The Abducted (2009)

Director: Jon Bonnell
Stars: Kathleen Benner, James Ray, Michael Harrelson, Greg Joseph and Ashley Francis

I must have spent an hour chatting away with Jon Bonnell a year ago at DarkCon without realising who he was. When I did, I had to point out that a year earlier still, I'd slated a film he'd directed, though to be fair, I did defend it a little because it was merely awful, not the worst film ever made. He asked which film and when I replied, Star Quest: The Odyssey, he fully agreed with me about its lack of quality. He said that he had been hamstrung by the producer, who wanted to make a serious film; he knew it would have been a lot better played for laughs. At the end of that review, I had written off the film's writer, Carlos Perez, but suggested that I was willing to give Bonnell another chance by watching Match.Dead aka The Abducted. It's taken me two years because the copy I had was broken, but Bonnell himself gave me a DVD so that I could watch and review. While I'm grateful to him for that courtesy, it has no bearing on my views on the film, which are that it's flawed but much better than that other movie released the same year.

It's notable that this picture has also suffered from a slew of negative reviews on IMDb, albeit not quite to the same degree as its lesser sibling. It's easy to see why though: like Star Quest: The Odyssey it's a long way from what people expected. In this instance, it isn't the DVD covers that did the damage, it's the way writer Alyssa Alexandria plays with the genre. In 2009, this would have appeared like a torture porn, with a man, Ridley Thompson, holding a young lady, Valora Smith, captive for almost the entire running time. The catch is that there's no nudity, very little violence and even less gore. A few people do get killed, but not in any gratuitious fashion; we don't see heads blown off and we don't hear overblown death cries. It's a matter of fact thing and that surely disappointed people. One reviewer highlighted his priorities through rating it on gore, nudity, effects, story and comedy, in that order. Another actively complained about the lack of nudity, which he felt would have spiced it up considerably. They don't get the point.

The Abducted does have real problems but lack of nudity, violence and gore aren't anywhere on the list. I didn't have a problem with the talky nature of the piece, as it allowed both of the leads to sink their teeth into their roles. Kathleen Benner does a decent job, though I don't believe it's up to what she delivered in Running on Empty Dreams, but James Ray has an absolute blast. Out of the eight James Ray movies that I've reviewed thus far, this is surely my favourite of his roles because he's so clearly acting with relish. He does try for a sort of Clint Eastwood voice early on, which soon lapses, but for a character so dedicated to death he's stunningly alive. He's having more fun than almost anyone I know and he's consistently doing it throughout the entire movie, even when his captive is trying to kill him. He's so infuriatingly happy that we want to kill him too, but it makes him so much fun to watch. Ironically, my next favourite of his roles is probably Death Investigator Theodore Davis in The Last Responders, almost the exact opposite to this.

The most obvious problems stem from the lack of budget, which drives its restrictions. The vast majority of the picture unfolds on one property, for a start, which doesn't help the lack of variety in the script. The cast is also notably limited, with Ray and Benner fleshing out most of the running time on their own but with a little held back for Michael Harrelson as Valora's grandpa, who long ago set her on the path she needs to get out of this situation and who's searching for her now. Only two other actors get more than glimpse time: Ashley Francis as the younger Valora and Greg Joseph as Guy, a friend of the family who's aiding in the search for her. Clearly there was no budget left for aging make up, as Harrelson looks no different in the present day scenes as he does at least a decade earlier. There's a pacing issue too, as things start to slow around the middle of the film and, once we realise the change, we feel them slowing even more. It doesn't help either that the ending is flubbed in a way that's so easy to fix but wasn't.

So there wasn't any money for anything flash; that means that the crew had to step up and do as much as they could with what they had and the results are a mixed bag. The writing is the most schizophrenic, because it might just be the best and the worst. The best is surely James Ray's dialogue, because it kept raising smiles on my face throughout the movie, from the tough catchphrases to his attempts to keep a 'second date' going when his captive won't eat. 'Don't make me do the choo choo!' he grins at her and I couldn't help but grin too. The worst is the lack of variety and, frankly, the lack of much of anything new happening throughout the film. It's set up quickly and well, but pretty much stays in the same place for eighty minutes, relying on Ray's charisma to keep us going. I do like what Alexandria does, unlike those IMDb reviewers, but there's maybe 45 minutes of material here that take 90 minutes to unfold. Maybe a bigger budget would have helped her, but I feel she could have shaken it up more without that help.

What she tries to do is let the characters build. There's no mystery here at all, as we discover that Ridley Thompson has kidnapped Valora Smith after setting up a meeting with her on a dating site. We don't see any of this as there wasn't the budget for it, but we do wonder why a young single lady would choose to drive out to a date's home in the Apache Junction countryside. He quickly explains that she's not the first but she is the first that he's actually sat down and talked with, perhaps because he offers each date the opportunity to run and the rest took it, only to be promptly shot down by his hunting rifle. Valora lost her parents at a young age, so was brought up by her grandpa who taught her never to run, to always stand and fight instead. She's the first to do so, which makes her special in this psychopath's eyes. He's clearly in love with her, so she uses that fact as leverage but she's rather inept at doing so. I wonder why she's not given more initiative, because it really hurts Valora as a sympathetic character.

If anything we find a little more sympathy for Ridley, which is strange to say because we're hardly in tune with his cause. It's just that he's having contagious fun and he does at least have a consistent and mostly believable flaw, which is that, while he can shoot people dead all day long, he can't actually touch a body without needing to cleanse himself afterwards. There's no explanation given for this at all, which is weird, but it is at least freaky enough to help his character. For a character we like, there's only one choice, and again it isn't Valora. It's her grandpa, who Michael Harrelson endows with a comforting voice that makes him feel like a sort of John Wayne next door. He broadcasts the feeling of being safe like radio waves, all the while teaching the young Valora how to actually be safe, which does make us wonder why she really needs those lessons and why she's forgotten so much of what he taught her by the time that they seem important again. That's all on her though, as he makes it seem like a gimme.

If Alexandria's writing is schizophrenic, offering much that's good but much that's bad too, it's mimicked a little by the rest of the crew, which includes a couple of major names in the local scene; Kevin R Phipps was the first assistant director and Webb Pickersgill shot and edited the film. There are points where the latter shines with both hats, such as a chase scene early on. Valora finds an axe, but her captor sees her and hunts her down. Pickersgill manages to keep on her for the most part, while never losing track of his movements; it's cleverly done. Unfortunately his introduction of shakycam for one scene later on acts as a counter, because it wasn't needed at all. On the editing front, he does reasonably well with the way he gradually weaves the flashbacks tighter to the present, but they're a necessary evil in this film and not a highlight. It would have been impossible for Alexandria to set up what she needed without them, but for the most part, they're just screen time without James Ray laughing at something inappropriate.

At the end of the day, he's the big winner here. For a psychopathic lunatic who has killed some 43 people before he captures Valora and takes care of a few more afterwards, Ray doesn't go overboard. Instead of playing up the lunacy, he plays up the normality, to the degree that he remains disturbingly normal even in the face of violence, intransigence or understandable hate. He's a strong character without much of a grounding who succeeds much more through Ray's portrayal than Alexandria's writing. Try to write down what he actually is and you'll end up with Ray's dialogue, grins and inappropriately cheerful disposition, little else. This is a few rungs up the ladder on every front from Star Quest: The Odyssey, Bonnell's other directorial effort of 2009, and it's a good deal more consistent than Running on Empty Dreams, on which he was an assistant director and both Ray and Benner were in the cast, the latter as a strong lead. It still isn't a great picture but at least it's fun, which Star Quest: The Odyssey emphatically wasn't.

Duel at the Mound (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Hanelin, Jonathan Medina, Holly Nordquist, Michelle Palermo, Eric Almassy, Stacie Stocker, Kyle Gerkin, Amy Searcy, Colleen Hartnett, Shellie Ulrich, James Leatherman, Kristi Lawrence, Gus Edwards, Keylor Leigh and John Miller

With an enviable number of short films, not to mention three features behind them, it's hardly surprising to find that Running Wild's fourth feature, Duel at the Mound, boasts a highly recognisable cast. There are fifteen names given special attention during the end credits and fourteen of them are regular faces, led by Michael Hanelin and Jonathan Medina as the two former semi-pro baseball players whose duel of the title helps keep them sane in lives otherwise full of pain and heartbreak. Hanelin is Walt and Medina is Mel and the two lead otherwise separate lives, never once meeting up for a beer or to just reminisce on old times. Perhaps that's because baseball may have given them everything, but it also took it all away again. Walt lost his family to the game, the film opening with his divorce and continuing with his struggle to keep his daughter close. We're never told why Mel quit, but it's surely something similar and he soon loses a girlfriend to the ongoing duel. She thinks he's cheating on her, but he's just facing down Walt.

Bizarrely, even though they don't talk to each other, Walt and Mel are each other's closest friends, which realisation explains much. 'I don't have any friends,' Walt tells his therapist. Well, except an 'old baseball acquaintance'. They communicate through baseballs, which they leave at each other's houses with dates and places written on them, and they connect through baseball, silently playing out their duel. While I'm English and thus don't understand baseball in the slightest, their pain is universal. It's troubling to watch people clearly driven by the one thing they're trying desperately to stop being part of their lives. Medina has the edge because Mel is notably less in control. He's completely driven by an all-consuming passion that he's failing to quench; he suffers when not playing and the game just won't let him be. Walt is able to suppress it better but it's still there. It's notable how close this pair are without knowing a thing about each other; their first real interaction is particularly telling for a number of reasons.

The fifteenth name in the credits belongs to Holly Nordquist, who plays Walt's daughter, Chloe, and does a respectable job of doing so in what is the most substantial role behind the leads. She's not completely new to Running Wild, having appeared in a 52 Films in 52 Weeks short, James Joyce's After the Race, and she establishes herself well here, sparring capably with Michael Hanelin, but she's not one of the quickly recognisable faces that populate the rest of the supporting cast. For instance, Walt's ex is Stacie Stocker and his therapist is Amy Searcy. The romantic connection Walt almost finds is with Colleen Hartnett and, of course, they don't quite connect as the moment Hanelin and Hartnett find a screen relationship that might actually work, the apocalypse will surely be upon us. The girlfriend Mel loses is Shellie Ulrich and, after a date with Kristi Lawrence, he finds Michelle Palermo. He works for Eric Almassy and he encounters a drunken Kyle Gerkin in a bar. Elsewhere, we find John Miller, James Leatherman and Michael Coleman.

These actors are here because they're quintessentially reliable. They're all immediately notable in their supporting slots and they're all capable in their roles, but few have substantial parts. While Stocker has the most emotional scenes, it's Almassy who makes the most of his role. Mel has become a high school teacher and though he's apparently good at it, it isn't what drives him and so he starts to let his life get to his performance. Almassy could easily fire him, but he googled his new employee and discovered his previous life, so everything he says has two layers: the spoken and the unspoken, which is flavoured by the school team that's in sore need of someone who knows what he's doing. He's the best of the bunch here, but the most obvious is Kyle Gerkin, partly because he has a decent amount of screen time late in the movie but mostly because he spends much of it drunk, including a memorable scene where he gets to drunkenly substitute for Walt in the duel. He's just a baseball fan; he doesn't understand.

I've both been looking forward and not looking forward to Duel in the Mound. I'm a fan of many of these actors and relish the opportunity to see them in a feature, but I'm not a fan either of baseball or movies that revolve around sports, something that's shaping a future Apocalypse Later book. I have a great deal of background with Running Wild Films, of course, as I've spent two years opening up each month with a review of one of their shorts; I'm now working through their 52 Films in 52 Weeks in 52 weeks of my own. I've reviewed each of their previous features and have been eagerly waiting the great one which I know will come from them but has been stubbornly refusing to show up thus far. I've long preferred their zero budget debut, The Big Something, to the more ambitious features that followed it, The Detective's Lover and The Men Who Robbed the Bank. I think I prefer it to this too, for its quirky humour and its astounding soundtrack, but there's no disputing that this is the best of the four, in front of and behind the camera.

The biggest flaw early on is probably rooted in the editing, as each scene feels crafted more like a short film than part of a feature. They're all complete vignettes in themselves, pieced together with care, and they might benefit from being looser and flowing less deliberately. However, they all benefit from strong cinematography and sense of place, underpinned by a good score and they still draw us in. Also notable in the early scenes is the fact that almost everything is negative, perhaps inevitably given how the story has to grow with depressed characters coming out of bad situations and struggling to find a way to turn them into good ones. It's the montage scene of Walt and Mel on the pitch that temporarily lifts us up out of their depression as much as them and tells us that there is indeed some positive in the picture. It may sound odd from me, but perhaps there should have been another of these early on to temper how down these two have become. It takes a while for the negative to bleed into positive and characters to engage.

The film engages more as it moves on, of course, and we learn more about these two characters. Hanelin is the more obvious for a while, as he's working hard on finding a life after baseball. He's working through the exams he needs for a career in medicine, working on his relationship with his daughter (who doesn't seem to be returning the sentiment) and working in therapy to figure out how to make it all, well, work. It might sound like we ought to be behind his admirable effort, but he's a hard man to like because he's so relentlessly lonely. 'I'm just not looking right now,' he tells a fellow student who clearly wants him. There's a superbly shot scene where he walks past her without acknowledgement, right through the hospital car park to be on the mound in the rain. While his story arc is one well worth following, he does get a little bit of a get out of jail free card at the end, because his subplot turns into a longer version of Shine Like Gold. I wonder if he would have made it out without that, down the tougher road that he was following.

Gradually, Hanelin gives up the floor to Medina, who is initially less interesting. For a while, he's the other guy in the duel and little more, his background less explored and his motivations less understood. There's worthy material in the school scenes but the effort he's making is all internal, not as quantifiable as what Walt is doing. Yet Medina, always so fantastic at being moody, brings real danger to the picture when his personal struggle starts to really falter. In a way, he gets a get out of jail free card too, but, unlike Walt's, it wasn't there all along waiting to be found and it isn't as easy for him to accept. Walt's story is over and done with by the time the end credits roll, but Mel's isn't. He might have a way out but he still has to take it and it's still not going to be an easy task for him. I should add that this aids the film to no small degree because it ends on a high note. We leave not only with Medina's thunderstorm of a performance but with the sun finally starting to shine through between the clouds. He absolutely rocks the end of this picture.

Of course, while it belongs to Medina, a lot of people rocked the end of this picture, not least because I'm utterly unaffacted by the national sport of the United States yet thoroughly enjoyed this part of the movie which revolves around it. Sure, the rendition of the national anthem backed by stock footage is overdoing the sentiment to no small degree, but all four characters playing the film out are on fire at this point and Travis Mills, who wrote and directed Duel on the Mound, gifts them with really good material to work with. The trio of short baseball films which Mills adapted from stories by Ring Lardner for 52 Films in 52 Weeks are some of my favourites in that project, not least because they're less about baseball and more about passion. This is no different, baseball being something of a MacGuffin because the film is really all about people struggling with their passion and how to let it co-exist amidst the rest of their lives. At a mere 68 minutes, this could have been a lot more, but it bodes well for Durant's Never Closes, coming soon.

Duel at the Mound has two nights left on the big screen at Pollack Tempe Cinemas this Friday and Saturday (7th and 8th November, 2014) at 9.30pm.

Exit to Hell (2013)

Director: Robert Conway
Stars: Kane Hodder, Tiffany Shepis, Rena Riffel, Dustin James, Owen Conway, Taryn Maxximillian Dafoe, Jason Spisak and Dan Higgins

I first saw Exit to Hell under the title of Sickle and I'm in two minds as to the change. Sure, Sickle makes it sound like a routine slasher movie, when there is a little bit more going on here, but Exit to Hell is more of a spoiler than a clarification. If the title is going to bring it that far out into the open, then I presume I can safely highlight that when folk turn off old 69 in Arizona and find themselves in the professionally isolated backwoods town of Red Stone, they're not quite entering the realm of the usual cannibal hick murderers; this place is a little more on the supernatural side. In Sickle, we're supposed to gradually realise that only bad people manage to lose the main road and take the same mysterious turn that none seem to notice, then wonder about what that really means. If it isn't literally Red Stone, a suggestive name to begin with, are they in Hell, Purgatory or just some cursed zone that feeds on dark souls? In a film called Exit to Hell, of course, it's frickin' obvious, even if none of them die until they get there. I liked the ambiguity more.

There's not a heck of a lot of ambiguity anywhere else in the film, because writer/director Robert Conway knows exactly what he wants to throw on the screen and he can't be accused of false advertising. This is neo-grindhouse pulp, painted in that modern style that grindhouse never really was but we imagine that we remember. Of course, the music is newer and heavier and the editing, especially during the opening credits sequence, is MTV ADD. After that, the artificial aging is predominantly restricted to wild transition effects; there are a lot of them throughout but they're not omnipresent. Instead we're given reminders of that seventies vibe in changes to the colour saturation levels and noticeable rear projection, not bad per se but deliberately noticeable. Most of all, the subject matter continually plays out in the neo-grindhouse style, full of drugs, gore and freakiness. It's not as stylised as Rodriguez, as cool as Tarantino or as nasty as Zombie, but it plays well to its budget. This is the sort of VHS you'd have gladly rented in 1985.

Perhaps my memory is playing up, but watching Exit to Hell on Netflix, I found it slightly different to what I remembered of Sickle, which screened with a Q&A at Phoenix Comicon last year. I remembered the odd footage from Conway's gore short, Necro Wars, that kicks in before the movie proper as a wild extension to the various production company idents, but I didn't remember there being quite so much of it. All told, we surely see most of that ten minute short dotted throughout the movie, which isn't good given that the running time is a brief 81 minutes. Knock out Necro Wars and the credits and the picture proper clocks in around the 70 minute mark, hardly a substantial piece. The thing is that I remember more of it from when it was called Sickle, with certain key scenes feeling a little less substantial here and the pace a little more pepped up. Didn't Sheriff Sickle get to use the enhancements on his police car bonnet or was I dreaming at the end of a long Comicon day? Certainly this could easily benefit from more flesh on its bones.

The good news is that the lack of real substance is the biggest flaw of the movie. Conway nails the style he wanted far better and more consistently than various other local filmmakers working with similarly low budgets. The most obvious comparisons are to Brian Skiba's more prominent recent neo-grindhouse films which share many of the same cast, such as Blood Moon Rising and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge. There's more going on in the former and more big names in the latter, but Exit to Hell plays out better than either of them, because it's consistent to itself and Conway hides the budget better. He achieves that by finding a strong location, killing off his characters liberally and stripping away the fat. Yes, he needed more meat on his bones, but at least he got rid of the fat. Those two Skiba films may well be more substantial meals than Conway's, but their fat content is enough to choke a whole bundle of arteries. This one doesn't have any room for distractions.

The story is pretty simple. A gang of thieves are robbing strip clubs and their latest target is Baby Dolls in Phoenix. Well, that's what the sign says, even if the DJ calls it the Pink Pussy. Their approach is to infiltrate a place and then wait for their moment to strike. Here, they've become Travis the DJ, Tasha the bartender, Jenna the stripper and Randy the customer, and their moment arrives in notably bloody fashion as Randy has a temper and the place promptly turns into a bloodbath, what the news dubs the Silicone Slaughter. Off they drive through the night to the border, but Randy lands them in Red Stone instead. We know what happens in Red Stone, because we've already followed a couple of opportunistic killers there in the form of a bug eyed Jose Rosete and a coked up Shane Dean. Cheno and Pablo really aren't bright but holding up Mordin's gas station just as Sheriff Sickle walks in turns out to be a particularly dumb move. The cop demonstrates why his name is appropriate and we're down a couple of talented local names.

Fortunately there are more to come. The leader of the thieves is Dustin Leighton, who I last saw in a short film, Kerry and Angie, but was also the lead in Conway's debut feature, Redemption: A Mile from Hell. The most prominent of the thieves turns out to be Jenna, played by scream queen Tiffany Shepis, who doesn't scream much here because she's clearly too strong to be a stereotypical victim, even while being chased down by Sheriff Sickle. Boris, who ran the strip club, is Michael Harrelson delivering a pretty good Russian accent. Even better is Jason Spisak as his boss, Yakov, a ruthless Russian crime lord who chases down the thieves and naturally ends up in Red Stone too. Spisak has appeared in a number of Arizona horror flicks, from Piranha to Locker 13, but he's far better known as a voice actor, probably why I first experienced his work as a narrator in Avé Maria. Shane Stevens gives a good showing in the coda and the late Noah Todd philosophises well while feeding his snake. As he died in 2010, this film obviously took a while in post.

With so many actors in such a short running time, it shouldn't be surprising that many of them get little to do. I haven't even mentioned Kevin Tye, who gets killed off so quickly that he hasn't even made it onto the film's IMDb page. Stevens is there for a very specific reason so his part is just right, but Tye, Rosete, Dean, Harrelson, Todd, even Leighton, all deserve a little more screen time. At least they are very much supporting actors here, but even the more prominent names get surprisingly little to do. It's Shepis who gets the most screen time but she gets little to do with it, at least kicking off with a topless dance routine and finding her way quickly into peril and out of it. She isn't top billed though, that honour given to Kane Hodder as Sheriff Sickle, presiding over all the overtly gratuitous gore on show. The title change doesn't do him any justice, as much of the brooding presence he had in the title role is lost as he becomes just another character. Like most of the cast, he does what he's asked but should have had more to do.

There are two other prominent actors in the same boat. Rena Riffel is another actor brought in from out of state, but she's particularly sidelined, even if she gets an exotic dance of her own. As Penny, she's tasked with little more than playing a stereotypically dumb blonde stripper who inadvertently puts Yakov on the trail of the thieves. The other is Dan Higgins, who thankfully succeeds where most of these actors failed, by stamping his presence on the film so emphatically that he's who I remember most when I think about it. That's a notable accomplishment when the lead is a force of nature and both Shepis and Riffel deliver pole dances, but his role is as a backwoods gas station owner. He's consistently note perfect, but his real scene to shine is the one when Yakov walks in and asks how he can find the thieves who are clearly here in town. It's a wonderful scene, a great adaptation of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, because Mordin defies Yakov in ways he never imagined. Both actors ought to win, but Higgins takes it.

That's the best scene in the film, even if, like most of the rest, it deserved to run longer. Others are much more exploitative, outrageous and/or gruesome, but Conway lets loose with the gore far more than any of the other elements he plays with. The nudity is restricted to early scenes and sex is rarely suggested. The cool angle to neo-grindhouse isn't prominent in the dialogue, which is relatively routine and mostly shorn of bad eighties puns, or the enhancements to the bonnet of Sheriff Sickle's car, which are wasted in this cut, even if they were given a use in my memory of the one I saw at Phoenix Comicon. Esther Goodstein deserves a mention as Sickle's wife, even if her cool role is restricted so far as to be a prop, yet another reminder that everything in this film is strong and consistent but used too sparsely. It would be better if the Necro Wars footage was stripped and every character and every scene bulked up so that this would run ninety or even a hundred minutes. As it is, it's a promise rather than a delivery.

Jane Doe (2006)

Director: Jane Fendelman
Star: Jane Fendelman

Jane Doe is rather unlike any movie I've seen before and that plays in its favour. I don't know quite what I expected going in but I guess it was some combination of the words, 'cancer' and 'documentary'. In 2005, Jane Fendelman was diagnosed with grade three breast cancer, its most aggressive form, and that meant a 40% chance of survival. In other words, it was likely that she was going to die. That's hardly the best of news at any time but it also served as a double red underline to the annus horribilis that was her 2004, in which her father had died, she'd suffered a miscarriage and her husband had left her for a friend. At this point, you might expect that the arrival of aggressive cancer and a 60% chance of death might prompt a submission, where Jane would give up, roll over and let death take the bad times away. She emphatically did not do that. She made this film instead. 'I'm a caterpillar and I'm going into a cocoon,' she explains. 'In seven months I'm going to come out with wings... everything I think and feel will be different.'

And above all, that's what this film is: a document of one person's surprising reaction to imminent death, in which she struggles through the obvious knowledge that cancer is the big, bad bogeyman who scares the crap out of a lot of people to the realisation that it's a heck of a lot more than that. Perhaps the most quotable film I've ever watched, the most important line comes when Jane suggests that, 'Maybe cancer is such a gift because it strips away everything you thought you were.' It's an unorthodox approach but a telling one, because Jane is one of the most alive people I know. I didn't know her in 2005, when she went through this, or in 2006, when she released this video diary of that time, but I know her now and it would be difficult to think of anyone with more drive. The reasons why are the building blocks of this film, as we don't really watch her struggle with cancer, instead we watch her struggle with what it means: to her, to her life and to the world around her. And she ends up realising that she's a butterfly.

If that doesn't make a lot of sense, it's because Jane Doe is less of a story and more of an immersion into the mind of someone reevaluating who she is, a sort of braindump that I might describe as chemo addled if only it didn't contain so much fundamental insight. In fact it's much easier to explain what the film isn't than what it is. It isn't a medical journey, for a start, because cancer isn't the focus here, it's far more of a MacGuffin, given that everything in this film revolves around it but it doesn't do anything (from our point of view) except serve as a catalyst for Jane's change. We do meet a doctor but he provides little medical detail and Jane isn't able to add much either; attempting to explain why steroids are being added to her chemotherapy cocktail, she only manages, 'It protects you or does something.' This is not going to help anyone learn what cancer is or what it does to the human body. The closest it gets is to hammer home the point that chemotherapy makes your hair drop out, hardly news at eleven.

It's not even a traditional video diary, of the sort that chronicles a journey through treatment. There isn't much treatment, at least in the film, because primarily we're focused on Jane's mind more than her body. There are few points where anything directly leads to anything else, so there's no real progression on the medical side. In fact, we have little idea of time, tracking it mostly through the various stages of hair loss. This is because Jane didn't edit down her 150 hours of footage chronologically, attempting more to catch the progression of her inner thoughts. This ends up highly appropriate because it echoes how epiphanies didn't arrive at once, they were gradual realisations, piecing together bits from here and there to form an idea and the ideas to grow into a mindset. It's quite clear that Jane is rarely completely lucid, the disease hitting her hard and the chemotherapy treatments messing with her head. It means that her narrative is a rambling thing but, like her thoughts, it gradually coalesces into a big picture.

The rambling is only one reason why it's a difficult film to watch. There are many moments where we drift away, but never for the usual reasons. I often drift away from the screen while watching movies but, most of the time, it's because they're boring and I eventually realise that I'm not watching any more and return to figure out what I missed and why I should care. Here, it's never boredom that made me drift. There are moments that are uncomfortable, emotional, private, repetitive, rambling, each of which shifted my eyes away but never fully and never for more than just moments. There's too much here that's magnetic, real, true, meaningful, wise. If some moments made me look away, others refused to let me blink. Unlike most documentaries, where what we're shown builds to a point, the points here leap out of nowhere when we least expect them. One moment, Jane is rambling again, unable to form a coherent sentence, and then she's blistering out entire paragraphs of directly quotable material.

And those scenes, if such a word can be applied to a movie where almost all we see is Jane's face talking into a video camera, are the best ones, because they're immense moments. They emphasise that behind the woman struggling with pain and disease, there's a mind that's connecting dots to realise vast truths and finding a way to give them a voice through the cocktail of drugs in her system. There's a much more traditional documentary moment later in the film, where Jane takes off a scary pink wig to show her mum her bald head for the first time and she leans over and kisses it. It's an irresistible moment, the sort that trailers were designed to highlight, but it's out of place here because it's part of a sequence that involves other people. It's a moment for the video diary that this isn't rather than the video diary that this is. Every time the camera widens its scope to introduce Jane's mother or sister, doctor or hairdresser, it leaves the movie where Jane tells us secret truths and becomes a lesser, more traditional documentary.

Those moments mostly serve to highlight where the real value is here, which is in Jane talking directly at us through the fourth wall. She's so blissfully open and honest that it's sometimes difficult to take, feeling like we're intruding on her privacy, but it's clearly important for her to let everything out, to unburden her mind as she searches for who she really is. There are points where she looks great and points where she really doesn't. There are points where she's bouncy, surely buoyed by energy gifted by the steroids in her chemo drugs, and points where she's subdued, lost, wiped out. There are points where the reasons to go on are clearly there in the forefront of her mind and points where they're gone, hiding beyond her reach. All these serve as jigsaw pieces that she gradually connects as the film runs on, building a picture of the butterfly which she'll become. What there aren't are points where she's embarrassed. 'I can't remember the last time I was embarrassed,' she says late in the film. It exists because of that as much as cancer.

It's inevitably a tough picture, because this isn't light hearted subject matter and because of the lack of conventional progression. What's hilarious is how well it plays technically. I may know Jane because she's a strong fixture, a force of nature even, in the local film scene, but she wasn't in 2005 because that side of her was one of many that found their way out after her metamorphosis. She shot this on a home video camera, mostly through simply sitting in front of it but occasionally by hauling it out with her too. It's not difficult to notice that she was the entire crew for most of the film, with the addition of a cameraman only when she's really out wandering. Yet, amazingly, we can hear everything she says, with less background noise than half the entries to local film challenges this year. We can see everything we need to, however sucky the camerawork and the lighting. Jane may not have much of a grasp of what day it is throughout, but she still provides better sound than many people with actual sound equipment. That's hilarious.

It's also ironic because it's much less important here than it would be in most films. It doesn't matter how bad the lighting is, because all we need to do is to see Jane as she pours out her thoughts and lets us in on the moments that matter to her as she goes through this journey. Sometimes those are as apparently meaningless as singing along to music, a hairdresser praying for her or her dog licking her face, but they clearly mean as much to her as more serious moments like the discovery that the focus on lumps in her left breast hid the fact that there's a lump in her right one too. The film is that personal and ultimately it's precisely why it succeeds. We begin the film knowing nothing but 'cancer' but we come out of it knowing Jane, because people are bigger than disease, especially when they're as strong and open to reinvention as she is. I've reviewed her in short films (and a play) portraying a variety of roles, but all of them came after the most important role she's ever had to play: herself.

She also provides her best lines, enough that they could easily be compiled into a short volume of truth. I'll settle for a paragraph, and skip over trite (if true) ones like, 'I'm happy that I'm alive' and the first line in the film, 'This is the story of the healing of a broken heart.' The substantial lines come later. 'I feel like I can do anything now,' she suggests in the depths of treatment. 'Anybody can do anything and it's really easy.' You just have to choose to do it. She tears up less facing death than losing her hair, but it's really all about change: 'I keep on being scared to go to sleep because I don't know who I'll be when I wake up.' Eventually she embraces being bald, because each step in the process makes it more real. 'When it's not real, it's like fighting a ghost,' she says. 'If I'm going to have cancer, I want to have the full experience.' These aren't the lines of Lifetime movies of the week, they're the lines of someone going into her cocoon, being addled by chemo drugs, finding her own personal truth and coming out a butterfly.

Important sources:
Niki D'Andrea - Jane Doe: A Phoenix Woman's Battle with Breast Cancer Becomes an International Documentary Success at the Phoenix New Times Blogs (2008).

Necromentia (2009)

Director: Pearry Teo
Stars: Chad Grimes, Layton Matthews, Santiago Craig, Zelieann Rivera, Zach Cumer and Cole Braxton

Here's a feature that I've been aching to rewatch because, I have to confess, I slept through much of it at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2009. I've fought sleep often at film festivals, where I'm in front of a screen for fifteen hours a day and talking outside for much of the rest, but this is the only time I really succumbed and, finally watching Necromentia afresh, I understand why. This is not a boring movie, by any means, and the sheer freakiness of it has stayed with me; even walking out of the theatre, I knew that this was a film I wanted to watch properly. Yet it's a hallucinatory dream of a picture that unfolds out of order and refuses to let us engage with it directly, preferring us to sit back and let it infiltrate all of our senses at once. Maybe I wasn't asleep, I was in a trance state. Even watching awake, it's tough to grasp everything that's going on until the end credits roll and then it's worth a discussion afterwards to make sure we got it all. I'm still unsure of a few details, but it won't be a hardship to revisit it once more.

Clearly, Pearry Teo wanted to deluge us with nightmarish hallucinations, a more consistent vision of what Clive Barker's work could have been in Hellraiser, if eventually a safer one too. He begins immediately, as the opening credits unfold in a gothic font to the accompaniment of enticing and often forbidden imagery and agreeably layered sound. As the film proper begins, we see much of the same with further montages blistered at us with editing that's so fast that it comes close to shifting into subliminals. Merely blink and you'll miss things you won't see again. The visuals are notably edited in synchronisation with the music, emphasising the experience of it all over the detail. We're shown a monster immediately, flashing in and out so we can't quite take everything in at once, just some conglomeration of muscles, chains and bulk. A man wakes up in an industrial setting, his back covered in bloody symbols, to be harangued by a weird monochrome figure in a gas mask and vaguely medical antique cagework.

We aren't introduced to this strange figure, but the man is Hagen, initially called to by a whispering girl's voice but then harangued in a barrage of words which echo the visual montages, spoken like a demonic throat singer in tones that are both deep and high pitched, as if they're being issued from more than one mouth. 'Elizabeth is dead,' he's informed. 'You were given a choice.' 'Tormented for all eternity.' 'Instead you chose Hell.' By the time we reach, 'You will be punished,' we're shown only blackness. Then we back up to see some of why he's here. Hagen is a strange one too, talking soothingly to a corpse in a bathtub. His glasses are cracked and taped; she has a rictus grin and her hair is starting to fall out. He bathes her anyway and waits patiently for her to return to him. She promised to come back from death, apparently, so only time sits between them now and with it, a routine of 'daily maintenance' to ensure that when she does return, it's as comfortably as possible. Oh yeah, he's more than a few cards short of a full deck.

Now, if this scene wasn't freaky enough, there's a lot going on here to emphasise to us how freaky it's all supposed to be. For a start, it unfolds with a curious colour palette, more yellow and green than it should but with that gangrenous feel somehow appropriate. The metal framework in which he encases her could easily be a home made torture device as much as an amalgam of medical equipment. The camera is an ever-moving thing, rarely staying still even when it's static, as if there's something alive in the air around them. Playing in the background, a little deeper than we expect, is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but it sounds more like a music box than a piano and perhaps not entirely at the right speed. Even Hagen, the only active character on screen, squints continually through the attachments that hide his full face and talks his crazy talk in a really quiet, clearly obsessive, voice. The set design here is magnificent and the choices on the technical side are no less, everything tilting us just away from the familiar.

You'll notice that I haven't said anything about the story yet and that's for a very good reason. We really don't have much idea what the story is until at least two thirds of the way into the movie. For now, Teo is content with drenching us in weirdness until the freaky tone that pervades the film is firmly established, enough that we occasionally wonder if it's about to escape it into reality. It's by far the greatest success of the film, because it's notably woven out of each of the elements that might contribute: the sound and the score (which here are often indistinguishable); the camerawork, framing and colour palette; the sets and the props that fill them; the way that everything normal in the script is translated instead into fetish or deviant equivalents; and the effects work, which feels entirely practical and analogue, right down to body painting as minimalist costuming. Everything is designed very carefully so that we recognise each detail that then grows into something else, something outlandish and surreal. We can bathe in it.

As to the story, it's almost impossible to detail any of it without venturing into spoiler territory, because it revolves around four different people, possibly five, who are connected in ways that we don't initially see, but whose connections are eventually revealed. For the most part, the story unfolds backwards, so that if I tell you the basics, which is doable in as few as a couple of lines, it will bypass that process of discovery and affect how you're supposed to experience it. Let me introduce the characters as you'll meet them, so you can attempt to figure it out anyway. Hagen is one, of course, as is the corpse which he's preserving in such a creepily loving manner. We have no idea what he does, but he might be the janitor for a barber's shop. We have no idea what she does either, but she's the Elizabeth we were told about in the first scene with the grey painted gas masked throat singer dude. The other two key players are Morbius and Travis, with the fifth being Travis's little brother, Thomas, who may or may not be even more important still.

We meet Travis early in the film, so there's no spoiler there. He comes to see Hagen, who he shaves with a straight razor forcefully. He's been watching him and what he does with the corpse, so has a proposition for him, one that could bring Elizabeth back to him. He has maps to the borders of the other side; he can find the doors, but he needs a key to get through them and that's where Hagen comes in. As Travis, Chad Grimes is tasked with grounding the acting side of the film. We may have met Hagen first, but he's more of a pawn than a first rank piece; while Hagen is best when he's under someone else's thumb, the actor playing him, Santiago Craig, is best when he isn't, because he can believably veer away from reality into his own freaky mindset. Travis is a more interesting character, because he's dominant over some but the plaything of others. Grimes does well in both aspects, carving people up for a living, caring for his little brother or being talked into things within hallucinations while high on ketamine.

I won't say what part Morbius has to play, but Layton Matthews puts on a magnetic show in this film, both in costume and out of it. If Grimes often resembles Chuck Norris, partly through his facial hair and partly through his demeanour, Matthews more obviously channels Alexander Skarsgård, if you can imagine him as an angel. All the actors deliver here, except Zelieann Rivera, who looks and moves great, but whose delivery is terrible. Fortunately she has the smallest part to play of the key characters, so it's not hard to look past that. Zach Cumer has the toughest role to play as Thomas, a mentally retarded young man who is confined to a wheelchair and contemplates suicide with the assistance of The Mr Skinny Show, which I assume isn't on the weird television that can't tune in visuals but is conjured up instead out of his broken brain. Whichever, the half giant pig, half sumo wrestler who's wrapped in barbed wire and plays carnival music is a genius creation, a notch up the freaky scale from the rest of the freakiness in this movie.

I'm tempted to say that the story is a downside, not because it's bad but because it's given a much lower level of importance than the feel. I adored the feel, but wanted the story to have a little more substance and a little less obscurity. The picture could still function as a dark hallucinatory experience even with an underlying story that makes complete sense or reveals more of itself earlier in the running time. I did like the way that some of the freakiest settings weren't really explained, such as Travis's day job. I've no idea how he'd detail his job description, but it's edgy enough to fit the story and the aesthetic both. When he brings in a babysitter to keep Thomas from finding a way to commit suicide while he's working, he finds another freak who just wants to read his Abasiophilia magazine. Given that abasiophilia is a fascination, often a sexual one, for people with physical disablities, and that the issue of the magazine the babysitter brings is the wheelchair fetish issue, he's hardly a great choice. I like that this is left in the background.

What I would say is a downside is the lack of follow through. Writer Stephanie Joyce fleshes out a story by Teo with panache, presumably responsible for the majority of the agreeable deviancy that populates this picture. However, while Teo conjures up an aesthetic to match that deviancy, with the able assistance of Timothy Andrew Edwards (music), Darin Meyer (cinematography), Damian Drago (editing), Clifton Dance (production design) and Catherine Joyce (art direction), among others, he doesn't seem willing to follow through and show it. For a picture so relentlessly outré, we see a lot less of it than we might think, much of it conjured up through suggestion and clever filmmaking rather than through actually putting it on the screen. The abasiophilia is kept just a freaky background detail just as Hagen's necrophilia is restricted to dialogue, The gorgeous cenobite-inspired monster does little and the gore effects aren't used remotely as often as our minds might remember.

And I wonder why. If Joyce and Teo wanted to be this edgy, why would they stay this polite about it? That to me is the biggest mistake of the film. If they'd have shown everything that they raise, this ought to be a notable cult hit, potentially a thing of legend in underground cinema. Certainly I've never seen a movie with such a consistently out there aesthetic. Hellraiser gets there at points, such as the design of the box and the cenobites (and the soundtrack by Coil that Barker wanted but wasn't used), but it isn't remotely as consistent with its look and feel. It talks about a journey to Hell, while Necromentia firmly suggests we were there all along. In the end, one of its strongest points turns out to also be one of its weakest, that it remains a true horror movie, unwilling to pander to any potential audience and telling precisely the story it wants to tell. This is the one film I wish had lost its restraint and pulled out all the stops. With restraint, it's a powerful immersion into nightmare; without it, it could have been a milestone.

Running on Empty Dreams (2009)

Director: Nitara Lee Osbourne
Stars: Kathleen Benner, Rachel Owens, Jose Rosete, Sevan McBride and Wil Rillero

To switch things up a bit from the predominantly action and horror movies I've been covering thus far for my Arizona feature project, here's a lesbian drama from writer/director Nitara Lee Osbourne. Well, that's what most people seem to take it for, even though there's a lot more going on, and they either love it or hate it accordingly. Some hate the film because there's only one brief sex scene even though IMDb lists keywords for it like 'female nudity' and 'lesbian love', while some love it because there's only one brief sex scene but the two leading ladies, Kathleen Benner and Rachel Owens, are believably close anyway. The contrast between sex and love is only one of the themes that Osbourne riffs on throughout; there's much that's worthy of discussion here and she deserves a good deal of credit for attempting so much in one feature. Sadly, her drive to send a very particular message (this was based on true events) prompts much of the negative side as she refuses to let her characters collaborate with her.

While this is generally seen as a lesbian film, that isn't the first theme that's explored; initially, this aims to take a look at fresh starts. Sydney Harris moves to Phoenix in the summer of 2000 with her husband, Corey, a former marine now working as a private investigator, and their young son, Matt, who's too old to be starting kindergarten partway through the movie. Their new home isn't the only fresh start. They are clearly not connecting well as a couple and Sydney is fighting thyroid cancer, something that they can't afford and thus is putting even more strain on their relationship. The second theme looks at what makes a hero. Corey saved the life of a colleague under fire, someone who was overtly thankful even though he lost a leg in the process. Having been a hero once, he feels frustrated that he can't be one again, to save his own wife, because he simply doesn't earn enough. He does everything he can for her, but he does it out of a sense of duty rather than because she wants him to. He thinks it's what heroes do.

The third theme is the most awkward one because of where it leads; it's the difference between religion and spirituality, as personified in the leading ladies. Sydney takes Matt to the playground in the park and he gets squirted by another kid with a water gun. He's Tony Smith and Sydney immediately hits it off with his mum, Jane. Jane epitomises spirituality as she's a free spirit, much more bubbly than Sydney and with a powerful smile that's even more notable during the few scenes when it's absent. Sydney, however, has a Roman Catholic background, so everything in her life is wrapped up in guilt, something that particularly plagues her when she realises that she's fallen in love with Jane. Even now, the film isn't about lesbians, as Jane, her kids and her house, are merely ways that Sydney can escape what's behind her. Presumably she ties her cancer and her husband together in her mind, even though he's decent, loyal and caring, so she tries to run away from both. She runs away a lot, often literally to underline the point.

By this point we're starting to see the strong aspects and the weak ones. The actors are strong, all three of the major cast selling their characters and aiming to endow them with substantial depth. The themes are flowering and the picture has a lot of potential. There's also a really nice transition into flashback, as Corey slams his fist down on the table at home and we explode into a battle scene where he's being a hero. It's the technical side that also leans most into the negative though. The sound is the worst, with certain indoor scenes underpinned by background noise that sounds like someone's vacuuming in the next room or a jet engine is about to take off next door. Bizarrely, sound isn't a consistent problem, as it's mostly OK, just obviously poor in some scenes. The camerawork is generally capable, if never particularly ambitious, but the colours are too warm throughout. The music is consistently predictable too, especially in the more overtly religious scenes; it's also often overblown and intrusive.

It's as the film progresses that it starts to show its seams. The big themes are good ones but when any of the characters question, the script refuses to bend to give them the opportunity to grow. This often leads to odd scenes where they act out of character because that's where the themes require them to go. Some of this even leads to contradictions that shouldn't be there, because you can't force a square peg through a round hole. Little details are less problematic but more predictable. We can usually see where the script is going to go by keeping an eye on them because they're always telegraphing something. As characters say things, we can see the scene after next because that's obviously the only reason why they had those lines to begin with. These issues made me wonder about something else that could be seen as a positive or a negative; the way in which lines of dialogue obviously apply to more characters than those to whom they're delivered. I saw these as positive for about half the film but then started to switch to negative.

Another major flaw is the character of Geri Woods, not because Amber Ryan does a bad job because she does precisely what's required of her, but because a conscience should never have been this prominent. Corey's conscience is personified by John Duncan, the soldier whose life he saved, though one late scene hints that perhaps he didn't save him after all. If he's imaginary at this point, why should we assume he wasn't earlier? Similarly, if he's imaginary to Corey, perhaps Geri, Sydney's conscience, is imaginary too. She seems real though, an intrusive, obnoxious character who raises a lot of awkward questions. She's a lesbian who turned celibate for Jesus and adopts a mission to convince Sydney to do the same. Sydney's Roman Catholic and the priest to whom she gives her confession is worse than useless, so she's happy to both follow her heart and then feel notably guilty about it. Geri should have been a one scene character to make an important point, but she moves into the film like an unwelcome guest and refuses to leave.

I liked the setup of the first half hour and appreciated the promise that was offered by a thoughtful script. I was less impressed by the second, which creaked its way into the lesbian drama that Osbourne perhaps always wanted it to be. The third half hour was like the second but more so, because the characters were consistently screaming to develop while she held them back to tell the story she wanted. I was impressed most by the actors at this point, because they kept my interest even as they became progressively more forced. As Sydney, Kathleen Benner is an engaging lead, the pivot of the drama, but she's unable to find ways to sell many of the changes that she's going through as they don't all make sense. Jane should be a lot more than just Sydney's love interest and Rachel Owens seems up for it, but the script holds her back in that one role and can't stay consistent. Jose Rosete is especially hamstrung because he's given depth but no story arc, struggling at the end with the same things he was struggling with at the beginning.

And that's a real shame. While I appreciated the way in which none of the major characters come out of this as either the good guy or the bad guy, I didn't appreciate how they didn't come out as themselves, pun accidental but appropriate. I also didn't like how the film never seemed to end, or rather that it kept ending, with the last half hour full of places where the credits could have run, only for yet another scene to carry on regardless. This is a ninety minute story that takes two hours to unfold and shredding Geri's role down to match John Duncan's is only the beginning of what the editor should have excised from the picture. I was surprised to see that Webb Pickersgill edited, as this felt very much like what happens when a writer edits their own work. His cinematography is generally a lot better here than his editing, if he was left to his own devices. I have a feeling that he may not have been and, at the end of the day, he was stuck with the material that was shot and that focused on the script which refused to bend.

Osbourne's refusal to let her characters tell their stories as they saw fit shapes the whole picture and that sadly overwhelms many of the more ambitious things she attempted. Even as annoyed as I became with the inconsistencies, obstinance and out of character moments, I liked how she continued to weave those bigger themes through her script, most of them still worthy of praise at the end. The love vs sex angle is particularly well handled, one reason why the growing relationship between Sydney and Jane is so strong. Jane, with her two kids and many prior relationships, explains to Sydney that she's never made love, only had sex, something that helps their friendship grow into something more. The hero angle is deepened by a discovery late in the film that isn't surprising but is welcome anyway. Unfortunately it's weakened later still by scenes that shouldn't be there, especially a few of Corey's. The theme of religious guilt is the one that's resolved best (the conflict is abandoned) but it was bludgeoned into submission first.

It might be ironic that Sydney is a screenwriter with a BA from Yale and a subplot that has her submitting her work to studios to fulfil a dream or it might merely be projection on Osbourne's part. While the film is apparently based on a true story, I have no idea whether it's hers or not. It could be that she's telling her own story through abstraction into a character or she could just be adding little details to Sydney to build her character. Certainly she has a sense of humour, as at one point Sydney and Jane watch a short on TV called Romey and Jules. Sydney says she can write better than that and Jane agrees, but Osbourne was a script supervisor on that short earlier in her career. Given what she achieves with this script, I'm sure that she can write better than this too, but she needed fresh eyes on it and she needed another draught; this isn't what it should have ended up as. Most of all, she needed to collaborate with her characters, loosing them from the rigid framework she constructed and letting them go where they needed to.

.357: Six Bullets for Revenge (2013)

Director: Brian Skiba
Stars: Laurie Love, Brian Ames, Fred Williamson, William Katt, Tony Mandarich, Miss Krystle and Shane Dean

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

One Devil's Night in Detroit, something horrible happens. Eric Draven is murdered the night before he's to marry Shelly Webster, who is raped and left for dead. A year later, the dead man is resurrected from the grave by the mysterious power of a crow to wreak his bloody revenge on the thugs who killed him: T-Bird, Tin-Tin, Funboy and Skank, who all work for a gang boss named Top Dollar. Oh, sorry, wrong movie. We're in 2013, almost two decades on from The Crow. This is .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, written and directed by Brian Skiba, who is not David Schow reincarnated, even if they have the same number of letters. This is about a young couple who did make it to the altar, but only just. Eric is murdered, while Jade is raped and left for dead. There's no crow, but a mysterious power brings her back from the dead and she returns a year later to wreak her bloody revenge on the thugs who killed Eric: Colorado, Zander, Pretty Boy and Ravyn. Oh, and Big Money, but he's not the boss here, just one of the thugs. The boss is Lyle Barnes.

If that isn't enough, and frankly it is, this goes a lot deeper, so deep that Skiba really ought to have had Schow and Shirley credited as co-writers. The big bad boss runs a bar with live bands booked. He and his girl have a succession of playthings which they break, and for break read kill during kinky sex. The dead girl's ring is pawned quickly, prompting a violent return to the pawnshop, though it was the owner in The Crow who had the .357. Of course, the black guy gets killed first, but then that's hardly restricted to these movies. The memorable costume that leading lady Laurie Love dresses up in is black and feathered. It's even worth bringing up the frenzied opening credits, which are laid out like a comic book and hint at the source of The Crow in the comic books of James O'Barr, and the finalé, which involves a swordfight on a roof in a storm. The biggest difference is that there's no crow here, unless Fred Williamson's character is seen as an amalgam of the crow and Ernie Hudson's cop. Even the dialogue often has parallels.

Beyond this being a thinly veiled remake of The Crow, a year early for a twentieth anniversary tribute, it's the cast that leaps out here. That film had an amazing cast, not merely Hudson and Brandon Lee, but Bai Ling, Michael Wincott and Tony Todd. Williamson is one of a pair of big names here, William Katt the other in the pawnshop owner role that Jon Polito nailed so magnificently in the original. Both are good additions to the cast, though Katt has little to do and Williamson clearly didn't travel far from his usual routine. He's playing himself playing the Hammer (literally) who plays the standard sensei we see all the time in films with any connection to martial arts. Of course, he's been merging the first two levels of that triumvirate for decades and the third is hardly a stretch. As such he can play this sort of character in his sleep, but Hammer roles tend to fall into two categories: those he cares about and those he doesn't. Fortunately he seems to care about this one because he does a pretty decent job.

In this telling, Jade is the half of the newlyweds who wakes up after being killed. There's good reason for the hit: she was a cherished plaything of Lyle and Ravyn, but she chose to abscond with their bartender and $50,000 in cash. No wonder Lyle's enforcers chase them down to do something about it. You could say they had a point, but rape and murder is notable overkill, so perhaps revenge for Jade is justified too and that's why we have a movie. Jade is Laurie Love, returning from her lead role in Blood Moon Rising and, well, pretty much any other movie Skiba's name is attached to. Williamson and Katt aside, the cast was sourced from local talent prominent enough that I've reviewed other films featuring the vast majority of them, so I instantly assumed Michael Alvarez was trying to be Seth Gandrud as her husband Eric but, once I realised the connections to The Crow, I realised that he's clearly aiming for Brandon Lee. Skiba's odd twist here is to have the girl survive and seek revenge, which, hey, I'm all for.

His other major change is what's highlighted by the title, that Jade swaps her ring for a .357 magnum and only gets six bullets in the deal, conveniently one for each of the people she wants revenge on. In a neat grindhouse touch, she even paints them up nicely with the names of their intended victims on the side. I liked that touch a lot more than some of the other faux grindhouse nods. Like we really need help from on screen graphics to figure out who's going to get theirs next? Let the story roll! One Skiba switch up that I appreciated was the whole training angle. While Eric Draven was invincible from moment one, Jade isn't; she completely screws up her first hit, aiming for Big Money while he's getting head in a parking lot of a strip club but getting taken down herself instead. Here's where the Hammer shows up, because she's an amateur who needs professional assistance, he's already on site, he read about her in the papers and he sees her deadly revenge as important enough to step in and help out with.

In fact he dedicates a year of his life to making sure she'll succeed in her deadly mission, training her up in martial arts, gunplay and all the other little things she'll need to get the job done. He's a Vietnam vet with apparently nothing better to do and he either owns the boxing gym that becomes her home base or he's merely important enough to whoever does for it to make no difference. The wonderfully named Jack Neptune calls him Master Hammer and bows his head when talking to his sensei. Richard Anderson does a decent job in an oddly subservient role, one of the most consistent actors in the film. It's here in these training scenes that Laurie Love does her best work, useless to begin with but gradually building up her skills until she can take down her trainers. She's pretty when she smiles, but doesn't get much chance to do that here, of course. She's at her most natural and thus her most believable when she's training. This movie would have played better for her as a regular action flick.

Unfortunately, it goes for the gothic tones of The Crow, wrapped up in a neo-grindhouse style and Love is less successful when she shifts into her revenge character. The depth she had begun to bring to the role vanishes into a one note cipher, who's either silent or shouting in a monotone, dressed in a costume that overwhelms the actress. Continually scowling adds years to her and the combination of silhouetted shots and feathered outfit makes her look huge, like the later Tura Satana playing a mysterious Angel of Death. She's not the only one stuck in an unflattering getup. Shane Dean is great at moody, pissy and sarcastic, but as Colorado, the next on her list, he's like a cartoon character. Whenever he's in thug company, like a crazy torture scene, he and his fellow henchmen turn into the hyenas from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the inappropriate laughter echoing in my brain. When he's solo, running his gambling joint, he's every cliché a thug can be: a drug addled shouty mess sponsored by the word 'bitch'. He's better than he's given.

And so the film runs on. If you've seen The Crow, you're going to have a really strong idea of how it goes, merely phrased more as a grindhouse flick than a moody gothic tale. If you haven't, then it still won't be too surprising but you'll notice the continuity issues more, because when Skiba shuffled his Crow cards, he lost a few that connected things together. For my part, I enjoyed the wide cast of strong local actors a lot. Even if Laurie Love was better as the trainee than the vengeful killer, she looks great splattered with blood and she gets a few decent fight scenes. As Pretty Boy, Aaron Neal Trout is a believable Irish thug, his backward baseball cap looking like a beanie. Kevin Tye is less believable as a South African and I still haven't figured out why he's even in the movie. The best thug is the one who isn't local, Tony Mandarich, who's frickin' huge and looks even bigger. He's a former offensive lineman in the NFL, no great actor but a very watchable character. All he needs to do is walk on screen, but he does more than that.

Of course, local actors really dominate the smaller parts. Backstage at the stripjoint, we see Windy West topless, which provides two powerful reasons for locals to seek out the movie. Melissa Ann Marie Farley is topless too, when she's not snorting coke. As Colorado's bouncer, James Ray impresses with his nervous routine which is surprisingly good, given how confident he is and usually plays. Rick Dyer is a wild tattoo artist. Blink and you'll miss Kimber Leigh in William Katt's pawn shop. The most fun local scene is the one where a string of mercenaries stride down a corridor and only one isn't familiar. They're Steve Dorssom, Bill Connor, Bill Wetherill, Chris Sheffield and Jax Menez, the one I didn't recognise. That's a lot of talent to relegate to such minor roles, where few get opportunities like Shane Dean with tiger venom coursing through his veins, Laurie Love splattered in blood or Brian Ames really acting when he confronts William Katt. One strong performance is enough for this movie though, which has completely different goals.

This is all about updating The Crow to a neo-grindhouse aesthetic, and Skiba could have done a lot worse at that. I don't buy the argument that plotholes are required for modern grindhouse movies just because the films they pay homage to had them and The Crow was a lot tighter than this. Fred Williamson gets to play himself yet again, which makes him happy, and have his name prominently featured on the poster, which makes local filmmakers happy. William Katt is a bonus on that front, proof that Arizona can make features with major names in that have capable sound and visuals. And really, with Windy West's boobs, Shane Dean's bitching and Tony Mandarich's bulk all on show, what more do we need that isn't covered by Laurie Love's pretty painted bullets and a lashing or six of blood? This covers all the bases it needs to cover, even if it would have played better with some originality. I don't buy the argument that grindhouse stories can't say something new either and this one is just a fair retelling of a twenty year old story.

Sacrifice (2010)

Director: Bob Nelson
Stars: Brent Heffron, Shanda Munson, Heather Liebenow, Noel Allison, Idena Thatcher, Jack Pauly and Lester Scott

I'm horrendously overdue with a review of Sacrifice, a Mesa monster movie that I've seen a few times and somehow haven't got round to reviewing yet. To be fair, on my first time through, it didn't have an ending but I've had the DVD forever and that's no excuse. Last time, I watched it as part of a trio of Quetzalcoatl movies: Q: The Winged Serpent, The Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon and Sacrifice. Yeah, you weren't expecting three of those to exist, right? Well, the first of the trio is by far the best, Larry Cohen's shlocky 1982 picture benefitting from a stellar cast that included Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine and Richard Roundtree. The middle one was made for TV in 2008 and only boasted lesser names such as Michael Shanks and Shannen Doherty. It could be seen as the opposite of this film because it has a really stupid story but surprisingly good effects work, while this microbudget local feature boasts a surprisingly strong story but suffers from the worst monster effects outside of Birdemic: Shock and Terror.

I should highlight here that this film is absolutely not 'from the Palm d'Or winning director of Farewell My Concubine', as the default poster at IMDb suggests; that's a completely unrelated Sacrifice, also made in 2010. Chen Kaige can surely afford much better effects work, so this was made by Bob Nelson, the head honcho of Brick Cave Media, who released it for free online viewing this weekend. Now Bob helped me a lot as I expanded Apocalypse Later from blog into print, by talking me through the publishing process, so I owe him a debt of thanks. However this review, as always, will be completely free of bias. Just because I like someone doesn't mean their movie doesn't suck. What I got out of my first viewing was that this was a learning process for Bob, who I didn't know at the time. Transplanting his love of kaiju flicks and sci-fi B movies into a story appropriate for the American southwest, he tried to get that vision onto the screen. I saw this first in a theatre, so he succeeded, but it really can't hide its microbudget.

There's good and bad obvious immediately. The opening credit sequence, horrible kerning aside, is good, mixing strong music with an imaginative approach. The picture proper kicks off with stock footage, which helps to cement a higher budget in our minds, but the new narration that kicks in is not well done. When we're whisked off to the Satellite Command Room of Task Force STOM, the first original visuals, we notice capable costuming but pixellated greenscreen. Lt Gen George Olendorf is about to activate STOM-1, the new Subterranean Object Mapping satellite designed to locate chemicals used to build weapons of mass destruction up to two miles underground. He explains to invited guests that the technology cost billions, which is believable for the the Apple hardware we see on control room desks. The general, the onlookers and the technicians are rarely shown in the same shot as the camerawork is static. The actors look their parts and have good intonation, though they often pause or falter. Nelson needed more takes.

Even this early, the strongest aspect is the story, which was written by Nelson with contributions from his better half, novelist Sharon Skinner. It's quintessential fifties sci-fi, right down to the running time, a short 67 minutes. Not for the first time, I wonder if it would have played better in black and white. Temporarily ignoring the technical issues, like the blockiness and the siren that drowns out the tech's lines, this would have played very authentically had it been in black and white. I've even seen sci-fi movies from the fifties that had the same stumbling over lines, so flaws like those could have been interpreted merely as quirky authenticities. Certainly the build is very reminiscent: a military man introduces new technology to folk who question the ethics of its use and, on activation, it immediately discovers a threat within the United States. Here, that's a cache of plutonium buried in Arizona, which immediately prompts an investigation and connects the military with the civilian side of the film.

Even on my fourth viewing, I find myself totally on board with the story, even as I cringe at the technical quality behind it. Sound especially continues to be a problem throughout, but the visuals need work too. The camera doesn't move enough and the composition of frame is not always what it could be. Lighting is often inconsistent, manifesting odd issues like when graduate student Atzi Olin and her boyfriend, Dr Kyle Broughnam, walk out of a room and into a corridor, while their clothes change from green to blue. They're the same clothes; it's just that they're lit completely differently. At least the editing is capable, if not special, and the acting does improve. All these actors were new to me when I first saw Sacrifice, but I've seen many since, often improving as they go. Shanda Lee Munson is the exception, as she's better here as Atzi than I've seen in anything since. Brent Heffron, Kat Bingham and Bob Barr have all moved onto better things, notably The Sum of Its Parts, Dust Jacket and The Crate respectively.

It's Heffron's character, Kyle, who the Air Force immediately comes to see. They're looking for help with their 'interesting geological puzzle' from a scientific expert and he's appropriate because he's already in Arizona and he's familiar with what STOM-1 does as he worked on the project. Atzi gets roped in because the plutonium is a couple of miles underneath the small town of Desert Cove, where she grew up. I liked Heather Liebenow as the lead Air Force officer, Col Lene, even though she overdoes the precision of her presentation. As she points out, 'We're the military. We're all about overkill.' Noel Allison, a strong lead in Pattern: Response, seems to be acting out a different role to the one he was given and Heffron seems to be inexplicably channelling Elvis Presley. I haven't a clue how solid Kat Bingham is, because she's not in the film enough and she's mostly lost under the air conditioning of Queens Pizzeria in Mesa, I mean the breakfast place in Desert Cove. She has character, at least, which shows through the obscured dialogue.

The good and the bad continues in Desert Cove, highlighting both the mistakes Nelson made as he shot this film and the things he learned as he progressed. The worst is always on the technical side, with the sound and lighting inconsistent. There's lots of back and forth during the conversations, which creates a distance that doesn't deserve to be there. The first major digital effects show up after half an hour in the form of an obviously overlaid graphic of a huge drill that they'll use to tunnel into the earth. The displays haven't been great and other overlays are similarly poor, but the really awful effects work is reserved for the monster. On the plus side, the helicopters, trucks and military camp sites appear to be real, as Nelson managed to find some solid assistance from all the right people. The quality of lighting is bizarrely better in the dark underground scenes, the sort of shots that even professional films tend to screw up. Dialogue isn't always great but it is always natural and the majority of the cast deliver it well.

Again, it's the story that stands out for special notice. We know that the plutonium isn't being used by an al-Qa'ida group, but as the Air Force drill into a mysterious tunnel leading into the ground, we find that it has ties to the ancient Mayans, from whom Atzi is descended. I like how Nelson blends ancient myth with modern science, because it's a great idea for a monster movie, far more believable than most of what the fifties B movies gifted us. I'll take the accidental resurrection of a creature conjured up by the Mayans to defeat the Spanish invaders over trans-dimensional turkey monsters from outer space any day, let alone invisible aliens, gorillas wearing diving helmets or giant turd monsters that creep slower than the victims they somehow catch. It also gives the script a solid ending, a particularly human one which renders the otherwise generic title rather appropriate. Sure, I can find issues without trying too hard, but it's a strong script that plays better than many of the sci-fi B movies that inspired it.

Of course, it's impossible to look past the bad effects work. The Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon would have been much better had it stolen the script to Sacrifice, which in turn would have been much better if Emily Albee, who did the creature animation for the bigger budget movie, had done the same here. She's local-ish, knows exactly what she's doing and can work wonders on a low budget. Just watch Kaze, Ghost Warrior to see what I'm talking about, which was entirely created on her home computer. Nothing in this film compares to that; the monster is better than those in Birdemic: Shock and Terror, but on occasions not by much. Without an expert to create a believable monster, Nelson would have done better with a man in a rubber suit. The analogue approach would have fit the tone of the movie too, which should have played out in black and white. He has moved on to better work, especially his new short, The Sum of Its Parts, written by J A Giunta and directed by Johnny Skinner. This was his learning curve: he did some things right and a lot wrong, but he learned from all of it.

Sacrifice can be viewed for free on YouTube this holiday weekend.

Dark Places (2005)

Director: Guy Crawford
Stars: Nessa Hawkins, David C Hayes and Syn DeVil

This film was an official selection at the 1rd Phoenix Fear Film Festival in Phoenix in 2006. Here's an index to my reviews of 2006 films.

Dark Places is one of those overly generic titles that doesn't promise much, but it's an oddly appropriate one given where it takes us. We're here to follow Keri Walker, a drug addicted whore, so she's hardly in a pleasant place to begin with and she quickly finds worse. 'You looking for a date?' is her first line, never a promising one in a horror movie, whatever the budget, and sure enough, her potential client throws her in the back seat and tries to rape her. She defends herself with a razor blade, so things get as messy as they do dark. To highlight how whacked out she is, we see much of this in schizophrenic montages, with staccato editing and a ravy soundtrack. Before we even get to the opening credits, she finds herself in a bathroom for a particularly freaky scene that sets the stage well. She's trying to clean up, utterly shaken, when another hooker comes in and tries to talk to her. It's a bizarre, utterly one-sided conversation that tells us a great deal immediately and may well tell us a lot more in hindsight, eighty minutes later.

Each time she descends to a new circle in her personal Hell we wonder if this is as far as she's going to go, but this film keeps switching the lights on another circle down. She's already physically and sexually abused, so next up is verbally abused. She walks over to her dealer Rush's place, hoping for a hit and a place to sleep, but he only sells her the former. 'You're not my friend,' he blisters at her. 'You're nobody's friend.' The hooker in the bathroom mentioned that she's going to stay at 'fat ass Luther's', so she heads over there to join her. He has an entire collection of hookers and addicts inside in every state of oblivion, some dancing it up like they're having the time of their lives, some completely zoned as if they've done that already and others passed out with nothing left in them. There's an elderly skeleton of an addict in the bathroom, hurling an encore of verbal abuse Keri's way; there's a prom queen in clown-like make-up looking for her crown; and there's a chick in Luther's bedroom who appears to have her lips sewn shut.

'Who says you'll be safer inside?' Luther asked her before she chose to enter and, given that he's played by David C Hayes, that's a really good question. He co-wrote and co-produced this film with director Guy Crawford and, while it fits very well with the freaky taboo roles he so often plays, it's far more consistent in its freakiness than most of the rest. Much of that has to do with the wild editing, courtesy of Nic Hill, which often makes us feel like we're going through a similar trip to Keri, but it's also due to those dark places which the film embraces. Every time we think Keri may have a lucid moment, the film is ready to scotch that. 'Kill yourself,' chants the anorexic druggy in the mirror. 'There's nothing out there for you,' suggests a strange chick who walks into the bathroom with her. At times, Luther's place seems like a set of trippers tripping different trips; at others, it's much more like a lunatic asylum. The tone and even the geography of the place changes, as if it's more of a nightmare place than a physical one.

Even lines that might play appropriately in the real world bleed into another level in this film. 'Everyone ends up here,' says one of its guests, after Keri wakes up from a nightmare to find there are four people on her single bed. It's at this point that the strangest thing happens, because this twisted exploitation flick reveals a heart and a substance that we really don't expect. Don't get me wrong, there are a whole bunch of problems here but we don't care as much as we would under other circumstances. The picture quality and lighting are notably variable. Sound is even more of an issue, as I suspect that the constant soundtrack doesn't merely aid the trippy feel of the piece, it also conceals for the most part the poorly recorded sound, which is ramped up every time someone has dialogue, accompanying static and all. If this had been another film, we could get disheartened quickly and drift away. Yet this keeps us watching for a bunch of reasons, the chief among them being Nessa Hawkins, who is amazing as Keri.

If IMDb is anything to go by, this is her only lead role, which is surprising. A year earlier, she had written and directed a short film called Drive By which won an award in Albuquerque; a year later, she appeared in another David C Hayes film, Machined. Why she vanished off the cinematic map, I have no idea, but it was far too soon. This isn't the sort of film that anyone watches to experience great acting and some of the supporting players are clearly here because they look their parts rather than because they could act them, but Hawkins is a real discovery, utterly believable in her role. She dominates proceedings, even if those proceedings dominate her character. Of course, the hallucinogenic feel helps her because she has few long scenes and those she has are strongly edited. There are also superb little shots that emphasise her plight, like one where we watch her shake on the floor, only to realise that the floor is a door when it opens to let her through, because the shot was taken from above it.

It's odd to care so much about a character like Keri, but the performance Hawkins turns in and the freaky framework that has her stuck in these dark places like a rat in a maze help us do exactly that. She knows full well that she's been on a downward spiral for a long time and she wishes she was able to escape the pain in a surprisingly sympathetic way. Of course, we never know how much of this is real and how much hallucination or nightmare, but it's claustrophobic and that helps us want her to get out. Even if she dug most of the holes she's found herself in, she's put through a lot more than we'd wish on anyone, and we don't exactly find a lot of sympathetic characters anywhere else. The bad guys are bad guys and so are the good guys, to someone like Keri. The only character in the film who does anything positive for her is Tim, one of the guests at Luther's, and he ends up bludgeoned to death and thrown into a pit. Nobody is able to help, not even the one who was willing, so Keri has to find a way to help herself.

While we aren't convinced from moment one that everything we see is real, Keri's inexorable descent into dark places continues until nobody can fail to notice how metaphorical it becomes. The key is also hinted at throughout but the most obtuse viewers shouldn't be too surprised when it shows up with a vengeance fifty minutes in to prompt us to reevaluate everything we've seen. One of the brightest decisions that the writers made was to tie the progression of the script so closely to Keri's state of mind, because it provides a fascinating and surprisingly substantial trip for we viewers and also inherently forgives any odd slips of consistency. Given that Keri isn't exactly seeing through lucid eyes, anything that doesn't make sense to us can be explained away as not making sense to her. This makes what actually happens less important than how it all goes down, which brings us back to Keri's hallucinogenic fever dream that manifests itself through the visual aesthetic and the increasing metaphors.

This makes me wonder whether Hayes's most important contribution to the film was as a scriptwriter or an actor. Certainly he's gone to darker places in other films, often in much smaller roles, but this is a big part in which he's consistently, freakily watchable. He holds court in a wildly outsider way, wearing a toga to sing and dance before a rapt and chanting crowd utterly under his thumb. His control varies from calm dominance to childlike frustration, though there's more of an edge here than I've seen when he's brought out the big baby approach before. He was embarrassing in Back Woods, for instance, but he's dangerous here. Keri finds out the hard way what happens to people who cross Luther. Also, it's bizarrely successful to have his screen wife here be a gothic lesbian dominatrix, with him because he makes her laugh. While Syn DeVil, like so many of the supporting actors, could have delivered her lines with more meaning, she couldn't possibly have fit the part better physically.

Director Guy Crawford is known for his edgy horror movies, though this is the only one I've seen thus far. He may have started out with what appears to be a relatively conventional slasher movie in The Catcher and his last film, Flesh, TX, doesn't look particularly out there, but in between there's a set of pictures in which he moved progressively into weirder, less commercial, more ambitious territory, such as Starved, Autopsy: A Love Story and Dark Places. This could be seen as an art film as much as an exploitation flick, because it really does come down to the trippy feel of the piece, which is generated by wild editing, odd gimmicks and deceptively loose writing. It's always interesting to see what someone with imagination can do with very little budget and there's no way that Crawford had much in hand to make this one, part of why it runs under 80 minutes. I'm sure that most viewers will have some idea of what they'll see, but I bet that most of them will end up surprised at how imaginative, successful and untraditional it is.