, the above notwithstanding, no real characters. We never find out why Tony is tagging along with the others when his heart very obviously isn’t in it. He doesn’t like Aleister, he’s not on for a shag with Helena or Charlotte (though we do later see Craig and Helena sharing a sleeping bag). What’s he doing there? Possibly even more interesting: why is writer-director Gardiner, whom one would expect to empathise most with mysticism-spouting Aleister, telling us through one of the other characters that the man is a tosspot?

None of this is answered or even hinted at. Instead we get loads more interminable musical sequences of people wandering around or holding hands in a circle. It’s abundantly unclear what these five people are here to do. They’re not ghost-hunting in any conventional sense, ie. you know, hunting for ghosts. Instead, there’s some babble about helping souls to pass over to the other side. So your guess is as good as mine. Maybe that makes sense to people who have seen one of Philip Gardiner’s documentaries or read one of his books.

An amateur photographer taking pictures of the buildings appears at the window at one point and informs them that Lord Byron used to live there, which seems to surprise them even though they claim to have done their research and, guys, it’s like in the first paragraph of the hall’s Wikipedia entry. We do actually see a short (but still over-long) sequence of two people in 18th century dress walking among the buildings and evidently this is supposed to be Byron and his bit of stuff, although the actor is utterly un-Byronic. I mean, it’s not like you have to try and work out what Byron looked like, the man is his own adjective. Since this sequence has no connection with anything else, it’s unclear whether it’s a historical flashback or whether these are ghosts.

The photographer is later killed, or something, in some other building. Some sort of ghost/demon/ghoul advances on him and the photographer shouts repeatedly “Get back! You’re not real!” So, um, why are you telling it to get back? It should also be stressed that, in all the years I’ve been reviewing crap films (and some good ones) on this site, the guy playing the photographer is probably among the five worst actors I have ever seen. And you know I’ve seen some bad, bad acting.

Some other bloke turns up, I think he’s a biker or something, and shouts obscenities at the gang. For some reason. He later seems to be the prime suspect when their tents are all mysteriously flattened while their backs are turned for about ten seconds. Later, when we see Craig and Helena together, he’s got maggots in his hair and she’s got a tarantula on her bum.

At night, when the others go to bed, Tony goes for a walk and see a bunch of folk performing some sort of Pagan/Wiccan rite inside the estate’s chapel, or something. Possibly Helena is involved in this but it’s not clear. On another occasion, Charlotte goes to use an outside (literally!) toilet but sees a strange young woman crying who then screams at her with a scary Exorcist-face before disappearing. Helena finds Charlotte weeping and clutching a doll but the sound on this scene is awful so we can’t make out most of the dialogue, which could possibly have been important.

So basically, as you can see, a bunch of weird and slightly spooky things happen but they don’t connect in any way and they are interspersed by more bloody music videos. Then for the last 30-40 minutes the weirdness and danger ramps up a level but, thanks to truly terrible camera-work, we can’t see what it is or, in some cases, who it’s happening to. This later stuff is shot day-for-night but it’s just way, way too dark (I’ve included here a couple of framegrabs from Gardiner’s website which demonstrate the problem). Tellingly, the credits list about 20 names as camera-operators - pretty much the entire cast and crew. In other words, the camera was held by whoever wasn’t on screen at the time and really, that’s no way to make a movie. There are four people you can’t do without on a movie set: a cinematographer, a sound recordist, a production designer and a first AD. If they all do their jobs well, you’ll have a good movie. Or at least, a good-looking version of a bad script.

Not that I believe The Stone had an actual script. Not a conventional screenplay as you or I understand the term. It couldn’t have. For starters, too many of the pages would just say: ‘They wander around some more. Then they do it again.’ And to maintain the one-minute-per-page rule those would need to be printed with lots of blank lines or in 144pt type. More to the point, where there is ‘dialogue’ it is obviously improvised. And I don’t mean improvised in a sort of Mike Leigh, let’s-workshop-the-characters, let’s-build-up-the-dialogue-through-improv way. I mean it really looks and sounds like the actors were just given vague direction and told to get on with it.

The problem is, not only are none of these people particularly good actors - in fact they seem to mostly be Gardiner’s mates from his previous day-job as a marketing executive - but also they have no characters. So for the most part they just keep saying the same thing over and over again until the director yells cut. It just look unutterably amateur. I’m sorry but it does.

So basically the first half of the movie is slow-moving and makes no sense but is at least entertainingly poor. For one brief, shining moment I thought we might have found a new Dicky Risk-all. But no, I think his crown is safe. And then, after the break, it still doesn’t make any sense but it’s too dark to see what’s going on anyway. I can’t even remember what happens in the end. I think they all die.

On slipping the screener disc into my machine it indicated a running time of 130 minutes, which scared me more than anything in the film. In actual fact, the last half hour or so turned out to be the extras: three actual music videos for songs featured on the soundtrack and some behind-the-scenes footage. Part of this is rather tedious ‘location scouting’ but part of it is stunts and other notable sequences - including Andrew Gough buried in the ground with the tarantula crawling on his face. Irrespective of anything else about the movie, props to him for that. You couldn’t pay me enough.

What strikes me most about this footage however, is how much fun Gardiner and his crew seem to be having. One might expect a bunch of solemn-faced, self-important no-laughs but actually it seems like they had a good time making the film and come across as a bunch of likeable, friendly folk larking about with cameras and boom mics. That sort of makes me feel a bit bad for trashing their movie now, but to be fair, it is awful and it would be remiss of me to say anything else.

Also included in the behind-the-scenes footage is the photo-shoot for the DVD sleeve. Two of those actresses are the ones who play Helena and Charlotte though they’re not in character. They never wear those costumes in the film nor do they pout provocatively like that. I honestly have no idea who the other bird is. Maybe she plays the scary-faced ghost-woman who frightens Charlotte on the loo. Maybe she’s Lord Byron’s bit of totty. Maybe she was a production assistant. Finally there is a trailer for Gardiner’s second feature film - Paranormal Haunting: Curse of the Blue Moon Inn - which looks in almost every way superior to The Stone.

Oh, and that black shiny thing which the three young ladies are fondling sensually on the sleeve is ‘the stone’. The team find it under some floorboards but its significance or effect is never explained. All I can tell you for certain is that no-one fondles it sensually in the movie. If you want to know more than that about the stone - or indeed The Stone - I fear you will have to ask either Philip Gardiner or Nick Pope.

MJS rating: D

Review originally posted 11th December 2011