Scarab

Director: Steven-Charles Jaffe
Writer: Steven-Charles Jaffe, Robert Jaffe, Ned Miller, Jim Block
Producer: Luis Calvo
Cast: Rip Torn, Robert Ginty, Cristina Hachuel
Year of release: 1982
Country: Spain
Reviewed from: UK video (Xtasy)

Long before he was Zed in Men in Black or Artie in The Larry Sanders Show, a very young-looking Rip Torn starred in this bizarre Spanish film (shot in English) as Professor Manz, an Egyptologist who summons and assumes the powers of the Egyptian scarab god Khepera. Robert Ginty (The Exterminator, and now director of shows like Charmed and Xena) is Murphy, an American reporter who spots something odd going on when the French Prime Minister, mid-speech, grabs a gun, shoots at his audience then commits suicide.

Murphy follows a nurse with mysterious psychic powers, Elena (Cristina Hachuel aka Cristina Sanchez Pascuel) whom he saw retrieving a scarab beetle from the dead man. His investigations bring him trouble as a mysterious man (who can vanish at will) causes explosions, gunfire and accidents around him.

Turns out Elena is Manz’s daughter. She and Murphy infiltrate the castle where ‘Khepera’ and his followers are holding a sacrificial ritual. Murphy is captured and placed in a sarcophagus and Elena is hypnotised into stabbing him, but remembers when she was forced to commit the same act against her own brother (something you stand no chance of realising unless you read it on the video sleeve) and stabs Khepera instead.

It’s an odd film, that’s for sure. The script is reasonable and Murphy is a likable character if not a terribly competent one (we’re introduced to him when the Swedish Ambassador catches his wife in bed with Murphy at a diplomatic reception!). Hachuel looks a bit like Sally Phillips from Smack the Pony. Khepera’s followers dance wildly in a mixture of masks and body paint while waving flaming torches, in scenes reminiscent of the later Darklands. And Donald Pickering (Zulu Dawn, Executive Stress) has a completely inexplicable role as, well, your guess is as good as mine. Curiously, Torn appears to have been filmed separately as he is never in the same shot as anyone else unless he is wearing a mask or has his back to camera - until the last ten minutes when he’s on screen with both the other leads and twenty extras.

Scarab (Escarabajos Asesinos in its home country) isn’t terribly bad or terribly good. It’s competently made and quite exciting if somewhat incomprehensible in places. Stephen Jones’ Essential Monster Movie Guide (there are no monsters in Scarab) says it has “plenty of naked women” but he’s seen a different movie to me because this just has a few body-painted topless dancers.

This was the only directorial credit for Steven-Charles Jaffe, who had been Associate Producer on Time After Time and Demon Seed (written by his brother and co-writer here, Robert, who also wrote and produced Nightflyers) and who went on to produce the likes of Ghost, Strange Days and Star Trek VI!

MJS rating: C+
Review originally posted 16th January 2005

They Crawl

Director: John Allardice
Writers: Curtis Joseph, David Mason
Producer: Paul Hertzberg
Cast: Daniel Cosgrove, Tamara Davies, Dennis Boutsikaris
Year of release: 2001
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK video (Metrodome)

There are Big Bug Movies (like Them! or Spiders) and Little Bug Movies (like Phase IV or They Nest) and they are both scary in their own way. They Crawl (aka Crawlers) is a Little Bug Movie and if you don’t shout, “Oh, gross!” at your TV at least half a dozen times while watching this then you have a stronger stomach than I, my friend.

Daniel Cosgrove (Valentine) stars as Ted Cage, investigating the mysterious death of his younger brother Brian. The police believe Brian was just a drug dealer who accidentally burned down his apartment, but Ted finds evidence that he was involved with a sinister cult, Trillion, and also with some top secret military research. Tamara Davies (Area 52) is Gina O’Bannon, the cop who believes him, and Dennis Boutsikaris (In Dreams) is Brian’s university professor. Meanwhile, the police are investigating a series of bizarre murders, apparently carried out by the Trillion cult - but we know that roaches are somehow involved.

Director Allardice’s background is as a Visual Effects Supervisor with Foundation Imaging, so one might expect that he would let the effects swamp the story, but in fact for the most part this is a tense thriller, with just enough background weirdness to keep the viewer hooked. It’s almost like an X-Files episode - a good X-Files episode, that is, when they used to do monster-of-the-week shows.

The deadly power of the roach hordes is glimpsed once or twice before the third act, when the action starts to really build up, leading to an absolutely barnstorming denouement that is pure ‘wow!’ In fact, it’s almost a shame that this final idea is over and done with so quickly; there’s a whole other movie there (They Crawl II?).

The acting is strong from all the leads, with some effective supporting characters, notably Ken Lerner (Principal Flutie from Buffy) as a coroner and Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer from Twin Peaks) as Ted’s mother. There are cameos by Tone Loc (as a gangster), Mickey Rourke (as a cultist) and Dollman himself, the great Tim Thomerson (as a bug exterminator). Writers Joseph and Mason also wrote one of Jim Wynorski’s latest, Project VIPER. The bug effects are mostly CGI care of Foundation Imaging, as one would expect, although a Roach Wrangler is also credited. They Crawl is a surprisingly intelligent - and enjoyable - Little Bug Movie.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 11th February 2005.

The Thirsty Dead

Director: Terry Becker
Writer: Charles Dennis
Producer: Wesley E De Pue
Cast: Jennifer Billingsley, Judith McConnell, John Considine
Year of release: 1974
Country: Philippines
Reviewed from: UK rental VHS (AVR)

Never judge a book by its cover, but a sleeve can tell you a lot about a video. Firstly, the title is given as just Thirsty Dead on the front and spine instead of the correct The Thirsty Dead (as on screen and indeed on the back of the sleeve). Both front and back of the sleeve proclaim the film to be “a surgical nightmare” and while you could argue that there are nightmarish elements, there is not a hint of anything surgical. And the main picture of an unshaven bloke swigging blood from a laboratory flask - God alone knows where they got that or what it’s supposed to be!

The Thirsty Dead, like all great horror movies, begins in a seedy Filipino night club where a go-go dancer is gyrating wildly (and frankly, rather amateurishly) in a cage for the amusement of sailors and other patrons. This is sassy Claire (former Miss Pennsylvania and daytime soap star Judith McConnell - or Mc Connell as the credits have it - from The Doll Squad) who hears an announcement on the radio about a rumoured Hong Kong-based white slave operation (“For the second time in 48 hours, a young woman has disappeared from the streets of Manila.”) moments before she is kidnapped.

The police are baffled: “Seven girls in a month. All young, all attractive. No motives, no clues, no ransom notes, no bodies.”

Next we meet Laura (Jennifer Billingsley: The Spy with My Face) who is an “airline stewardess” according to the sleeve though that’s not stated in the film and who has an amazing head of Farrah Fawcet-style hair. She is telling her boyfriend Francisco (Rod Navarro: Armalite Commandos and the 1955 classic - probably - Bim, Bam, Bum) why she won’t marry him and moments after they part she too is grabbed by hooded mysteriosos. Taken through the sewers out of the city then up a river into the jungle, she joins three other young women: blonde teenager Ann (Fredricka Myers), oriental Bonnie (Chiqui de Rosa) and our old friend Claire, who is frankly looking forward to being a white slave in Hong Kong.

But they’re not off to Honkers. Instead the girls' captors drop their robes revealing themselves to be bald, mute, loincloth clad men who shepherd the women through the jungle. There are a great deal of ‘walking through the jungle’ shots in this film...

In a secret network of caves deep inside a mountain live a community of beautiful people who are immortal and who spend their days making jewellery and pottery. They are led by High Priestess Ranu (Tani Guthrie: Daughters of Satan) and High Priest Baru (John Considine: When Time Ran Out, Doomsday Virus, Fat Man and Little Boy and, um, Free Willy 2), the former High Priest having somehow died 500 years ago. He is called Raoul or Ramon or similar (difficult to make it out) and now exists as a disembodied head in a red glass box atop a stone table.

The people are all garbed in simple, pastel-coloured dresses and smocks - though Baru also has a pale blue cloak with a huge stand-up collar - and with the extensive use of hopelessly unrealistic cave sets, the whole film consequently looks alarmingly like a 1960s Star Trek episode.

Claire, Ann and Bonnie are all going to join the group of young women whose blood is used to keep the immortals alive. The girls lie down on stone slabs and a nick is made in their neck from which blood is collected in a cup. A magic leaf heals the nick and the blood is mixed with the essence of the leaf then drunk. Laura is offered the chance to join the immortals because she looks exactly like the one that the prophecies talked about yada yada yada but she turns them down, much to the shock of Baru and Ranu. Laura wants to stay with the other three but Baru shows her what will happen to them; they will rapidly wizen and age and then die.

Laura, Ann, Bonnie and (against her better judgement) Claire escape with the help of a wizened old crone named Eva (Mary Walters) and receive shelter from a jungle village - but Baru finds them and takes them back. However, he is starting to be swayed by Laura’s arguments about how immoral the whole set-up is. Baru says that they worship only beauty but Laura says that their actions make them ugly. So eventually Baru decides to help the girls escape by freeing the locked up old crones. (Eva has died by this time. “She was 28,” says Baru. “Brought here five years ago.”) The sight of unkempt troglodytes attacking beautiful people in pastel outfits is very reminiscent of the Morlocks and Eloi in George Pal’s version of War of the Worlds.

Claire doesn’t want to escape, she wants to become immortal: “I’m pretty. I’ve got a good body. They’ll take me.” Laura chases her through the stone tunnels until Claire falls into a pit and dies. Baru then leads the other three to the outside, but when they pass the ‘ring of age’ (some markings on the rocks) he starts to age rapidly by the miracle of lap dissolves and the girls leave him. They eventually make it to a road and flag down a passing jeep, but a subsequent police helicopter search shows nothing on the mountain which is unclimbable anyway. Or is it?

What a load of tosh this ‘International Amusement Corporation’ production is. The promise of a nasty horror movie is betrayed by the daft sub-Shangri-La plot (Blood Cult of Shangri-La is actually given as an alternative title by some sources, as is Blood Hunt). It’s competently enough made and the acting’s not too bad, but frankly it’s just not very interesting, with the high point being Claire’s ambivalent attitude to her kidnapping. The legendary Vic Diaz (Beast of the Yellow Night, Night of the Cobra Woman, Wonder Women, The Big Bird Cage) turns up at the end as a policeman and was also production co-ordinator, but even that’s not enough to make me recommend this movie.

This seems to be the only feature from director Terry Becker, who also helmed episodes of M*A*S*H, Mission Impossible and short-lived musical-spin-off sitcom Anna and the King. Charles Dennis (Double Negative, a TV movie of Svengali and The Jayne Mansfield Story, also a novelist and actor) wrote the screenplay from a story by Becker and Lou Whitehill (Wonder Women).

Cinematographer Nonong Rasca also shot Superbeast, Night of the Cobra Woman and Daughters of Satan while art director Robert Formosa worked on Black Mama White Mama, Savage Sisters and The Twilight People. Make-up artist Cecile Baun went on to do prosthetics for both Platoon and Hamburger Hill! The most impressive name here is composer Richard LaSalle, whose other credits include The Mermaids of Tiburon, Twice-Told Tales, The Time Travellers and for TV: Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Planet of the Apes and Wonder Woman!

The Thirsty Dead is utterly typical of mid-1970s Filipino fantasy movies - except that it has a lot less blood than many of them and no nudity whatsoever. It’s okay, nothing more, though it might look better on DVD as this ex-rental tape is a lousy transfer of a lousy print. Incidentally, many sources shoe-horn this into the vampire genre because of the eternal-life-from-blood-drinking theme, but it should be stressed that the characters are not particularly thirsty and they’re certainly not dead.

MJS rating: C
Review originally posted 14th April 2007.

Under Surveillance

Director: Dave Campfield
Writer: Dave Campfield
Producer: Dave Campfield
Cast: Eric Conley, David Rigg, Felissa Rose
Country: USA
Year of release: 2006
Official website: www.davecampfield.com

Justin Besler (Eric Conley) is a young man who has been living with his mother for several years but now returns to the old family home to live with his father Kurt (David Rigg), a cop with, shall we say, old-fashioned values. Justin is studying for a law degree; he is a practising Christian and has a much more liberal attitude than his dad although he gets on well with Kurt, which is more than his mother does.

Justin meets up with an old friend, Scott (Fred DeReau), and Scott’s college roommate Rick (director Dave Campfield himself) who makes extra bucks by selling beer to under-age students. He also meets and befriends a mysterious local girl, Kayla (Alexandra Eitel), whom he meets outside his house.

Since getting divorced, Justin’s dad has converted the family home to include three apartments which he rents out. In Apartment 1 are ‘masseuse’ Heidi Broonen (Felissa Rose: Sleepaway Camp, Nikos the Impaler, Zombiegeddon) and her autistic younger sister Sonja (Brenda Abbandandolo, who was also in Nikos); Apartment 2 is home to Robert Krol (Chris Cooke, who was the voice of the Colonel in Bill Plympton’s marvellous I Married a Strange Person), a large man with a penchant for prostitutes; Apartment 3 houses garbage collector and aspiring actor Vincent Calabrese (Mark Love) and his abused East European wife Larisa (Sara Baker Bahr).

When Kayla is found murdered, the blame is pinned on a local cult, the Black Circle, which Kurt has been trying to track down for some time in connection with earlier crimes. Justin is convinced that the killer lives in his own house and lets Rick persuade him to install hidden cameras in the three apartments. Rick, Justin and Scott then spend their nights watching monitors in a Ford Transit parked across the road.

Half an hour in, the film promises to turn into one of those films built out of digetic camera footage, like Hell Asylum or My Little Eye. Although we do sometimes see what the trio see, Campfield doesn’t quite have the confidence to work with the restrictions of high-angle, fixed cameras and instead the ‘monitor footage’ is simply black and white, but retaining close-ups, multiple angles, reverse shots and other directorial/editing touches that simply couldn’t exist in genuine surveillance footage, along with perfect sound. This is a shame as it distances the viewer from the action, making us no more than a normal TV/film audience, rather than placing us into the position of the voyeurs in the van. A few shots do flirt with realistic monitor images but it’s not consistent enough to work. This seems odd. Why build a story around captured TV footage and then not show us that captured TV footage?

Despite the above caveat, the story becomes engrossing and even tense. Justin and Scott are sucked into Rick’s enthusiasm for spying but find that what happens in the apartments is affecting them, even as they are affecting what happens in the apartments. At one point they slip an accusatory note under each door to see if anyone will give themselves away by their reaction, but the results are not what they expect. The watchers’ intrusion into the three homes, physically in a couple of instances when they want to check something out, has unforeseen effects, creating tension between the Broonen sisters, between the Calabreses and between Krol and his succession of hookers.

At the same time there is tension in the van (they later move the monitors into Justin’s bedroom, which seems more sensible) as Justin and Rick find that their agendas are very different. Can Rick be trusted? Is Justin being completely honest about his relationship with the murdered girl? And meanwhile, Kurt is on the trail of the Black Circle, unaware that it may lead him to his own home.

Under Surveillance (later retitled Dark Chamber) is a gripping and original thriller which confidently twists its protagonists (and antagonists) around what could have been a relatively straightforward plot. The large cast of characters, many of whom never interact outside their own immediate relationship, are well-drawn and believable. Campfield directs with a slick professionalism while DPs Xavier Rodriguez and Andrew Seltz make the film look more expensive than it presumably was with great camerawork, especially within the confines of the van. The Black Circle, who favour half-black masks and pentagram tattoos, are mysterious, threatening and not overplayed and there are some really quite scary moments when they appear.

This is an impressive debut feature which displays Campfield’s obvious cinematic talents to the full.

MJS rating: B+

Review originally posted 15th April 2006

Talisman

Director: xian vassie
Writer: xian vassie
Producer: Mark Collins-Cope, Joumana Jeffers, xian vassie
Cast: Manu Monade, Ellie Fairman, Antona Mirto
Year: 1997
Country: UK
Reviewed from: preview tape

Here’s something a bit odd - a review of a film that was never finished.

I have had this tape sitting my shelf for six years. I assume that it was sent through to me when I was working on SFX, possibly when I was also writing my ‘Independents Day’ column in the early days of Total Film. So one day I decided to sit down and see what I’d got.

What I’d got turned out to be about 30 minutes of disjointed scenes which promised a terrific little film. A search through the MJS archives also turned up a publicity brochure - which was handy as there were no credits on the film at all.

Here’s what I could work out. Snooty, wealthy Lizbeth Falahoun (Antona Mirto) has Professor Lipton (Bill Neenan, unseen) prisoner while she tries to track down the remaining pieces of the Talisman of Set, a powerful ancient Egyptian artefact. She sends two less-than-bright blokes, middle-aged Alf and young Fisty (sorry, don’t know the actors) to search the Professor’s house, where they come across French chef Jules (Manu Monade, a genuine chef who was hailed by The Sunday Times as baker of the best bread in London!) also looking for the Prof.

Jules has one of the pieces of the talisman, found in the soup of a restaurant customer who died at his table. Kidnapped by Alf and Fisty, Jules is nowhere to be seen when waitress Brigitte (Ellie Fairman), who has a crush on him, calls at his loft-flat. She assumes he has run away, consumed with guilt about the dead customer, and enlists the help of fat, jovial Porsche (Paul Tripp - not the one who composed Tubby the Tuba!) to search for him.

Meanwhile, Falahoun, served dinner by her manservant Petr (David Love), is visited by tall, supercilious Sir Luke Homers (Sean Brosnan) and his nervous lawyer Sophie (Carol Kentish). Homers has another piece of the talisman and offers Falahoun a contract which would give them joint control of the magical artefact (Homers’ company is named on the contract as Clearview Occult Investments, Trading and Unexplained Sciences - which gives it an interesting acronym!).

Handling the talisman fragment gives Jules hallucinations: he sees his carpet moving slightly and discovers underneath it a trapdoor, below which is a red-lit Egyptian temple. We also see him on a tube train, where he finds himself the only passenger, the train not stopping at any stations, and visited by ghostly twins (Rose and Sarah Kendall) whom we have seen in a painting, together with the talisman, in the Professor’s house. There is also a very effective scene when Jules opens the door to his flat to find all his furniture dancing around the room, a smashing stop-motion shot which would not have shamed Jiri Trnka.

And then the tape stopped. Some of the scenes had no soundtrack, and a shot of Jules rescuing Sophie from Falahoun’s mansion seemed oddly out of place, but I thought it was all just a dream sequence. It wasn’t - well, some of it might have been - it was a collection of disparate footage from various points in the story.

Basically, Jules is a chef who dreams of being a swashbuckling hero. There’s a still in the brochure from a scene not on the tape: Jules in a swordfight with a pirate named Ripper (Don Fearney), presumably a Walter Mitty-type daydream. He gets caught up in the situation after approaching phoney supernatural investigator Homers about the mysterious object found in the dead customer’s soup. Falahoun is apparently High Priestess of the Cult of Nephythys, who will have power over the ghosts of everyone who ever lived if she can piece the talisman back together...

On the evidence of this disjointed half-hour of footage, this would have been an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek romp. The brochure says that “shooting started in April 1997 and is scheduled to end in October ... post-production is due to be completed at the end of the year.” Just how far did this film get? Does it exist in any sort of finished form? I want to see more!

Apart from chef Monade (who was picked to add authenticity to the cooking scenes!), all the cast were professional actors. Ellie Fairman for example was a voice in the 2001 computer game Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive and also starred in an award-winning audiobook adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Antona Mirta has since appeared in another low-budget British film, the action thriller Red Mercury. Don Fearney now organises Hammer Horror fan events. Sean Brosnan is not, despite what the brochure claims, Pierce’s brother.

Carol Kentish, it turns out, I might actually have met! She was one of the actors who provided voices for the British dub of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, a dubbing session which I visited on behalf of SFX. She was also in The Devil’s Harvest, another unreleased British fantasy movie [Eventually released in 2005 - MJS], starring Brian Blessed and Julie T Wallace (of which I saw some footage when I was visiting that same Gamera dubbing session). Her other films - which may or may not have been completed - are Instant Karma (Slice Films), Inciting Murder (Equator Films) and Living Down Here (We Should Be Ltd). She performs in a topical comedy revue in Brighton called The Treason Show which is actually available on CD from Doctor Who audio producers Big Finish!

Scouring the web reveals that cinematographer Roger Eaton shot an acclaimed documentary on the Spanish architect Gaudi; editor Bill Sneddon went on to work on comedy shows like Jam and Smack the Pony; and costume designer Sam Dightam fulfilled the same role on the Richard Alston Dance Company’s production of The Rite of Spring for the BBC TV series Masterworks in 2002.

And then there’s the writer/director/producer (and composer), the defiantly lower-case xian vassie. Being an adept journalist it took me no time at all to identify him as Christian Vassie, a composer of music for more than sixty film and TV productions including a number of wildlife documentaries and the 2001 BBC Raffles pilot starring Nigel Havers. Born in York, where he still lives, he was once Head Chorister in York Minster Choir. And what is Mr Vassie doing now? He’s representing the Lib-Dems on York City Council!

How far into production did Talisman get? Why was it never finished? Does Christian Vassie still have all the footage? Will any film starring the lovely Carol Kentish ever actually get shown anywhere? To answer these questions I contacted the director himself and received this reply.

MJS rating: It wouldn’t be fare to give this one a grade.

Virgin Witch

Director: Ray Austin
Writer: ‘Klaus Vogel’
Producer: Ralph Solomons
Cast: Vicki Michelle, Anne Michelle, Patricia Haines
Year of release: 1971
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK VHS (Salvation)

Real life sisters Vicki and Anne Michelle play screen sisters Betty and Christine in this entry in the ‘home counties witchcraft’ subgenre which flourished in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The early entries into the field, such as The Sorcerers, had diversified into superior historicals (Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw) and rather tacky contemporary pictures such as this one.

Betty and Christine, innocents both, travel to London with a view to finding modelling work, accepting a lift from passing motorist Johnny (Keith Buckley: Dr Phibes Rises Again, Excalibur), who falls for the younger Betty while Christine is ‘auditioning’ at the offices of lesbian agent Sybil Waite (Patricia Haines). Sybil whisks Christine off to Wychwold, the country estate of her friend Dr Gerald Amberley (Neil Hallett: X the Unknown, Ghost Squad), ostensibly to shoot an ad campaign for cider, with Betty along as chaperone. (It is only when we see the name written down quite some time later that we realise people haven’t been talking about some satanic amusement park called Witchworld.)

The house and grounds are home to some creepy people, but photographer Peter (James Chase) seems nice enough. In fact, the whole thing is a front for a coven of witches, into which Christine is initiated at night, waking up the next morning in bed with Sybil and subsequently acting much more self-confident and mature. Revelling in the release of her latent magical powers, she plans to oust Sybil as High Priestess of the coven during Betty’s initiation the following night, but Johnny is on his way down to Wychwold to rescue Betty.

What starts off as a pretty crappy movie picks up towards the end, leaning more towards - though never reaching - the sort of unnerving, slightly too serious atmosphere of menace that characterised the best witchcraft films (The Devil Rides Out, for example). The idea of a modelling agency recruiting young girls for supernatural purposes is a tad too close to the nonsensical story in the second half of The Night Caller (in which Patricia Haines was the victim, not the abductor) although it seems slightly more credible as a witch’s plan than that of an alien from a moon of Jupiter. Nevertheless, once the movie settles down to a battle of psychic wills between Christine and Sybil, it becomes much more watchable and a lot more tense.

The script, bizarrely, is by producer Beryl Vertue (under a pseudonym) who went on to produce The House in Nightmare Park but is best known now as the matriarchal figure behind such hit sitcoms as Men Behaving Badly and Coupling (written by her son-in-law Steven Moffat). Vertue was an agent for Associated London Scripts (Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes) but this script (and her own novelisation of it) seem to be her only professional writing credits - and she keeps very quiet about them!

However the major selling point for the film back in the 1970s was the copious amount of full nudity from Vicki and especially from Anne. In fact, pretty much everybody gets naked in the climactic ritual, including some older members of the cast who undoubtedly add authenticity to the scene but dampen the sexual allure. The nudity in earlier scenes, such as Christine’s ‘audition’ for Sybil during which the older women touches her up under the pretence of taking her measurements, is often tacky, but in the scenes of black magic it is not only relevant but actually adds to the air of menace.

Vicki Michelle, two years older than her sister but here playing on her fresh-faced appearance as the younger sibling, went on to appear in Queen Kong and an episode of Space: 1999 before finding fame as Yvette in Allo Allo in the 1980s. Ann (credited on-screen as Anne Michelle) actually acquired a bunch of genre credits including Psychomania, House of Whipcord and the 1979 US production Haunted - in which she played, of all things, a native American - before disappearing from the screen to concentrate on stage work.

Peter Halliday (A for Andromeda, Madhouse) plays a nightclub manager while the coven members include Garth Watkins (Twins of Evil), Prudence Drage (A Clockwork Orange), Sheila Sands (Year of the Sex Olympics) and Steve Peters (Lead Roboman in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD!). Cinematographer Gerald Moss had shot second unit on Village of the Damned, while the very effective music is by Ted Dicks, whose other horror credit is the title song to Carry On Screaming!

MJS rating: B-

Zorg and Andy

Director: Guy Davis
Writer: VZ Montengo
Producers: Guy Davis, Quentin Dodd, Paul Dodd
Cast: Scott Ganyo, Kate Rudd, Sally Weatherston
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: US DVD
Website: www.zorgandandy.com

I always feel guilty when somebody sends me their film that they’ve worked hard on and I watch it and, not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s awful. Part of me says ‘Hey, don’t review this. Give these guys a break.’ And another part of me says ‘Write what you genuinely think because to do otherwise would be a disservice to your readers and indeed to the film-makers themselves. Any creative artist, especially one just starting out, can learn more from detailed analysis and constructive criticism than from unalloyed lauding of their work. So tell the truth.’

A bit more verbose, that second voice.

It’s difficult to know where to start with Zorg and Andy, a 65-minute, self-styled ‘indie comedy sensation’ but I would suggest that its biggest failing is that it isn’t even slightly funny. Not only did I not laugh once, I didn’t even smile. It’s clearly not meant to be a serious film because the central premise is ridiculous and in fact there is tremendous potential for comedy in said premise, but none of that potential is mined here. It’s like the film is one enormous joke-oid; it has the shape of a comedy without actually being one. It’s not that the gags are weak or unfunny, it’s that there don’t seem to be any. Not only did I not laugh, I couldn’t work out where I was supposed to laugh if I had found it funny.

Which is a huge shame because the premise is very good. A student doing work experience in a museum is left in charge of an ancient idol which goes missing and it turns out that his university is full of secret cults and cabals, all of whom want to get their hands on the idol for their own nefarious purposes. I like that idea. It’s clever and original. I work in a university and I can well believe that secret ceremonies go on behind certain faculty doors.

Well, when I say “full of secret cults and cabals” I’m paraphrasing the sleeve blurb (“their idyllic campus is overrun by pagan blood cults”) and the website blurb (“his idyllic campus is home to a network of bloodthirsty pagan cults”). In fact there are precisely two cults with about 15 or 16 members between them.

The plot, in a nutshell, is that an archaeological dig by a German team in Turkey uncovers the stone idol and a mysterious woman who has a mind-control drug in the heel of her stiletto persuades the lead archaeologist to ship the item to the States.

Student Andy has had some problem in his previous work experience so he is assigned to a museum where the staff consists of brusque, downtrodden Jen and irritating, chirpy Pete plus an unseen ‘Professor Harpax’. While cleaning the statue, Andy gives it to a strange woman who calls it Zorg. When Jen finds this out she goes ballistic and sends Andy to get it back.

He goes to see two entirely unexplained characters, one of whom wears a large, papier-mâché pig’s head for no apparent reason. Identifying the woman from a bunch of staff photos as ‘Colette from Economics’, he then goes to the Economics Department where he finds a gaggle of middle-aged people wearing odd costumes who are planning to sacrifice Jen to Zorg.

Later, while Jen sleeps, Andy answers the door and Colette whacks him with a golf club and steals Zorg again but she is tricked by Professor Harpax who leads an all-female cult which already owns a female version of the Zorg statue. They plan to sacrifice Andy and Jen and Colette but the other cult turn up and there is a short chase until eventually two campus security guys arrive and arrest everyone.

There’s a good idea in there somewhere but a whole bunch of things let the movie down, not least a badly structured script (by the possibly pseudonymous ‘VZ Montengo’) which drags out the Turkey-set prologue and is nearly halfway through before Andy even sets off to find the statue, which is supposed to be the central quest of the plot. There is even the potential in there for comedy, for misunderstandings, for surprises and shocks and people going nuts and other people staying frustratingly cool and collected.

But the only thing that might possibly be supposed to be funny is the pig’s head schtick which seems to be just random surrealism and as such is totally out of keeping with what the rest of the film is (allegedly) trying to achieve. I’m wondering whether the pig thing is some sort of in-joke. If not, why is it there. Who is ‘The Pig’ and who is the other guy with The Pig?

Okay, enough beating around the bush. The script is terrible - in terms of both plot structure and dialogue - and nobody was ever going to be able to make a good film out of it. And there’s a whole bunch of bad choices and technical deficiencies which I shall detail in a moment. But something has to be said about the character of Andy and the actor who plays him, Scott Ganyo.

Meh.

I don’t mean that as an opinion or as a critical comment. I’m using the term ‘meh’ in its purely adjectival sense. Andy Monroe is the most ‘meh’ character I think I’ve ever seen in a film. He’s blank, he’s nothing, he’s a character with no character. Not in a fascinating way like, say Peter Sellers in Being There. No, this is just an utterly dull character played in an utterly dull way so that we never, ever care about him at all. We don’t care what he does or how or why he does it.

He’s given no background so we don’t know who he is and he’s given no goal (apart from the short-term task of getting back the idol he gave away) so we don’t know what he wants. And we don’t care. I have honestly never seen a central character so monumentally dull. Not even dull enough to be interesting or amusing. Just bland. He shows no expressions: no fear, no elation, no concern, no curiosity. Nothing.

Not that he’s given anything to say or do in the bland script. Every line of dialogue that Andy utters is a prosaically dull statement, invariably delivered by Ganyo in the same flat monotone after a pause of about half a second. It’s like he’s not even aware of what’s going on - yet not distracted by something else either. He never seems to make eye contact with anyone else. There’s no body language, no sense of urgency when threatened, no sense of relief when safe. Andy is a narrative and emotional void at the centre of this film. Notice how, in the plot synopsis above, I was able to apply two adjectives to both Jen and Pete but nothng to Andy.

And since the film is called Zorg and Andy, and Zorg is just a small statue, that doesn’t really leave much. Really, the film should just be called And.

If the central character was played as a bit of a wise-guy chancer we could laugh with him. If he was played as lovable slacker we could laugh at him. But he’s neither, he’s nothing. It’s like some background extra with one line was stuck in front of the cameras and made the centre of the whole film but without bothering to expand his character from that single line. For example, there’s one scene where Andy picks up some antique coins from a display and uses them to buy a drink from a vending machine and, because he’s such a bland non-character, we don’t know why. Is he so dumb that he didn’t realise they were antiques or is he so cocky that he didn’t care they were antiques? Either might work but we have no idea which (if either) is the case.

So the next question is this: is Scott Ganyo a terrible actor or is he just playing Andy like this? I must admit that I assumed, given the cheapo nature of the film, that the cast probably consists of director Guy Davis’ friends and colleagues but it turns out that Ganyo is a professional SAG/AFTRA actor. So presumably it’s not that he doesn’t know how to act, he’s just playing Andy as if the character were being played by somebody who doesn’t know how to act. Somebody who not only doesn’t understand how to convey emotions but doesn’t even realise that’s what he’s supposed to be doing when that camera-thing is pointing at him.

At some point in the film, a terrible thing occurred to me. And I apologise in advance in case anybody thinks I’m being flippant, but I wondered whether the character of Andy was intended to be autistic. No really, it seems the only way to make sense of his disconnectedness from everything around him. It’s like he has his own world and his own judgements and he’s not doing anything really strange but there’s something indefinably different. And it reminds me of what little direct experience I have had with autistic people.

And once I had thought that, I couldn’t unthink it. And everything after that made some kind of sense, at least as far as Andy’s behaviour went. Of course, if I’m wrong and the character is actually meant to be some sort of laid-back, goof-off slacker - in fact, if Andy is meant to have any character at all - then I’m afraid Scott Ganyo really is an unbelievably terrible actor.

The rest of the cast varies from adequate to dreadful. Sally Weatherston as Harpax is probably the best of a bad bunch although I must mention Nancy R’beck who plays one of the Economics cult members. She has about three lines yet still manages to stand out as one of the worst actresses I’ve ever seen in my life.

Davis’ direction and editing are okay but he’s a little too trigger-happy on the shot-reverse-shot sometimes which is distracting and creates one or two body-position continuity errors. Cinematographer Benjamin Weatherston comes off best from this film I think although he can’t do anything about the perpetual problem of day-for-night shots, which is that they have never, ever looked like night-time in any film that has ever used them. Ever. I don’t know why people still bother with them, I honestly don’t.

Look, while I’m lambasting this little film, let’s point out a few specific problems. The German subtitles in the prologue are tricky to read. Then when we first meet Andy he’s lying in bed and somebody is leaving a message on his answerphone. But if you’re going to treat a voice with a telephone distort effect, don’t stick music over the top, especially when the film is just starting so we’ve no clues or context to help us decipher what is being said. It’s something to do with Andy’s last work experience but it’s mostly inaudible.

The only thing we can make out is that he has been assigned to the Kungsbaden Museum of Natural History which may or may not be part of his university - that’s never made clear. What is clear is that this is a museum of natural history, partly because it is called that several times and partly because of all the stuffed beavers, mounted antelope heads and dinotherium skeletons around the place.

I mean, kudos for finding - and getting permission to use - a real museum. This isn’t just set dressing, this is a full-on natural history museum and numerous shots are packed with top-quality background inaction of impressive taxidermy and some superb fossils.

So, er, what is an archaeological item, an ancient stone statue, doing in a natural history museum? Jen says repeatedly that this is Harpax’s prized acquisition and nobody bats an eyelid at its out-of-placeness. There’s a throwaway line about the museum concentrating on ‘anthropology and ethnology’ but that doesn’t square with the fully mounted woolly mammoth skeleton out front. Apart from the previously mentioned antique coins there is nothing in the museum which has any connection with anthropology or ethnology or indeed anything except animals. Either this is a general museum with a natural history section and an archaeology section - which is not what we are told/shown - or it’s just a natural history museum, in which case it makes no sense for it to have the facilities to clean and prepare archaeological specimens.

It looks like Guy Davis got access to this fabulous museum location and decided to shoot there even though it contradicted the basic premise of his plot. Are we supposed to not notice that the idol is in a completely inappropriate place? Because the characters don’t. I don’t get it.

The ‘museum’ also has, for some inexplicable reason, an insect lab full of free-flying ‘flesh-eating bugs’ which are represented by lots of little black blobs whizzing around, a buzzing noise and occasional insert shots of a cockroach. Andy and Jen are locked in the lab which is supposed to kill them but the bugs (who don’t seem capable of flying out of the door while it’s open) cause no more bother than a swarm of house-flies would. A giant millipede can be clearly seen at the edge of one shot, crawling around its tank, but is never mentioned.

Andy and Jen escape through the traditional large, square air duct that has served characters in dodgy B-movies as an escape route since time immemorial. Except that this one is represented by a metal plate about 12 inches square that the petite Jen might just about get through but Andy stands no chance. And the other end of the ‘air vent’ is represented by the two actors emerging from a small cupboard! Sorry, but that was the point at which I started to lose sympathy with Zorg and Andy. That’s just amateur. This film wants to be treated like a real movie but it’s more like a home movie, a student project designed for playing to the people who made it but a chore for other folk to sit through.

An equally badly done scene is Andy’s rescue of Jen (and Zorg) from the Economics Department. At this stage, Andy is still hoping to apply a ‘fixative’ to the statue to protect it when handled but he finds that he accidentally swapped bags with a photographer friend whom he met on the stairs before seeing pig-head-man and other-man. The friend must be a keen photographer because he has a decent camera which he carries around in a large bag with nothing else at all. Andy uses this camera to ward off the cult members and force them to untie Jen - but how does he use it?

The dialogue has a threat to leave the incriminating photos where they will be found and published if Andy dies but that’s not a way to ward off physical violence. Once Andy has one shot of the group (he’s just firing off the camera randomly) then any additional photos won’t incriminate them any more - and they are evidently prepared to commit murder - so they might as well grab him, stab him and smash the camera. Or are we supposed to imagine they’re frightened of the flash? Unfortunately, between the people playing the cult members being such terrible actors and Guy Davis not knowing how to direct this scene, we can’t really tell why they’re frightened. (We also have no clue why they have kidnapped Jen in particular.)

There are plenty of other gaping holes in the plot. Why does Harpax travel all the way to Turkey with her truth-drug-heel-syringe (the one and only interesting thing in the film) then just use it to persuade the German archaeology professor to have the idol shipped to her university. She puts him under mind-control and then just hands him her address! Later, Jen talks of having spent ages overseeing the shipping of the statue. So why didn’t Harpax just take the bloody thing when she had a chance, avoiding all that bother and risk?

Similarly, when Jen is asleep, recovering from her kidnap, and Andy goes to answer a knock at the front door, he is careful to pick up Zorg and carry the idol through the house so that he can be holding it when he gets whacked with a golf club. He has no reason to pick up the thing and carry it. Jen’s asleep, he’s unconscious (from a blow to the stomach?) so Colette could have just walked in and taken the statue off the table. It’s more bad script compounded by poor direction.

There is some mention near the end that Andy is somehow the ‘chosen one’ of Zorg but this is neither explained nor explored - then the film wraps up at about 59 minutes. About six minutes of credits follow, more than half of which is an endless list of all the sound effects which Davis used from various websites. That still leaves the movie short of the seventy minutes required to classify it as a feature; it’s a measure of the film-makers’ inexperience and naiveté that they didn’t think to simply run the credits slower (or bigger) to drag the whole thing out. Have they never seen a Charlie Band picture?

If there is one word to describe Zorg and Andy it is ‘over-ambitious’. Guy Davis has bitten off far more than he can chew, working from an unsuitable script with an untalented cast in inappropriate locations. It’s a real shame because he has put a lot of effort (and fair bit of money from a large team of credited ‘executive producers’) into this movie. It looks like everyone involved had a great time making Zorg and Andy but that doesn’t translate into a great time for the audience. If anything, the reverse often holds true. Many of the best films ever made were hell on Earth for their cast and crew.

I was really looking forward to Zorg and Andy because it sounded great on paper. And, truth be told, I’m still looking forward to it. I really, really want to see a comedy movie about secret cults on a university campus fighting for possession of an ancient idol while some hapless intern tries to recover the sacred object just to save his job. That would be - well, could be - a great movie. I hope that Guy Davis spends some time shooting a few shorts, hones his craft, collects around him a stock company of talented actors and eventually remakes Zorg and Andy a few years down the line. With a decent script.

Sorry folks.

MJS rating: D+

Man Who Sold the World

Director: Louis Melville
Writer: Louis Melville
Producers: Louis Melville, Stuart Fenegan
Cast: Jonathan Sidgwick, Rita Kvist, Dan van Husen
Country: UK
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: advance screener disc

Even from this unfinished version it's clear that Man Who Sold the World is an authentically spooky fantasy and an undeniably original film. The two central performances are both great, the creepy kid is suitably creepy, the sense of paranoia and nightmare is very well built, the transitions between levels of reality/dream are adroitly handled, the locations are marvellous and well-used, the editing is bang-on, the camerawork is great and the music is terrific.

But I would be lying to you if I said I understood the ending.

Jonathan Sidgwick (The Witches Hammer, Bane) stars as Max Trisch who inherits a rambling, antiques-filled stately home from his grandmother and drives out there to take a look. In an upstairs room he finds Zisna (Dan van Husen: House of Blood, Forest of the Damned, Cold and Dark), an Aleister Crowley lookalike priest, helping himself to some thing that Max’s mother had borrowed. Subsequently exploring the local area, Max finds an empty church with a worried Christian priest, Reverend Carmichael (Andrew Tiernan: 300, The Quatermass Experiment, The Bunker), who is evidently in opposition to Zisna.

But mostly what Max sees is an expressionless, silent boy (Alex McNeill), aged about 12 or so and wearing an old-fashioned school uniform. Appearing and disappearing, this ghost leads Max through the woods until he collapses and finds himself revived in the stately splendour of Zisna’s home, from where the charismatic leader controls, via internet sermons, a worldwide cult of ‘Koslantians’. This seems to be a standard end-of-the-world cult: armageddon is a-coming and the Koslantians will be saved and transported to humanity’s true home, a place called Koslantis. Evidently, acolytes can progress through levels as a ‘tapoge’. It’s all a sort of Branch Davidians meets Scientology set up with a heavy dose of Crowleyism. Max, understandably, is polite to his gracious host but remains thoroughly cynical.

Max’s Scandinavian girlfriend Lidija (the lovely Rita Kvist - The Weight of Water, Lime - about whose brief, gratuitous nude scenes you won’t find me complaining) arrives to keep him company. Together they investigate the old house and find evidence that Max’s grandmother was inadvertently responsible for allowing the Nazis to get their hands on the Holy Grail. This ties in with visions of Nazi pomp and circumstance which Max is experiencing, all Teutonic knights and busty Rhinemadchen.

This is one of those films where the weirdness builds relentlessly over the full ninety minutes. Max and Lidija attempt to drive away but however far they go, they’re still within walking distance of the house. Red-jacketed Koslantian tapoges hunt for them; Reverend Carmichael bangs on their door, shouting that the apocalypse is here; Max’s pet python Fido escapes and is never found (a shot of Fido slithering past a half-eaten apple must have some sort of Biblical symbolism, I guess). Most significantly, elements of Nazi concentration camps start to appear with first the creepy boy and then Max himself in stripy prison pyjamas with a yellow Jewish star. (This raises the question of whether Max is Jewish, which seems unlikely as what we are told about his paternal grandmother indicates her to be Christian, possibly Catholic. Maybe he’s Jewish on his mother’s side.)

Interspersed with this are interactions between Max and a beardy psychiatrist, sometimes in cutaways, sometimes in voice-overs which sound rather too much like narration. I actually found these quite confusing: at first I thought they were flashbacks to before Max left London, then they seemed to be part of the main story (which left me wondering how Max was able to drive back and see the shrink, then get home so quickly). Eventually I decided that they must be a framing story with everything else as a flashback. The disc I saw wasn’t the final edit so this confusion may be cleared up - or perhaps it’s deliberate.

And that ending? I really don’t know. It’s something to do with stigmata, and Adolf Hitler himself appears briefly in some sort of white limbo. But precisely what is going on, what it means and how it relates to anything else - search me. In some way, Man Who Sold the World reminded me of old European films: plenty of weirdness, middle class protagonists trapped in a nightmarish series of events and no real explanation for the viewer. If this had been made thirty years ago in Spain, Redemption would be all over it. There is also a touch of The Avengers in the dangerous eccentricity hidden away in the English countryside, maybe a dash of The Wicker Man too.

For a first-time director, Louis Melville does a bang-up job. Every time I made a note of something which didn’t seem to make narrative sense, I had to scribble it out two minutes later as the situation was explained in the dialogue. He is greatly assisted by the cinematography of James Friend (Wishbaby, Reverb) and Boyd Skinner (Cargo, Springheel Jack) although there is an unavoidable shot-on-DV flatness to the image. Editors Adam Biskupski and Richard Graham are also to be commended for stitching together such a potentially disjointed story. A fine orchestral and piano score by Simon Lambros (The Last Horror Movie, Puritan) is augmented by a handful of sparsely beautiful songs by Tally Koren. Mark Stevenson, who was so great as the assistant in The Last Horror Movie, appears as a monk with a mask even beakier than the one in HellBride.

Though it kept me gripped to the very end, Man Who Sold the World left me slightly niggled because I don’t know whether I was even supposed to understand the denouement. The whole film goes somewhere - but where? Undeniably skilfully constructed and resolutely intriguing, here is a movie which raises more questions than it answers. Take a look - maybe you’ll spot something I missed.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 29th June 2007

Kill List

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writers: Ben Wheatley, Amy Jump
Producers: Claire Jones, Andrew Starke
Cast: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Michael Smiley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release
Website: www.kill-list.com

Some critics have suggested that the best way to approach Kill List is with as little foreknowledge as possible. This is absolutely not the case and frankly unfair to the film’s audience. There are some things which you really should know before taking the time to watch this film.

First, despite early indications, this is a horror movie. Not quite supernatural horror but more than just excessive violence. The third act involves some sort of Wicker Man-style pagan/wiccan cult, positioning Kill List on the very edge of fantasy, depending on whether or not their magick is real (that’s not made clear). This is important to know because the first act, which introduces us to ex-squaddie Jay (Neil Maskell: Doghouse, Tony), his Swedish wife Shel (MyAnna Buring: The Descent, Devil’s Playground), his son Sam (Harry Simpson - no relation) and his oppo Gal (Michael Smiley: Burke and Hare, Outpost), goes on far too long.

We see the outward normality of these people’s lives. We learn that Jay and Gal were together in the army, then worked for a private security firm, then became freelance hitmen. Jay hasn’t worked in eight months and his savings are drying up, further cracking his strained marriage. Gal has been offered a job and wants Jay in on it.

While the quality of the writing, the direction and the performances ensure that this first part of the film doesn’t drag, the fact remains that it’s not what we’ve paid to see and the same ideas and information could have been conveyed in half the time. This would bring forward the start of the second act when the film turns into a thriller and hence hasten the arrival of the third act that we’re all waiting for.

The other thing which you really should know in advance is that you will be sorely disappointed if you expect any sort of explanation or resolution - and this is the film’s biggest failing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that everything should be wrapped up with some pat explanation. I’m not even saying that all the questions raised should be answered. But at least some of them should be answered, otherwise what’s the point?

I’m all for films that leave unanswered questions. The Descent, for example, never explained what the crawlers were or whether they were even real. The ending of the film (in the British cut) was clearly in the main character’s head, but when did the narrative pass from reality to fantasy? Was it getting stuck in the narrow gap? Was it the accidental killing of a friend? My personal theory is that it was the car crash in the prologue and that everything after that is fantasy (an idea born out by the often overlooked scene of the hospital lights mysteriously switching off). The point is that the lack of a definite answer makes the debate all the more fascinating.

In a similar vein, Vampire Diary refuses to confirm or deny whether the central character is a real vampire or just a disturbed young woman with a taste for blood. There are plenty of other examples. In fact, there are legions of horror films which leave an audience wondering what happens next, especially those with a Carrie-style sting at the end.

But Kill List isn’t a film open to different interpretations, it’s a film which raises a whole bunch of unconnected questions and leaves them all hanging at the end - including what actually happens at the end. Without wanting to give away any spoilers, the climax of the movie is genuinely disturbing and shocking. For a brief moment I was in awe at the audacity of the film-makers, amazed at what they had revealed, but this was immediately muddied by confusion over character reactions which completely contradicted everything we had been told and shown so far - and then the whole thing just suddenly stopped. In an instant, ‘Wow!’ turned to ‘What?’. It is possibly the most disappointing, arbitrary cop-out of a non-ending since The Blair Witch Project.

However, while Blair Witch was 70-odd minutes of nothing happening to people we didn’t care about, so the crap ending came as something of a relief and the main disappointment was at the waste of an evening and the cost of two cinema tickets, with Kill List the opposite is true. This is a terrific film (or rather, this is 98% of a terrific film). Everything up to that ending is great because up to that ending we are impressed at the originality and the diverse range of weirdness happening on screen. We are impressed - as we would be with any finely wrought, complex, convoluted narrative - that a writer has crafted a tale which weaves all these ideas together and will make sense of them at the end.

But implicit in this adulation is the assumption that the writer will make sense of things at the end. And this, Ben Wheatley and his wife/co-writer Amy Jump singularly fail to do. Watching Kill List is like seeing all the theatrical preamble to a large-scale magic trick and then just as the magician raises his magic wand - the curtains close and the house lights come up. In other words, it’s a con, a swizz and a rip-off.

Here, we venture unavoidably into the realm of spoilers, so beware:

Gal’s new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) carves a symbol in a hidden spot in Jay’s house. Why? Along with several other later actions by Fiona, no explanation is offered except that she is part of the pagan cult/conspiracy.

We never find out who Jay and Gal’s employer is, nor why he wants these people dead. That’s not such a problem; it’s not the driving force of the film or the character’s motivations. These are two men doing a job - nothing more, nothing less. The second kill is of a man involved in some sort of violent underground pornography ring (possibly kiddie porn) although it is unclear whether the others on the ‘kill list’ are also involved or whether this is coincidental.

The first victim, a priest, accepts his fate and says ‘Thank you’ before being shot. Ooh, that’s mysterious. Will we ever find out why? No.

The second victim goes further, enthusiastically thanking Jay with every agonising crunch during a violent - but far from exploitative - prolonged torture scene. Some reviewers have been shocked by this but it doesn’t linger, it’s technically clever, it’s not gleeful in any way, and it is frankly a lot less disturbing than similar stuff shot for a fraction of the budget eight years ago for The Last Horror Movie. What is more significant is that this victim, when Gal is out of the room, praises Jay like some sort of celebrity. What is it about Jay? What is going on here? We will never find out.

A major problem with the plot is that very little attention is paid to the folder of documents and photographs which Gal takes from the victim’s safe (presumably to make the hit look like a botched burglary). This folder is all about Jay and Gal, it includes a whole dossier on something which happened in Kiev (frequently alluded to but never in sufficient detail for us to care about) and there are even photographs taken of the duo carrying out the hit on the priest a few days earlier.

This should have been a complete game-changer, a wake-up call that the two men are not just hired guns but somehow mixed up in a much bigger, more deadly and more personally relevant situation - but Gal doesn’t even show Jay the folder. He just mentions it in passing and they pretty much shrug and go, oh, that’s weird.

There are a couple of other situations which simply don’t ring true. On discovering that the next hit is an MP, Jay and Gal seem unconcerned. But a disappearing priest or a random bloke killed by a burglar are one thing, assassinating a Member of Parliament is quite another. Any investigation will be massive and much more likely to lead to their arrest - but they just accept it as Another Job.

The MP has a huge estate and it is here, bivouacked in woodland for the night, that our two leads are woken by a torchlight procession of 20-30 people, some naked, some in hooded smocks, some wearing wickerwork masks. This comes completely out of nowhere and although the downing of hoods identifies some minor characters we know, the significance or relevance or meaning of it all is glossed over. Incidentally, it’s never indicated whether any of the cult members is the MP in question.

And here comes the final problem with the story (non-ending aside). Jay and Gal start shooting the cult members. That’s two trained, professional killers, hidden among dark woodland in the middle of the night, armed with a shotgun and an automatic pistol, against a couple of dozen unarmed, brightly illuminated individuals. Yet not only can the cultists somehow see where the two hitmen are but the hitmen are unable to take out more than one or two cultists as the latter race unsteadily towards them across several hundred yards of rough terrain.

None of this is in any way believable or credible and none of it will be explained so don’t get your hopes up.

It’s worth for a moment considering the sine qua non of pagan-cult movies, The Wicker Man. One of the reasons for that film’s success is its careful structure. By the third act, Sgt. Howie (and hence the audience) has worked out what is going on. Then in that classic finale Howie (and hence the audience) discover that there is something even bigger going on. The Wicker Man actually answers more questions than it asks, because the actions of the characters are not only explained by Howie’s initial assumption but also by the reality. This is important: every single thing that anyone does or says in that film - however spooky, however random - can be seen, in retrospect to be part of the overall scheme to entrap Howie in accordance with the Summerisle beliefs.

The Wicker Man has a coherent narrative. And while not every film can be The Wicker Man, a coherent narrative is not too much to ask.

It’s worth also taking a look at the Kill List production notes. They won’t explain what is going on, but they offer some clue as to the problems with the film, which become more numerous and more significant the more one thinks about it (and that’s not good for a film which sets out to make its audience think abut it after seeing it!).

“Eight months after a disastrous job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier turned contract killer, Jay, is pressured by his partner, Gal, and wife Shel, into taking a new assignment.”

Is there any indication in the actual film that Kiev left Jay “physically and mentally scarred”? No, there isn’t. As previously mentioned, it’s just referred to in passing a couple of times. Mental scarring? None that I could notice. He argues with his wife. Who doesn’t do that? Physical scarring? He has spurious lower back pain, that’s all.

“the [second] victim acknowledges Jay and thanks him for his fate. The shock and confusion are too much for Jay who viciously attacks the man.”

Nope, that doesn’t come across at all. Jay is already viciously attacking the man and everything indicates that his anger is based on the victim’s involvement in orchestrated child abuse. If Jay was shocked at being addressed directly and continually thanked, all he has to do is slit the guy’s throat and the bloke will shut up.

“As they descend into the dark and disturbing world of the contract, Jay begins to unravel once again – his fear and paranoia sending him deep into the heart of darkness.”

Again, this just doesn’t come across in the movie. Is this press officer hyperbole or was this the actual intention of the film-makers? Either way, it doesn’t match what is on screen. Jay certainly goes over the top but there is nothing to indicate this is anything other than a previously expressed utter hatred of kiddy-diddlers. There’s no sense of fear and paranoia, the very opposite in fact. Neither Jay nor Gal seem particularly bothered at what they are getting into, treating the job at all times like just another set of contract killings. If the above is what Wheatley and Jump were aiming for, they have missed their mark considerably. And even if they had nailed this aspect of the story, that would not in any way excuse the cop-out at the end, when it really looks like they just ran out of ideas.

Here’s a quote from a short interview with Wheatley in the press notes: “I’ve always loved horror films, but there seem to be so few that are actually scary. I wanted to make something that would make the audience afraid and unnerved. I sat down with Amy Jump and we thought about the things that scared us the most and then built the script around that. A lot of the sequences are built around re-occurring nightmares I’ve had since childhood. I thought that if these things scared me then - they would scare a larger audience.”

Therein, I suspect, lies the problem. Wheatley and Jump have prioritised scaring people over actually telling a good story. They have written the script as a ghost train ride: a succession of freaky, creepy events that has no actual continuous narrative thread and which stops arbitrarily when the car re-emerges into the fresh air. It’s possible to give a ride a narrative, as many of the bigger, better theme parks have found with their fancy-dancy 3D wotsits, but Kill List exhibits no more storytelling structure than you will find at Billy Bates’ funfair.

This is Wheatley’s second film after a thriller called Down Terrace. That received extensive critical praise but so has Kill List so I can’t see myself wasting an hour and a half of my life watching another of this director’s films. More interesting, and I think relevant, is that Wheatley was both director and writer on The Wrong Door.

Regular readers may have come across mention of this BBC3 sketch show before, in my review of Just for the Record. That film - inarguably the worst British movie released last year - was written by Phillip Barron, who was also a writer on The Wrong Door. Maskell, Buring and Smiley all have The Wrong Door on their CV, as do numerous other cast and crew. Ah, it starts to fit together...

The biggest problem with The Wrong Door, the thing which made it stand out as particularly shit and unfunny even by the dirt-scrapingly low standards of BBC3 sketch shows in general, was that it was clearly made by people with absolutely no understanding of comedy. The sketches were written to some sort of formula - incongruous character in normal situation or normal character in incongruous situation - and pumped out without any thought for whether they were actually amusing. It was production line ‘comedy’ made by people with no concept of what they were doing, like poor Chinese factory workers hand-painting unlicensed rip-offs of western TV characters. Just a mechanical process without thought or care.

And it is my conclusion that Ben Wheatley has here approached horror the same way that he, Barron and others approached comedy on BBC3. He has knocked together something that looks like a horror film - it has strange events and sinister characters and brief, brutal violence and a hint of the mystical or supernatural - and then he has given it a lick of paint and watched it sail off down the conveyor belt to be packed into a box and stacked on a pallette and lifted into a container and shipped across the ocean and unloaded onto a lorry and shelved in a warehouse and sold by a wholesaler and taken in a white van to a shop where everything costs one pound.

It looks like a horror film but it’s not a horror film. Because the purpose of a horror film is not to scare people. The purpose of a horror film is to tell a scary story. And a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Wheatley has played a trick on people, making a stylish and compelling film which seems, for 98% of its running time, to be so good (and comes with such hype) that many viewers have developed a blind spot for the completely crap, run-out-of-ideas ending. It’s a common (and annoying) tendency among film/TV fans nowadays to praise poorly crafted stories and try to defend them by setting up straw men among critics and/or by creating extraordinarily convoluted explanations. Take a look at online discussion about most of the recent Doctor Who episodes and you’ll see what I mean.

I‘ve seen some ludicrous explanations for the shoddy plot of Kill List: Jay is the Antichrist; it’s all a dream; whatever... The truth is that it’s the Emperor’s new clothes. People just won’t believe - can’t believe - that the film doesn’t have a true and wonderful meaning.

Ah, the heck with it. That’s 3,000 words and I think I’ve made my point. Kill List is overhyped, over-rated and demonstrates that although the film’s writer-director may enjoy horror, he doesn’t understand it as a genre. The movie might work better if you lower your expectations. Don’t believe the hype.

The cast also includes Struan Rodger (who was the voice of the Face of Boe!) as the mysterious client, Esme Folley (The Horror of the Dolls) as a hotel receptionist, Sara Dee (Room 36, Zombie Office) as a newsreader, Alice Lowe (Liz Asher in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace!), Ben Crompton (Going Postal, Doomwatch remake) and Twins of Evil’s Damien Thomas as a GP who is also in on the conspiracy (for some reason and in some way).

Cinematographer Laurie Rose does camera-work on The X Factor. Editor Robin Hill is the same Robin Hill who worked on Project Assassin (on which Wheatley helped out), Are You Scared and Pumpkinhead 4. Composer Jim Williams scored Philip Ridley’s Heartless and the remake of Minder.

One final point is to consider whether the film has any of the social relevance that characterises the best British Horror Revival titles? Well, yes and no. The characters’ lives, if not the characters, are solidly middle class and aspirational. Jay and Shel have a jacuzzi in the back garden and own a holiday cottage in the country. But we see nothing of their greater lives or their social situation. Where the film scores best is in its depiction of Jay and Gal’s bland existence in motels and travel lodges as they move around the country on their mission. But when, an hour in, the film-makers decide they’re bored with making a thriller and want to make a horror film instead, all that goes out the window.

MJS rating: C-

review originally posted 6th October 2011