Prankster (2023)

Director: George O’Barts
Writer: George O’Barts
Stars: Nextraker, Bourke Floyd, Dylan Garcia, Gabby Barbosa, Sean Berube, Gianna Francesca Giorgio and Ken Ronk

This is such a quintessential George O’Barts film that it seems surprising that it had to wait until his third feature. He’s a pixie at heart, a filmmaker who subverts human behaviour by adding levels of karma, irony and silliness but never wants to be cruel. If all the filmmakers I know in Phoenix were to make a feature about an imaginary friend, 80% would make a horror movie and 15% would conjure up a drama. Of the 5% of others, only O’Barts would plump for a prankster comedy.

It’s primarily set indoors, within the offices of Biggs Cable, where a host of characters take calls in generic cubicles. It’s low key as it gets going, introducing us to a bunch of characters and setting the stage for what’s yet to come.

Johnny’s helpful but long suffering. Sheila’s supportive. Grace is a bitch while Candice is a manipulative bitch. Jim’s an accepting janitor and Ray’s a lazy IT guy. I know many examples of all of these characters from my life within corporate America. They’re real, but they need more than that to grab our attention here and it’s a while before that really happens.

The only dynamic character in the office is Conner, known as Conner the Terrible. He’s a step up the corporate ladder, as the supervisor over the helpdesk, but he wants to make it up to the executive floor and he’s manipulating Johnny’s hard work to get there. They’ve put a proposal together between them to send up to management but, while Johnny has done most of the work, it only sports one name on the front and it isn’t his. Conner has a sort of trickle down take on how it’ll help Johnny too, who mostly buys into it and, just like that, we have our hero and villain.

4/20 Massacre (2018)

Director: Dylan Reynolds
Writer: Dylan Reynolds
Stars: Stars: Jamie Bernadette, Vanessa Reynolds, Stacey Danger, Justine Wachsberger, Marissa Pistone and James Storm

Index: Horror Movie Calendar.

Holidays come in all shapes and sizes and, as marijuana takes over from nicotine as the go to drug for Americans, 4/20 is becoming an important one. With stoners a traditional element of slasher movies, I’m rather surprised that nobody’s shot a horror flick set on this date before. I’m happy that the first turns out to be Dylan Reynolds, director of Nipples & Palm Trees, as he’s not the usual candidate for this sort of picture and he brings something a little different to the table. In many ways, this isn’t a horror film at all, even if it does feature such a quintessential slasher story as a bunch of young adults going camping in the woods, where they’re picked off one by one by a silent maniac who’s credited as the Shape, in a nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween. At heart, it’s more of a character-driven drama that merely happens to have a gruesome death scene every quarter of an hour. Only as the count of living people in the woods drops to three (c’mon, you were expecting everyone to live?) does it really become a traditional horror movie.

Reynolds, who wrote and directed, clearly understands the conventions of slasher movies and is happy, at points, to cater to time-honoured traditions. Mostly, however, he’s happy to avoid them. For instance, the folk whom he has traipse up four miles of trails to get to their remote campsite are odd in number, meaning that not everyone is going to pair up for the inevitable fooling around. I hope I don’t put potential viewers off by saying that he gives us precisely zero scenes of people having sex in tents. We don’t even see any boobs, even though all five of these campers are female, thus avoiding a few more clichés. They’re here to celebrate Jess’s birthday, which is on 4/20 (or, for my fellow Brits, 20/4, which just doesn’t sound as catchy), but Jess isn’t particularly fond of the weed; she tells her friends that it makes her paranoid. It’s Donna that’s the traditional stoner and she’s more than happy when the plot almost literally runs into them on the way up the hill to the campsite.

Dark (2015)

Director: Nick Basile
Writer: Elias, from a story by Nick Basile and Elias
Stars: Whitney Able, Alexandra Breckenridge, Brendan Sexton III and Michael Eklund

I enjoy discovering new films at Apocalypse Later, whether they’re part of a project I’m working or merely happened to be submitted for review. This is one from the latter category, but it was a gimme because of the names involved. The most obvious to many will be that of Joe Dante, the executive producer, but I’m a fan of a few others too. The screenplay was written by Elias, who wrote and directed Gut. The leads are all established names: Whitney Able notable for Monsters, Alexandra Breckenridge for The Walking Dead and Michael Eklund for Errors of the Human Body, amongst many others. So, I wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to see a thriller from these folks that was enticingly set in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. That power outage, which affected 55 million people, was the second most widespread in history at that time and it contributed to twelve deaths, though this film isn’t a fictional spin on any of them, rather a character study of a troubled woman’s paranoia building with deadly effect.

She’s Kate, a former model from Brooklyn who’s recently moved into the New York apartment of Leah, her girlfriend, who is about to head out for the weekend on business. That’ll leave Kate on her own at a tough time in their relationship. You might think that their moving in together bodes well for their future, but it’s not that simple. Kate is clearly a troubled soul with a troubled history, even if that history isn’t detailed in the script, and it’s already overflowing into their life together. Kate’s started smoking again, even though Leah hates it; Kate wants her lover to pull her hair and strangle her during sex, which Leah really doesn’t want to do; and Kate is even having difficulty unpacking from the move: the moment Leah heads out to work, she’s on the phone looking for a new place. Then again, she’s an exercise in contrasts, suggesting schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or some other mental torment that pits her against herself. How else can we buy into a yoga teacher who smokes nervously?

There are good moments for Kate; she giggles at couples making out on the subway and at street artists poledancing in the carriage. But there are bad ones too and they add up; each of them adds another item to our growing checklist of what might be wrong with her. She drops a bottle in the apartment but there’s no kitchen roll to clean it up because she’s not focused on actually living there. Without much thought to where she is, she wanders over a crossroads without looking and nearly gets hit by a car. Sure, the traffic lights are out because of the blackout but we wonder how comfortable she is in this neighbourhood. John the neighbour knocks on their door to check on how wide the outage is and the conversation is awkward to say the least. When she tracks down some candles and a battery powered boombox, she leafs through old photos and doesn’t seem happy to see most of them. We see her old hospital bracelet in the box too, but we’re left guessing as to why she had one. Well, for a while at least.

As you can imagine, this story revolves almost exclusively around Kate and, fortunately, Whitney Able is up to the task. In fact, she draws us into her tormented life so capably that it’s only after the film is over that we start to wonder why we were so engrossed, given that we really don’t like her. She’s certainly not a sympathetic character hooking us because she reminds us a little of ourselves. If anything, we’re more likely to associate with the characters around her: Leah, the grounded girlfriend who’s wondering why it isn’t working the way she thought it would; John, the awkward neighbour who just wants someone to talk to; even Benoit, the French Canadian she meets at a club and who wants to walk her home. Throughout all of this, we’re very aware that it isn’t these folk causing her troubles, it’s her causing her own. There’s little doubt that Kate is her own worst enemy and that’s the hardest sort of character for an actor to try to inhabit because the better they do at it, the less we’re going to care.

If this picture was always going to hang on the performance of Whitney Able, there are some interesting cinematic tricks in play to support her. One that’s used at a few key points is oddly jagged editing. When Kate visits a bar in a kinky black outfit with a padlock around her neck, she gets talking to Benoit. During their opening conversation, before he’s even bought her a drink, the editor cuts out the boring stuff and leaves in the key lines, which is routine enough until we realise that the dialogue often overlaps between cuts. I honestly wondered if there was a lipsync issue when I first saw this, but it’s consistently done and restricted to a couple of key scenes. Presumably the goal is to show Kate disconnecting from reality, as she does especially well back at the apartment when we’re wondering what happened to Benoit. I’m still not sure where he goes. One minute she tells him to get lost, the next she invites him in but then he’s never seen again, even though we watch Kate’s half of a conversation that we expect to be with him.

Elias clearly wanted us to think about what his script was saying. We’ve seen the dysfunction growing in Kate and Leah’s life. We’ve seen the marks on her body that Benoit sees and reacts to. We’ve had shots where Kate revels in her rebellious behaviour; if Leah doesn’t want her to smoke, she’ll smoke right into a powerful camera she’s using to snap increasingly wild shots of herself. But we’ve also had shots where she seems to hate what she’s doing and hate herself for doing it. I know Elias dropped a whole bunch of clues for us to hone in on because I caught some of them, but others seemed more cryptic, at least on a first viewing; maybe a second will shed some more light on Dark, as it were. I wonder if there are enough to really piece together Kate’s former life. I get that she had attempted suicide, but I don’t know when or why. I saw hints at some of the latter but I don’t know if I was reading them wrong. Was she overreacting, for instance, to John’s drunken performance because of paranoia or because of personal history?

And that leads to another key question. Are we supposed to read this entirely straight or assume that it’s partly the product of hallucination? Certainly she seems to leave a voicemail for Leah using a dead phone and listen to music on a silent boombox, so the latter seems possible but the former just as likely. If some of it is taking place only in Kate’s head, where’s the point at which that begins? I could argue that it’s the point she asks Benoit in because a heady combination of paranoia, alcohol and guilt would explain a few things, but I’m not convinced. I think we’re supposed to read it straight and trust that Kate’s hallucinating is happening without having to see it. That makes the ending particularly brutal but leaves us questions as to the how of it all. It’s beautifully shot, Kate wandering the balconies and flashing her camera to see, but a blackout doesn’t stop our ears from working. Given that the admirably diverse soundtrack features Johnny Thunders, Dead Can Dance and Nina Simone, we’re aware of what we hear and what we don’t.

Dark was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, raising just over $50,000 in 2013, and much of it is up there on the screen for us to see. The title refers both to the darkness caused by the Northeast Blackout, which is very effective as a backdrop, and the darkness inside Kate’s head, but it doesn’t refer to the images we watch. We can always see what we need to see in this film, which was particularly refreshing in a movie all about darkness. I’ve seen too many movies recently that were either shot, mastered or projected too dark to be really watchable. One, which admittedly took place entirely at night, felt like a radio play with occasional visual elements rather than an actual feature film. I wondered if a picture called Dark would play into that from conscious decision making but I’m happy that it didn’t. It aimed instead for a claustrophobic feeling and succeeded in finding it. Scenes often run long but, through a combination of script, performance and camerawork, feel freaky and disjointed anyway because that’s how Kate is surely experiencing them.

I can’t say I enjoyed Dark but then it’s not the sort of film one enjoys. I appreciated what it did and where the story took Kate, even as I wanted to know more about her background. I enjoyed the supporting cast even if none of them had much screen time and it was always used to build Kate rather than themselves. Alexandra Breckenridge gets some time early and uses it well; she was enticing enough to make me feel that I should be a lesbian. Redman gets one scene as a doorman who recognises and welcomes Kate and thus makes us realise that she hasn’t always been dark. Michael Eklund is oddly off during his scenes but it’s very possible that he did that deliberately; Benoit may hold a key in this story but he’s not developed far enough for me to understand what it is. Brendan Sexton III may be the best of them though, as John; I wasn’t sold on his underplayed initial scene but loved his return very much under the influence of booze. I wonder if watching the film drunk would render it even more effective. Maybe I should experiment.

Heir (2015)

Director: Richard Powell
Stars: Bill Oberst Jr, Robert Nolan and Matteo D’Avino

If anyone foolishly thought that, after Worm and Familiar, a pair of deeply unsettling short films, Richard Powell, their writer and director, would settle down and make something pleasant for the kiddies, they’re in for something of a shock with this one. Sure, its tagline does suggest that, reading simply, ‘A touching tale of father and son’, but it’s playing more literally with those words, even if it obscures everything in a web of deceit and another abstraction into body horror. The film’s credits at IMDb appear in alphabetical order and the very first one is for the dream part of ‘Rotting Pedophile’, so there should be no surprise to discover that this is another deeply unsettling short film, looking at the curse of paedophilia as a disease. Back yet again is Robert Nolan, who shouldn’t be getting better and better with each film I see him in, as he was too damn good to begin with, but he’s accompanied by Bill Oberst Jr, an amazing actor too often wasted in crappy movies. He’s painfully believable here, disquieting and loathsome but utterly real.

Nolan plays Gordon, who is magnificently introduced in the 75 seconds before the title card. We see that he’s a husband and father, but that things are not good in this family. Initially we think divorce, because he takes pictures of his wife and son and crops her out of them. He composes an e-mail entitled ‘My Son’ to ask for a ‘play date’. But then he starts to ask directions and we start to wonder. The ominous, pulsing, score doesn’t say divorce; it says nagging urge. Nolan looks guilty, as if he’s not only fighting something within him but he’s scared of losing that fight. And he has some sort of sore on his hand, an oozing sore full of viscous white liquid that emerges as he fingers it. Clearly this itch that he’s scratching is not just a physical one, it’s a metaphorical one and it doesn’t take much to collate these pieces together to see an awful big picture. Gordon likes little boys and he has one of his own. Perhaps he hasn’t done anything at this point, but he wants to and whatever he’s used to stop himself thus far isn’t working any more.

So off he drives with his son, Paul, who’s probably in his early teens, to meet an old college friend, Denis, at a diner, and, if we hadn’t worked out what was going on already, we can’t fail to figure it out here. The double entendres about food are unyielding and the only way Paul can miss the nauseating eagerness of his dad’s ‘college friend’ is through really not caring in the slightest about any of this and losing himself in his game while the adults chat. ‘You’re not hungry?’ Denis asks Gordon and he’s really not referring to food. ‘Ain’t nothing like the real thing,’ he digs. ‘Ain’t that right, dad?’ In this scene, Nolan, who’s usually the dominant presence, clearly plays second fiddle to Oberst; Denis is so comfortable with who and what he is that he can generate nightmares just by eating a sandwich. Gordon is stuck in the uncertain ground between his companions. Paul is completely innocent, while Denis is that word’s every antonym: not just guilty but corrupt, immoral, experienced, cunning, impure and stained. Gordon isn’t that. Yet.

And they go back to Denis’s place and I’ll stop right there, after three and a half minutes of the fourteen that Heir runs. Let’s just suggest that what your twisted imagination might have conjured up for the rest is likely to be partly true and partly wide of the mark. I’ll avoid talking about where Gordon’s itch goes in reality and mention that it goes a heck of a long way in metaphor, a bubbling and boiling creature living inside of him, phallic of course and even more reminiscent of Cronenberg body horror than what we saw in Familiar because it’s as much science fiction as it is horror. I’ll also say that while it’s easy to see what this story is about, what’s truly going on in Gordon’s head is a complex tangle indeed. This is far from a black and white reading of an issue that many see in black and white terms and that’s going to generate controversy in itself, but where Gordon goes within this story is worthy of a great deal of discussion too. He’s a villain, make no mistake, but he’s also a hero in his way and that’s an odd thought to ponder.

The title is another conundrum, as it usually is with Powell’s films. Worm was a relatively straightforward title, albeit through metaphor, but Familiar carries a number of meanings and so does Heir. Does it refer primarily to the cycle of child abuse where the abused sadly become the abusers? If so, is the suggestion that Paul will become the heir to Gordon? If so, he becomes a more important character in this film than we might initially assume, given that he’s very much the MacGuffin of the piece. Or is Gordon the heir, a whole other story having unfolded before this one even begins? That idea gives depth to what Nolan has to channel in this role. Certainly mere progression suggests that Gordon might become Denis’s heir, but that’s where this story lies and you’ll need to watch yourself to see how that plays out. I love how Powell can endow so much depth into his short films, especially when they’re edited as tightly as this one. This makes the longer Familiar seem like a sprawling epic.

What’s really different here is that Nolan isn’t the dominant force that he has been previously. It was hard to acknowledge that anyone else existed in Worm and he was all over Familiar like a rash, but here he’s the lead character without being the dominant one. It’s fantastic to see Nolan and Oberst share a screen, especially when both have such gifts of characters to portray. Oberst gets the dominant one and he does it so well that I wanted to wash my hands when the end credits rolled. Nolan gets the one with depth but at the cost of emphasis. He’s tasked with playing a character driven in a number of different directions at once and that’s really difficult to do. I think he nails it at the beginning and at the end, but perhaps allows Oberst too much dominance at points in between. The diner scene is a great example of one that he gifts to his co-star when he could have fought a little harder for it; he had to stay subservient but not quite so far as he does. It’s still another great performance though and I can’t wait for a Powell/Nolan feature.

Death in the Desert (2015)

Director: Josh Evans
Stars: Michael Madsen, Shayla Beesley, Paz de la Huerta, Jon Palladino and Roxy Saint

If this film’s story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The screenplay was based on the non fiction book of the same name by Cathy Scott, which looks at the life and death of Las Vegas casino heir, Theodore ‘Ted’ Binion, the homicide investigation that followed his drug overdose and the trials (plural) of Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish, his live-in girlfriend and her lover. Binion died in 1998, so it’s not ancient history, and we have had plenty of opportunities to catch it in books like this one, coverage on TV shows like On the Case and American Justice and in at least one TV movie, 2008’s Sex and Lies in Sin City. It was fictionalised on CSI and even turned into a musical spoof. What’s more, the whole story feels like quintessential Vegas. If we’ve seen one movie about the underbelly of Las Vegas, we’ve seen ’em all, right? This time, the movie merely wasn’t directed by Martin Scorsese and Joe Pesci isn’t anywhere to be found. Well, not quite, as it turns out to be surely the most interesting take on this age old story that I’ve seen yet.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Michael Madsen plays the character we expect, merely renamed here from Ted Binion to Ray Easler, and what he goes through is the story we expect. The difference is that we don’t get to see much of it at all, because it tends to unfold offscreen, out of our sight and, more importantly, out of sight of Kim Davis, the Sandy Murphy equivalent, because, while this is Easler’s story, we’re watching it unfold from Davis’s perspective. Initially this feels a little off and it gets progressively more off until we twig to the approach that John Steppling (writing as John Melmoth) and director John Evans took. We don’t watch Easler grow, because we join his story when Kim does. We don’t meet his estranged wife, because he keeps her away from his girlfriend. We’re never a fly on the wall to his business meetings as she’s not there. We don’t find out just how much danger he’s in until bullets are fired through their house windows. We’re kept out of the loop because Kim is kept out of the loop. Only our experience fills in the gaps.

We’re here to watch Kim, played by Shayla Beesley. She’s a California girl who moves to Vegas and starts that familiar decline: she pawns the diamond that’s the only thing she has of worth and loses the money on the roulette table, she gets a job as a stripper and clearly sells her body on the side because that’s the way she meets Ray, the swaggering big shot in the cowboy outfit who takes a shine to her and waves his money around, starting with some for her services rendered. However, she’s not yet the broken soul that some of her companions are. She lives with Margo, who Paz de la Huerta plays like a woman who’s been chewed up by the lifestyle and spat back out again. Frankly, Margo is a scary lady, like Cory, Kim’s friend at work, who Roxy Saint endows with the impression that she’s only getting through her life with the help of illegal pharmaceuticals. She only comes to life when she sings at the Schizoid Pistol, because it’s what she wants to do and it’s the only time she feels herself.

By comparison to these two, Kim seems to be doing well. Sure, taking off her clothes in front of strangers and giving head to rich guys in broken down buildings is hardly a dream job, but she’s a pretty girl, she’s able to say no to free drugs and she knows not to admit who she is to a stranger who knocks on her door. Well, at least not until he explains that he’s Easler’s chauffeur with $2,500 to pick up Miss Davis for a lap dance. And so the relationship begins. She knows that he’s married. She knows that she’s just the young and pretty girl to hang on his arm in public and service him in private. She knows that it’s not going to be this way forever. But hey, he buys her a car and a horse and takes her to posh dinners. He owns the town. Beesley plays Kim like she’s a fish out of water who’s trying very hard to learn how to swim. She’s also not just Ray’s girl, she’s his mother and his nurse and his conscience, and when she occasionally recites, ‘Yeah, baby, whatever you want,’ sometimes she actually means it.

What I spent a long time trying to figure out is if Beesley was up to the task. Madsen struts his stuff as we might expect, swaggering and swaying through the film like a big shot who knows he can do pretty much anything he likes and often does so just because he can. He’s large and he’s loud and the screen belongs to him just like everything in Vegas. He also provides the narration, so he’s never far away. Kim is quieter, calmer and inherently subservient, so we watch her while we experience Ray. The question is whether the fish out of water is Kim Davis, Shayla Beesley or both. There are moments where Kim stumbles and we’re not sure if it’s really the actress stumbling, because she’s relatively new, only has a few credits so far and just impressed a casting agent enough to get a shot in an indie feature opposite a recognisable lead. Yet there are also points where she nails scenes so perfectly that we wonder why we ever doubted her talent. I found that I bounced back and forth between these two throughout. I need to see her in something else.

I ended up on the side of the actress, because everything we see is centred on her character and I didn’t think that the picture would have progressed without the filmmakers being in tune with her performance. Also, she’s depicted with more sympathy than what little I know of the real events might suggest. Within the film, she’s the most sympathetic of the few main characters, even though she starts out as a stripper, becomes a trophy girlfriend and ends up cheating on her meal ticket with one of his colleagues, publicly too. However, she’s also a voice of reason who constantly works on Ray to quit his burgeoning drug use, a calm presence in his life who only gets into one shouting match in the entire film (truly unprecedented) and someone who apparently comes to actually care for him, even if she never planned it. In real life, the equivalent character was arrested for his murder, along with a batch of other charges such as conspiracy, robbery, grand larceny and burglary, tried, found guilty and locked up, until a second trial freed her.

If Michael Madsen, a frequent recognisable name in indie features, is easily the most obvious thing about the film and Shayla Beesley’s much more subtle performance is its actual focus, the script is the third real thing of note. The film’s plot synopsis might suggest that it’s really a love triangle, but that’s buried deep in the mix and John Palladino isn’t given any real opportunity to steal much attention. He’s decent as Matt Duvall, but the character has no real depth and he can’t compete with Madsen, who effortlessly steals his share of scenes, and Beesley, who looks halfway between Mariah Carey and Debbie Harry with perhaps a little Elisha Cuthbert in there for good measure. The script is what emerges to make itself known and I’m fascinated as to why Steppling and Evans chose to tell their story from such an unusual perspective. It’s an utterly original dynamic, alternately frustrating and invigorating, as we’re left out of the big picture to catch only its periphery when events or conversation bring Kim into those smaller pictures.

Visually it’s capable, with the production given access to a variety of locations and props that help to sell the affluence of Ray Easler without having to resort to cheap tricks. Regular viewers of indie features will see where money isn’t spent where Hollywood would have spent it, but it spends enough to work. Only in the supporting roles does its indie nature really show up, because some of the actors who get a line here and there clearly aren’t up to the standards of the rest of the production. A few are capable, like Charidy Wronski as a policewoman and some polite but knowing ranchhands, whose names I failed to catch, but most are not. Other weaker aspects include some slower scenes in the middle portion of the film and the way that the ending is left open wider that it should have been, given just how much has been published on this case and is readily available for anyone to explore by simply searching in Wikipedia, especially in regards to Easler’s fortune in silver and the favourable treatment given to Kim Davis.

Then again, this is fiction, even if it’s based on a non fiction book. The wise choice to change the names of the lead characters speaks to that. Kim Davis may be a sympathetic character, clearly innocent of any of the charges that were brought against Sandy Murphy in real life, beause they’re not the same; one was merely based on the other. It feels like they didn’t take that decision just to avoid being sued by someone who might get upset with any of the changes, but because they knew they’d changed things just enough to want to ensure that their creation is received as fiction. Braveheart this isn’t, thank goodness, and the film doesn’t begin with a banner that proudly proclaims, ‘Based on a true story!’ It’s a work of fiction and on that front it entertains, led by one strong lead and one subtle one and an odd experiment of a script. I wonder how many viewers will thrill to the different approach and how many will feel cheated because of what they don’t get to see. Maybe it’s down to the budget, maybe imagination, but it’s certainly original.

The Gays (2014)

Director: T S Slaughter
Stars: Chris Tanner, Frank Holliday, Mike Russnak and Flip Jørgensen

Next year, I'm planning to review something completely out there every week under the banner of Weird Wednesdays and this film, sent to me for review by its producer, could easily qualify as an early hint at how out there it's going to get. This is a new comedy feature from writer/director T S Slaughter, who had similar roles on the slasher movie Skull & Bones in 2007, but these aren't your usual movies. That was a gay slasher movie and this is a gay comedy, because they're clearly supposed to be gay before anything else; that's what defines them. In fact, it would be a serious challenge for any movie to be more gay than this one. It's called The Gays, for a start, named for the family at its heart, a gay family named Gay. Dad is Rod Gay ('Gay, Rod' in the phone book). Transvestite mum's surname is hyphenated, so she's Bob Gay-Paris, which is pronounced just as you might expect. They have two gay sons, Alex Gay and Tommy Gay, who they've brought up as gay from moment one. Right from baby's first butt plug.

Whatever else this film is, you can't accuse it of false advertising. If anything, the picture's website, DVD cover and blurb don't go far enough. Sure, this is 'raunchy, twisted and hilarious', if you're of a like mind to the filmmakers, but I can think of a bunch of films that fit that description; none of them go anywhere near as far as this one. Clearly the primary cinematic influence is early John Waters, but it truly outdoes the master in offending anyone it damn well pleases. It makes an 'it went there' comedy like Pizza Shop: The Movie look Production Code safe. It's edgier than anything I can remember even from Troma, as if it kidnapped all the gay moments in Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, anally gang-raped them into compliance, waited for them to contract Stockholm Syndrome and then used them in a propaganda film. It's professionally offensive out of the gate and it remains that way throughout. Most people won't make it to the title card; anyone who does is likely to wear out their DVD at parties. Gay parties, of course.

After being introduced to little Alex Gay as a gurgling baby, mummy's own little butt pirate, and listening to the catchy theme tune, Come Meet the Gays, that accompanies the opening credits, we get right down to business because this short 68 minute feature doesn't have time to mess around. We meet the grown up Alex in a gay bar in West Hollywood called the Luca Lounge; it's 1997 and he's chatting with another gay man named Kevin. The format is almost sit-com in nature: Kevin asks Alex a question and he replies in the form of a long flashback to explain how things were in his gay household growing up, almost a gay take on something like How I Met Your Mother, just not remotely suitable for prime time viewing. As Kevin and Alex are both at the Luca Lounge from the outset and they never leave, we can easily imagine them there forever, continuing this question/flashback format long after the end credits roll. With enough skits and a day to shoot more framing scenes, this could run for half a dozen sequels.

The only catch to that is that without reference points to tie this material to our own lives in some highly watered down way, this episodic approach eventually makes the 68 minutes run long. Perhaps gay men living in Pasadena in the eighties, imagining a parallel universe in which the law might allow them to be married and raise children, would find those reference points. However, Slaughter's examples of what it might be like are so deliberately extrapolated to the most outrageous extremes he could imagine that it becomes a challenge rather than a commentary. We wonder much more about how far he's willing to go than about the real life ramifications of the recent trend towards such a legal situation, and he does find it hard to escalate. The first flashback has Bob explain to her kids that they grew inside her intestines to be born from her ass in ectopic anal pregnancies. Did it hurt? Well, an accompanying visual of a Crisco'd up garden gnome answers that question in rather graphic fashion. How to escalate from that?

While it's clear that the most graphic scene arrives a few skits later when we finally get to see the birth, of a doll whose umbilical cord is anal beads, I honestly wondered which scene was the most offensive. It takes a special sort of picture to wonder about that, but Slaughter gives us plenty of material to choose from. The very concept of a baby butt-plug, which we see but don't see used, thank goodness, is a hard one to beat. The discipline meted out to Alex for not taking advantage of his friend Billy who's sleeping over seems tame by comparison, until we realise that the adult actors are pretending to be preteens. If we didn't catch that, we can't miss it when Chris, an adult overtly playing thirteen, is forced into sucking off Rod Gay to thank him for dinner. This is where the film would have become pornographic if the body parts had been real. This is the only obvious stunt cock used in the film, which is otherwise not short on full frontal male nudity. Actors were clearly hired because of what they would do, not for acting ability.

Fortunately, while trying to offend viewers seems like Slaughter's primary goal, that's not the only thing in mind. The parts I appreciated the most were the humorous nods to popular culture, as the movie finds time to reference pictures as unlikely as A Clockwork Orange or The Exorcist and temporarily become a commercial. It parodies a number of TV theme tunes (being English, I've never seen The Brady Bunch or Romper Room, but my wife grew up on them and her reactions were priceless), even carols like O Little Towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. We're given a laugh track at one point and at another we're shown a GI Joe with Rim Job Butt as a pre-teen gay kid's Christmas present. These nods grounded the film better for me than any of the situations that characters find themselves in and especially the amorality with which they're all addressed. Really, that amorality is far more offensive than any of the gayness pervading the film. The funniest bits turn out to be simple things like a gloriously inappropriate icicle.

It was this amorality that made me wonder most though. Maybe it was just the easiest way to offend, but it isn't the most palatable. Of course, even thinking about whether offensive material should be palatable or not really defeats the purpose of such things and it highlights how the line that filmmakers can't cross has moved so far since the days of Pink Flamingos. Yet I felt throughout this film that there was a reason for it beyond grossout comedy and simply going further than anyone else and its constant amoral nature served to blur what that reason could be. Everything revolves so relentlessly around male gay sex that I wondered if it was a riff on the fear behind prejudice. There isn't a single woman in the film and lesbians are never even mentioned; there's also nothing about gay love, just emotionless sex, sex for sex's sake, one track mind stuff, right down to the constant double entendres (like 'I work my asshole to the boner'). Could this be a way for gay men to laugh about how straight men might imagine gay households?

Certainly there's a huge amount of effort given to translating every aspect of straight life into some sort of gay equivalent. Every example is taken to a ludicrous extreme, right down to the gay phone that only receives calls, but there are real questions underneath it all. How should a male gay couple with children explain where they came from, other than not through ectopic anal pregnancy? How should parents talk to their gay children about dates, other than not treating it like Texas Hold 'Em? How would a household comprised entirely of gay men have any understanding of what women are like? Is the idea here to take straight life, translate it directly into gay equivalents and show how ludicrous it all is through a mirror? It certainly seems like the direct comparisons are a good deal of the point, perhaps to resonate with a gay audience who grew up in the other world. Here, Alex is reprimanded with, 'Heterosexuality is not proper dinner conversation.' How many gay sons of straight parents grew up with the exact opposite?

With a growing acceptance of gay marriage and gay adoption throughout the US, I'm sure that the film industry, always a few years behind the curve, will start to make gay films that work for straight people as much as gay ones. TV shows like Game of Thrones are pushing that envelope already and indie films are, as always, ahead of Hollywood. David de Coteau is making horror movies to the same template that he's always used, except the characters making out in the shower are now young men instead of young women. This, however, is so far out there that any social message is almost entirely buried under a goal of offending as many people as possible. It's not that The Gays is gay, it's that, to offend on the grandest scale, it appears to encourage a heady cocktail of date rape, sexual abuse and corruption of minors, all the way to baby's first butt plug. Wondering how far it will go turns it into a freakshow and the questions it raises fade away into the background. Instead it's: 'They didn't? They didn't? Yep, they did.'

Rather last minute, but The Gays will enjoy its New York premiere at 10pm tonight at the Anthology Film Archives. Admission is $10 and that includes a copy of the DVD. Details can be found on the film's website.

Kiki Meets the Vampires (2014)

Chrissy Mountjoy-Collette, John Tomelleri, Dale Hilton, Amber Lodge, Shawn Mock, Rev Dwight Frizzell, Lionel Dekanel, Paxton Von Kruger, Eric 'Kiki' Clam and Krystal Heib

The biggest perk that stems from being a film critic, reviewing at Apocalypse Later the sort of films that most critics don't review, is the feedback I get from filmmakers. It's the best feeling in the world when an actor, a writer or a director gets in touch with me from the other side of the world because they've found my review of their film and they want to let me know that I got it. Well, one film that I'm still not sure that I've got yet is The Legend of the Shoe Man, which I first saw as a festival submission. It's a short piece of folk art which builds something mythical that may or may not have been real. It might be a documentary or a fairy tale or an anthropological study or a fireside yarn or an experiment to build an urban legend out of thin air using an odd mix of interviews, stock footage, comedy, exploitation, music video, sermonising, reenactment and outsider artistry. Well, I reviewed The Legend of the Shoe Man and Joey Skidmore, the man behind the film, found it and kindly sent me a copy of Kiki Meets the Vampires to review too.

Now, if The Legend of the Shoe Man was offbeat, Kiki Meets the Vampires is a wild glowing portal into the Twilight Zone. It's about everything that Hollywood isn't and, while it refuses to explain itself, it's easier to figure out than Skidmore's first film. It just took me a while to get there and until I did I'm not sure if I was embarrassed, entertained or embarrassed about being entertained. My better half didn't like it at all but I couldn't keep my eyes off it. I found a peculiar charm to it that suggests that it would play well at a party, not just once but looped over and over, in the right company of course. And that's going to be the key, as this is far from a movie for everyone. The more open you are to the unconventional, the more you might just get a kick out of this movie, because it's less of a narrative story and more of an odd collage of odd characters shoehorned into an odd hour. The closest I can come to summarising the film is by suggesting an episode of Scooby Doo, as cast by Ed Wood and directed by Mack Sennett.

To describe it properly, I have to explore it through its characters. It begins with Krystal Heib portraying a vampire queen like her life depended on it. Scantily clad in lingerie and a fur coat and backed by stained glass, she writhes in ecstasy in an antique chair to the music video for La Guinguette by les Fossoyeurs, a French punk band. Using an outrageous Bela Lugosi accent and enough emphasis for a dozen mimes, she cries to her entourage, 'Him! I vant that one! Bring me Kiki!', referring to the lead singer of the band, also one of its three saxophonists. When did you last hear a punk band with three saxophones? It might have been the same time you last saw a punk band switch to jazz via traditional chanson and even include a whistling section through which they do-si-do. Les Fossoyeurs (or the Gravediggers) aren't your regular punk band, that's for sure. Krystal Heib isn't your usual vampire queen either; surely most don't have a bald bongo playing vampire stooge in a purple velvet smoking jacket. This is all about wild coolness.

If Heib and her minions constitute the vampires, it's time for us to head over the pond to meet Kiki, and so we do, watching les Fossoyeurs eating dinner, jamming in a local club and surviving vampire attacks without apparently noticing that they're even happening. I was never quite sure if the vampire girls with their corpse paint and transparent pursuit tactics are supposed to be invisible or not, but they're easily foiled through such timeless tactics as banana peels and farts. Then again, being French, Kiki's farts are probably lethal to vampires because of the garlic. Maybe all French vampires should emigrate to Kansas City instead. After a succession of scenes both legitimately or inexplicably in French, les Fossoyeurs hop Stateside for an American tour, grounded as the whole film is by the newsreading of a French DJ. French news is comprised half by coverage of 'the biggest band in Europe' surely about to break North America and half by the mysterious murders spreading across the continent.

What's clear thus far is that most of the people in the film can't act but that all of them are clearly having a blast making it. Also, just as Ed Wood cast non-actors who were fascinating people (psychics, wrestlers, horror hosts etc), Skidmore cast this film from the eccentrics and fascinating characters around him (and given that he's been a musician for decades, there are plenty of them). Some return from The Legend of the Shoe Man like Wolf the Bounty Hunter (now Vampire Slayer) and John the Angry Plumber. Others show up at this point, like the Rev Dwight Frizzell or the bikers with flaming swords who arrive at the finalé. The key to getting into a Skidmore film appears to be the ability to do something either bizarre or unique, like walking across a kitchen floor on your hands to attack someone with your feet, or to actually be someone bizarre or unique, whether through size, shape or character. Then he can shoot you doing something cool and edit your respective footage together into something that vaguely resembles a story.

Most of these folk only have bit parts though, what might be fairly described as cameo appearances if a debut screen appearance could be called a cameo. The thrust of the narrative follows three set groups of characters. Two are represented in the title: Kiki and the French punks in les Fossoyeurs and the vampire queen and her minions. The third are not and they're later arrivals in the film but they do become just as prominent, in fact far more important to the film and its tone. The realisation that they're a parody of the Scooby Gang brings everything into focus and suddenly it all makes sense. Why was Betty reading in the bath, while Chrissy played with her bubbles? Why do the pair of them have a pillow fight and frolic on the bed for no apparent reason? Well, because they're really Velma and Daphne and who didn't grow up with that vision in mind whenever they watched Scooby Doo? Now Tom and Stoney make sense. Now the twin for Wolf makes sense. Now the Reverend makes sense. Now it all makes sense!

Daphne, I mean Chrissy, is the most prominent, as Chrissy Mountjoy is a tall drink of blonde water with a short purple dress and a lime green boa. She's acted before, generally in lesbian horror films like Dream Witch and Christine's Addiction, but surely her finest moment here is after the credits when we watch her try repeatedly to pronounce 'les Fossoyeurs' in the outtakes. Amber Lodge is much better as Velma, erm Betty, even though this is her debut on screen. Her fact filled Nosferatu monologue needed retakes but otherwise she was surprisingly strong as an actress. John Tomelleri appropriately gets little to do as Tom because, after all, Fred never did much in Scooby Doo, right? However Shawn Mock doesn't get any more as Stoney, because Shaggy always needed Scooby and this film had no budget for an animatronic hound. Maybe that's why the vampires nabbed Chico, the old turnip farmer's dog. Like Lodge, neither Tomolleri nor Mock have acted before and their chance may come in the next Skidmore movie.

If the Scooby Doo parody defines most of the tone of the film, at least some of it is phrased through old school slapstick instead. There was a lot of that in Scooby Doo too, but here it seems to be separate from that side of the film so I wonder if it was just a separate influence. It's mostly apparent as vampires try to obtain Kiki for the vampire queen and in another apparently random picnic scene in the park. That has a pair of 1950s teenagers who clearly aren't teenagers any more, Boner living up to his name and wanting more than his Christian girlfriend wants to give up. The joke is that she's a rather buxom lass, innocently topless by the time the vampires show up, but they end up chasing after Boner instead. This is less like a Scooby Doo gag and more like what Mack Sennett might have written, had he included bloodsuckers and boobs in his silent pictures. Given the lack of consistency of tone, this scene could even have been shot in black and white and with intertitles instead of sound and worked just as well.

And that inconsistency, more than anything else, is what's going to challenge potential audiences. Many people have no problem with bad acting, or Nicolas Cage wouldn't have a career, but they don't want to be challenged by the movies they watch, content instead to be drawn along by a smooth progression of inanity. This is far from smooth, so it'll challenge people. It's an English language film but its main stars only speak French and other characters do likewise. There are so many people in the film that nobody is ever really focused on, so we jump back and forth continually trying to figure out where we're going and eventually realise that the film is always in the moment not in the flow. The humour is often juvenile, as is appropriate with Scooby Doo and slapstick comedy influences, but there are moments with full frontal nudity too, both male and female, often entirely out of the blue and for no apparent reason. And, it's a mere hour in length, including the music video in the middle and the outtakes at the end.

So there's frankly no way that Kiki and the Vampires is ever going to go mainstream. You're not going to see this in your local multiplex or reviewed in your local newspaper. However, it really doesn't care as it's hardly what it's aiming for. It has to be said that as a filmmaker, Joey Skidmore is a damn good musician (and the film's insanely catchy theme tune opens up his excellent new album, Joey Skidmore Now!). His editing and cinematography are hardly sophisticated and his writing is far from linear. He can't maintain a tone or a theme without wanting to throw something else in there for no better reason than it happens to be cool. I'm sure they'd kick him out of film school but, frankly, is there anything more punk than that? The people who don't hate this are going to love it because it's an unholy collage that plays out like the cinematic equivalent of a punk zine, with Skidmore, the editor with a passion, writing about all the cool things he's found, pasting in images of the sacred and the profane, xeroxing it at work and selling it at gigs for beer money. On that front, it's a cult film that will be watched over and over.

Heavy Metal Horror (2014)

Director: Richard Boylan
Stars: Keltie Squires, Damian Dunwoody, Daphnee Hanrahan and Anthony Rotondi

While we frequently can and do complain about the dearth of cool genre film events in Arizona, a couple of established festivals notably excluded, sometimes we get slapped with a few of them all at once. I was elated to see a feature called Heavy Metal Horror announced at the Valley Art in Tempe, especially with a few of the cast members there in person for a Q&A. I'm a metalhead, a horror nut and a film critic, so this is about as tailor made for me as any movie could be. Unfortunately I was hosting my own film event the same night at LepreCon, so couldn't make it. However executive producer Mel Hoy kindly sent a screener my way so I can catch up, however far after the event. Bizarrely, the film is at once exactly what the title suggests and nowhere near what I'd expected from it. Most obviously, metal is usually fast and this is far from that, even though Armifera, the band who feature here as a fictional version of themselves are very much an old school thrash band. It's a slow, grounded movie that has no concerns about taking its time.

Initially it appears to be two completely different films. The first half of the title naturally follows Armifera, whose original guitar player, Richard Boylan, wrote and directed. Originally named Death Metal Horror, it also inspired their song DMH. Armifera are a real band from Edmonton, Alberta, which is surely why they sound so tight on stage in a tiny club. They're not a groundbreaking act, but they're clearly very capable musicians. I'd happily go to see them live, especially in a club that small. Off stage, they don't appear to be particularly bright, though I don't know if they're putting it on for the sake of the story. Their side thus far is the sort of thing you'd expect: they get together, buy drugs and rehearse. It's no hard task to watch them noodling around and chatting, because it feels very real and thus very believable. We do wonder if it's going to take us anywhere, but it does ground the film effectively while we take in what we're seeing from the second half of the title, which eventually becomes 'horror' but starts out as 'whore'.

In this thread, Boylan adds the hat of documentarian and interviews a hooker about a story she's wanted to get off her chest for a couple of years. Her name isn't Julia but she chooses it for the interview because she liked the movie Romeo and Julia with Claire Danes. Yeah, there are clearly some damaged brain cells in play here, though the actresses (Keltie Squires in older scenes, Daphnee Hanrahan in newer ones) feel as appropriate for the part as Armifera are playing themselves. Julia is lucid but disillusioned, clearly not all there but never too far away. She's a faded beauty, but with solid potential to look good again with an effort. She's a little stupid and a little slow but she's still able to call others on stupid questions. She's not too comfortable about being in the profession she is, apparently, possibly because she was trying to quit two years ago and didn't manage it. 'I'm a hooker' she says with her eyes notably elsewhere. 'I do what I gotta do.' Yet she talks in euphemisms, referring to her sex work as 'arranged meetings' and the like.

The biggest flaw of the movie is in how long it feels like it takes to get moving while we're watching. With hindsight, the pace isn't a problem, but we have to get to the end to realise that, rendering it an odd but eventually satisfying picture. We know the two halves of the story have to connect at some point, partly because there wouldn't be much point otherwise, partly because Julia's interview footage interrupts the renactment of what she's building up to and partly because she's all white and dressed in black but with very red lips, like she's all ready for a role in a stylistic movie with a deliberately restricted colour palette. For a while, the biggest suspense is wondering if the inevitable is really inevitable or whether the halves will remain unconnected. She offers background that's interesting but doesn't seem to take us anywhere; they just do what bands do without ever suggesting why we're watching them do it. It doesn't even seem like we're watching a horror movie, until Chris the guitarist lets us know he's planning to raise a demon.

Now, I've seen movies where bands raise demons and they're not remotely like this. I remember watching The Gate on its original release then walking down to my local record store to order the Sacrifyx album. It was great being a kid watching The Gate, Trick or Treat and their ilk, but this isn't remotely like that. We're not enjoying another cheesy horror flick, we're watching an adult drama, phrased as a fake documentary and with a real band playing themselves to make it seem all the more believable. After so many routine scenes, which frankly include the vocalist putting up freaky fliers with a Satanic vibe, we're conditioned to take the whole demon raising concept as completely normal. Similarly, we hear enough about Julia to quit asking questions when odd things come up. She lived in a haunted house when she was a kid, or at least she thought so. It seems to us like she still does. When she was a kid, her imaginary friend was a hole in the back yard which told her to throw things into it. Like rocks. And cats.

And finally, things start to connect. Vincent, her pimp, texts her to meet a john and she won't do it. She's going to quit the streets. He rings her driver. She runs. And hey, all of a sudden, there's the bar at which Armifera are playing. The stars are finally aligning and we have ourselves a movie, both subplots still in play but unfolding together until the conclusion. As a drama, it's surprisingly engaging for such an odd framework, but as a horror flick we wonder what we actually saw because the finalé is far from explained, probably because the whole tone of the piece is documentarian in nature and open to our interpretation. I had a whole bunch of questions. Is Julia speaking out of guilt or horror? Was something summoned or was something brought? If the latter, who brought it? The film's synopsis suggests that Julia is 'hounded by an evil spirit' but is that before or after? What's with the hole? Does that have a deeper purpose? Is Julia crazy, schizophrenic or demonic? Maybe a second viewing might tell me but the first didn't.

I enjoyed Heavy Metal Horror, though it's far from what I expected it to be. It's not a horror movie; there's nothing camp here, even the parts that would be under different circumstances like the cheesy demonic book. It's more of a drama that reaches into horror territory towards the end, a slow paced one that's all the slower because of the approach taken to mix documentary footage with a reenactment and because it spends far more time than is usual grounding the story in reality. Musicians will surely subconsciously nod their heads while watching this movie because the little details are so true, like the band taking time after their performance to deconstruct their show and all their little mistakes. I wonder if any ladies of the evening watching might do the same, Julia so often talking but not talking or detailing the things she'll do and the things she won't. In the end, it's a sort of art film, something you might expect to watch on IFC or the Sundance Channel rather than on FearNet.

As you might imagine, none of these actors are particularly experienced, but they're all very believable. There's good reason for the band to feel real, of course, given that they are a band; Armifera are a going concern playing gigs in northwestern Canada and festivals like the Calgary Metal Fest and Farmageddon, in the countryside east of Edmonton. Their debut album, Eradication, is also now available and based on what they sound like in this film, it ought to be a good buy. Making an intriguing feature film is surely an original way to build publicity and I wish them well. I have friends in Edmonton, one of whom often stays with us in January, so I'll make it up there one of these years, probably for one of the genre film festivals that sells out up there like DedFest or Deadmonton. Seeing Armifera live on the same trip would be cool. The individual members are characters but not so much that they would thrive outside the band. They're charismatic enough to appear as themselves, but clearly it's music that drives them, not acting.

Of course, the film's approach really doesn't call for acting, mostly calling instead for its cast members to act as naturally as possible. While Anthony Rotondi does get to shout a lot, the only one who really gets the opportunity to act here is Daphnee Hanrahan as the modern day Julia. IMDb only details one previous picture for her, Bridges Over Montreal, a Canadian romcom in which she presumably goes on one of the five memorable first dates that it covers, which all take place, as you might expect, on Montreal bridges. That would seem like a notably different role to this one and I'd be interested to see how she does. This is hardly the sort of movie that allows us to really gauge her talent. She's believable in the role of a hooker wanting to not be a hooker and she gets enough little quirks of character in there to become memorable. In many ways the film itself does the same thing. It doesn't seem to do much, but it does it uniquely and it's all the more memorable for that. It's definitely not your usual horror flick but it's still worth a look.

Mike Case in: The Big Kiss Off (2013)

Director: Justin Baird
Stars: Les Mahoney, Debra Mayer, Devai Pearce, Atoy Wilson and Dale Shane

I watched The Big Kiss Off and I enjoyed The Big Kiss Off, but I'm still not sure exactly what I saw. I think what it boils down to is an equivalent to The Big Something that merely plays a little closer to its source inspirations. The Big Something is a microbudget Arizona feature film that takes an idea conjured up by Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep, the first of his Philip Marlowe novels, and runs with it, namely that in reality, detective stories don't unfold quite as cleanly as they do in the movies. The traditional model sees a crime solved through insight, intelligence or intuition. Watch enough of them and you'll begin to realise whodunit a few minutes in. When Howard Hawks adapted The Big Sleep to the big screen in the late forties, he followed Chandler's approach instead, which was to concentrate on the feel of the piece, building a story not through plot but through character. He even asked Chandler who killed one of the supporting characters, only to be told that even the writer didn't have a clue. It simply wasn't important.

In other words, what The Big Sleep did was to have its detective stumble about poking a stick into every hornet's nest he could find until he got the sort of reaction he was looking for. Eventually, he stirred up enough reaction for the villain to come to light so the story could be wrapped up. It has a beginning and an end that appear to tie together, but what comes in between is completely up for grabs. Who knows who did what? Who knows if Marlowe found the right clues or acted on them in the right way? It doesn't matter. He got his man in the end. Well, a man, at least. Some have complained that The Big Sleep is a confusing, hard to follow mess, but they're missing the point; it's supposed to be! It's an attractive idea, one that has been played with in many other movies, usually with titles that reference the original. The Big Lebowski is the most obvious thematic return to this idea, but The Big Something does exactly the same thing on a much smaller budget and with a much quirkier feel. That's why it leaps to mind here.

I've now seen almost eighty films by Travis Mills and Running Wild Pictures and The Big Something, his debut feature, is probably still my favourite, even if it isn't the best. Talking with regular Running Wild actors at the 52 Films/52 Weeks event last weekend, I found that I'm not alone. It must have cost about as much as my granddaughter has in her piggy bank and it's certainly not without its flaws, but it takes that stumbling detective idea from The Big Sleep, hauls it into the modern day and endows it with some gloriously quirky characters and situations. It's a lot of fun, like The Big Lebowski without a budget. The Big Kiss Off does precisely the same thing. Shot in Hollywood, it clearly isn't a Hollywood movie; it's an indie feature that takes neat advantage of its lack of budget. Mike Case, for instance, is a classic PI with his name inevitably stencilled on his office window; but here, that office is his car. It's this sort of little touch that does a lot more than merely recycling character names from Double Indemnity.

The screenplay tasks its hero less with solving a case, which has to do with finding a missing husband, and more with just bouncing from one quirky character to another. This is the film's greatest success, but it couldn't work without a strong character to ground all the wackiness and, fortunately, that's the other obvious success. Les Mahoney would seem to be responsible for both of them, as he co-wrote the script with Sherman Hirsh and took the role of Mike Case for himself. He's not your usual leading man, even if he wears the usual hard boiled detective's suit. He often looks older than he is, because his face has the sort of worn in look we might expect from a jaded private dick who's been there, done that a few times too often. He feels somewhat like Doug McClure playing Tom Waits, if you can imagine that combination. He also often feels out of place, like a forties character lost in time, because this movie is emphatically modern, however it wears its film noir influences on its sleeve.

The contrast is highlighted early on. Case suffers through a wonderful early scene at the Freaky Tiki Bar where he follows the detective movie rulebook, only to be ripped off by a bartender in a Hawaiian shirt. Bogie wouldn't have stood for it; he'd have slapped him into dishing out the dirt. As this lost opportunity highlights, Case isn't quite the hardboiled dick that he thinks he is. That's underlined soon after, as he visits Lt Lorena Dietrichson at home for police insight. He relentlessly tries to pump her for information while she just wants him to pump her. So Case thinks he's like Bogart's Philip Marlowe, but he's more like an alien stuck in Marlowe's skin with only a bunch of films noir as reference. Fortunately Mahoney plays Case straight throughout. Had he played him for laughs, this would have gone horribly wrong, but Case doesn't see humour in setting the Magnum, PI theme tune as his ringtone, tweeting his new case or driving around with bloody fuzzy dice hanging from his rear view mirror. We do, of course.

Most of the humour comes from the situation comedy and the wild characters that Case encounters as he blunders his way towards the end. Viewers who expect every movie to look like it cost $50m won't get too far here, but the live or die moment for those with more discerning tastes may be when Tamal Dupta shows up about the seventeen minute mark. He's a young conman masquerading as a bad guru and every scene he's in feels like it was improvised on the spot. Maybe that is the key. Everything else is when Dupta's on screen. He's easily the wildest character thus far and his arrival is the point where the film emphatically moves from being a detective movie with humour to a comedy with a detective. Anyone who doesn't appreciate this switch probably isn't going to enjoy where the picture goes from there, but if you find yourself laughing at his blatant attempts to fleece an undercover Mike Case, you should stick around and have a blast. And a beer. That would probably help too.

As Dupta, Sunil Sadarangani may play the most outrageous character in the picture, though Guillermo Jorge would battle him for that title as a Vegan bullfighter, but they're not alone. S W Thomas is surely my favourite as a crazily cryptic character with a stream of consciousness mouth. Like Jorge, he shows up out of nowhere, as does Maxim cover girl Erica Ocampo to slide into Case's hot tub and discuss the size of his gun. Given how little connection any of these have to the actual plot, maybe they're all just creations of his subconscious juggling things around. Then again, he does that sort of thing much more overtly with post-it notes on his car's bonnet. William Tell Mitchell brings a memorably broken voice to an art dealer with a line in therapy. Dale Shane proves a neatly apologetic enforcer and Atoy Wilson an eccentric informer. Hannah Pierce has a way of stealing scenes, even though she isn't even an actress; she's the waitress who served Hirsh and Mahoney when they first met for lunch to discuss the script.

There are experienced actors in the film. Debra Mayer, veteran of many a Full Moon movie, is a lot of fun as a nymphomaniac cop, even if she can't bring the proper nuance to film noir lines like, 'I've been well; now I'm better.' David Alan Graf seems to make his way into every other indie feature nowadays, but his role here has even less screen time than he had in Biology 101. Inevitably, they're more solid than some of the less experienced names. Devai Pearce has a decent shot at Victoria Billows, the wife who hires Case to kick off the film, given that she's earned precious few credits thus far. She has some good moments too but not enough of them. I'd still watch Scream, Zombie Scream though to see how she does with three roles in the same movie, one that was directed by one of the writers of this film, Sherman Hirsh. Throughout this surreal journey, it's Mahoney who is the only real constant. Everyone else is here for him to bounce off for a few minutes and move on.

As a film noir, this is clearly an affectionate tribute to the days of yore but it doesn't remotely follow in their footsteps. It's a detective movie without detection, not to mention a porn movie without the porn. It knows what it needs to include, but the obvious lack of budget, improvised feel to the dialogue and lack of emphatic sets means that a number of scenes feel like they might play out a little differently in the non-existent hardcore version. As a comedy, it's a lot more successful; once I managed to adjust to what I was actually seeing, I laughed my way through. The story is pretty terrible, possibly deliberately, but everything spins out of the offbeat characters and scenes, which are varied enough and frequent enough to keep us interested. I'd certainly watch it again (I laughed as much on a second time through as a first), but it would certainly play better in good microbudget loving company with a steady supply of alcohol to add to the ambience. Maybe that is the key. What do you say, Dupta?

Antisocial (2013)

Director: Cody Calahan
Stars: Michelle Maylett, Cody Ray Thompson, Adam Christie, Ana Alic, Romaine Waite and Ry Barrett

The Japanese have a habit of jumping on the latest technological trend and spinning a dark urban horror story around it. Director Cody Calahan, who also co-wrote Antisocial with Chad Archibald, is a Canadian but he does exactly the same thing here. In spades. In fact, he spends so much time exploring the tech that today's youth takes as utterly routine that he almost forgets that he's making a horror movie. Sure, there's a horror framework: there's a global infection killing billions, while a small group of college kids are trapped inside a house fighting for survival. Sure, there's a great horror scene, as a young lady who has succumbed to the infection illuminates the Christmas lights that bind her, attacks a former friend like a vicious animal, only to be hauled back and thrown into a stairwell to die a second death hanging from her bindings. Sure, there are neatly unusual creature effects and hints at Japanese trendsetters, but it isn't the horror that drives the piece, it's the tech every time, what it is and what it means.

We're deluged with it early on, to the point that entire generations are surely going to be confused. The focus is Samantha Rezner, a young alienated college student. She rings her boyfriend, Dan Hamilton, on her smartphone, only to get his voicemail. Moments later, an alert pops up to highlight that he's posting to a social network site, the Social Redroom. So she hauls out her laptop to check it out, only to find that a chick with a sexy avatar had an amazing time with him last night. Almost before we can read her post, Dan invites Sam to a video chat. He's apparently at a friend's house, surrounded by people in states of undress, distracted enough that he's texting someone while he talks to her. Sam wants him to meet her in person. Dan suggests that they should take a break and, sure enough, the next alert to hit her cell is his relationship status change, from taken to single. Her response is to delete the Social Redroom app entirely. All this unfolds in only two and a half minutes, a dizzying thing for anyone over 25.

And this is actually really important. Youngsters, who populate almost the entire film, will be wondering why she used a laptop at all, rather than just using the app on her phone, or why she typed out the url in full instead of using a bookmark. Older generations are going to ignore the details, read through the whole thing and realise that Sam is pregnant, especially given her reactions to other things around her, like the sight of blood. Yet it's this distraction that's key. The modern ADD generation could get caught up by this story, as they've grown up grokking this sort of omnipresent technology, which surrounds them and comforts them. To them, this story may have substance that may resonate uncomfortably enough for them to get a disturbing kick out of the thing, but I doubt it. It doesn't do much that's new on the horror front. However, anyone old enough to remember dialup, rotary phones or pagers will be automatically distanced and will probably find the whole thing fundamentally stupid.

Where Antisocial may have most value is with the people in between, young enough to understand the various technological concepts in play but old enough to not be owned by them. This is because it's far more of a commentary on our relationship to technology than it is a zombie apocalypse movie. Sam is the most important focus, partly because she's the most, and arguably the only, fleshed out character in the entire film, but also partly because she relies the least on technology. She constantly appears to be the odd one out because she can step away from the always connected world that her peers live in and she actually seems to like doing that. Even before we realise what's driving the end of the world, we're already sure that everyone is doomed except her, if only because of pattern recognition: one of these things is not like the others, right? Apply that to the story after, say, a quarter of an hour, and you'll be able to write the rest of the script pretty accurately.

Michelle Mylett is effective as Sam, even though the fundamentals of her character mean that she has to underplay it for most of the film. Her job here is to highlight the way out, not by doing things (except one rather enjoyably icky thing during the finalé) but by not doing them. Everyone else does them and that's why they're doomed. She doesn't, much, which is why she survives. Her real story begins as the film ends, in what could easily become a very different sequel indeed, one that would be hugely more accessible to a wide audience. This entire picture could be neatly summarised in the opening text and then we'd watch pregnant Sam kick ass for an hour and a half in the ashes of the world. I'd watch that movie, for sure. Unfortunately this isn't that movie, it's merely the opening text brought to life and it's far from the same thing. Mylett, earning her first IMDb credit here, is the biggest human reason that it works as well as it does, but she's clearly subservient to the commentary.

I wondered a lot during the first half of the film if Calahan had forgotten anything to throw in to boost that commentary. His characters are all generic and broadly drawn: Steve McDonald, the token black guy; Kaitlin Cosgrove, his blonde girlfriend; Jed Erickson, the joker; and Mark Archibald, the nice guy. The actors do their jobs but there's nothing much for them to do because they're so transparent. It's what Calahan gives them to play with that we're focused on throughout: Steve films Kaitlin on his phone because she wants to make a sex tape, while Jed can't stop watching a webcam show, the one that backed the opening credits with freaky effect. This is a clever inclusion that really underlines the story; it's a fundamentally insubstantial piece of fluff, just two girls talking about what clothes they've just bought, but then one brutally murders the other in cold blood because she's infected. She comes back to the camera to tell the world and can't turn off the connection. It goes viral, pun intended.

In many ways, this is Dawn of the Dead: The Next Generation. Just as Romero updated his zombies to riff on consumerism, having them mindlessly congregate at the mall because of herd instinct, Calahan updates the concept to the digital age. These characters aren't consumers, they're creators, even if its meaningless content. They're people who live on social networks; they're the YouTube generation. Calahan sets up a few expected scenes but then deflates them. Should Mark and his friends let Chad into the house, given that he's bleeding from the nose and ears and so must be infected? A decade ago, they'd open the door and soon regret it. Here they mull for a moment then leave him to die, then check the media to see what's happening. Almost every zombie movie I've seen includes characters watching the TV for news, but in this one, that's all they do. Even with the zombie apocalypse unfolding outside, they watch it online. These folk would go to a live gig and watch it through their recording iPhones.

There are great ironies here that many won't notice; they'll surely fly far over the heads of anyone who tweets their lunch or feels drawn to check in on Facebook every time they visit the bathroom. Most of them can't be explored here because that would spoil the ending, but I can point out that for a script that revolves so clearly around internet addiction and the concept of trust in the digital age, I found it frankly hilarious to see how it all went down. I can safely highlight a minor moment though that shows up during the glorious death scene I mentioned at the beginning of this review. The infected character thrown into the stairwell at the end of Christmas lights apparently held on to her phone throughout her brief zombie phase. It drops to the floor below her as she dies afresh. It's only a brief shot, but I couldn't help but see the manifesto of the characters we watch, and by extension the entire generation it aims to caricature. You can have her cellphone only if you pry it from her cold, dead hands...

I liked Antisocial but I probably fit in that middle demographic; anyone older than me is going to find it stupid, while anyone younger may not get it. It wouldn't surprise me to find this generally derided, but with an aware audience consistently defending it on merits that the rest don't see. There are homages here to other horror movies; there's a live exorcism online that looks rather reminiscent of Linda Blair's footage shot on webcam and the name of the social network is very telling. Redroom! Redroom! There are neatly impressionistic audiovisual montage sequences that go beyond the usual, mostly by adding sound triggers alongside the usual video ones. The agreeably icky creature effects are superbly done, though they're rarely used and mostly disguised as hallucinations; they're icky, black and neatly alive. Perhaps the most likely common ground is going to be the score, Steph Copeland's first, which shines. It's a pulsing electronic piece, but not in the usual ways. It may be all that spans the generations.

4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker (2012)

Directors: Mike Campbell & Todd Johnson
Stars: Katherine Browning, Leah Verrill, Mike Campbell, Ashley Love, Tiffany S Walker and Bianca Lopez

I first saw the film now known as 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker, as a festival submission when it was still called The Rental. Now, The Rental is hardly a snappy title but at least it doesn't give away, count them, two separate spoilers. What are the odds that this picture is going to feature four girls who are killed by a soul taker? Honestly, this could be the most spoilerific title ever, a full idiotic step beyond John Dies at the End. I remembered The Rental, though not its title, but couldn't remember much more about it than what is given away with the replacement name. It was one of those films that was capable enough to eat up an hour and a half without overt complaints but not memorable enough to stand out from the crowd, something that, by definition, every festival submission really needs to do. It was a bundle of hot chicks, death scenes and plot conveniences, meaning that it'll work well enough in the wild but be forgotten in no time unless a cast member suddenly makes it huge. None have yet.

At least the prologue is clichéd enough to dissuade more discerning viewers from proceeding further. It is so quintessentially clichéd that for a while I was honestly waiting for someone to shout, 'Cut!' and let us in on the secret that this is a horror movie within a horror movie. Unfortunately it doesn't; it keeps on going until we realise that we're seeing a template for the next ninety minutes. I literally can't spoil this picture, as there is nothing here that isn't a given from the new title and the first five minutes in which Becky is chased slowly around a small house by Roger Corman in an Emperor Palpatine costume. She's in full on victim mode, so far into hysterics that she's obviously going to be killed off quickly. He's calm and confident, issuing unending clichés. 'You leave me no choice, Becky,' he warns her, while trying to keep a straight face. 'I can do this all night, he mutters, 'but I prefer not to.' Given that he's played by Mike Campbell, one of the two directors, he doesn't have a choice. 'Give me your soul,' he whispers.

After the title, we discover that he's Devlin Chito and he's the landlord who is about to let the very same house to a quartet of stereotypical giggling young ladies. Well, four stereotypical giggling young ladies who are clearly a little older than they should be but still look good. Two are polar opposites: Lily is as pure and virginal as her flowery name would suggest, while Bianca is happy to bed anything with a penis. In fact, she even has her very own silent hunk to haul in her stuff. That leaves Lori and Pam, who are a lesbian couple; Lori is the blonde, Pam the brunette. Lily is the inevitable link between the four, as Lori's sister and Bianca's schoolfriend. I can buy the former but not the latter. Lily and Lori could easily be sisters who reacted differently to heavily disapproving parents, but Lily and Bianca clearly aren't the same age. The only things they agree on are that they love the house and that Devlin is a creepy dude. 'There's something not right about that guy,' says Pam as he vanishes into a puff of smoke outside.

And so the quartet settle into the house and their stereotypes, which only hint at going beyond sexual preferences. Bianca may be a nymphomaniac but she also freely and knowingly uses her body in order to get men to do anything she wants. Lori and Pam are a cute couple, though Pam has a bitchy streak, perhaps because however intolerant Lori's parents are, we discover Pam can't ever go home. They're believable together, playfighting with popcorn and cushions before jumping in the sack, then pissing each other off the next day; Pam flirts outrageously with Bianca, who isn't remotely interested, all to make her own girl jealous. Lily is the counter to all of them, because she isn't just waiting for the right man, she appears to be icked out by the concept of bodily fluids, not just sex but even drinking out of the same glass as someone else. She also prays for the others as they sit down to eat dinner. It's odd that she be the one to show her bits first; Lori and Pam don't even take off their bras to make love.

As if we might get the idea that there's some social value in the story, we're given our first outrageous plot convenience just before half an hour in. These girls are all in college, which isn't much of a surprise, but the first evidence of that is when Lori does her homework on mythology that just happens to be all about Choctaw shadow beings, starting with Nalusa Chito, best known as the soul eater. 'That's pretty weird,' says Lily. 'Mr Chito's last name means soul eater.' Well, 'chito' merely means 'spirit', but let's not quibble. We're here to learn exactly what the landlord, who has been watching the girls throughout on camera, is up to. Apparently the soul eater gets its strength from the souls of evil women, suggesting that in enticing ladies to his house and killing them, Mr Chito is merely recharging his batteries. 'Only the death of the innocent renders it powerless,' Lori reads, so we know where the story is going. Lori's question of, 'What is good and what is evil?' is the only real substance to the story.

The unusual thing is that this question manifests itself mostly through the gay subtext to the story, an obvious thing from the outset but one that builds through the first half. Every powerful moment ties to this aspect of the story. We're given a closed environment with four girls, in which the traditional good girl is the outsider. Her sister is gay but devoted and looking at marriage, if it ever becomes legal, while her best friend is straight but overtly uses sex as a weapon. Lily finds that, while she's all family values in her own mind, she can't help but see Lori as good, if fundamentally flawed according to her morality, but Bianca as bad. It's not who you do it with, it's why you do it, almost a manifesto for gay rights. Also, Lori and Pam's relationship is the only real one here, as Lily doesn't have them and Bianca doesn't have real ones. Yet it's framed just like any relationship, with tender, loving moments and tougher ones that ask questions about sincerity. It just so happens that both halves of the couple are girls.

I hadn't realised after my first viewing quite how well constructed this half of the movie is, but it's surely why it got picked up by Breaking Glass Pictures, whose dominant programming strand is LBGT movies. Certainly it's far more substantial than the horror side of the story, which hardly gets much attention at all. That side is thrust emphatically to the fore at the halfway point, where the film morphs into a weird creature without any real focus. It's a slasher movie, but one confined in a particularly enclosed space where there's no doubt who the particularly invulnerable slasher is and why he's doing what he's doing. It's a suspense flick, but it was clear from the first five minutes where everything was going to end up. It's drama, as tensions arise between characters, but none are remotely believable. It's even a torture porn movie, as Mr Chito turns into a sort of manipulative Jigsaw character, but it's a torture porn movie without any real torture porn. Really, as a horror movie, it succeeds only in eviscerating itself.

The actors do a surprisingly good job, given the material and given that none have racked up much in the way of credits. Katherine Browning is most prominent as Lily and she screams pretty well, but this was only her second feature, after the thoroughly awful The Carpenter: Part 1 - And So They Die. This was the first substantial role for Tiffany Walker, who plays Bianca, but she does fine. Ashley Love does better as Lori, who has a feature and a couple of shorts behind her. Leah Verrill gets lots of opportunity as Pam, with her bitchy attitude, and she lives up to it, though she does go overboard on occasion. And that's about it. The only other substantial role belongs to Mike Campbell, who does well at being creepy but not so well at being anything else. His role consists of standing still and speaking in an infuriatingly calm monotone with a grin on his face that makes him appear less like a Choctaw shadow dweller and more like a paedophile priest. 'Another evil gone,' he recites at one point, but without depth.

4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker isn't getting good reviews, though Greg Goodsell's at Cinema Head Cheese (currently also the only one at IMDb) is hilarious. Unfortunately it isn't really getting reviews, period. It's being consistently ignored, it seems, which is sad because I want to see what other people thought of it and its rather strange approach to horror. It asks a good fundamental question, that time honoured one about good and evil but, even as it does so, it promptly forgets that it might want to hazard an answer. In the end, we're returned to it as we close in on the end credits, but by that point, we really don't care because we've been led down so many clichéd horror tropes that we forget that there was even a hint of a wink at a possibility of some substance. Really what we're left with is that gay subtext that played out strongly and capably for half a picture. If this had been a drama instead of a horror movie, it might have been a lot more enjoyable. As it is, it's merely watchable at best.