Gnaw

Director: Gregory Mandry
Writers: Michael Bell, Max Waller
Producers: Rob Weston, Simon Sharp
Cast: Hiram Bleetman, Sara Dylan, Gary Faulkner
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: screener (4Digital Media)

I’m sure even the people who made Gnaw wouldn't deny that it is, at heart, yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre clone, with the action transplanted to darkest Suffolk (although it was shot in Surrey).

Six young people go away for a weekend, staying on a farm where the friendly old farmer’s wife cooks them a whole range of delicious food. There’s no sign of the farmer, but there is somebody creeping around, watching them (though they’re unaware of this) who turns out to be the old lady’s hulking, silent son. And it’s his job to butcher visitors with assorted farmyard tools before stuffing them into the meatgrinder.

An opening montage of newspaper cuttings about missing people and a caption telling us how many missing person reports are filed each year provides a supposedly chilling context to the story and ultimately leads to an obvious sting about one minute into the seven-minute end credits (without which the film runs a commendably taught 70 minutes, though various sources list 85 or even 90). But really, none of that holds up, and in fact this is another one of those films, like The Scar Crow, where the supposedly unexplained disappearances would spark a massive police operation and murder enquiry.

A group of people going missing on the back roads of Texas is credible. Texas is a big, empty place and neither they nor anyone else knew precisely where they were. A group of friends who fail to return from a weekend away at a B&B in Suffolk, however far it is from the nearest village, would be very, very obvious. In fact, the dialogue makes it clear that at least one of the group has told his mum precisely where they’re going.

And the implication is that this happens on a regular basis, that a whole succession of holidaying young people have ended up in the meatgrinder. I don’t know the Suffolk Constabulary personally but I’m sure they’re not that dim: “Oo-ar, Conztable Robinzon, moy luv. That there be the zixth grooop uv them they townie kidz az haz been boooked into they Blackztock Farrrm and then dizappearrred. Oi don’t be knowin’ wutt to make uv it...”

The plot does depend in various places on people doing things which, even if they’re terrified, are pretty dumb. A prologue shows us a previous occupant of Blackstock Farm’s guest rooms (Jennifer Wren, who provided uncredited voices in WAZ and recently appeared on stage as Mary Shelley) trying to escape, running along a grassy country lane, clad only in a blood- and mud-caked white shift, while a landrover trundles along menacingly behind her. I’d certainly be interested to know if anyone has watched this without thinking - or possibly even shouting at the screen - “Run through the trees, you stupid bitch!”

Anyway, our principal sextet follow the usual rules of a happy couple, an unhappy couple and two singletons. Ed (Hiram Bleetman: Zombie Diaries I and II, Jack Said, Habeas Corpus) and Hannah (actress/model/ballet dancer/choreographer Julia Vandoorne) are the nauseatingly all-over-each-other couple, taking every possible opportunity for a quick shag, venturing into slightly kinky territory with blindfolds and so on. It’s a remarkably effective blindfold in that it somehow prevents Hannah from noticing when the ‘boyfriend’ she’s snogging is about a foot taller and about ten times more muscular with huge, calloused farm-worker’s hands and an unshaven chin (instead of a silly little goatee and moustache which suggests he’s uncertain whether to model himself on Captain Jack Sparrow or Jamiroquai and has hedged his bets).

Jack (New York-trained Nigel Croft Adams) and Jill (Rachel Mitchem, who trained as an opera singer and was in half-hour short Horrorshow and two episodes of EastEnders) have a more tense relationship, as rammed home unsubtly in a game where people have to describe each other. Jack is full of himself while Jill has something of a pole up her arse. They’re not actually at loggerheads but they would be if Jill ever discovers that Jack is carrying on behind her back with morose borderline-emo Lorrie (Sara Dylan: Peridot, Storm). Making up the numbers is slightly drippy Matt (Oliver Lee Squires, who started as a child actor in a Ken Russell film) who has a slight crush on Lorrie but stands no chance.


On the way to the farm, Ed and Hannah accidentally run over a cat which they somehow correctly deduce must belong to Blackstock Farm itself. Instead of simply slinging the corpse into a ditch or indeed just leaving it on the road for the crows and foxes to eat, they decide for some inexplicable reason to put it into a plastic carrier bag and take it with them, with the intention of somehow disposing of it the following day. Hannah actually says “Let’s put it in the boot” although they’re driving a pick-up truck so (a) the vehicle doesn’t have a boot and (b) the bag full of rotting, mangled cat corpse will be very obvious to anyone walking past the truck while it’s parked at the farm.

Interesting fact: if you run over and kill a dog, you are legally required to report it to the police. If you knock down a cat, no-one cares. Cats are everywhere, and feline life is cheap. Anyway, there are a couple of follow-ups later on which suggest that the farm family have found this dead cat, but it’s clearly not motivation because they were evidently planning to butcher the kids in any case.

Carrie Cohen (Hellbreeder) is Mrs Obadiah, landlady of Blackstock Farm, and looks like she’s having a whale of a time in the climactic moments when she goes into full-on, Sheila-Keith, insane old woman mode. Gary Faulkner nicely underplays her son, credited only as ‘The Slaughterman’ (although Faulkner’s CastingCallPro page gives the character’s name as ‘Judd’). Faulkner has subsequently appeared in several public sector corporate promos for Gnaw director Gregory Mandry and was also in a stage production directed by Jennifer Wren. There’s no sign or mention of Mr Obadiah; and I don’t think it’s unkind to assume that the two farm residents are not only mother and son but probably related in several other ways as well. This is Suffolk after all, a part of the country where a posh wedding is any one where the bride’s and groom’s relatives can be sufficiently distinguished to sit on different sides of the church.

There’s some misdirection early on with Matt’s suggestion that the spooky old farmhouse is haunted. There are some stupid practical jokes played by people on other people which are basically just cat-scares. There’s a ballet dancer music box which, in defiance of cliché, has not been left in the untouched bedroom of a dead child. And there’s an unwanted pregnancy subplot which may actually be something new and different in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre clone. But as I haven’t seen every single one I couldn’t swear to that. There is one genuinely effective and chilling moment when Hannah and Ed are so busy sticking their tongues down each other’s throats that neither notices the Slaughterman standing silently in the corner of the room, illuminated for the audience in occasional flashes of light.

Which brings me to my main gripe with Gnaw: the lighting, or lack thereof. This film is incredibly dark. I know a lot of it takes place at night but a lot of the time we just can’t see what is happening. Much of what looks like good production design is thrown away by the camera-work. The skill of night-time cinematography is letting the audience see just enough but Gnaw falls down just the other side of that fine line. I don’t think it’s atmosphere - well, obviously it’s partly about atmosphere - there really do seem to be things that we’re being shown but can’t actually see.

Most notably, the Slaughterman sometimes wears some sort of mask (in fact there’s one scene where he removes it in front of a terrified victim) but we never get a good enough look at it. Is it made of human skin? Is it made from a dead cat? Is he just wearing a hood. We should see this clearly at least once, otherwise it’s all a bit pointless.

For all its generic nature (genericity?) and minor flaws, Gnaw - which premiered at Frighfest 2008 and hit US shelves in 2009 but has taken three years to make it to UK DVD - is a confident and reasonably exciting slice of cannibalistic rural horror. The characters are believable and mostly likeable, even pompous, unfaithful Jack. The acting is generally very good apart from, oddly, occasional individual flat line-readings by various characters, which suggests to me that the problem might lie with Gregory Mandry’s direction rather than the cast, most of whom have very impressive stage-training backgrounds.

The script by Michael Bell and Max Waller gives the impression that this was intended as a black comedy but it hasn’t ended up that way and the occasional humorous line therefore sticks out like a chopped-off thumb rather than being part of a consistent whole. Bell was a production designer (including The Zombie Diaries) and award-winning pop video director while Waller produced operas(!) but they are now concentrating on their work as a scriptwriting partnership. The duo share story credit with producer Rob Weston (another Zombie Diaries alumnus - he was line producer). The other producer, Simon Sharp, was also 1st AD. Bell and Marc Seery (the Newcastle-based marketing guy?) are credited as executive producers.

Production designer Tony Noble has credits stretching right back to the early 1970s when he worked on infamous David Warbeck-starring thriller The Sex Thief and Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different. He mostly designs commercials but his other features include Whoops Apocalypse and Moon. Hayley Nebauer (Doghouse, The Reeds, Rise of the Footsoldier) designed the costumes. Unfortunately, much of their work on Gnaw is obscured by Tom Jenkins’ cinematography, which is not helped by some irritatingly shaky handheld camera-work. (Jenkins gets a second credit as one of two camera operators.)

Hair and make-up is credited to Florence May Carter whose short film work includes Walker Stalker, Corpse and the probably brilliant Hands Solo, a comedy about a deaf guy who becomes an unwitting porn star, with Vickie Ellis listed as ‘key hair and make-up artist’. Editor Mark Towns also cut slick-but-boring martial arts picture Underground and something about six years ago called The Battersea Ripper aka Manilla Envelopes, starring Danny Dyer, which is completely absent from the IMDB for some reason. Sound recordist Simon Bysshe (boom operator on the Jack Black Gulliver’s Travels, the remake of Brideshead Revisited and The Hurt Locker) interestingly dates Gnaw to 2005 in his CV, suggesting that it was a long, fragmented shoot.

Backing up this theory is the fact that, as well as an actual ‘second unit’ (directed by Michael Bell, DPed by Rupe Whiteman: Charlie Noades RIP), the credits group the crew members together into three further units defined by location. The Eastbourne Unit shot at Pekes Manor, the Dorking Unit shot at Dunley Hill Farm (the postal address for Mandry’s Big Yellow Feet production company), while the Farnham/A30 unit shot at Frensham Manor, Pitt Farm and the Snack Wagon burger van - which gets its own location credit! The identity of the DP/camera operator on the Farnham/A30 unit is hidden behind the Discworld-inspired pseudonym ‘Samuel Inigo Vimes’; the busy Michael Bell was unit production designer while Leona Wilson handled hair and make-up. James Morgan was special effects assistant on the Eastbourne Unit.

And therein lies the biggest mystery of Gnaw. Despite the wide range of stabbings, hackings and other violent, bloody acts on show (including a tongue-removal) there is no credit for special effects supervisor. James Morgan is the only named FX person, although Leona Wilson is apparently a horror movie fan and so presumably contributed some of the gore. In the end credits (which are padded out with 109 individually listed ‘thank you’s!) there are five companies listed as having provided ‘SFX/prosthetics’. Animated Effects contributed to Alien Vs Predator, LD50, Resident Evil, Dust, Shadow of the Vampire, Highlander IV, Death Machine, Mary Reilly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and oodles of other films. Breakaway Effects specialise, as the name suggests, in breakable props. I can’t find anything on Evolution Effects (unless it’s the US company of that name) and Model Supplies is likewise too generic a name to research. And SFX GB is the trading name of Neal Champion whose credits include Strange, Dead Set, Ashes to Ashes, the 2009 Day of the Triffids, Lesbian Vampire Killers, Nine Lives and Pandaemonium. But an actual FX supervisor credit? No sign of one. Does that mean whoever fulfilled that role asked for their name to be removed? Gnaw isn’t anywhere near being that bad.


One final note: composer Mark Hill scored several top ten hits in the late 1990s as The Artful Dodger and subsequently produced Craig David records, which is, it must be said, a more appalling and horrific thought than anything which crossed my mind while watching Gnaw.

[One final, final note. Selecting images for this I found two variant sleeves for the French DVD, retitled Cannibal Kitchen. One calls this 'Un film de Gregory Mandry' but a presumably earlier version has 'Un film de Frank Merle'. US director Merle did indeed make a film called Gnaw but it's a zombie short, not this one. The perils of marketing people relying on IMDB! - MJS]

MJS rating: B

review originally posted 13th February 2011

GI Samurai

Director: Kosei Saito
Writer: Toshio Kamata
Producer: Takeshi Motomura
Cast: Sonny Chiba, Jun Eto, Hiroyuki Sanada
Country: Japan
Year of release: 1979
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Have you ever been watching a film and found yourself repeatedly saying “Holy moley, this is awesome!” as the movie just gets better and better? No? Well then presumably you’ve never seen GI Samurai. Even in what is very evidently a heavily cut-down version, this amazing, action-packed epic stands out as a strong contender for the title of greatest sci-fi/war movie of all time.

Also known as Time Slip: The Day of the Apocalypse (the full title is both on-screen and on the box of this British VHS release), Sengoku Jietai cost a fortune, features vast numbers of extras and packs a punch that combines science fiction and samurai films into a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts. All this - and it stars Sonny Chiba too!

This is a time travel film and there are of course two sorts of time travel stories. Some, like Back to the Future, Retroactive or the marvellous East German comedy Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea, play with the idea of time travel and the complications it can create. Others, ranging from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Life on Mars, simply use time travel as a device to set up a culture clash scenario. The Terminator is an unusual example of a film which falls into both camps.

GI Samurai is firmly in the Connecticut Yankee mould, with a very simple premise that is never explained because, frankly, it doesn’t need to be. A gaggle of military personnel from Japan’s Self Defence Force travel back in time about 400 years. Presumably they’re starting from what would be the present day - late 1970s - but there is no indication of what happened except that every soldier’s watch has stopped at 5.18. (Actually, there are some weird polarising effects and suchlike which presumably is the time slip itself but this is after everyone has spotted that their watches are kaput.)

There are about 20-30 troops all told and between them they have a jeep, a half-track armoured personnel carrier (both equipped with a heavy machine gun), a light tank, a lorry full of ammo, a helicopter and a motor patrol boat. They rendezvous on a beach somewhere; we’re not told where and we’re not told why. They’re clearly still in Japan (as will quickly become clear and in any case the SDF was not supposed to operate outside the country) but they seem to be on active service rather than just manoeuvres. I think it really doesn’t matter.

The point is that once the lorry, the chopper, the MPB and the convoy of jeep, tank and APC (initially introduced in darkness as part of a much larger convoy) have introduced themselves, they spot three samurai warriors on horseback who take a look then turn and ride off. Before you know it, a hail of arrows rains down on the soldiers from a row of medieval archers atop a nearby cliff and they have no defence except to cower behind their vehicles.

This is the crux of GI Samurai: 20th century weapons and techniques against those of the 16th century. It’s not as obviously one-sided as you might think.

The soldiers repel another attack but also establish an alliance with a rival lord who turns up to investigate what is going on. He realises that, with the assistance of these strangers and their amazing weapons he could defeat his enemies and rule the whole country.

We don’t get to really know any of the soldiers, at least not in this cut-down version, apart from Lt Yoshiaki Iba, played by the legendary Chiba-san. Some small amount of characterisation is evident in scenes that they share with some of the non-combatant locals: a young woman, an old lady, some kids. There is probably much more of this in the full version. But the bulk of the film is two battles, one small one and one very big one.

Initially, Lt Iba’s men attack a castle and have little difficulty in beating the defenders, delighting their new-found samurai allies, but then they progress to a pitched battle against a very large samurai army and this long, thrilling, sometimes horrific sequence constitutes the bulk of the movie in this edit. It’s terrific, absolutely terrific.

Yes, the 20th century troops have automatic weapons, heavy machine guns, grenades and a damn great tank but they are outnumbered by several hundred to one. What use automatic firepower when you are facing literally thousands of warriors, highly trained and completely fearless, willing to lay down their life for their lord? The soldiers-vs-samurai theme is much, much more than just a high concept, it’s a fascinating examination of how different styles of warfare deal with each other, demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of each. Most war films, by their very nature, pitch against each other enemies who are roughly equivalent in terms of technology and tactics. GI Samurai is in some ways more like a western with Lt Iba’s men as the Seventh Cavalry and the samurai as the Cherokees, fighting by their own methods and on their own territory.

Two films jumped into my head as precedents while I watched this. One is my favourite film of all time, The Man Who Would Be King, in which two 19th century British soldiers successfully conquer an Indian mountain kingdom by supplying one local warlord with Martini-Henrys and the training to use them. But the comparison breaks down because although Iba allies himself with one of the local warlords, his men fight alone. A better comparison might be, well at first I thought Zulu but then I revised that to Zulu Dawn. The Japanese soldiers, like the British at Isandlwana, grossly underestimate the abilities and tactics of the local ‘savages’ and pay the price for their hubris in a terrifying and bloody confrontation.

But there is another film that stands comparison with GI Samurai and what makes it particularly interesting is that it was produced a few years later. That film is Return of the Jedi.

The Ewok attack on the Imperial forces in that film is remarkably similar to the samurai attack on the SDF forces in this one and when we consider that the Ewoks were originally going to be Wookiees, we can see an even closer comparison (there used to be fan art and fan fiction about ‘Samurai Wookiees’ back in the 1980s but I don’t know whether that had any direct derivation from canonical Star Wars material). The medieval army in GI Samurai use traps and knowledge of the terrain to the full extent just as the Ewoks would do four years later. Most specifically there is a sequence where they attack the vehicles by rolling logs down a steep incline. If you can watch that without thinking of Endor you’re a better man than I am.

It is well known that George Lucas is a long-time fan of Japanese movies. He has acknowledged the debt that Star Wars owes to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and Darth Vader’s helmet has clear Samurai origins. I would be genuinely surprised if Lucas had not seen GI Samurai before making Jedi (or if not Lucas, maybe Lawrence Kasdan or Richard Marquand). The comparison is obvious, this film was a major production promoted internationally and it would be a big coincidence if there was no direct influence.

What the samurai have that Ewoks don’t, of course, is spectacle. Many samurai movies concentrate on individuals or small groups so it is jaw-dropping to see hundreds of men, each with a tall, fluttering war banner sticking up from his back, charging across a hillside. You can feel the fear of the SDF soldiers, facing this enemy which charges so brazenly and so relentlessly. Like the Terminator, a samurai army “can’t be reasoned with, can’t be bargained with and it absolutely will not stop.”

There’s wave after wave of attack and gradually the soldiers lose one vehicle after another. Eventually only a handful of survivors make their way to a wooden building where they are met by the warlord whom they befriended earlier, and so the film culminates in a bleak and shocking ending.

There are some loose ends and obvious gaps in the non-battle parts of the plot, due to losing so much footage. The original version apparently runs 140 minutes but this VHS tape is only 88 minutes so the best part of an hour has been cut. That extra time may help the film by allowing us to know these soldiers as people or it may drag it down by spending too long on character and dialogue with no action. I’ll need to see the full length version to comment on whether or not it’s as good as this edit, but I’d love it to be even better.

The medieval soldiers have no idea what they’re fighting and they don’t care. There’s a great shot where one of them repeatedly jabs his sword down the barrel of the tank’s gun, believing that he is attacking it in some way. But what stands out among the carnage is Lt Iba and his decision to fight back against the samurai on their own terms, to which end he mounts a horse and grabs a sword, a bow and a bunch of arrows. The film constantly hammers home that one method or level of technology is not inherently superior to the other and that war is a brutal, cruel business however you do it.

GI Samurai is based on a novel by Ryo Hanmura but virtually the only information I can find anywhere on this author - apart from birth/death dates of 1933/2002 - is that he jointly won the Hayakawa SF Competition in 1960 and later won the Naoki Award for best popular literature by a young writer. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction cites one other title by Hanmura: Misaki Ichiro no Teiko. Toshio Kamata (Legend of Eight Samurai) wrote this film’s screenplay and it was directed by Kosei Saito who makes a much more exciting and coherent job of things than he managed with the awful Ninja Wars.

Sonny Chiba is probably best known to ‘the kids’ now for playing Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill Vol.1 and Uncle Kanata in The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift but he started acting back in the late 1950s and by the time he made GI Samurai had already established a global reputation in The Street Fighter and its sequels (including one of my favourite films, Sister Street Fighter) as well as The Shogun’s Samurai, Message from Space, The Bodyguard and Gangster Cop. His other notable films include Battle Royale II, Sure Death Revenge, Samurai Reincarnation, Dragon Princess and, um, Aces: Iron Eagle III.

Other cast members here include Jun Eto (Godzilla X Mechagodzilla), Kenzo Kawarasaki (Parasite Eve and a 1997 TV version of Ring), Asao Koike (Baby Cart in Peril and a couple of Zatoichi pictures), Masao Kusakari (ESPY), Noboru Nakaya (Kwaidan, Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld), Miyuki Ono (Evil Dead Trap) and the legendary Hiroyuki Sanada (Ring and sequels). Executive producer Haruki Kadokawa (Samurai Reincarnation, Ninja Wars, Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus and heir to the Kadokawa publishing empire) gave himself a role too.

Info on the crew is harder to come by. The only credits on the English language version are a cast list (differentiated only into ‘soldiers’, ‘samurai’ and ‘others’) plus director Saito, musical director (Kadokawa giving himself an extra credit), fight director (Chiba) and, for some reason, sound recordist Fumio Hashimoto (Angel Guts: Red Classroom). If the IMDB is accurate, the art director was Hiroshi Ueda who also designed Incident at Blood Pass, Samurai Banners and The Birth of Japan, while the music was composed by Kentaro Haneda who scored a lot of anime including Barefoot Gen and Robotech: The Macross Saga.

Sengoku Jietai was remade in 2005 as Sengoku Jietai 1549, accompanied by a manga adaptation. This was directed by Masaaki Tezuka - fresh from three Godzilla pictures - and although it was quite widely publicised the film appears not to have had an English language release (although the comic was translated and published in the USA). Much less well known is a 2006 TV series based on the same story, Sengoku Jietai: Sekigahara no Tatakai directed by Kosei Saito again under his other name of Mitsumasa Saito.

The full 140 minute version of Time Slip is now available on DVD in the UK under the GI Samurai title from Optimum both singly (HMV has it for a fiver, as I type this!) and as part of the three-disc Sonny Chiba Collection Vol.2 (with Bullet Train and Golgo 13). The US DVD is deleted but a two-disc special edition is planned for April 2008 release. I’m sorely tempted to invest in one or other of these because I want to see the full version of this completely brilliant movie.

MJS rating: A
review originally posted 27th January 2008

The Gingerdead Man

Director: Charles Band
Writers: ‘Sylvia St Croix’ and August White
Producer: Charles Band
Cast: Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke
Country: USA
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from: R1 DVD (Full Moon)

This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is Charlie Band back up to speed. Decadent Evil had its moments but was, frankly, a bit disappointing; Doll Graveyard was fun. But The Gingerdead Man is a hoot.

The basic structure is off-the-shelf: a small cast, in a single location, threatened by something or somebody. But even before we get to the something or somebody, this movie scores points for originality. Come on, what was the last film that you saw which was set almost entirely inside a bakery?

In a prologue we see gun-toting psycho Millard Findlemeyer (Gary Busey) robbing a diner. He has already killed the waitress and proceeds to shoot two thirds of the lone family cowering under a table (dad Newell Alexander, who was Sam Beckett’s father in the pilot episode of Quantum Leap, and son James Snyder). The daughter, Sarah (Robin Sydney: The Lost), he only injures because he doesn’t want to shoot an unarmed girl but his mother always told him to finish what he started.

Sarah’s family runs Betty’s Bakery in Waco, a family business which just scrapes by. A couple of years on, Sarah is holding the business together helped by her alcoholic mother Betty (Margaret Blye: The Entity) and employees Julia (Daniela Melgoza) and Brick (Jonathan Chase: 7eventy 5ive) who has a sideline as an amateur wrestler and carries a torch for Sarah. But competition is looming in the form of a soon-to-open large bakery across the road, which is described as being part of a major chain although it seems to belong solely to stetson-wearing Jimmy Dean (Larry Cedar: Demonic Toys, Pinocchio’s Revenge) who wants to buy out the competition.

Dean dotes on his selfish, spoiled daughter Lorna (Alexia Aleman) who was recently voted Miss Pretty Face of Waco. Lorna sneaks into Betty’s Bakery at night, when Sarah is the only occupant, and releases a rat with the intention of having the establishment closed down on health grounds. Following her inside is her bit-of-rough, simple-but-honest boyfriend Amos (Ryan Locke: Supercross) who knows he’s being used and has some sympathy for Sarah and her family.

Now, here’s where it starts to get weird. In fact, Charles Band admits in his introduction to the Making Of featurette that this is possibly the weirdest ‘monster’ of any of his films - and that’s saying something, but he might actually be right. Sarah is baking a large gingerbread man as a test piece for some new gingerbread mixture - but unbeknownst to her that mixture contains the ashes of none other than Millard Findlemeyer who was recently executed in the electric chair; wardrobe supervisor E Dee Biddlecombe (The Phantom Eye, Dinocroc, Doll Graveyard) appears briefly as Findlemeyer’s mother who engineers her son’s supernatural revenge. Millard Findlemeyer, it transpires, is back to finish what he started by killing Sarah - and anyone else who gets in his way. And he is doing this through reincarnation as that gingerbread man.

We’ll give you this one, Mr B. Compared to all those killer puppets and flying disembodied heads, this is really, genuinely weird.

There follows a series of set pieces as Sarah, Lorna and Amos try to escape the homicidal cookie. Betty and Julia both return to the bakery and are attacked, the latter being turned into a human cake, smothered with dough (with prominent breasts and glacé cherries for nipples!) and left in the oven. When rescued, her all-white appearance and the way that her flour-streaked hair is sprayed out around her head makes her look a little like the Bride of Frankenstein although I’m not sure how deliberate that is.

Lorna’s father also returns although he doesn’t last long as he is run over by the killer biscuit (yes, he drives a car!). Eventually Brick turns up and defeats the threat by - well, how would you ‘kill’ a gingerbread man? Exactly! But this only leads to more trouble...

Throughout all this, Busey has a ball as the voice of the Gingerdead Man, who wisecracks his way through the various killings and attempted killings. The character is mostly represented by a series of puppets, built by industry veteran John Carl Buechler and operated by Mark Andrews. There is also a Buechler-built full-size suit (Kyle Lupo is the hapless soul inside) but to be honest I didn’t notice whether this was actually used. Certainly the revelation of the suit’s existence in the Making Of was a surprise to me as I assumed I had been looking at a puppet the whole way through.

The Gingerdead Man has ‘franchise’ written all over it and the title character has the potential to become a cult comedy-horror icon along the lines of Chucky or the Leprechaun. And how long can it be before we witness The Gingerdead Man vs Demonic Toys or Puppet Master vs the Gingerdead Man? Hmm?

The cast all acquit themselves well and Band keeps the tension going in the second half which is when the killer cookie is let loose. The only major ‘huh?’ moment is when Julia and Betty are being attacked; the bakery just doesn’t look a big enough establishment that the others would not be aware of this. But on the whole, the action and characterisation is fine.

The 18-minute Making Of (directed, as usual, by associate producer Jethro Rothe-Kushel) includes some footage from a test-reel for this project shot a few years ago by actor/effects man William Butler (actor in Ghoulies II, Friday the 13th Part VII, Buried Alive, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Arena and the Tom Savini Night of the Living Dead remake; effects/make-up work on Eliminators, From Beyond, Curse IV and Cellar Dweller; director of various Power Rangers episodes). Butler’s version featured a fully CGI-ed Gingerdead Man who looked a little like the Pilsbury Doughboy but with bigger and sharper teeth.

A script seen briefly in the Making Of carries the credit (for those who bother to freeze frame and check) ‘written by William Butler, revised by August White’ which means that Butler has asked for his name to be taken off this and has opted instead for the pseudonym ‘Sylvia St Croix’ (the name of a talent agent character in the stage musical Ruthless, according to a quick Google). August White’s real identity is Domonic Muir, writer of Critters - which explains why one or two sources who got their info mixed up credited the Decadent Evil script to ‘Domonic White’.

Other crew who have worked with Band before include cinematographer Keith Duggan (Decadent Evil, Delta Delta Die!), editor Danny Draven, production designer Elvis Strange and make-up lady Crystal Blair (Decadent Evil, Bad Movie Police 1: Galaxy of the Dinosaurs). Hairstylist Cyndi Welch seems to have mostly worked on soft porn flicks with interchangeable titles like Dangerous Pleasures, Wicked Temptations, Sinful Desires and Erotic Obsessions. Busey, being a name star, had his own hair and make-up artist, Peggy Seagreen.

Busey must be one of the busiest men in Hollywood with eight other movies and a mini-series listed on the IMDB for 2005. Among his previous fantasy/horror credits are Frost: Portrait of a Vampire, A Crack in the Floor, Universal Soldier II, Predator 2 and Silver Bullet. He comes across in the Making Of as a nice guy and a professional jobbing actor.

The real star of the featurette however is Jonathan Chase who very obviously had an absolute blast on this movie and plays up to Rothe-Kushel’s behind-the-scenes camera for all he is worth. He may not be on-screen as much as some other cast members, but Brick is a cool role for any actor plus he gets to wear some groovy prosthetic make-up in the finale. Also briefly interviewed - and this must be a first, though it is undeniably appropriate - is caterer Joanne 'Trixie' Sullivan.

The DVD also has the usual plug for Full Moon toys, a few bloopers and the same selection of trailers that were on the Doll Graveyard disc. It goes without saying, by now, that the actual film runs only 60 minutes and is followed by eleven minutes of glacially slow credits.

MJS rating: B+

review originally published 22nd November 2005

Finnigan's War

Director: Conor Timmis
Writer: Conor Timmis
Producer: Conor Timmis
Cast: Conor Timmis, Mark Hamill
Country: USA
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: screener
Website: http://finniganswar.blogspot.co.uk

War is not beautiful. War is ugly. Every war ever fought, for whatever reason, in whatever way, between whichever sides, in whatever time and place, has been an ugly thing. That’s the nature of war.

War can be thrilling, war can be exciting: it wouldn’t make such a good subject for films if it wasn’t. War can be honourable, it can be righteous, it can be moral, it can be romantic, it can even be blackly comic. But it can never be beautiful.

So how has Conor Timmis, director of Kreating Karloff, managed to make a movie about war which, in searching for le mot juste, I can only describe as a beautiful little film?

It’s because, although ostensibly a documentary about the Korean War, Finnigan’s War isn’t actually about war. It’s about people. And people can be beautiful. The beauty of the people in this film - though some of them are undoubtedly good-looking old fellas for their age who probably drive the old gals wild on whist night - is the inner beauty of goodness and humanity. It is the great irony of war that while it is so inhuman on a grand scale, down at the individual level, it is full of some of the best that humanity can offer.

So here’s what we have. Conor’s grandfather, John Finnigan, was killed during the Korean War. In 2010, on the 60th anniversary of the start of that war, Conor set out to meet surviving veterans, and the families of those who died in the conflict, and learn their stories. Three years later, on the 60th anniversary of the war’s end, this personal quest has been turned into an hour-long film of which young Mr Timmis should be extremely proud.

This is a personal quest and a personal film. It starts with Conor’s grandad and progresses to another soldier from the same regiment whose sacrifice is commemorated in the name of a US Navy ship commanded by Conor’s uncle. Conor is there in the interview segments, not obtrusively but giving a human touch to the process of recording these memories. He meets an extraordinary cross-section of ethnic America: men from the only all-black Rangers regiment; the first Chinese-American US Army officer (remember - they were fighting the Chinese); Puerto Rican bikers who commemorate a Puerto Rican unit; the family of a Native American soldier; and a Hungarian-born Jew who survived a Nazi concentration camp, signed up to the US Army in gratitude and five years later found himself in a Chinese POW camp.

Extraordinary stories of ordinary men doing extraordinary things, all told sympathetically and with dignity. In still photos of Conor posing with these men, we can see a genuine admiration on the film-maker’s face, and also the pleasure of these old geezers in the interest that this young man is taking in their memories. There is a sincerity throughout this whole film which one so rarely encounters and which could so easily have disappeared if the picture had toppled into either cloying sentimentality of soulless objectivity.

One particularly noteworthy touch is the use of comic-book artwork, with limited animation, to accompany readings of individuals’ medal citations. Justin Case of gunmother.com supplied the artwork, Mark Hamill supplied the voice. It works brilliantly. Which is a surprise because one would think that comic book artwork - with its connotations of Sgt Rock, or Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos (or, on this side of the Atlantic, Battle Picture Library and Commando Picture Library) - would cheapen the stories. But it doesn’t. One reason why it doesn’t is because these aren’t gung-ho tales of kicking the Commies’ butts, these are stories of men going above and beyond the call of duty, sometimes paying the ultimate sacrifice, to save their comrades in arms. Though these men took lives, they did so to save lives. That’s the nature of war. Kill or be killed. That’s why it’s ugly.

Two things are deliberately (and justifiably) absent from Finnigan’s War. One is any historical context. Conor calls this the story of “the forgotten heroes of an almost forgotten war” and he’s right. Really, to my shame, I know almost nothing about the Korean War. Coming as it did inbetween the morally unimpeachable global behemoth of World War II and the nation-dividing shameful shambles of Vietnam, Korea is overlooked by history. But men fought and died there, far from home. And it’s the men who are the subject of this film. Why they were there - the big story, the macro-tale - is not relevant here. There are plenty of books about the Korean War that will tell you why it started, what happened, and how and why it ended three years later. Conor did the right thing to ignore this: he could only have touched on the notions and ideas, never doing justice to them, and even then it would have bitten into the film’s 56-minute running time.

Also absent, or almost absent, as a result of the above, is any discussion of the enemy. They were Chinese Communists, that’s all we’re told. Only once does one of the veterans recall engaging directly with an enemy soldier, the two spotting each other at almost the same time with the GI quickest on the draw. The Chinese man was old for a frontline soldier, in his forties, and the American recalls asking his corpse “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your family?” It’s pretty much the film’s only moment of acknowledgement that every war has two sides, that Chinese men were being sent to fight the Yankees, just as US troops were being sent to fight the Commies. This is an important anecdote: without it, the film could have been justifiably accused of being too jingoistic.

Finnigan’s War is an American film, made with American sensibilities, but of course the perception of the US military - current and historical - is very different outside the States, in terms of both individuals and overall strategies. The flag-waving patriotism of Americans for everything their soldiers do sits awkwardly with the more cynical European view. But the simplicity, sincerity and underplayed, quiet dignity of Conor’s film cuts through any such cultural differences. This is a film which could play well at any film festival around the world and I hope that all programmers of documentary festivals will take a look and consider screening it.

Although this is very much Conor’s personal opus, it is still a collaborative project of course. Mention must be made of sympathetic editing by Gary Fiero (Pickman’s Model) who is also one of four credited cinematographers, and the excellent, subtle music by Scott Keever.

It doesn’t sound much, broken down into its constituent parts: some old guys recalling a war 60 years ago with a few semi-animated interludes. But Finnigan’s War is a beautiful piece of film-making and I am genuinely glad that I was given the opportunity to watch it and write about it.

MJS rating: A

The Ghost Train

Director: Walter Forde
Writers: Marriott Edgar, JOC Orton, Val Guest
Producer: Edward Black
Cast: Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Carole Lynne
Year of release: 1941
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

The Ghost Train is basically the British equivalent of The Bat or The Cat and the Canary, a creepy story derived from a stage play, in which a group of people find themselves in a creepy location menaced by an unseen threat, possibly supernatural but ultimately revealed to be merely criminal. And just as Hollywood shoe-horned Bob Hope into The Cat and the Canary, Gainsborough Films stuck ‘Big-Hearted’ Arthur Askey into this version of The Ghost Train.

A group of rail passengers find themselves stranded in the waiting room of an isolated station, having missed their connection. When the station master is unable to persuade them to leave - it’s bucketing it down outside and the nearest village is miles away - he warns them of the local legend of the ghost train, and how all who see it perish. Later, a strange couple turn up out of the blue, the man claiming that his sister is an escaped lunatic while she protests her innocence and begs the disparate group to protect her from her brother.

Those waiting in the waiting room include drippy couple Herbert Perkins (Stuart Latham, who was in a 1939 TV version of The Tell-Tale Heart) and Edna Hookey (Betty Jardine), who are to be married the next day; teetotal spinster Miss Bourne (Kathleen Harrison: Mrs Huggett in the Huggetts films and radio series) and her pet parrot; booze-sozzled Doctor Sterling (Morland Graham: Whisky Galore!); arrogant cricketer Richard (RG) Winthrop (Peter Murray-Hill: Bell-Bottom George) and his charming cousin Jackie (Carole Lynne, who apparently made only one other film). Then there’s music hall comedian Tommy Gander (Askey) and suave Teddy Deakin (Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch), both of whom are enamoured of Miss Winthrop. Askey and Murdoch were huge stars in Britain at this time on the basis of Band Waggon, the first ever BBC comedy series. This was their fourth film together in two years.

It must be said that, much as I enjoy Arthur Askey’s comedy, he is spectacularly irritating in this part, but deliberately so. He is endlessly cracking weak jokes, his cheery face falling when he sees how little reaction he gets, and constantly dodging the entirely justifiable annoyance of Winthrop and Deakin. Still, there’s some good visual comedy, as when Askey/Gander tries to fill a tea-cup with water using a water tower pipe in a rainstorm. Essentially Askey is playing himself, slipping in some of his catchphrases (“Ay thangyew!”) and referring to himself as ‘Big-Hearted’ Tommy.

The Ghost Train was written by Arnold Ridley - yes, Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army, when he was a young man - and is packed with red herrings and diversions. Ridley’s original play script was adapted by Marriott Edgar, JOC Orton and Val Guest (later director of The Quatermass Xperiment, The Day the Earth Caught Fire etc.). All three had written the bulk of Will Hay’s classic comedies, including Oh Mr Porter! - which was loosely based on The Ghost Train. Orton later co-wrote the early SF comedy Time Flies. Director Walter Forde is one of the forgotten greats, a former silent comedian who in his time was a serious rival, as far as British audiences were concerned, to Chaplin and Keaton. He also directed the 1931 version of Ridley’s play, starring Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, as well as a previous Askey/Murdoch comedy, Charlie’s Big-Hearted Aunt.

Interestingly, the dialogue actually pinpoints the exact night that the action takes place, 22nd January 1940 - 43 years to the day since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In deference to wartime concerns, the ‘ghost train’ turns out to be a front not for smugglers but for Nazi-sympathising gun-runners.

The film was shot at a studio in Shepherd’s Bush in November and December 1941, when the London Blitz was at its height. Consequently, Askey and most of the cast lived permanently in their dressing rooms, within easy reach of the studio’s air raid shelters. So far as I can tell, the only surviving member of the cast is Carole Lynne, who subsequently packed in acting to become Lady Delfont! Askey went on to make a few more comic horrors on TV. His 1956-58 series Before Your Very Eyes featured a Frankenstein sketch in one episode (16th December 1957) and a spoof of House of Wax in another (23rd March 1956) using figures borrowed from Madame Tussaud’s. A 1960s series of comic playlets, Arthur’s Treasured Volumes also included a horror episode, entitled ‘The Curse of the Bellfoots’.

This big screen version of a periodically revived theatre classic is good fun for those of us who enjoy 1940s comedy, but will be of only academic interest to horror fans who lack a penchant for wartime whimsey. It only just scrapes into the horror genre by virtue of the ghostly legend behind which the smugglers/gun-runners hide their criminal activity. Finally, viewers are advised not to think about the plot too closely: with the revelation that almost the whole village is in on the nefarious goings-on, why go to all the trouble of staging disappearing dead bodies, etc. to frighten the passengers, when it would have been so much easier to simply find a bus or van and transport them away from the station?

MJS rating: B

review originally posted before November 2004