Hunters of the Kahri

Director: Ali Paterson
Writer: Ali Paterson
Producers: Ali Paterson, Pip Hill
Cast: Marc Goodacre, Jon Bennett, Doug Booth
Country: UK
Year of release: 2006/2016
Reviewed from: YouTube

This is the first time I have ever reviewed a movie without watching the whole thing. This is not something I intend to make a habit of, but Hunters of the Kahri is literally unwatchable. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of films before which, for one reason or another, were effectively unwatchable. For most people. But I’ve stuck with them, for your sake. I provide a service here. I take pride in my work.

Hunters of the Kahri is 104 minutes long. I suffered through the first 44 minutes; the final hour can frankly go fuck itself. (I did skip through the rest of the film, just in case there was any evidence of a major change in direction or quality. There wasn’t.)

I had this film on my list of never released British horror pictures. It was shot in 2005, had a single cast and crew screening in June 2006, then disappeared. In April 2017 I spotted that Ali Paterson had posted the whole movie onto YouTube the previous October. So I gave it a spin. All I really got out of my viewing experience was confirmation that this isn’t a horror film. It’s a sub-sub-sub-Tolkien fantasy of swords and quests and suchlike but there are no demons or other elements that might make it borderline horror.

It is also – and let’s make no bones about this – a home movie. Not just an amateur film made by a group of friends (there are plenty of those reviewed on my site) but literally just something cobbled together in somebody’s garden.

Which runs for 104 minutes.

I think it’s set in a post-apocalyptic quasi-medieval fantasy world, rather than a historical quasi-medieval fantasy world, which just about excuses the fact that most costumes are obviously just muddied-up T-shirts and similar 21st century garments. What it doesn’t excuse is the neatly trimmed hedges, fishpond and patio. Bizarrely, some of the film is set in open countryside, so your guess is as good as mine why Paterson didn’t shoot everything away from suburbia. It really seems like he either didn’t care about, or possibly didn’t notice, anything that was in the background of his shots. In one shot, two bicycles are leaning against a tree. In another, a character who has just been killed is sitting up, apparently unaware that they are in view.

The story itself is impenetrable nonsense. Our central character seems to be Calum Narata (Marc Goodacre) who sports an eye-patch and has two teenage children, despite being clearly in his early twenties. He steals a sword from someone and gives it to someone else who is going on a quest and wants Calum to come along but Calum stays behind and sends his two kids instead. There’s a woman in a white boob tube and a bloke in a kimono and another guy dressed in a white bathrobe and a bedsheet. They have names like Kenzo Kasdan and Jengole Marguand and Tenzing Oz, and most of them carry samurai swords for some reason.

It’s all incredibly talkie, with just the occasional brief, dull swordfight. There is a woman narrating the film with lines like “After the slaughter of the Woodpeople, Xenos fled, leaving Narata to take on the rest of Tenzing’s horde.” After a bit she slips into the present tense so it’s like she’s just reading from the script descriptions of scenes that they couldn’t afford to film.

The whole thing has been shot for zero pence, without even the most basic concern for things like character, story, photography, sound or audience. It looks like no-one was expected to watch this who wasn’t also in it. Like I say: a home movie. But why make a home movie that’s 104 minutes long? Especially when that is 104 minutes of stuff that makes Stephen Donaldson novels look interesting and well-written. Why not make a 14-minute home movie, show it to your mates who made it with you, and then you’ve got an extra hour and a half to get drunk and come up with daft ideas for the next one. Or just one idea would be good, and would be a step in the right direction.

Of particular note is the sound, because one of the things that makes this unwatchable is that it is mostly inaudible. Paterson apparently got hold of some outdoor sound effects – basically birdsong – and added this to most scenes, over the top of the dialogue (which looks like it may have been looped). But because he either didn’t know what he was doing or didn’t care, he’s got the sound mix all to hell so that the dialogue is drowned out by the music which is in turn drowned out by these bloody birds. It’s like watching the film inside a particularly well-stocked aviary and means that only occasionally can we make out the terrible dialogue that the non-characters are statically spouting.

There really is no reason for anyone to ever watch this, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even have bothered with a review. But there is one aspect of this film which means that it is worth recording, so that it’s not just a title on a filmography, and so that people don’t get overly excited and think they’re missing something.

Most of the cast, as you might expect, have no other IMDB credits. One of them is called Christian Lloyd and the IMDB thinks that’s a British-born, Canadian actor who has numerous film and TV credits since 2001 including Jude Law-starring sci-fi feature Repo Men and Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. No, I don’t think that’s the same guy. Perhaps he came over to the UK in 2006 to make a film in Ali Paterson’s back garden, but I have my doubts.

However, Calum Narata’s son Sagar Narata is played by 14-year-old ‘Doug Booth’ who, as Douglas Booth, has gone on to not just a genuine career but considerable critical acclaim. Being somewhat out of touch with popular culture I wasn't familiar with Mr Booth's work myself, but a look at his IMDB and Wikipedia pages indicates that he’s quite the hot young thesp. His first proper acting job was in Julian Fellowes’ ghostly fantasy From Time to Time, but his filmography starts with Hunters of the Kahri, which is consequently cited in various features about him. A good-looking, talented young lad like Booth undoubtedly has a small army of fangirls by now who may want to seek out this film. Ladies, if you come across this review, let me assure you that although the film is available to watch on YouTube, its only purpose is as somewhere to get screengrabs of Boothy-babe when he was a teenager.

Booth played the lead role in a 2010 BBC drama about Boy George, which brought him to the attention of critics, and also modelled for Burberry. He was Pip in the BBC’s Great Expectations, he was Romeo in a version of Romeo and Juliet scripted by Fellowes, and he was in Jupiter Ascending which, you know, it’s not his fault. Big sci-fi epic by the … siblings who made The Matrix. A young actor’s going to take that, isn’t he? Anyway, Sean Bean was in it and he really should have known better.

You can look up the rest of Douglas Booth’s credits for yourself. In a few months he’ll be seen as Dan Leno in Juan Carlos Medina’s The Limehouse Golem, which might be okay but the script has been written by the seriously over-rated Jane Goldman who made such a hash of The Woman in Black, so we’ll see. He has also recently wrapped a role as Percy Shelley in historical romance Mary Shelley (aka A Storm in the Stars). Plus he was in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So borderline horrors with fancy frocks seems to be his genre of choice right now.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and here is where Douglas Booth started. In years to come, maybe when he’s picking up his third Oscar, people are going to be saying: "What’s this on his IMDB page? Hunters of the Kahri, starring lots of people who never made another movie? Must be the Inaccurate Movie Database up to its old tricks." But it’s not. Is there evidence of Booth's talent here? Well, he can clearly act, which many of the cast equally clearly can't, but frankly Kenneth Branagh couldn't make a script like this work, especially with these production values and the abundant non-direction.

As for Ali Paterson, he made a second feature, the snappily titled The Third Testament: The Antichrist and the Harlot. This is a biblical epic which looks like it might be horror and the appearance of Hunters of the Kahri on YouTube gives me hope that The Third Testament may finally appear one day too. Kevin Leslie, who starred in The Third Testament before going on to be 50% of Fall/Rise of the Krays, also starred in N-Day, a half-hour short that Paterson made with, by the looks of it, a budget. This is about four people trapped in a submarine while the world is hit by a nanobot virus (or something) and the cast also includes Jemima Shore herself, Patricia Hodge.

Since when Paterson seems to have concentrated on corporate stuff about finance. Which is where the money is, in more ways than one.

Hunters of the Kahri, according to Paterson’s page on Casting Call Pro, features “horses, CGI creatures, battles and choreographed fight sequences”. Just to be clear, there is one shot of someone (dressed in white so it might be bathrobe guy) riding a horse. There are indeed several choreographed sword fights. In at least one of these, the sounds of battle have been added to the soundtrack to try and give the impression of a larger conflict. (It doesn’t work, but at least those bloody songbirds shut up for a bit.)

There are however absolutely no CGI creatures, or CGI anything, or any sort of creatures. Apart from a fallow deer that wanders past the camera about 90 minutes in. If that’s CGI it’s bloody good.

Watching these things so you don’t have to. And thanks for sharing, Mr P. Genuinely appreciated, just so I can knock this off my list.

Oh. If you’re wondering, the Kahri is some sort of precious stone they’re all after. I think.

MJS rating: E-

Bigfoot vs Zombies

Director: Mark Polonia
Writer: Mark Polonia
Producer: Mark Polonia
Cast: Dave Fife, Danielle Donahue, Jeff Kirkendall
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: TubiTV

Despite a filmography of 42 features since 2000 (plus a few earlier ones), this is the first ‘Polonia Brothers’ picture I have watched. I do view a lot of odd stuff but I’m pretty sure I would remember if I had seen Preylien: Alien Predators or Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast or Peter Rottentail or Curse of Pirate Death or Jurassic Prey or Snake Club: Revenge of the Snake Woman or any of the three dozen or so other titles in that list. And boy, do these guys do titles.

I say ‘guys’ but since 2008 when John Polonia passed away, ‘Polonia Brothers’ has been a solo project by his twin Mark. I suspect that’s why there’s a two-year gap between HalloweeNight (listed as 2009) and Snow Shark, after which Mark Polonia returned to his hugely impressive output of two to four features every year.

Unfortunately that’s going to be the only usage of the term ‘hugely impressive’ in this review. Bigfoot vs Zombies is watchable, if you’re in the mood for lacklustre micro-budget tosh, but I’d hesitate to call it enjoyable. Nevertheless it deserves to be noted, if only for its status as a crossover between two otherwise utterly disparate subgenres.

The one thing that the film has going for it is an original setting, which is a body farm. If you’re not familiar with the concept, don’t worry, it’s explained about ten minutes in. A body farm is where dead bodies are placed under controlled conditions in order to be studied by forensic experts. It’s a clever (if gross) concept. If you leave three corpses on the ground and examine one after a month, one after six months, one after a year – then when the cops discover an actual dead body somewhere, the forensics dudes can judge how long it’s been there by the state of decomposition.

Obviously any body farm has to be well away from habitation and protected by a stout metal fence to keep out both intruders and wildlife. The object is to see what happens when a human cadaver is eaten by bugs, not by foxes or bears.

A body farm would be a place where there were lots of dead folk just waiting to walk again, although in real life they would more likely by in shallow graves or ponds than just lying around. And this premise does at least justify why the zombies here appear different to each other, with some merely grey-faced and others having stiff, skull-like masks. Although that may be more the result of there being dozens of zombies but only 11 actors playing them. Even then, we see the same zombies killed multiple times. Also, it pains me to say it, but the quality of this film can be judged by the fact that one of the ‘skull-face’ zombies has been so shoddily created that we can clearly see the actor’s beard underneath the skull…

This particular zombie farm is run by mad scientist Dr Peele (Jeff Kirkendall) and his long-suffering, bored lab/admin assistant Renee (Danielle Donahue). There is a truck driver named Andy (Bob Dennis) who drives around the farm, delivering cadavers to requested locations. And there is a security guard (Todd Carpenter) on the main gate who has no character name. Rather cruelly, the others refer to him throughout the film as ‘the security guard’ despite the fact that he is 25% of the farm’s entire workforce and they must all see him at least twice a day.

Stu (James Carolus) and Ed (Dave Fife) are delivering a couple of new corpses in their van. Stu’s an old hand at this, Ed is the new guy. Stu and Andy both constantly hit on Renee who is repelled by their unsubtle advances but takes a liking to nice guy Ed. So, you know, characterisation.

The problem is that Dr Peele has been working away in his ‘secret lab’ (which is literally an office with a microscope and a couple of bottles on the desk) to develop a serum which will deteriorate the bodies faster. The idea being that he can then process more corpses through his body farm and thus make more money from the local hospital that supplies them. Don’t look too closely at that plan, it maketh not one lick of sense.

Actually the real problem is that, far from deteriorating the cadavers, this serum brings them back to life. Although it is unclear whether this is due to the injections that Dr Peele has given the dead bodies or leakage from the barrel of the stuff which drops off Andy’s truck near the start of the film. Much later, it is discovered that an overdose of this stuff will actually kill a zombie but this is never followed up on, as if both the characters and the director simply forgot this ever happened.

As the dead start to rise, one more character arrives at the farm. Duke Larson (Ken Van Sant) is a big game hunter called in by Dr Peele because Andy has reported that one of the shallow graves has been dug up, presumably by a bear that has somehow got into the compound.

Well, strictly speaking two more characters arrive because here comes Bigfoot. We have already met him in a prologue where he spies on a hiker/photographer (Greta Volkova) who is later munched by a zombie after somehow getting past the security fence. For no reason at all, Bigfoot hides in the back of Duke Larson’s Jeep to get into the farm, where he starts fighting zombies.

The last part of the preceding sentence sounds very exciting and is the nub of this high-concept film whose title basically is it plot. And kudos to Polonia for the amazing sleeve art showing a giant, fearsome sasquatch hurling itself at a shuffling army of the undead.

But you won’t be at all surprised if I tell you that there ain’t nuttin like dat on show here at all, no sir ma’am.

This film’s Bigfoot is, well, it’s an ill-fitting, tatty gorilla suit with a long, shaggy wig over its face. It’s really one of the very worst Bigfoot costumes you’ll ever see. I know the movie isn’t exactly taking itself seriously but nevertheless this is just kind of embarrassing. Uncredited on screen, the actor inside the suit is Steve Diasparra according to the old IMDB and he does at least attempt to give the creature some characterisation, establishing a mute, somewhat touching relationship with Renee.

At various points in the film we do get Bigfoot fighting zombies but it’s all really half-hearted and lame. Basically they shuffle towards him and he pushes them away. In fact, that’s the film’s biggest failing: it is utterly devoid of even the slightest hint of action. There’s gore, certainly. Or at least, there’s fake blood in some scenes as people scream. But obviously they couldn’t afford to get any of that on the gorilla suit as the dry-cleaning bill would have trebled the film’s budget. So we have lackadaisical shuffling scenes, and shots of bloody terror, but nothing inbetween. No actual fast or emphatic movement. Even in dialogue scenes, people just stand around talking. Then they walk somewhere. It’s like they can’t do both at the same time.

There are a few nice bits of dialogue but the quality of the acting is generally poor. Most of the cast have been in various other Polonia pictures and some have other credits at a similar level, but nothing notable. And, for all his experience in film-making, Polonia’s direction remains thoroughly pedestrian. Cut to Renee; Renee says line; cut to Ed; Ed says line; cut to Renee, Renee says line... and so on. There’s no flair here, but there’s also no real sense of storytelling or atmosphere. It certainly kills any potential comedy moments stone dead. There’s no verve, no pizzazz, no oomph in any scene in the entire 79 minutes. And if there’s one thing that a film called Bigfoot vs Zombies should have it’s oomph. I don’t think anyone ever actually runs anywhere in the entire film.

A sequence in which Duke Larson drives his Jeep across the farm, shooting at zombies with a pistol, is probably the closest we get to any action - but there again the direction hobbles the potential enjoyment. We have close-ups of Van Sant in his jeep, and cutaways of zombies falling over, but no shot of the Jeep actually driving past zombies as Larson blasts them out of the way.

Yes, budgets (or lack thereof). Yes, shooting schedules. Yes, lots of other limitations on micro-budget indies. But there are plenty of micro-budget indie pictures which manage to stage action sequences, which manage to film exciting scenes, that demonstrate oomph or just where characters, y’know, run.

The film carries a 2014 copyright date, is listed as a 2015 picture in the sales agent's publicity, and eventually appeared on DVD and VOD in February 2016. Mark Polonia's subsequent films have been Sharkenstein, Land Shark and Amityville Exorcism. You've got to give the guy props for coming up with titles (and commissioning great sleeve art).

I can’t say that Polonia’s movie is the worst zombie film out there, not by a long chalk. Neither am I convinced that it’s the worst bigfoot movie ever made. And certainly within that tiny lozenge at the centre of this previously unconsidered Venn diagram, Bigfoot vs Zombies holds its own – primarily because of the absence of any other pictures that tick both boxes.

But I can’t help feeling that this could have been better, without too much additional effort. It honestly doesn’t look like anyone had fun making it. Maybe they did, but that doesn’t come across at all. And with a film like this, if it doesn’t seem like it was fun to make, sadly it’s not much fun to watch.

Still, it hasn’t put me off watching other Polonia Brothers productions. And boy, do I have a lot to choose from.

MJS rating: D+

Cryptic

Directors: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills
Writers: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills
Producers: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills
Cast: Ed Stoppard, Vas Blackwood, Ray Panthaki
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: DVD
Website: http://nextlevelfilms.co.uk

Cryptic is an amazingly good film. By which I don’t mean that the quality of the actual movie is staggering. Yes, it’s good – but it’s not perfect and it won’t blow you away. What I mean is that the fact that Cryptic is a good film – is amazing.

Because of who made it. This is the third horror film from the team of Bart Ruspoli and Freddie Hutton-Mills. They also wrote/produced the middling zombie time-waster Devil’s Playground and wrote/produced/directed the ridiculously titled World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen which, in a crowded market-place, manages to stand out as one of the very worst found footage pictures ever made in this country.

World War Dead was actually made after Cryptic but released first. My understanding is that the executive producers approached Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills, asking them to quickly bang out a zombie picture that could tie in to the centenary of the First World War (tasteful…). Can’t really blame the guys for taking the money and running, and the number of people who have suffered through WWD:ROTF must be pretty minimal, but still it’s not a good film to have on your CV. So it’s fortunate for the duo that Cryptic, which is significantly better than Devil’s Playground and infinitely better than the execrable World War Dead, is now out there to be viewed.

This has certainly revised my opinion of BR and FHM. I was genuinely surprised not just by how much I enjoyed Cryptic but by how skilfully it had been constructed. Where World War Dead was utterly devoid of characterisation or plot, Cryptic is a tightly structured narrative which relies almost entirely on characterisation.

So what I really meant to say, back up at top there, was: Cryptic is, amazingly, a good film. All the right words, not necessarily in the right order.

This is a classic gangster set-up: eight people, one room, loyalties and conflicts ebbing and flowing, tension building until someone lets fly with a shooter. There is a brief discussion about how similar the situation is to “that film, the one with dogs in” to acknowledge that the film-makers understand the territory wherein they are currently working.

The location is a crypt underneath a church (in, presumably, London). Our first two characters are ‘Sexy’ Steve Stevens, a dapper and rational crooked banker (Ed Stoppard: Upstairs Downstairs redux, The Frankenstein Chronicles and Dan Dare audio dramas – rocking a very fine set of threads) and ‘Meat’, a nervous and not terribly bright gangster (typically superb performance by the great Vas Blackwood: Lock Stock, Creep, A Room to Die For). Both have been sent to the crypt by a local Mr Big, as have the next to arrive, brothers Jim and John Jonas.

The Jonas Brothers (presumably named as a gag about the soulless boy band from a few years ago, which fairly accurately dates when this script was written) are both psycho idiots. One is slightly less idiotic than the other and one is slightly more psychotic. But you wouldn’t trust either of them to cat-sit for you or to count to 20 without using their fingers. They are played by Philip Barantini (World War Dead, Young High and Dead) and Daniel Feuerriegel (Spartacus TV series, Pacific Rim 2).

Completing the sextette are Cochise (Ray Panthaki: The Feral Generation, 28 Days Later, World War Dead), an arrogant fellow with intricate designs cut into his beard, and his moll Alberta (Sally Leonard). All six have been sent to the crypt with instructions to locate and guard – but not open – a coffin. Their employer will be with them in due course but has been delayed by illness.
It’s a very Beckett-ian set-up and once again Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills acknowledge their debts with the name of the godfather behind all this is. Meat, Cochise and the others are all… waiting for Gordon.

Two other people show up. One is Ben Shafik as Walter, a posh junkie looking for some drugs he stashed in the crypt. (Shafik was in not only World War Dead and Devil’s Playground, but also the Bart Ruspoli short that the latter was based on, The Long Night.) The other is Gordon’s crooked lawyer (Gene Hunt’s brother, Robert Glenister: Spooks, Hustle, Law and Order UK) who knows all the others (except Walter, obviously) though they don’t know him.

Five gangsters, a lawyer, a banker and a junkie.

The coffin, when located, proves to be a curious metal construction, solidly locked. What – or who – is in there? Meat has an idea, because he has invested in a vampire-slaying kit.

Over the course of the film we learn about the gradual decimation of organised crime in the area, a series of gangland murders which some are saying is the work of a vampire, or at least, someone pretending to be a vampire.

Because, as Steve Stevens assiduously points out, there are no such things as vampires.

But then, if there are no such things as vampires, what is in that coffin and why has the frustratingly delayed Gordon assembled this team to guard it. Guard it against what?

As the plot develops – through dialogue but without being talkie – the characters find themselves in groups of two or three, often discussing the others. Unable to find his junk, Walter is getting withdrawal symptoms. And attempts are made to resolve an unpleasant situation caused by the slightly more psycho of the Jonas brothers having recently raped and murdered a 17-year-old girl.

Eventually somebody cracks and lets off a shooter. Which punctuates the dialogue but thankfully doesn’t tip the film into general mayhem. By now the door is locked and no-one is getting out until Gordon lets himself in. And eventually, inevitably, one of the group, in a dark corner of the crypt, unseen by the others, is killed – with subsequent examination revealing two puncture wounds in the neck.

Five gangsters, a lawyer, a banker and a junkie. And one of them is – possibly – a vampire. Well, you’re spoiled for choice there, aren’t you?

It is a measure of how carefully plotted Cryptic’s script is, that each act of this 90-minute film is exactly 30 minutes long, the inciting incidents for acts two and three occurring dead on the half-hour and the hour. You could set your watch by it. And there’s some lovely, lovely dialogue in the script, some real zingers, many of them delivered by Steve Stevens whose masterful calm clearly infuriates the psycho Jonas Brothers. It’s a cracking script that, while it doesn’t unfold in exactly real time, could probably be adapted into a stage play without too much difficulty.

Notwithstanding all the above, the film falls down in two respects. One is the sound mix. As the group fragments, people hold whispered conversations in corners of the crypt. And sometimes the dialogue just isn’t audible – especially when Ray Panthaki is speaking. You can pump up the volume on your telly but you’d better remember to turn it down again before the next round of shouting and shooting.

The other problem is the character of Alberta, whom you may notice I have barely mentioned. And that’s because she doesn’t really have a character. Which is no reflection on the actor. It’s not that she isn’t given stuff to do. There’s a couple of very funny scenes where two male characters discuss matters while, in the background, Alberta struggles to lift a dead body on her own. And when it is revealed that she is from Transnistria there is debate over whether that is where Dracula comes from.

But there’s just no depth to Alberta, a situation heightened by the seven well-rounded characters surrounding her. Even the junkie has more personality. She is defined by her skin-tight, cleavage-flaunting black leather outfit, her flame-red hair and her eastern European accent. None of those elements define character. She might as well be somebody at Comic-Con pretending to be Black Widow. Maybe Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills suffer from the traditional British male writer’s inability to create realistic female characters. Or maybe they just couldn’t work out what to do with her, beyond using her as a sounding board so that Cochise doesn’t have to talk to himself.

Those cryptic, whispering corners – and indeed the rest of this small but adroitly used set – come courtesy of top production designer Caroline Story (The Seasoning House, Vampire Diary, Its Walls Were Blood). The excellent hair and make-up is by Emma Slater whose British horror CV includes The Borderlands, Stormhouse, Evil Never Dies, Blood Moon, World War Dead, The Rezort and 47 Meters Down). There’s some fine cinematography by Sara Deane (The Horror of the Dolls, World War Dead) and a sympathetic score by Emma Fox. But I think what really stands out is the costume design (not least Ed Stoppard’s terrific coat, which I craved throughout the entire film) courtesy of Raquel Azevedo (The Seasoning House, Truth or Dare, Scar Tissue). It’s somewhat ironic that a movie with so many female department heads should fall down so badly in its non-characterisation of the only woman on screen (a big fat zero on the Bechdel test here).

Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills, whose other feature was prison drama Screwed, are currently in post on sci-fi picture Genesis, which uses many of the same cast and crew as Cryptic. The website for their Next Level Films company says their fourth feature will be called Dark Web, but that’s out of date – it was a comedy thriller that got shelved when they were unexpectedly asked to make World War Dead.

Shot in 2014, Cryptic was released on UK DVD in February 2016 but doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else yet. The IMDB lists Chinese and South African releases in September 2014 which we can take with a pinch of salt.

My expectations when I picked up this DVD were low, which only heightened my delight when Cryptic turned out to be such a whip-smart, carefully structured slice of gangster/vampire cinema. It’s a long, long way from the over-the-top bullets’n’bloodsuckers action of From Dusk Till Dawn or Dead Cert. Give it a spin and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

MJS rating: A-

Delusion

Director: Christopher Di Nunzio
Writer: Christopher Di Nunzio
Producers: Christopher Di Nunzio, Jami Tennille
Cast: David Graziano, Jami Tennille, Carolyne Fournier
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/thefilmDelusion

Delusion is a laudably enigmatic and ambiguous ghost story. Slow-moving and gentle for the most part, it eventually reaches a bloodily brutal climax but without any sudden shift or jump. I quite enjoyed it.

David Graziano is terrific as Frank, a middle-aged bloke whose wife Isabelle died three years ago. He has her ashes in an urn but we’re never told how she died. As the film kicks off he has received a letter from Isabelle that has somehow taken three years to reach him. This gives Frank a sense of closure which has been missing up to that point and he finds himself able to look for a new relationship.

A mysterious figure in a suit and red tie, who has something of the demonic about him, seems to be following Frank, who starts having bad dreams. He begins a relationship with a younger, very forward woman named Mary (Jami Tennille: American Poltergeist, House of Shadows) but there’s something not quite right about her. Frank goes to see a local psychic who reads some tarot cards and is concerned by what they foretell.

There’s a sense of magical realism to all this, a feeling bolstered by some Mexican-style ‘Day of the Dead’ facepaint. But what gives me pause, and makes the film work, is that we know Frank is taking some sort of medication. Meds which he loses, then finds, then throws away.

Without those pills, this is a fairly straightforward romantic ghost story, with Isabelle (Carolyne Fournier: The Last Halloween) watching over Frank from beyond the grave and Mary as some sort of succubus. But when we consider Frank’s medication, the story shifts so that it straddles the line between the occult and mental illness. Is Mary really a demonic entity? Or just a woman onto whom Frank’s psyche is projecting ideas and (mis)perception? Is she real at all? How corporeal, if at all, is Isabelle’s ghost? How imaginary is she? What about the sharp-suited guy? Is he real, or just an artefact of Frank’s broken psyche?

I always enjoy ghost stories based around supernatural/psychological ambiguity. The final violent scenes of this film can be viewed in a literal way if this is fantasy but offer much more scope for interpretation and debate if we consider that some of what we have seen hasn’t been real, in which case what is the real nature of this violence?

(To be fair, when the psychic hears actual voices that does tend to suggest a supernatural angle. But she thinks she’s psychic so of course she thinks she hears voices. That proves nothing.)

A solid cast and some good photography combine with unpretentious direction and a good script to create a fine slice of thought-provoking horror cinema that raises questions about what is on screen and follow-on questions about the nature of reality and ideas of mental health. A special note is due to Jessy Rowe who provides a lovely, characterful supporting role as a diner waitress with a passion for film noir.

Filmed around Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Delusion premiered at the Hudson Valley Film Festival in August 2016 with a VOD release two months later. Christopher Di Nunzio previously made an award-winning thriller, A Life Not to Follow and some interesting shorts (with some of the same cast and crew).

MJS rating: B+

Let’s Be Evil

Director: Martin Owen
Writer: Martin Owen
Producer: Jonathan Willis
Cast: Elizabeth Morris, Kara Tointon, Elliot James Langridge
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/LetsBeEvilMovie

Let’s Be Evil tries to do something different and we must give it props for that. I don’t think it fully succeeds, and in all honesty I don’t think what it’s trying to do is as different as the film-makers – and some critics – think. But this is a sincerely made movie with some nice characterisation and one genuinely shocking, nasty moment that will stick in your memory.

It’s also absolutely laden with post-production. Excessively so.

Three teenagers take paying jobs with something called the Posterity Project. It’s based in an underground complex, where they are chaperones to 20 or so children, aged about 7-11. These kids are being prepared to become great leaders and thinkers, learning hugely advanced scientific concepts. The less cine-literate among my fellow reviewers have consistently compared them to the young antagonists of Village of the Damned but actually that’s completely misleading and a much closer, more relevant and accurate comparison (which could actually be a direct influence) is These are the Damned.

The three teens and the kids all wear ‘augmented reality’ glasses, without which the complex is pitch black. I guess it saves on the leccy bill. And this is where the post-production comes in as we see almost the entire film through these glasses, with lots of unreadable little graphics skittering away on both sides of the screen. There is also a tab in the top left with the name of the person and a little photo. Which is handy for us as an audience because it means we know whose POV we’re looking through at any one time, since the film constantly cuts between the three main characters. But it does seem a bit redundant because people know who they are…

So yes, what we have here is another entry in what I have suddenly decided to call the third wave of found footage. The first wave – post-Blair Witch films where people carry cameras around with them at all times – are passe, as are second wave, post-Paranormal Activity stories about folk setting up cameras everywhere to record spooky activity.  None of which stops people from still making that sort of stuff, of course.

But a more recent development has been POV film-making where we see everything from one or more person’s point of view, usually (but not always) because of a tiny camera mounted on their glasses. A good example of this sub-subgenre was POV. A poor example was Day of the Mummy. I would venture to suggest that Let’s Be Evil falls somewhere betwixt the two in terms of quality.

Let’s be honest (not evil) – it’s a gimmick. It’s only ever going to be a gimmick. And it gets irritating really fast. What it does is at least distract from the sparse and – let’s be honest again – daft story at the heart of the film.

I actually liked the three main characters. Jenny (co-writer Elizabeth Morris) is sweet, fun and thoughtful. Tiggs (Kara Tointon: EastEnders, Mr Selfridge, Never Play with the Dead) – it’s short for Antigone – is more vivacious, dynamic and spunky. And Darby (Elliot James Langridge, who most people know from Hollyoaks but I know from Dalston Heath) is kind of a slacker but a good-hearted one who is nerdy enough to make a passing Trekkie reference to the Kobayashi Maru. I liked the relationship(s) that these three build up. I particularly liked that, a few bits of joshing aside, there’s no attempt to insert a romantic or sexual dynamic into the set-up. All three actors deliver fine performances of natural-sounding dialogue.

Where the script falls down is in what they do about where they are. They seem to just accept their situation. They say things like “This is weird” but at no point do they, either singly or together, question what’s going on. They didn’t know what this job entailed before arriving. They’ve had no contact with anyone apart from a phone voice confirming they’ve got the job. They never question the morality or ethics of what is being done to these children. They never ask where the kids come from or what the purpose of this advanced training is or where their families are. They never even wonder how long they or the kids are going to spend down here in this sunless network of rooms and tunnels.

In fact, what are they even paid for? The children behave in a kind of quasi-autistic way, not even acknowledging the trio’s presence. Food is provided from a dispenser in the form of unappetising mush in sealed packets.  There’s no suggestion that Jenny, Tiggs and Darby are doing the kids’ washing or any similar housekeeping chores. Also, there was no-one down here before them, or at least there was no sort of handover, so it looks like the kids have been doing fine on their own. They all seem to passively and unquestioningly follow instructions from Arial.

I haven’t mentioned Arial, which is the sentient AI running the place. Sometimes she’s a disembodied voice (Natasha Moore) and sometimes she appears as a rainbow-washy female silhouette (Jamie Bernadette: Reel Evil, The Bunnyman Massacre), usually in the corridors. She always walks ahead of the characters (so we can see her via the glasses) and consequently has to keep talking back over her shoulder, which just looks silly. Arial (or rather A.R.I.A.L.) stands for something tortuous and one can’t help thinking: if you’re going to come up with a strangulated acronym, why not make the second A an E and then you would have a much better name, one which simultaneously carried connotations of remote control/communication and a magical, ethereal sprite. But whatever.

Arial’s female form is purely digital and can only be viewed through the ‘augmented reality’ glasses of course. Which is something else I’d like to question. In what sense is any of this ‘augmented reality’? Now, I’m no technogeek, but my understanding of augmented reality is that it overlays digital imagery onto the real world as a sort of extra. So one might be able to view a still image that moves, or one might be able to read explanatory labels on things, or one could just search for and find a weird Japanese cartoon creature in a certain location. But there’s none of that here.

The children, when seated at their long table, wave their hands and fingers in the air in front of them, operating invisible (to us) touchscreens as they learn and study and calculate. But that’s not augmented reality is it? It’s just a heads-up 3D display that responds to motion, a cross between Google Glasses and a Wii. It’s no different from what Tony Stark does in his basement, or even what Tom Cruise did way back in Minority Report. At one point, Darby has a go at playing with some giant 3D star-map thing that the kids have been playing with but again it’s just a 3D display. There’s no sense of it seeming to interact with the real world when viewed correctly.

Now, it seems to me that the horror potential in augmented reality is when you find yourself uncertain about what’s real and what isn’t, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the film-makers were aiming towards here. At one point Jenny finds a message carved into a toilet stall door which is no longer there when she shows it to Tiggs. And later she steps out of a shower to find that her clothes, which were neatly folded and balanced on the hand-basin, have disappeared – and now they’re back in her room. But this doesn’t square up with the premise of augmented reality. Everything that the characters see through their glasses is really there – because they can feel it. Jenny physically put her clothes on the basin. Their location is nothing to do with what she can or can’t see. They are physical objects. It’s entirely possible that they look different, that the name tag everyone sees is actually blank – now that would actually be augmented reality – and for all we know the 'black' outfit is really shocking pink with pictures of unicorns on it. But its physical nature – and hence its physical location – is undeniable.

The creepiness of the situation and the creepiness of the silent, super-brainy kids – neither of which is ever really explored in any great depth – give way in the third act to basically just a generic chase sequence. Jenny and the oldest little girl, Cassandra, who has somehow broken out of her quasi-autism and made a personal connection with her surrogate big sister, scramble around the facility, collecting first Tiggs and then Darby. Cassandra has lost her special glasses so has to hold Jenny’s hand in the darkness (though Jenny’s exhortation to never let go falls a bit flat when Jenny repeatedly lets go of Cassandra’s hand).

This third act, though more action-packed – and featuring one astounding, out-of-nowhere act of violence which is let down only virtue of the victim being a very, very minor character we’ve met once, briefly, ages ago – doesn’t really use the film’s premise in any way. Since we don’t actually see the children they are running away from, the nature of the threat is immaterial. They could be escaping zombies or killer robots or giant ants for all the difference it would make.

And why exactly are they afraid of the children? Sure they’re outnumbered but these are little kids. Three fit young adults could easily fight them off if they turned wild and violent like in that old, banned Star Trek episode (look it up). Like so many elements of the story here, it's an idea that has no substantial premise underlying it, just an assumption that this is how things are because the plot requires it.

Don’t get me wrong, individual moments within the film mostly work, and there are many of them strung together. It’s the framework they’re strung together on that makes no sense, a bunch of half-formed ideas loosely connected without development or discussion. There's no weight to the film, and a film about children's minds being messed with that also questions the nature of the reality we see around us should have some weight, some oomph, some PKDick-ian pizzazz. Let's Be Evil is oomphless, disappointingly so. It's neither thought-provoking nor mind-expanding, throwing away its interesting premise with a lightweight tale that goes nowhere.

Furthermore the whole film is book-ended with a splash panel prologue that has no obvious connection with anything else and a dumb, lazy epilogue that makes not a lick of sense.

In short, the whole of Let’s Be Evil is less than the sum of its parts. It’s an okay time-waster and at only 82 minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome. But there is a much more interesting story to be told about these characters and this set-up, one that uses the premise to explore ideas of humanity, responsibility, even the very nature of reality. And one that isn’t bogged down with the restrictions of third-wave found footage. If half the effort that went into all the photography and post-production here had gone instead into the script, Let’s Be Evil could have been a belter.

Said script is credited to director Owen (who also provides a telephone voice near the start). Owen and Elizabeth Morris share the story credit, which is “based on an original concept” by producer Jonathan Willis. So there’s a three-stage process there and the actual creation of a coherent, interesting story that explores this scenario, plays on the creepiness of the kids and uses the undoubtedly well-drawn characters in some way – well, that’s just slipped through the cracks. What, we are left wondering, was Willis’ ‘original concept’? Was it just 'creepy kids in a secret underground facility'? My money’s on it being something about augmented reality and seeing the whole film through the character’s hi-tech glasses.

See, it’s all very well having a concept. It’s fine and dandy having a story. But they’ve got to mesh in some way. The story has to take the concept and build on it in ways that derive from that concept, incorporate that concept and rely on that concept as an intrinsic element of the narrative. Not just use the concept as window dressing.

Four other producers are listed separately from Willis: Owen, Morris, Matt Williams and Weena Wijitkhuankhan. The old IMDB lists these as co-producers but they are producers on screen. Willis also gets an Executive Producer credit, separately from the other 24 executive producers (whom I’m not going to list here). Willis has also exec-produced Dartmoor Killing, The Machine, Andrew Jones' Puppet Master homage The Toymaker and The Last House on Sorority Row, a forthcoming slasher which Steve Lawson is making for Jones.

This is Martin Owen’s second feature after Abducted aka LA Slasher, an Anglo-American picture which seems more the latter than the former so doesn’t make it onto my BHR master-list. Before that he made some shorts with regular Brit-horror actor Giles Alderson. Production designer Melissa Spratt should get a shout-out for effective use of the location, which is an old nuclear bunker in Brentwood. Some distinctly low-tech equipment – phones with cords, PCs with CRT displays – contrasts with the super-futuristic glasses and their displays in a way that adds to the spookiness and apparent unreality of the whole set-up.

Let’s Be Evil premiered at Slamdance in January 2016 and also played Frightfest in August, a couple of weeks after an American VOD (and limited theatrical) release. There was an extremely limited UK theatrical release in October of that year (could have been a single cinema). The first DVD release was in Japan in December 2016 with the UK disc following at the end of January 2017.

Two final points. Cassandra is played by Isabelle Allen who was the little girl on the poster of the movie version of Les Miserables. One of the pre-release images was Allen as Cassandra, her hair blowing across her face in a recreation of the iconic Les Mis image, a bit of fun which seems to have been (wisely) relegated to the back of the actual DVD sleeve. Maybe there’s something in the (otherwise meaningless) title too: let’s be evil instead of let’s (be) miserable. Maybe not.

And also: Kim Wilde. When we first meet Jenny, a pop video is playing silently on a TV screen which I instantly recognised as ‘Kids in America’ – and indeed that is the song that plays over the end credits. The MJS rating definitely goes up a notch for featuring the Kimster.

I didn’t dislike Let’s Be Evil, and you won’t either. But it’s a poorly constructed, frustratingly empty missed opportunity which never has the courage of its convictions and consequently squanders its narrative potential in favour of gimmicky post-production and a formulaic third act.

MJS rating: B-

Onus

Director: George Clarke
Writer: George Clarke
Producer: George Clarke
Cast: Robert Render, Anthony Boyle, Vivian Jamison, Caroline Burns Cooke
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: DVD screener
Website: www.yellowfeverproductions.com

Just over a year ago I watched George Clarke’s 2009 debut feature Battle of the Bone and his newly released The Blood Harvest. Since then I have watched (for my next book), but not reviewed here, all of Clarke’s other feature – and now comes Onus, actually shot before The Blood Harvest but released eleven months later. So here’s a quick run-down of the career of Northern Ireland’s busiest independent film-maker.

Battle of the Bone is impressive: a distinctively regional zombie romp in which three young people try to make it across Belfast, avoiding undead hordes and religio-political gangs, all culminating in one of the most breathtakingly imaginative visual sequences I’ve ever seen in a zombie picture. Sadly Clarke’s follow-up, The Knackery, is rubbish: a plotless nonsense about a game show where participants fight each other while running away from zombies. Not worth your time.

The Last Light: An Irish Ghost Story, in 2012, was better though still not big on plot. A workman gets trapped inside an old, haunted building that he’s boarding up while his wife and sister-in-law come looking for him. It’s atmospheric but deathly slow. This was followed by 2014’s Splash Area: Night of the Freaks in which three teens out on Halloween chase some never-explained psycho clowns into a mental asylum and spend the rest of the film running away from them. All three of these movies had scenes which could have been shown in any order; truth be told, even Battle of the Bone is light on actual plot but makes up for it with likeable characters and that amazing ending.

The Blood Harvest and Onus represent a new phase of George Clarke’s career as he finally stops making films about someone being randomly chased by something. Harvest has a real plot; in fact it has two. Acts one and two are an intriguing police procedural as coppers hunt down a bizarre serial killer – then act three gives us a silly and not entirely satisfying sci-fi explanation for everything.

Onus has the same model but even more explicitly so as there is a ‘Chapter 1’ caption at the start and a ‘Chapter 2’ caption 40 minutes in, at the point when you have completely forgotten the first caption (plus, inexplicably, a lonely ‘Thursday’ caption partway through the second half). It seems like Clarke, who undoubtedly knows his way round a director’s chair, just can’t work out how to tell a story that runs for about 70-90 minutes. He either pads out the running time with endless variations on the same chase concept that carry no coherent through-narrative, or he writes two sub-feature scripts and bolts them together. He needs better scripts (or at least a decent co-writer) if he is going to fulfil his potential as one of the UK’s most interesting indie horror directors.

So to Onus. The first half, shot in Norway for no obvious reason, starts with an intriguing premise. Teenager Kieran (Anthony Boyle, currently playing Draco Malfoy’s son in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and soon to be seen on screen as a young Ian Paisley) and middle-aged Bob Andrews (Robert Render, a Clarke regular with numerous bit-part credits including FreakDog) awake in the middle of nowhere with about two metres of chain linking their wrists. In his free hand, each has an automatic pistol held firmly in place with swathes of gaffer tape. A post-it note on a nearby tree says they have one bullet each and only one of them can survive. They already know each other slightly: Andrews is a science teacher and school counsellor; Kieran was a bullied pupil who visited him on numerous occasions.

This is a startling, intriguing, original set-up and if the whole film was about these two it could have been awesome. What’s going on? Where are they? How did they get there? Who has done this and why? Is someone watching them? (I’ll tell you now: no, despite some misleading POV cheat-shots.) What I was looking forward to was an exploration of the characters, their relationship and their unlikely, uncomfortable situation, with some plot twists or revelations at key points that made me completely revise what had gone before. To be fair, we do get two major, revelatory developments at about 20 minutes and about 40 minutes, shortly after which we suddenly switch to Chapter 2 “one month later”.

This far less interesting 50 minutes centres on Kieran’s mother Joan (Clarke regular Vivian Jamison) and her counsellor Liz (Caroline Burns Cooke: The Spiritualist). Joan is determined to find out what happened to her son but the answer is closer to home than she expects. The psychological horror of the first half is ditched in favour of a less-than-thrilling thriller driven by coincidence and leaps of logic. For example, an absolutely crucial moment is when Joan sees someone with a length of chain – but there’s a thousand reasons why someone would have a chain. It’s just regular chain like you can buy from Homebase.

One of the characters says, on more than one occasion, “It was meant to be simple” but the plan that is revealed, which evidently went wrong but may now be repeated, was pointlessly complex and liable to go wrong in any of several different ways.

There is nothing to suggest that the first story takes place anywhere except the locality in which these characters live so why it was filmed in Norway is beyond me. At one point the two encounter a Norwegian-speaking man (Kenny Thompson) in a Scandinavian-looking forest cabin outside which graze a herd of goats. It couldn’t be more Norwegian if there was Grieg on the soundtrack and a sign saying “This way to the fjord.” Yet what we subsequently learn makes it impossible to believe that this could have happened in another country.

Onus is a frustrating film (as was The Blood Harvest). I really, really like what George Clarke does on a broad scale, building up a Northern Irish indie genre film culture (including his annual Yellow Fever International Film Festival) and supporting homegrown talent on both sides of the camera. He has achieved some impressive things, including DVD releases on both sides of the Atlantic and even limited domestic theatrical runs. But the simple fact is that his scripts let him down so that, aside from his brazenly ambitious debut, his movies to date have fallen flat.

The Norwegian half of Onus was shot in June 2012, with Render and Boyle earning ‘additional material’ credits for improvising much of their dialogue. The domestic home-stretch was shot one year later and the film premiered at Clarke’s YFIFF event in September 2013 with further festival play in Belfast and Florida. The DVD/VOD release via Left Films was on Boxing Day 2016, by which times Clarke had not only shot and released The Blood Harvest, he was already making a start on his seventh feature Mindy Must Die. I retain a hope, as I have with each of his previous films, that this will be his breakthrough title, the movie where he finally demonstrates his undoubted talent without a weak script hobbling him.

The DVD includes a commentary, Making Of, bloopers and trailers.

MJS rating: C+

In a Lonely Place

Director: Davide Montecchi
Writers: Davide Montecchi, Elisa Giardini
Producer: Meclimone
Cast: Lucrezia Frenquellucci, Luigi Busignani
Country: Italy
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: Facebook

Within the first couple of minutes of my viewing of this film, one thing became clear to me. In a Lonely Place has absolutely the best cinematography of any independent film that I have ever seen in my entire life. Shot after shot after shot is drop-dead gorgeous. Long shots, two-shots, close-ups, static shots, panning shots: you could take a hi-res frame-grab from almost any moment in this film, blow it up, frame it and hang it in a gallery.

The light, the shadow, the colours and oh so many reflections. Mirrors make extra work for cinematographers, obviously, but In a Lonely Place is packed with mirrors. Mirrors on walls, mirrors on the floor, mirrors in front of someone, mirrors behind someone, shattered mirrors, multiple mirrors in one shot. Holy cow, this is visually the most amazing thing you’ll see all year.

Fabrizio Pasqualetto is the man responsible, and if there isn’t an Oscar somewhere in that man’s future, I’ll eat my hat. He paints with light.

A tip of the hat also to camera operator Lino Hermaus, focus puller Matteo Franca and digital image technician Guido Zamagni. Between them these four gentlemen have crafted something stunningly beautiful.

This could be the first film review in history to mention the focus puller before the director but that’s just because I wanted to acknowledge the camera crew up front. The whole film is the vision of Davide Montecchi, and what a vision it is. There are only two actors and, to be honest, not a vast amount of dialogue when you consider that the film runs only 80 minutes (plus credits) and numerous lines are repeated over and over again. But that just leaves more room for the film to be ‘a film’, exploring the possibilities of cinema.

Describing the ‘plot’ of In a Lonely Place would be like synopsising a poem. It would completely miss the point and belittle the work. (“A guy gets freaked because a raven flies into his library while he’s having a nap, and it causes him to think about his dead girlfriend…”) Lucrezia Frenquellucci is Theresa, a young woman who has been invited to visit an empty hotel. Luigi Busignani is Thomas, the man who invited her there, an obsessive, mentally disturbed stalker.

We open with Theresa tied to a chair, and then follow two narratives. In the main story Thomas abuses and tortures Theresa, both physically and mentally. Interspersed with this are flashbacks of earlier in the evening as they share a meal, she dresses in one of the hotel rooms, and then he takes some photographs of her. One story leads up to that opening shot, one leads away from it.

I did say that summing up the story would belittle the film. The above paragraph makes In a Lonely Place sound like trashy (if good-looking) torture porn. There are hundreds of micro-budget, misogynist ‘horror’ films that have basically the same ‘plot’ (a few, a very few, are actually worth watching). But you know, the world is also full of representations of ‘a beautiful man with an amazing physique flashing his cock’: 99.999% of those are gay porn, and then there’s Michelangelo’s David. I’m not belittling the gay porn industry – I know some great guys who make gay porn films – I’m just demonstrating how a very simple, essential concept can, in the right hands, treated and viewed in a special way, become something with not just genuine artistic merit but the sort of work that transcends conventional concepts of art to become iconic.

Through a combination of Montecchi’s direction, Pasqualetto’s photography and two excellent actors (working in a foreign language) – plus the many other crew who contributed, of course – this movie takes something which could be (and often is) tawdry and cheap and turns it into a work of art. I’m not saying it is actually as ‘good’, on some impossible, hypothetical scale of artistic quality, as David because, bloody hell, Michelangelo. I just want people to understand that the narrative content of the film, which is limited in the first place and will be naturally brief in descriptions, short reviews, film festival catalogues or DVD sleeves, is not a fair summation of the cinematic experience here.

Adding to all of this is the amazing location: a huge, empty, modern hotel. A landscape shot shows nothing nearby except a power station (though that may have been digitally altered of course). The interiors, whether they are genuinely part of that building or studio creations, are amazing. The main room where the primary story takes place has been carefully arranged so that every square centimetre contributes to the film’s look and feel. This hotel is disused but not derelict. It is in a mysterious, transitory state between a vibrant, busy place and an empty ruin, which places the limited story and the two characters in a sort of limbo, divorced from the real, outside world.

Ivana Alessandrini was the set designer and has done an amazing job which Montecchi and Pasqualetto have then taken and turned into magic. (Tip of the hat also to set decorator Diana Fazi and set dresser Annalena Piri.) If you ever wondered what ‘mise-en-scene’ actually means, take a look here.

One more striking visual is Luigi Busignani himself who has a fascinating, angular face that you won’t soon forget. He speaks with a strong accent: stressing, each, word, separately. Sometimes he whispers, sometimes he shouts, but he never tips over into being a cartoon psychopath. Lucrezia Frenquellucci’s performance is one of confusion and vulnerability but with determination below the surface. Her character is, apparently, a model/actress so it makes sense that she is beautiful, but in an interesting, human way, not an airbrushed, formulaic, magazine sort of way. Theresa’s voice has been looped by Barbara Sirotti; perhaps Frenquellucci has too strong an accent.

There is some violence and injury on screen, with special make-up effects provided by Mauro Fabrizcky. Be warned that there is also a disturbing (but entirely fake) moment of animal cruelty.

I don’t know what else I can tell you about In a Lonely Place. It is an extraordinary film. A true cinematic experience. Take the opportunity to watch it if you can.

MJS rating: A+