Bella in the Wych Elm

Director: Thomas Lee Rutter
Writer: Thomas Lee Rutter
Producer: Thomas Lee Rutter
Cast: Lee Mark Jones, Sarah L Page, 'Tatty' Dave Jones
Country: UK
Year of release: 2017
Reviewed from: online screener

I love Tom Rutter’s stuff. Right from his early teenage movies like Full Moon Massacre and Mr Blades Tom has always wanted to do something different. Not for young Master Rutter anything as simple as a generic slasher or zombie picture – there was always something offbeat, something unique and distinctive. Something new and unapologetic.

Since those days he has made a fair number of oddball shorts, from hallucinogenic clowns to stop-motion animation to Ancient Greek drama. Some of these have been assembled into flatpack anthologies such as Quadro Bizarro and The Forbidden Four.

The one thing you can be sure of when you watch a Tom Rutter film is that you can’t be sure of anything. You can confidently expect that it’s pointless to expect anything. The man’s range and nonconformist approach is his auteurial signature. Tom is a cinematic maverick, the original ‘unable to label’.

The latest movie from Tom’s outfit Carnie Films is a half-hour dramatised documentary about a very curious event which happened in the Black Country during the Second World War. It’s such a bizarre tale that I had to check to see if it’s true – and indeed it is. Which makes the film no less fascinating and enjoyable.

Here’s the basic gen: Some boys discover human remains hidden inside the hollow trunk of a tree (a wych elm, not a ‘witch elm’). The police investigate and find the skeleton of a woman who must have been crammed in there shortly after she was killed. Attempts to identify her came to nothing – and to this day no-one knows for sure who she was, although various theories have been put forward. Some of these relate to black magic, some relate to WW2 espionage. And just to make things even weirder, a recurring graffiti has been inscribed around the area over the years asking: “who put Bella in the wych elm?”

I won’t go into any more detail. If, like me, you’re not familiar with this story then Tom’s film is an excellent summary of events. If you are familiar with it then you’ll enjoy the way it is presented. If you want to find out more, there’s tons of stuff all over the web. It’s exactly the sort of local Forteana that people love to document.

Fascinating story aside, the strength of Tom’s gorgeous little film is in his use of the image and the sound. A cast represent the players in this tale but they’re all shot silently as the story is narrated, in a glorious accent, by someone named ‘Tatty’ Dave Jones. As the story – and one possible explanation – progresses, Tom Rutter turns the visuals into poetry, mixing and cutting and overlaying and using all manner of techniques so that what we have is something very, very much more than just dramatised, narrated scenes.

This is film as art, without sacrificing narrative. It is film as dreamstate, without sacrificing reality. Together, Jones’ voice and Rutter’s camera-work and editing create an unnerving atmosphere resonant of English folk tales much older than 1943. An alternative version exists, with Jones’ narration replaced by intertitles.

I really, really enjoyed watching Bella in the Wych Elm. It’s not a straightforward documentary on the subject, and if someone made one (mayhap they already have) no doubt we the viewers would learn more facts (or at least, more speculation and theory). Neither is this a straightforward dramatisation; the story could bear one but the lack of a definite, satisfying conclusion to the mystery would require some fictionalisation on the part of the screenwriter. This is something between and separate, something special. I heartily recommend it to you because it’s different and beautiful and intriguing and mind-expanding.

Which is not to say that if you like this you will also necessarily like Full Moon Massacre, which is cheesy as hell and has me in it. But you might.

The cast on screen includes Lee Mark Jones (Theatre of Fear, Spidarlings). Some of the cast are also in The Forbidden Four and/or Tom’s next movie, now in post, the hallucinogenic western Stranger, which I. Cannot. Wait. To. Watch.

MJS rating: A+

Altre

Director: Eugenio Villani
Writer: Raffaele Palazzo
Producer: Eugenio Villani
Cast: Agnese Nano, Antonietta Bello
Year of release: 2017
Country: Italy
Reviewed from: online screener

Bearing the parenthetical English title Others Like You, Altre is a 22-minute Italian short which is intriguing, thought-provoking and slightly disturbing. A thoroughly polished production, it looks great and is carried by a pair of very fine performances.

The opening two minutes will hook you, before we hit our main story. Ester (Antonietta Bello: La Buca, The Space Between) is a young woman who thinks she might be pregnant, despite a recent, unspecified operation. Greta (the hugely experienced Agnese Nano, who was in Cinema Paradiso) is a stern family doctor who says Ester’s perceived ‘symptoms’ of pregnancy are just a side effect of the surgery.

Disappointed, Greta adopts then loses a kitten. Searching for the missing feline, she discovers something dark and alarming, a secret that Greta has been keeping. More detail than that it would be unfair to reveal, except that the underlying theme is one of motherhood.

Now, I would be lying if I said that I fully understood the ending of this film. But that did not lessen my enjoyment. I like a movie that makes me ask questions, that offers unclear answers, that hints at ideas and suggests possibilities. This sort of open-ended, stylish enigma is something that Italian cinema has always done very well, and Eugenio Villani has done it very well here.

Villani has been making short horror films for about six years now, and you can find most of his earlier work on his Vimeo channel. This film’s script was written by Raffaele Palazzo, an actor who was in Villani’s earlier short Haselwurm.

Altre was kindly sent to me by Emiliano Ranzani whose own short film Langliena I reviewed a few years back. Emiliano is one of three credited associate producers on Altre, along with DP Carlodavid Mauri whose photography is a major part of the film's success.

The version I was sent was labelled as not quite complete but, apart from a couple of minor typos in the (otherwise very good indeed) English subs, it looked pretty finished to me. It was shot near Turin in November 2015.

The film isn’t yet out on the circuit (in fact it’s not even on the IMDB yet) but I expect that it will soon start popping up at festivals across the globe. Catch it if you can.

MJS rating: A-

The Rite of Rosemary

Director: Daniel Webb
Writer: Daniel Webb
Producers: Daniel Webb, Sara Jimenez Criado
Cast: Bill Thomas, Guy Barnes, Tanya Page
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Website: www.facebook.com/RiteOfRosemary
Reviewed from: Online screener

In the context of this impressive and enjoyable short, Rosemary means the herb, not the girl’s name. Dan Webb’s half-hour film is principally a two-hander between Bill Thomas as Thomas, an old guy who has moved from his large house into an adjacent lodge, and Guy Barnes as Jack, the son who returns after years away.

These two fine actors create a solid and believable relationship between the characters, a familial antagonism based on the secrets that each keeps from the other (and they both initially keep from us). Through their tense conversations – and a flashback featuring Jack Stevenson as young Jack – we find out something of their history. Initially Jack seems more of a threat, but Thomas is also a dangerous man. His reduced home has religious icons and he chides his son for taking the Lord’s name in vain. A painting of the Virgin Mary is essentially the Chekhov’s Gun of religious obsession, so we know that Thomas’ dogmatic faith will come into play later on.

Webb’s screenplay - based on a short story by Sarah Scanlan - is cleverly structured and flows well, so that the film seems to fly by. I’ve watched shorts of eight or nine minutes that seemed to drag compared to this one. To go into too much detail would be to risk spoilers; suffice to say there is a little violence, a little prosthetic gruesomeness and a good slice of obsessive wacko determination.

Bill Thomas is a veteran character actor of more than 40 years’ standing with TV credits that include Minder, Poirot, Boon, Lovejoy, Bergerac and many other classics shows. He was in The Tenth Kingdom, episodes of Merlin and Atlantis, and one episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Guy Barnes has a much shorter IMDB list but it includes Rock Band vs Vampires and an Aliens fan film, plus he sings the end credits song for this film. The cast also includes Tanya Page as a police officer and Charlotte Mount in a role that it would be a spoiler to identify.

Among the crew, one notable name with multiple British horror credits is costume designer Sallyann Short whose other gigs include Nightmare Box, FirstBorn, Let’s Be Evil, Shed of the Dead and The Devil Went Down to Islington.

Dan Webb has directed a few shorts in recent years and and has been editor on a bunch of other people’s movies. You won’t find it on the IMDB but way back in 2007, when he was but a slip of a lad, he shot a zero-budget feature called The Zombie Survival Guide.

The Rite of Rosemary is an accomplished work, with echoes of classic British folk horror. Webb uses his cast and his location well to tell an intriguing, disturbing story. If I'm being picky, some of the cinematography is a bit dark and the initial concept of a killer on the loose is not fully developed and consequently seems something of an unnecessary red herring. But neither of these factors impinged on my enjoyment and appreciation of the film.

Currently playing festivals, The Rite of Rosemary was shot in June 2014. It screened for cast and crew in September of that year and was briefly available online in summer 2015 as part of the Top Shorts Online Film Festival.

MJS rating: B+

Sally Kerosene

Director: Steve Barker
Writer: Steve Barker
Producers: John O’Hara, Kieran Parker
Cast: Amanda Loy Ellis, Olivia Shaw, Alex Zed Fodor
Country: UK
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: VHS

Sally Kerosene is one of a number of 20-year-old VHS tapes I recently came across and watched. The principal interest in this one being that it is an early work by Steve Barker, creator of the Outpost trilogy.

This near-future, film noir cyberthriller is about half an hour long and stars Amanda Loy-Ellis (subsequently in episodes of Cracker, Peak Practice etc) in the title role. Produced just three years or so after the web was invented, just as ‘the internet’ was becoming a thing, there is a charmingly retro feel to the film as Sally and her partner Max (Tim Poole, also in Stephen Gallagher-scripted mini-series Oktober) explore the net using VR goggles and gloves, which was kind of how we all hoped it might be.

Underneath Sally’s sprightly, cynical narration we’re told about how she and Max worked for crime boss Parry (Gregory Cox – later in X-Men: First Class!) but came a cropper when the online information they were stealing was also stolen by someone else. Sally is betrayed by Max and ends up being driven around by a couple of hitmen (Alex Zed Fodor and the always watchable Tom Wu – Ra.One, Mutant Chronicles – who around this time was doing bit parts in episodes of Cracker and Thief Takers).

Interspersed with this are scenes of Sally talking with her mother (Olivia Shaw) who would very much like her daughter to settle down, dress a bit more feminine and give some idea of what she does for a living. These scenes are in colour while the main story is in black and white, plus there is a fun spoof cop show in distorted hypercolour which Sally watches on her ‘interactive TV’. Nic Osborne was the DP and some fine work indeed is on show here. The whole thing is neatly snipped together thanks to the adroit editing of Hardeep Takhar and Andrew Ward (who later worked on Wallace and Gromit!).

Sally Kerosene is a crisp, smart 30-minute short of the sort that they don’t make them like any more. Made back in the days when there was almost no way for something like this to be seen (except at festivals), this is a calling card as much as anything. But it’s also a neat little film, a half-hour story told over half an hour, reliant on its script, acting, direction, photography and design rather than flashy gimmicks. That said, Sally is a fun character in a fun world and there’s no reason she couldn’t have returned in a feature.

This was Steve Barker’s graduation film, produced at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. It played some festivals and won a few awards, including Best Short at Houston, but its biggest exposure was on TV. Back when there were only four channels and the fourth one was actually good, there was a C4 series called Shooting Gallery which each week collected together two or three impressive short films. This slot actually ran for several years and a few episodes are available on All4 – but not the November 1995 episode ‘Images of Femininity’ which included Sally Kerosene.

It’s clear from comments that lie scattered on various forums and blogs that Steve Barker’s film made a strong impression on those who saw it (and understandably so). For example, I found a 2009 blog post by Chris Regan, director of Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw, in which he describes Sally Kerosene as, in his opinion, “the greatest short film ever made…Essentially, it's a British cyberpunk thriller that manages to be huge in scale and scope whilst never over-reaching it's meagre budget. And the title character is super cool.”

Sally Kerosene was Steve Barker’s entry into the film industry, helping him to get his foot in some doors and establish a name for himself. After a number of writing gigs including crime thriller Plato’s Breaking Point and true-life crime caper The Great Dome Robbery, Steve made his mark with 2008’s Outpost and its 2012 sequel (for the third film he handed the directorial reins to Sally/Outpost producer Kieran Parker). More recently he shot second unit for Paul Hyett on Howl and now his latest feature The Rezort (aka Generation Z) is lined up to screen at Frightfest next week (it has already played Edinburgh and had a limited theatrical release in Spain).

For some reason, Sally Kerosene has never appeared online. In fact there's almost no record of it outside of a BFI page. It's not on the IMDB and there isn't a single image anywhere on the net (apart from the VHS sleeve I've just scanned). I know a lot of people would like to see it so maybe once Steve has finished promoting The Rezort he could dig out a copy. Until then, my VHS tape and a few off-air copies held by Chris Regan and others are the only evidence of this corking sci-fi romp.

MJS rating: A

The Interrogation

Director: Ian David Diaz
Writer: Ian David Diaz
Producers: Ian David Diaz, Angela Banfill
Cast: Oliver Young, Richard Banks, Giles Ward
Country: UK
Year of release: 1996
Reviewed from: VHS tape

In 1999, a low-budget British thriller called The Killing Zone was released straight to VHS.  Directed by Ian David Diaz, it was produced by ‘The Seventh Twelfth Collective’, which was Diaz, Julian Boote and their pals, The same gang made ultra-obscure horror anthology Dead Room (only ever released in Greece and Thailand!), Anglo-Canadian horror Fallen Angels and two American thrillers, Bad Day and Darkly Dreaming Billy Ward.

It’s a lo-o-ong, long time since I’ve seen The Killing Room, but a little digging reveals that it is about a cool, calm underworld assassin named Matthew Palmer. Viewing the world from behind large, thick-framed glasses, Palmer’s name is a tip of the hat to Harry of that ilk and there are other Michael Caine references scattered throughout the three stories which together make up the 65-minute feature.
The first story concerns a couple of small-time crooks who are believed to have stolen some cocaine. Tied to chairs in a warehouse, they are interrogated by a sadistic gangster while Palmer stands implacably by. This story is a remake of a short film which Diaz shot in 1996 called The Interrogation.

The point of all this is that, 20 years on, I found The Interrogation among a pile of VHS tapes I was taking to the skip so decided to give it one last watch before it becomes landfill. It’s a smartly-directed, tightly written, generally well-acted little thriller. Much of the film is experienced crook Fenton (Richard Banks) and first-timer Finn (Oliver Young) tied up and questioned by ‘Mad Dog’ McCann (Giles Ward), a tall, pony-tailed, dinner-jacketed sadist who wants to get this all over and done with so he can make it to a dinner party on time.

Fenton takes his impending death in his stride. Finn is scared shitless. Both are adamant that the contacts they were due to meet were already dead – and without any cocaine – when they got there. McCann doesn’t believe them. While McCann knocks the two around and reveals how much homework he has done on them – he knows their motives, their backgrounds, their needs – Palmer just stands motionless in the background in trench coat and spoddy glasses. But he’s not window dressing, he will become very relevant towards the end of the story.

The reason why all this is of interest to me is the casting. Banks, Young and Ward all reprised their roles when the film was remade as part of The Killing Zone, which starred Padraig Casey as Palmer. But in this short film, Martin Palmer is played by none other than Kevin Howarth.

Kevin’s page on the Inaccurate Movie Database lists his first film as a thriller called Cash in Hand, then relationship drama The Big Swap, both listed as ‘1998’ along with Razor Blade Smile. In fact The Big Swap was his debut, filmed in 1996, followed by RBS then Cash in Hand (filmed as The Find). So this short apparently just predates The Big Swap. By the time that Diaz was shooting the feature version, Kevin already had several films on his CV and either didn’t need to do The Killing Zone or was simply too busy.

Subsequently of course Kevin has become a familiar face to fans of British horror with roles in The Last Horror Movie, Summer Scars, Cold and Dark, Gallowwalkers and The Seasoning House.

If I hadn’t know this was Kevin Howarth, I probably wouldn’t have recognised him. Maybe it’s just the hair, glasses and make-up but he looks somewhat rounder of face, less gaunt than he appears in later films. Once he speaks, however, the voice is unmistakable. Kevin has always been particularly good at portraying largely emotionless characters (much harder than it sounds) and Palmer is about as emotionless as they come. But he’s threatening, in the same way that a gun on a table is threatening.

Although most of the cast of this film disappeared after making this and Dead Room, a few names in the credits have, like young Mr Howarth, gone on to greater things. Co-producer and editor Piotr Szkopiak is now an experienced soap editor, with many episodes of EastEnders, Emmerdale and Corrie to his name. And composer Guy (son of Cliff) Michelmore is now – how cool is this? – the regular composer for animated Marvel projects, including series based on Thor, Hulk, Avengers, Dr Strange and Iron Man.

It’s not quite true to say that there’s no record of The Interrogation anywhere as it has a page on the BFI website, but that’s all. So now it has a review too. It’s a crisply directed, enjoyable short but, unless Ian David Diaz decides to post it online, your chances of ever seeing it are effectively nil. On the other hand, a DVD of The Killing Zone can be picked up easily and cheaply so the story’s there if you want to check it out. Just not with Kevin Howarth.

MJS rating: B+

Seventh Victim

Director: Andrew Kutzer
Writer: Russell Devlin
Producer: Russell Devlin
Cast: Darren Maxwell, Audrey Lamont, Geoff Tilley
Country: Australia
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: screener disc

I’m not normally a one for watching completely amateur (in a non-judgemental sense) movies - fanfilms in other words. They’re all very well and good for those who like them, but I have enough films to watch already, thank you very kindly. But I’ll make an exception for this 17-minute Aussie short, partly because it’s not a fanboy love poem to some big-budget cinematic franchise, but mostly because it has been written and produced by my old mate Russell.

‘The Seventh Victim’ is a famous short story by one of the great SF writers, Robert Sheckley, who sadly passed away last December. He tended to write SF that bordered on, or toppled over into, satire. (Sheckley’s influence on the works of Douglas Adams was something that Adams himself tended to gloss over.)

‘The Seventh Victim’ itself has quite a history. First published in Galaxy magazine in 1953, it was filmed in Italy in 1965 as The Tenth Victim, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress (the title possibly changed to avoid confusion with the 1943 Val Lewton picture). There was allegedly an Italian TV version in 1979 too and there was a radio dramatisation in 1957 as part of the series X Minus One. Sheckley himself novelised the 1965 film and wrote two lacklustre sequels to it in the late 1980s, by which time his copious and rather notorious consumption of certain substances had severely dulled his literary edge. A new version, also called The Tenth Victim, was was announced in 2001, allegedly to star Catherine Zeta Jones; Brendan Fraser was reported to be aboard the project two years later. Although this never came to anything, when I interviewed producer Ed Pressman last month on the set of Mutant Chronicles, The Tenth Victim was still very much part of his portfolio of in-development projects.

The actual plot is relatively simple; most of the science fictional aspects are in the setting. In the future, war and crime have been eradicated by the introduction of legalised murder, co-ordinated by the Emotional Catharsis Bureau (ECB) which pairs up killers and victims. About one third of the population take part, but very few killers make it into ‘the tens’ - kills in double figures. There are also gladiatorial combats and ‘death races’ to entertain the populace.

Stanton Frelaine (Darren Maxwell, director of Alone and The Psychology of Killing) is assigned his seventh victim and is shocked to discover that it’s a woman, Janet Patzig (Audrey Lamont). He can’t back down or refuse the assignment. Well, actually he can but that would mean that he would be reclassified as a victim. (We learn at this point, as an aside, that killing innocent bystanders, even accidentally, carries the death penalty).

Frelaine has a ‘spotter’, Ed Morrow (Geoff Tilley), who tracks down his victims for him and the two are soon parked in a car watching Patzig drink tea at a cafe table, seemingly oblivious to her status as a victim. Unable to carry out the hit for both practical and emotional reasons, Frelaine instead approaches Patzig and the two strike up a nascent romance. But when they go back to her flat, Stanton finds out that this ‘unsuccessful actress’ is not all she says.

It’s a fairly corny plot with a twist ending that can be spotted miles away but it was probably fresh and original in 1953. Russell Devlin’s script does a good job of sticking to Sheckley’s story, embellishing it with TV clips including a show which interviews successful killers and a TV debate in which one of the pundits is played by director Andrew Kutzer (who also provide an announcer’s voice). The script's weak point is towards the end, when Frelaine is momentarily left alone and indulges in an entirely unnecessary voice-over monologue in which he voices his contradictory feelings towards Patzig. We are told about the character’s predicament instead of being shown it. Actually, we are shown it as well, in the form of a montage, and the scene would work perfectly well with just images and music. (The film’s music is variously lifted from episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits plus Holst’s Planets Suite.)

Devlin worked hard on this short, racking up credits as not only writer and producer but also DP, props, sound, lighting gaffer and title sequence. He shot the film on video and it shows, and some of the interior scenes suffer from bad sound, as so often with this level of film-making. There is not really anything by way of special effects. The acting is surprisingly good, especially from Maxwell whose character undergoes a complete transformation during the film’s short running time.

Sheckley’s works were the basis of several other films and TV shows, notably Freejack and Condorman, and towards the end of his life he wrote spin-off novels based on Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 and Aliens as well as an unpublished (allegedly unpublishable) novelisation of the computer game Starship Titanic. Back at the start of his career he wrote episodes of Captain Video! Ideas from ’The Seventh Victim’ can be seen in the excellent Series 7: The Contenders but it can be argued that the subgenre extends all the way back to The Most Dangerous Game.

Russell sent me two discs, one with the director’s version, one with the producer’s version. There is relatively little difference, just a couple of bits of dialogue and some different takes in certain shots. I slightly preferred the former but that may just be because I watched it first. Also on the discs was a trailer, a stills gallery (which include innumerable posters, one of which announces that ‘nobody will be admitted after the first 17 minutes’), a spoof music video, various out-takes and a half-hour ‘scrapbook’ of rehearsals and behind-the-scenes footage in lieu of a proper Making Of. Also included is the (public domain) X Minus One radio version, the opening announcement of which forms the start of this film.

Seventh Victim is not an authorised adaptation. It was produced shortly before Sheckley died but he was not aware of it (mind you, he probably wasn’t aware of his slippers for most of his last decade). It has been screened at a couple of festivals/conventions to considerable acclaim and the team behind it are now working on larger and more ambitious projects.

MJS rating: B+
review originally posted 6th July 2006

Solid Geometry

Director: Denis Lawson
Writer: Denis Lawson
Producer: Gill Parry
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ruth Millar, Peter Capaldi
Year of release: 2002
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

This short story by Ian McEwan was very nearly filmed by the BBC in the mid-1970s but production was cancelled at the eleventh hour because (allegedly) a make-up artist objected to one of the props - a pickled penis in a jar. That may well be true, in fact, as the Beeb was certainly riddled with enough union politics at that time to make it easier and cheaper to scrap a whole production than replace a make-up artist. Now Denis 'Biggs Darklighter' Lawson, having already directed one short, has adapted the story as part of a Scottish short films project.

I haven’t read the original story, but McEwan is a ‘literary’ author, not an SF writer and this production certainly betrays the hallmarks of someone dipping their toe into the genre and then wasting a good idea by completely failing to understand the field’s potential. Basically, Scottish advertising exec Phil (Lawson’s nephew, the ubiquitous Ewan McGregor, who made this the same year that he made Attack of the Clones) receives several boxes containing 42 volumes of his great-grandfather’s diaries plus various esoteric items - including a (very large) pickled penis. His grandfather has endowed £25,000 to Phil if he will edit the diaries, which contain vast amounts of esoteric mathematical formulae and some very naive discussions of sex.

Increasingly obsessed with the diaries, Phil packs in his day-job, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend Maisie (Ruth Millar). In a nicely edited flashback we see that his great-grandfather (Peter Capaldi: Neverwhere, Wild Country) discovered an esoteric geometric shape which was in some way multidimensional - “the plane without a surface” - which unfortunately is represented here by an origami chrysanthemum. When perfectly created, this shape will disappear into another dimension, taking with it anyone who happens to curl themselves around the shape.

Phil and Maisie grow more distant, then seem to come back together again, but has Phil really forgiven his girlfriend for petulantly smashing the jar with the penis in, or does he have other plans?

Actually, this makes the thirty-minute film sound considerably better than it actually is. Not only is very little explained (that’s fair enough) but even less is explored. We don’t see or understand Phil’s growing obsession, nor is there even the slightest discussion of what such a discovery could mean, either in the flashback or the main story. Mostly this is an excuse for McGregor to get his kit off yet again and indulge in some lengthy romps with Millar which totally fail to add anything to either character or plot. It’s difficult to make a half-hour short drag unnecessarily, but Lawson has managed it here.

Without knowing the source material, it’s impossible to say how much of this lacklustre story is McEwan’s and how much is Lawson’s creation. But whoever is responsible, this is a real disappointment which simply doesn’t do anything or go anywhere. And why is there a pickled penis? Who knows? It’s entirely irrelevant to what little there is of the ‘plot.’

Some nice digital cinematography by Robin Vidgeon (Hellraiser) and editing by Kant Pan (Summer Scars, LD 50) don’t make up for the lack of story and shallowness of characterisation.

MJS rating: C-
Review originally posted 10th December 2005

Devil Town

Director: Nick Barrett
Writer: Nick Barrett
Producer: Stephen Callo
Cast: Johnny Vivash, Matthew Hebden, Elina Alminas
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: Online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/corporealfilms

This 16-minute short is a well-written, well-directed, well-acted slice of British horror and well worth your time. Theatre/radio actor Matthew Hebden is Patrick, a corporate arsehole with a smartphone and no time for anyone around him. Johnny Vivash (The Fallow Field, Kung Fu Flid) is Driscoll, a homeless man who follows Patrick into a smart coffee shop and engages him in conversation.

For most of the running time this is a two-hander, with director Nick Barrett doing a good job of keeping the conversation flowing and our attention paid. Patrick airily tries to dismiss Driscoll and even offers him money to go away. But Driscoll has a secret that he wants Patrick to know. About what’s really happening in the city. His is a They Live-style paranoid delusion which Patrick casually dismisses with a reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But of course, we have to wonder whether there is some truth behind Driscoll’s paranoia. Without giving anything away, I can reassure you that this does not lead to a simple “Ooh, he was right after all” twist. The story develops in its second half. And questions you will start wondering – like why has Driscoll singled out Patrick, and why has a posh coffee shop allowed a scruffy tramp to come in and sit down – will be answered.

The two leads both give absolutely terrific performances. Vivash brings real depth to a character who could have just been a drunken bum. And Hebden travels a hugely impressive emotional pathways from irritation to exasperation to tolerance to scorn to confusion to understanding to acceptance to realisation to, well, terror. Elina Alminas, who had bit-parts in Jupiter Ascending, Ex Machina and the live action Disney Cinderella, provides solid support as the waitress.

Fine cinematography by Marcos Avlonitis and Nick Barrett’s own atmospheric score combine to build a steadily increasing mood of uncertainty and doubt throughout the picture. Currently doing the festival rounds, this is a gripping, scary, clever film which I expect to read more about as word spreads.

MJS rating: A-

Nihan: The Last Page

Director: Tofiq Rzayev
Writers: Tofiq Rzayev, Mustafa Erdogan Ulgur
Producer: Tofiq Rzayev
Cast: Erhan Sancar, Alsen Buse Aydin, Sevgi Uchgayabashi
Year of release: 2016
Country: Turkey
Reviewed from: online screener

I’m a very busy man right now. Very busy. Too busy to write new reviews for this site at the moment. But… when a 14-minute Turkish short turns up unannounced in my inbox, what am I going to do?

Nihan: Son Sayfa is one of those short films where not much happens, making it almost impossible to review in any detail without giving away the entire plot. Except I’m not entirely sure what does happen.

This is the latest film from Tofiq Rzayev, whose previous work here was The Girl in the Woods. That was listed on the IMDB as an Azerbaijani film whereas Nihan: The Last Page is apparently Turkish. That was what confused me and is why I didn’t recognise Rzayev’s name at first.

So what is the film about? It’s mostly a discussion between a man and a woman about the man’s dead girlfriend, Nihan, and about the house they’re standing in. The man has nearly finished a book. I may be barking up completely the wrong tree but I think this is a ghost story of some sort. Although, truth be told, that’s basically a combination of ‘it’s about someone who has died’ and ‘I didn’t really understand that’. If it is a ghost story, then I iked it. If it's not a ghost story, then it's too obtuse for me and I don't know what's going on.

Apparently the film is influenced by the work of Tarkovsky and that’s certainly very visible. The first two minutes – out of only 14, remember – are just the man walking to his front door, turning and walking back again. The film has the languid pace and reflexive inaction of a Tarkovsky film, that’s for sure. This ain’t no Michael Bay picture.

It’s beautifully shot by Rzayev, who also edited, and the three actors (including Uchgayabashi, who is credited with the original story idea) are all very good. The subtitles are well done, which matters.

At just under a quarter of an hour, Nihan: The Last Page doesn’t outstay its welcome. It is thought-provoking and enigmatic in its paucity of narrative and I quite liked that.

MJS rating: B+

The Stay

Director: Frazer Lee
Writer: Frazer Lee
Producers: Frazer Lee, Alan Stewart
Cast: Daniela Finley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: thestaymovie.wordpress.com

The Stay is a slickly crafted nine minutes of spookiness with a neat-o central performance and adroit direction which frustratingly stumbles in the narrative department. It’s good, it’s very good, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Nevertheless, as the first film directed by Frazer Lee since 2002, I can’t help but recommend it to you.

Either side of the millennium, Frazer directed a pair of critically acclaimed shorts, both starring Sir Douglas Bradley: On Edge (adapted from a Christopher Fowler story) and Red Lines. In the 13 years since then he wrote Jason Fragale’s 2010 short Simone and was one of the many hands who made heavy work of the Panic Button script. The IMDB throws up a few other curious credits I didn’t know about: production assistant on legendary, unfinished, Alex Chandon scripted oddity Siamese Cop, script editor on a 2009 Norwegian horror short called Palazzo Massacre and best boy on Urban Ghost Story(!). Mostly he has been writing novels: six to date including The Lamplighters (which was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award) and a novelisation of Panic Button.

Now comes The Stay. Daniela Finley (who was in a Dizzee Rascal video) gives a bravura, solo, dialogue-free performance as a young woman who arrives at a holiday cottage for some me-time. A bit of supper, a glass or two of wine, snuggle under the blankets – lovely.

What sets the spookiness in motion is the discovery of a shattered, circular, black mirror. Initially spotted in the bin, this item recurs in both broken and unbroken forms throughout the film. Unlike some mirror films, there is actually something spooky to be seen in the mirror, and Frazer’s direction of these creepy moments ably demonstrates his mastery of the genre.

Individually, the various moments work brilliantly but there doesn’t seem to be anything tying them together. The ending, while effective, doesn’t relate in any noticeable way to what has gone before (except maybe the loose concept of a mirror image, I guess). The plot is basically ‘woman arrives at cottage, weird things happen, the end’. Even in a film running just eight and a half minutes, there should be more than that. The absolute minimum, smallest thing that can constitute a narrative is two connected events. A cause and an effect. Something has to happen because something else happened. But as with some other shorts I’ve reviewed here recently, there’s really just one thing here: a random sequence of weird events in a cottage. At least there is a thing, the brief story progressing smoothly and satisfyingly, unlike some of the disconnected, unsatisfying stories I’ve recently watched.

But within that story, each of the spooky, mirror-related events seems disconnected from the others, like variations on a theme rather than a progression towards a crescendo. This is less of a problem in under nine minutes than in a feature, but it’s still a little disappointing to reach the end credits without a revelation of How It All Fits Together and What It All Means.

Frazer has roped in his old buddy Alan Stewart, who DPed Red Lines and On Edge, as cinematographer and to also share producer duties. Stewart also lit Lab Rats and the Quatermass Experiment remake and has pulled second unit duty on a bunch of notable stuff including The Woman in Black, Spectre, Pan, Inkheart and both Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. Lee David, Tom Tatchell and Stuart Pitcher provided the smoothly integrated and subtle visual effects.

Shot over three days in February 2013 in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, The Stay received its world premiere at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in May 2015 after a lengthy period of post-production. In December of that year, Frazer released the film on DVD with a solid hour of extras (plus a bare-bones VOD release).

The Stay is one of those films I feel bad about for not being more effusive over. It’s extremely well-made and undeniably atmospheric. If there had just been a distinct narrative arc, it could have been even better. Still, it’s great to see Frazer Lee back in the director’s chair and I hope we won’t have to wait 13 years for his next movie.

MJS rating: B+

The Railway Carriage

Director: Ross Adgar
Writer: Ross Adgar
Producer: Ross Adgar
Cast: Dean Sills, David Chambers, Geri Preston
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/The-Railway-Carriage-1457082814587031

I seem to be getting sent a lot of non-narrative films recently. Or at least films which are so obtuse in their storytelling as to be effectively non-narrative. I don’t mind. I’m not some reactionary old duffer who believes that a film must have a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order), although I can’t deny I do like a good hero’s journey. Even if it’s just the old climbs tree, falls out of tree, is he alive (comedy) or dead (drama) hero’s journey.

The Railway Carriage is ten minutes of imagery which is probably meant to be allegorical or metaphorical or symbolic but comes across more as hallucinatory. We have an old church, containing a few candles and a metronome. And we have an old-fashioned railway carriage (empty, stationary) containing a framed photo and an old-fashioned portable radio. The photo is of the two teenage children of our protagonist, John. The radio carries a news story about a father (presumably John) abducting his children from his ex-wife and killing them.

In some way, this railway carriage and this church are the same place, in that when John steps out of the church we cut to him in the carriage and vice versa, although naturally our initial assumption is that there is an edit there and he has travelled between the two. Like I say: hallucinatory. The two children appear intermittently in the carriage, dressed as they are in the photo.

Eventually John wakes up somewhere else, although I’m not sure whether that’s meant to be a return to reality or more of the dream. If the former, it raises the unanswered question of why he has a metronome on his bedside table, which is an odd thing to have. (As indeed is a very collectable vintage radio.)

The Railway Carriage is competently and sincerely made, but I’m afraid that it left me cold. Does it just represent the anguish in the head of a man who has lost – either literally or metaphorically – his children? That’s the only interpretation I can come up with, but that’s a bit clichéd and obvious. There must be more to it than that, surely. And: apart from being a nice location, what is the actual significance of the railway carriage? Or indeed of the metronome?

I’m not looking for pat, simplistic answers, but that’s probably because The Railway Carriage didn’t really raise any questions. A film like this should make the viewer think, but it only makes me think about this film - What does it mean? – instead of making me think about the subject of the film, whatever that might be.

The Railway Carriage bills itself as a horror film but that doesn’t come across. Dean Sills (Blaze of Gory, Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, Xmas Creep Tales) delivers a solid, largely wordless performance as John but he seems only confused, not frightened. The film is dreamlike but not nightmare-ish and I really couldn’t say in what sense it could be considered ‘horror’ except in the very basic sense that (a) our protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on, and (b) there are references to two kids being killed.

Writer-director-producer Ross Adgar set out to tell his story in an ‘unconventional way’ which is very laudable, but conventions exist for good reason. Conventions aren’t clichés, they’re tools that allow a storyteller to tell a story without getting bogged down in details and allow audiences to concentrate on what's important. If you leave out the conventions you’re working without your best tools.

Rarely am I completely ambivalent towards a film, but I’ve watched The Railway Carriage twice now and it has just washed over me. I felt no involvement, I took no interest, I found no empathy. Sorry. Nevertheless, it has been picked up for a couple of festivals and Ross Adgar shows definite promise. But for his next film he needs to explore how cinematic conventions can help and support him, if used skilfully, rather than aiming for something abstract which renders itself inaccessible and hence unsatisfying.

MJS rating: B-

Do Not Disturb

Director: Jon James Smith
Writer: Jon James Smith
Producer: Alexander Glenn Prather
Cast: Ron McMahon, Kathryn Leeman, Richard Shelton
Country: UK/USA
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.jonjamessmith.com

Well, here’s an absolutely terrific little short that ticks all the right boxes. Do Not Disturb is a skilfully crafted thriller with a twisty-turny plot and really the only criticism I can lay against it is that, once it has subverted our expectations a couple of times we no longer believe anything it tells us. Which unfortunately makes the final twist completely predictable. But this is so well made, in every respect, that this really, really doesn’t matter.

Running just 14 minutes, this is tautly plotted; not a word of dialogue, not a shot or edit is wasted in telling us an actually quite complex story. I’ve seen films that took 30 or 40 minutes to tell a tale simpler than this.

George (Ron McMahon: The Witch Chronicles) is a married businessman with a penchant for motels and hookers. When his latest rental proves more interested in violence than passion, he’s forced to tell his wife Margaret (Kathryn Leeman) to empty all the bank accounts as ransom for his release. And more than that it would be remiss of me to tell you. I came to this film completely blind; I recommend you do so too. Only to note that the other main role, Detective Forbes, is played by Richard Shelton who used to be Dr Forsythe in Emmerdale and is now a Hollywood actor and Frank Sinatra impersonator!

It’s Jon James Smith’s attention to detail that really impresses. After a night tied up, the first thing that George’s kidnapper does is pour a little water into his mouth. A scene on some baseball bleachers has one other person sitting there: no-one would have sent the wrong signals, as would multiple background extras. Just that one guy, in that one place on the screen: that’s what good mis-en-scene is all about.

The camera-work by Leonardo Agrizzi Netto (Harry and the Succubus, Making a Monster) is bang-on, in both the lighting and the crucial framings which are as much a part of the story-telling as the actors and the script. And a big thumbs-up for sound mixer/recordist Elizabeth Avalos whose work is a huge part of the film’s success. It’s clear that writer-director-editor Smith and producer Alexander Glenn Prather have pulled together a talented cast and crew who have synched perfectly.

Smith is a British director/cinematographer whose DP credits include Anthony Powell’s short Slashimi and Jason Croot’s original Le Fear (but not its sequel). His previous shorts as director were Spira (horror) and Linen White (sci-fi). For Do Not Disturb he travelled out to LA with a mixture of British and American crew, and he considers this a UK/US co-production – which is good enough for me.

Do Not Disturb has won a bunch of awards including some at the 2015 British Horror Film Festival, and is scheduled to screen at the 2016 Horror-on-Sea. Which is slightly odd because, apart from the opening scene with the prostitute (who owns a Stanley knife) there’s nothing approaching horror here and I certainly wouldn’t class this as even a borderline horror film.

Nevertheless, hugely recommended.

MJS rating: A

The Devil of Kreuzberg

Director: Alexander Bakshaev
Writer: Pippo Schund
Producers: Alexander Bakshaev, Mathis Vogel
Cast: Ross Indecency, Sandra Bourdonnec, Tomas Veit
Country: Germany
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/devilofkreuzberg

The Devil of Kreuzberg is what we used to call – and I guess still do – Eurosleaze. It’s very sleazy, and very European. It channels the spirits of Jean Rollin (whom I once had the pleasure of interviewing on stage) and Jesus Franco (who I never met). Scenes filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of Hamburg among lapdancing clubs, sex shops and gay porn cinemas almost look like they have been edited from something shot in the 1970s. These things, these places, they don’t still exist, do they?

Apparently they do.

Although it starts off rather confusingly, introducing us to several different characters, only some of whom will become relevant, after a bit this sub-feature length film settles down to a relatively straightforward plot.

Jakob (Ross Indecency) is a thin, rather fey German writer with a mixed-race girlfriend, Linda (French actress/singer Sandra Bourdonnec). But he’s getting tired of her so asks his dour, East Mediterranean best friend Kurt (Tomas Veit) to kill her, which isn’t unreasonable as Kurt is a professional hitman. But Linda has been convening with the spirit of her late grandmother (a graveyard voice which may be genuinely supernatural or may be in Linda’s head) who tells Linda that she is destined to kill her lover, just as previous generations of her family have done. Her surname name is revealed to be Karnstein but whether that’s meant to imply she's a vampire or whether it’s just a Hammer homage is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The finer details of the plot are more obtuse, but enjoyably so rather than frustratingly so. There’s a paucity of dialogue as Bakshaev tells us the story through actions and looks as much as spoken words (which are mostly German, occasionally English or French; subtitles are good and clear). Halfway through, Kurt and Jakob get up and dance to some 1980s-style synth-pop. It’s not just an interlude: it tells us about these characters, their attitudes and their relationship. The soundtrack mixes these sub-Kraftwerk keyboard noodlings with freeform jazz and spoken word samples. Like the film as a whole, it’s arty and artistic without being artsy or arse.

It takes a while to get used to the somewhat mannered acting but part of that is just the studied pretension of some of the characters. Veit is particularly good as hit-man Kurt, never betraying a hint of emotion through his face or voice yet still letting us see inside the character.

The IMDB reckons this runs 65 minutes. The online screener I was sent ran 42 and, while it didn’t have any opening titles, I doubt if they were 23 minutes long. Whether this would be better, less good or just different at that longer running time I couldn’t say. I certainly wouldn’t want to watch it for two hours, but it could probably work at just over an hour.

Russia-born Alexander Bakshaev has for several years now been an associate of Jason Impey, on both sides of the camera. He was in Jason’s feature Tortured and a number of shorts which have been subsequently combined into lash-up features. Impey starred as ‘obsessed film-maker’ George Eastman (hoho!) in Bakshaev’s 2008 sub-feature The Trip and was also in his 2009 short Bittersweet.

The Devil of Kreuzberg was mostly shot in Berlin (Hamburg sex shops notwithstanding) over 16 days for about 3,000 euros. Thomas Lee Rutter (director of Full Moon Massacre, Mr Blades etc, who receives a ‘thank you’ in the credits) gave the film a CD-R release in October 2015, including a Making Of and Bakshaev’s 2012 short Zartlichkeit.

Gritty, grimy, provocative and thought-provoking, The Devil of Kreuzberg is a toe dipped into the seedy underbelly of a world you wouldn’t want to visit except through a screen. In that sense, it’s pure, classic Eurosleaze. Bravo!

MJS rating: B+

The Brethren

Director: Shane Wheeler
Writers: Shane Wheeler
Producers: Shane Wheeler, Liam Baines
Cast: Daniel Lovett, Ian Clegg, Scarlett Jasmin Groom
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: Vimeo
Website: www.facebook.com/thebrethrenfilm

The Brethren looks gorgeous, is finely crafted, has an original and suitably disturbing plot, and I haven’t the slightest clue what it’s actually about.

It’s always difficult to synopsise a ten-minute film without just describing the whole thing. But here’s the basics. A young man wakes up, goes into his garden, digs a hole in his lawn and removes an old wooden box. Inside are six sealed glasses of liquid. He drinks each one in turn, and something weird happens after each glass.

I could tell you specifically what happens, in the sense of describing what is on screen, but what would be the point of that? The film’s on Vimeo. It’s ten minutes long. Watch the damn thing yourself. Then tell me what you think is going on.

I have no doubt that director Shane Wheeler knows what’s going on, but frustratingly that’s not communicated by the film itself. Which wouldn’t be so bad if this was a cheapo piece of silliness but clearly great time and trouble has gone into this. And the results look great. But every film brings together three elements: the artistic, the technical and the narrative. Full marks on the first two; see me on the last.

Let me give you an example. The film’s synopsis says “A young man awakens from a vivid dream, compelled to go outside and dig in his garden.” But what we see is: a young man wakes up in the middle of the night, goes out to his garden and digs a hole. We have no way to know that he is doing this because of some compulsion, and certainly not that he has had a vivid dream. He could be digging up his lawn at half past one in the morning for a number of reasons. Maybe he was instructed to do so by someone last night. Perhaps he meant to dig up the lawn yesterday evening, forgot to do so and has woken up thinking “Oh shit, I’ve left that wooden box under the back lawn.”

Perhaps this was deliberate: he knows there’s something down there and wants to dig it up while none of the neighbours are watching. Perhaps he’s fulfilling a prophecy. Perhaps he’s just a nocturnal gardener. We don’t know any of this. We just know he digs up a box. We don’t know if he buried it, if he knew it was there, if he has been searching for it for years or just dug randomly on a whim.

The Brethren is a succession of impressive images but the narrative is too obtuse to work. I’m a great believer in ‘show don’t tell’ but what you show has to do the telling instead. This isn’t a film like Devil Makes Work which was basically a film poem, a pop video without the music. I’m sure there is a narrative in these 12 minutes and I’m frustrated at not being able to access it. Why is the box under the lawn? Why does he drink the liquids? Who actually are 'the Brethren'? Damdifino.

For most of the cast and crew, this is their first IMDB credit and it’s a good showcase. Adam-Thomas Bane, a freelance body-painter and stilt-walker, provided the make-up on Scarlett Jasmin Groom whose ‘conjured spirit’ is seen briefly but features prominently in the publicity.

I feel bad criticising a film made with such care and passion, but a film rests on its script, and the script here is too full of ellipses to actually tell a story. Still, I very much look forward to seeing what Shane Wheeler does next.

MJS rating: B

The Stomach

Director: Ben Steiner
Writer: Ben Steiner
Producer: Dan Dixon
Cast: Ben Bishop, Simon Meacock, Peter Marinker
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screening (Fantastiq) and online screener
Wesite: www.fumefilms.com

It has taken me a ridiculously long time to review this 15-minute masterpiece of British horror. But I wanted to do it justice.

The Stomach premiered at Fantastic Fest in the States in September 2014. I saw it at Fantastiq in Derby the following May. In August 2015, Ben Steiner was kind enough to send me a screener, at about the same time that the film appeared on iTunes. All this time it has been touring the genre and mainstream festivals of the world, playing well over a hundred gigs, amassing more than 20 awards and impressing all who see it. Meanwhile, a major project at the University kept me working evenings and weekends (and exhausted when I wasn’t working) so that it is only in October 2015, five months after first seeing the film, that I have been able to find the time to watch and review it.

Please understand, folks, that a quarter-hour film doesn’t take a quarter of an hour to review. And frankly, in this house, just finding a quarter of an hour of uninterrupted viewing time can be a bleeding miracle. But I’m not here to write about my home life. I’m here to write about The Stomach. To explain why it’s one of the very best British horror shorts of recent years, why it has been such a popular choice at festivals, and why you should take the trouble to watch it.

The Stomach is a beautifully original idea. Not for Steiner and his Fume Films partner Dan Dixon the standard tropes of zombies, ghosts, psychos, vampires and so on. This is a tale of mediumship gone awry, of communing with the dead. So it’s a supernatural tale, but it also ticks the ‘body horror’ box because of the unique way that brothers Tom (Ben Bishop: Whitechapel and the 1999 Doomwatch TV  movie) and Frank (Simon Meacock: Slash Hive, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, lots of TV including Poldark, Outlander and MI High) do that communing – via Frank’s torso. A customer provides an item relating to the deceased. Lying in bed, stomach bare, Frank takes this, and then puts a wide tube into his mouth. His belly distends. The customer can then commune with the deceased by speaking into the tube in Frank’s mouth while listening to his stomach through a stethoscope.

It’s a disturbing, even repugnant vision, made all the more unpleasant by the shabby bedroom in which Frank lies, straggly of beard and pale of face. You have to wonder, first, what sort of sick mind comes up with a cinematic idea like this, and second, how Frank and Tom discovered this ability…

Tom, dressed like a seedy working men’s club compere in a velvet jacket that adds nothing but irony to their situation, is the organiser and the money man. The brothers are close; there’s no suggestion that Tom is ripping off or using his brother, though clearly he is the dominant partner while passive, prostrate Frank is the one suffering through these gastric séances. There is also no suggestion that anything is fake. This is genuine communion with the dead.

Most of their customers are rather sad old ladies like Mrs Bird (Jennie Lathan: Gangsters, Guns and Zombies, The House of Silence) who visits regularly to chat with her late friend. The problem arises with the arrival of Mr Pope (Peter Marinker: The Martian Chronicles, Nightbreed, Judge Dredd, Event Horizon and numerous voice dubs including Ben in Star Fleet!), an unsavoury, criminal character looking to contact his younger brother. There is more to Pope than meets the eye.

To say more would be to spoil a film which is at once startling, revolting, fascinating and thought-provoking. Steiner’s script is a fine, self-contained slice of horror which tells us everything we need to know about these people and this world. He has then directed the story with an eye for detail - the fish tank, the coughed-up blood – that makes this more reality than metaphor. What I really, really loved about this film – even above the script, the direction, the superb sound design (by the enigmatically named ‘Z No’)  and the terrific acting by all concerned – is Nicola Wake’s production design.

The combination of Wake’s design with Dominic Bartels’ cracking cinematography creates a seedy, working class, very British world. It’s not the stereotypical world of geezer gangsters (despite Pope’s dodgy motivation) but instead it’s the world of kitchen sink drama, more A Taste of Honey than A Day of Violence. It’s a prosaic (under)world of old bed-linen and peeling paint. This is exactly the sort of horror-meets-social-realism film which exemplifies the strengths and distinctiveness of the British Horror Revival.

Britishness is also key. It’s hard to think of any other country where this would work in the same way. Maybe Germany or Scandinavia, but that would be a different film. This is probably unintentional but it occurred to me that, in combining spiritualism with crime, The Stomach harks back to one of the forgotten bedrocks of British horror cinema. That’s At the Villa Rose, the AEW Mason novel which was written in 1910 and filmed (with extraordinary regularity) in 1920, 1930 and 1940. What goes around comes around.

The fine cast is rounded out by Kiki Kendrick (Grave Tales) and Neil Newbon, whose pop culture immortality is guaranteed by having played the waiter in the original Goodness Gracious Me ‘Going Out for an English’ sketch! Editing is jointly credited to producer Dixon and Jacob Proctor (The Borderlands, The Scar Crow, um, MasterChef). Jon Revell (Belly of the Bulldog, The Forgotten, Scintilla) designed the costumes; Dicken Marshall composed the effective music; Jodi Cope designed the make-up. The prosthetic effects on which the whole story rests were supplied by Dan Martin (Sightseers, In Fear, The Sleeping Room, The Devil’s Chair, Salvage, F, Isle of Dogs, Little Deaths, The Devil’s Business, Nina Forever, Ibiza Undead…) and damn good they are too.

Steiner and Dixon’s previous short was The Flea, an eight-minute vampire film which played Frightfest in 2008 and is now available on YouTube. Before that. Steiner made one segment of 2008 half-hour mini-anthology HorrorShow. Both of those also starred Meakin. Dixon’s day-job in visual effects has garnered him credits on a number of blockbusters including Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Godzilla and Avengers: Age of Ultron. The pair are now developing a slate of four Fume Films features including an expanded version of The Stomach.

Wasting neither a second of screen-time nor a pixel of screen, The Stomach is a little slice of horror perfection. A film you must see and, having seen, will not easily forget and will want to see again.

MJS rating: A+

The Girl in the Woods

Director: Tofiq Rzayev
Writers: Tofiq Rzayev, Erdogan Ulgur
Producer: Tofiq Rzayev
Cast: Deniz Aslim, Gizem Aybike Sahin, Cevahir Gasgir
Year of release: 2015
Country: Azerbaijan. No, seriously: Azerbaijan
Reviewed from: online screener

I have films on here from nearly 20 different countries. I have ghost stories from Thailand and giallo from Ireland, cartoons from Russia and superheroes from India, martial arts from Chile and vampires from France. But this is something new. The Girl in the Woods is the first film I have ever been sent from Azerbaijan.

Running about 24 minutes, this is a simply told, well-made, gripping mystery with a satisfyingly horrific conclusion. Gizem Aybike Sahin plays Ceren, whose fiancé Ali has disappeared. He left no message, no indication of where he might have gone or why. The only clue is a text message to their friend Mert (Deniz Aslim) saying simply ‘Find me.’ With another friend Cem (Mehmet Samer), they set to searching for Ali.

Mert takes a look in the woods, which Ali was last seen heading towards. There he meets a mysterious, seductive girl (Cevahir Gasgir) who hasn’t seen Ali but is interested in seeing more of Mert. Does she know more than she’s telling?

Crisply directed by Tofiq Rzayev, the script was originally written by Rzayev in English then adapted and translated by Rzajev and Erdogan Ulgur. There is a good mixture of location shots, both rural and urban, giving a distinctive regional feel to the picture, plus tight dialogue scenes emphasising the solid acting of the cast.

Rzayev has been making short films since 2010, with the IMDB listing a dozen or so titles. I can’t claim to be an expert on Azerbaijani cinema but apparently film-making started in the country as far back as 1898. Obviously during the years that Azerbaijan was part of the USSR domestic movie production was generally limited to serious dramas and historicals, but since independence in the 1990s the local cinema industry has evidently been expanding.

The Girl in the Woods is the first evidence I have seen (though admittedly I haven’t been looking) of an independent cinema movement in this particular nation.

With subtitles that are mostly accurate, The Girl in the Woods is easily accessible to international audiences and would be a fine addition to festivals looking for something unusual to show.

MJS rating: B+

Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats

Director: Nathan Smith
Writers: Nathan Smith, Bryan Allen
Producer: Clifford A Miles
Cast: Ken Sansom, R Chase O’Neil, C Brock Holman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Porchlight)

Who doesn’t love a good monsterfest, a film that gathers together a whole bunch of classic monsters in one story? This specific subgenre can trace its origins back to the final three films in Universal’s Frankenstein series in the 1940s. House of Frankenstein went one better on the previous Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man by tossing Dracula into the mix. This formula was repeated in House of Dracula then spoofed in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein which also threw a Vincent Price-voiced Invisible Man in as a final gag.

The other two well-known monsterfests are The Munsters (in all its many variants) and Fred Dekker’s wonderful The Monster Squad. Van Helsing falls into the category too as does a 1990s TV mini-series which appropriated the House of Frankenstein title. And then there are the animated monsterfests. Series such as The Drak Pack, The Groovy Ghoulies and Gravedale High took advantage of the freedom which animation offered, where a monster character costs no more than a human one. But probably the two best animated monsterfests are the brace that were produced by the famous Rankin-Bass Studio: the stop-motion Mad Monster Party? (with its completely inexplicable titular question mark) and the lesser-known, cel-animated Mad Mad Mad Monsters.

Well, now here’s another one. Produced in 2007 and released onto DVD in time for Halloween 2008, this is a half-hour stop-motion film so packed with classic monsters that it’s difficult to find a subgenre that it doesn’t tread on. It’s not a great film in terms of script or characters but TF seems to like it and he’s the target audience much more than an old monster-geek like me.

Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats concerns two children out trick-or-treating. Makean looks to be about seven or eight and is wearing a quite good vampire costume, which just about shoves this into the vampire subgenre because, oddly, that’s the one type of classic monster which is not included. Makean’s name is pronounced ‘Mac -KEE -an’. His sister Katie is about twelve and is dressed as a cat, complete with ears, tail, furry cuffs and ankles and a wide, 1960s-style belt that puts one unavoidably in mind of the very different (or maybe not so different) cat-suits worn by Emma Peel.

After Makean is scared by a mouse and a scarecrow in a cornfield (the mouse is wearing a puritan outfit for some reason), he and his sister walk into the village where they meet an elderly fellow called the Candleman. He has a wide-brimmed hat covered with lit candles and also a pet fish called Brunswick which floats in the air and is towing a small cart along the ground.

Here’s what you need to understand this film. Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats is the second in a projected series of seven such tales under the banner Evergreen Holiday Classics. The first film in the series was called The Light Before Christmas and there is a trailer for both that one and this on the Spooky Bats DVD. This is why we are neither introduced to Katie and Makean (which is no real narrative problem as they’re generic kids) nor to the Candleman himself. This latter situation is a problem because the Candleman is entirely an invented character with no basis in legend or fiction so we have no references. Katie and Makean evidently know him but how, and who the jiminy is he? And, er, why does he have a pet fish that can fly? Presumably there is some background in The Light Before Christmas but the film-makers have forgotten that people who buy this disc won’t necessarily have seen the previous one (which is still available in the UK but seems to have been deleted in the States).

Also important to know is that the characters and settings are based on the work of James C Christensen, a Hugo- and Chesley-winning artist whose speciality is heavily-clothed figures in whimsical settings, often with a spiritual or religious element. And whose trademark is a fish, swimming through the air. I didn’t know any of this when I watched the DVD.

The Candleman asks the two children if they will deliver some invitations to his Halloween party, to which they agree, hoping to collect some candy along the way. And this is where all the monsters come in...

Among the recipients of invitations are a mummy (inside an Egyptian tomb), a werewolf, a plant-creature who is to all intents and purposes Swamp Thing, a zombie (we only see the cadaverous arm reaching from the grave), a family of ghosts, some giant carnivorous plants, the Grim Reaper, an old witch and finally ‘Frank’ - and we can all guess who that turns out to be. Along the way, the sceptical Katie who doesn’t believe in ‘spooks’ (the M-word is never used) comes round to her more paranoid brother’s way of thinking. The quest ends at the home of the ‘fire-headed pumpkin demon’ (or somesuch) with a selection of the ghouls advancing towards the two terrified children.

But... it turns out that this is actually the Candleman’s home and the ghouls are of course his friends, come for the party. So is the message that we should conquer our fears or that there is nothing to be afraid of? Is the message that spooks and monsters are real but friendly or that they’re not real? This isn’t the first animated special I’ve come across where, despite a general moral tone, the actual moral itself is rather fuzzy.

There are some very nice touches. In handing the invitation to the mummy, Katie accidentally rips his arm off and he picks this up to wave bye-bye (or rather “Bmm-bmm” - there’s a lovely gag at the end where Frankenstein complains to the werewolf that he can’t understand a word that the mummy says). Also, the scene with the ghosts has Katie repeatedly trying to hand over the invitation only for it to fall through the recipient's non-corporeal hand.

Where the film falls down is in its own uncertainty about whether it’s set in the real world or some magical fairyland. Katie and Makean’s costumes suggest that they are contemporary characters, especially as they collect their treats in plastic, pumpkin-shaped baskets. Their speech is contemporary too, as is the older sibling’s dismissive attitude towards her brother’s childish belief in the supernatural which is finally dispelled when the witch lends them two flying broomsticks to carry them to ‘Frank’s place’.

But the village that we see is straight out of the Brothers Grimm via Hollywood, a mittel-European-influenced, 18th century hamlet. There is even a brief glimpse of the lower half of a giant, also out trick-or-treating. When the Candleman (who is very obviously a magical character, even before we notice his fish) sends the kids off on their errand, he summons an old-fashioned carriage without horses or driver, of which Katie blithely comments, “This must be one of those new steam-powered carriages.”

You see the problem? The film’s core is the acceptance by modern, cynical Katie that magic and the supernatural are real, yet she and her brother evidently already live in a quasi-historical world riven with magic and fantasy. This robs the film of its essential dichotomy. Not that five-year-olds like TF are going to mind.

The animation is very good although there is something about the alternate heads of the Candleman figure which means that his mouth movements don’t exactly match his words. I don’t know if this is a problem with the bar-sheeting (see, I know my technical animation terms!) or whether some of the dialogue was changed after the animation had been done. Nevertheless, the designs, the sets, the costumes are all impressive and where digital effects are used they are effectively integrated into the story, such as creating the mist-covered swamp.

Another five Evergreen Holiday Classics are planned: A Cozy Valentine, Shamrocks Leprechauns and Shillelaghs (for St Patrick’s Day), Independence - What a Day! and films based around Easter and Thanksgiving. These are all summarised on the series’ website although it’s notable that the synopsis of the Halloween film is different to what we see here. In November 2008, just after Spooky Bats was released on DVD, The Light Before Christmas opened theatrically in some IMAX theatres.

The company behind the Evergreen Holiday Classics is Tandem Motion Picture Studios, a Utah-based animation studio run by brothers Chris and Nathan Smith. Nathan Smith directed Spooky Bats and wrote it in collaboration with Bryan Allen although curiously Chris Smith doesn’t seem to be credited anywhere. Allen, Smith, producer Clifford A Miles, executive producer Michael R Todd and James C Christensen share the ‘story’ credit and Christensen also gets ‘based upon characters created by’ which seems fair enough. I’m guessing that Todd uses his middle initial to differentiate himself from the Barnsley-born animator who was technical director on Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Wall-E, although I suppose that they could be the same bloke as his bio says he has also working on Disney’s aborted Snow Queen feature (as well as Shark Tale, Reign of Fire and Spider-Man).

Cliff Miles, who also handled voice direction, has worked on a wide range of other projects include the world’s largest dinosaur museum (very rich in fossils, Utah). And in that vein it looks like Tandem’s next film isn’t another Candleman short but a feature called Pangea which will be the first film ever to mix dinosaurs with elves! It’s all about a ‘water elf’ called Nemonie who teams up with a dinosaur called Gobi to search for treasure on the prehistoric supercontinent (Nemonie is also the title used on a trailer on the Tandem Studios website).

Argentinean production designer Nebel Luccion was responsible for translating Christensen’s distinctive style into 3D with the assistance of wardrobe designer Patricia Walton. Visual effects supervisor Mathew Judd has worked on the likes of Lake Placid, Deep Blue Sea, The World is Not Enough, Minority Report and Mission: Impossible II as well as a large number of games and some military training simulation programmes.

Leading the voice cast is Ken Sansom as the Candleman. He has been the voice of Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh films and TV series since the late 1980s; his other credits include Herbie Rides Again, 1983 TV pilot The Invisible Woman and the voice of Hound in the Transformers TV series. R Chase O’Neil (Katie) was born in March 1993 (not October as the IMDB has it) and started her career in 2000 with a small part in a TV movie based on the JonBenet Ramsey case, progressing to war drama Saints and Soldiers and ice skating film Go Figure. C Brock Holman (Makean) was in a 2003 production called A Pioneer Miracle which was directed by cinematographer TC Christensen (I don’t know if he’s related to James C).

The werewolf, the witch and Frankenstein are voiced respectively by Joel Bishop (who was also in Saints and Soldiers and that JonBenet telemovie as well as Stalking Santa and Cyber Sleuths), Mary Parker Williams (Don’t Look Under the Bed, Firestarter 2) and Christopher Miller (who could be one of several actors of that name).

The other element of note is the music by Lisle Moore, who has previously scored trailers such as The Missing, Haunted Mansion and Cold Mountain as well as various Playstation games. Specifically, there is a song midway through the film as Katie and Makean fly on the broomsticks which is an utterly shameless rip-off of The Nightmare Before Christmas (complete with “Halloween! Halloween!” chorus). The aping of Danny Elfman’s music is so blatant that it frankly spoils and cheapens the production as a whole, which is a shame.

One final point to note is the running time which according to the DVD sleeve is 65 minutes. In fact, Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats runs only half an hour, the rest being padded out with the two trailers, a short (but surprisingly good) look behind the scenes of the production... and half a dozen public domain Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons. That’s a bit naughty, although we should blame the distributor, not the producers.

While it has its faults, mainly in the story department, Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats is a nicely produced little special which has enough fun for its target audience and enough monsters gathered in one place to get adult fans excited.

MJS rating: B+
Review originally posted 7th December 2008.