The Lakeside Killer (2012)

Director: Bret Thomas
Stars: Johnny Ortiz and Jarod Anderson

Given how much fun writer/director Bret Thomas is obviously having with The Lakeside Killer, I wonder why it took three years for him to get around to his second film. Everything is bigger and bolder than 2009's Anywhere But Here, and that spreads beyond the movie itself. The premiere at FilmBar in Phoenix sold out, the film's website is an intriguing attempt at viral marketing and Thomas aims to publicise even more with fake missing posters put up around locations used in the film. Arizona locals will recognise many of these, as this often dabbles in travelogue. The stomping ground of the title character is Rio Salado Park by the Tempe Town Lake, but we're also driven along the 202, over the bridge from the Marquee to downtown Tempe and most of the way down Mill Ave, with stops at places like MADCAP Theatres and the ASU campus. Now that Tempe has a monster movie, I wonder if Scottsdale will feel obligated to get a bigger one.

The Lakeside Killer is a found footage film, but don't let that put you off. It's not that shaky, so you're not going to get motion sickness. It even follows the rules, so avoids editing in camera and, for the most part, deus ex machina plot conveniences. There is one right before the finalé but that's when the real suspense and shock moments kick in, so while you'll certainly notice it, you may not care too much until afterwards. As with Anywhere But Here, the biggest downfall is the sound, but the benefit of this being found footage is that that's not as important. The setup is that Eddie Toren, grieving his girlfriend, Kasey Robertson, is shooting a documentary to look into her death and others nearby, while raising awareness of what the media calls 'The Lakeside Killer' but the cops call coincidence. Eddie is not a professional journalist and his cohort Ty is not a professional cameraman, so their footage not being professional is merely realism.

Given that this footage was found with their camera at the scene of a triple homicide, it's pretty obvious that Eddie and Ty are going to constitute two thirds of the body count, but it's open as to who the final body will belong to. What I found was that it really doesn't matter. I hope this isn't supposed to be a whodunit, as there's little effort spent on pushing us into figuring anything out, merely a vague collection of hints that we're dealing with something a little more traditional in the monster vein than just a serial killer. That isn't to say that the film fails, because I think it works really well as a portrayal of grief-driven frustration. Eddie starts out fed up of getting nowhere with the cops, fed up of being told to wait, fed up of being ignored. He falls apart for a moment during his first monologue to the camera before composing himself. His questions to Kasey's mother are less interview and more therapy. All this is handled really well.

Johnny Ortiz does an excellent job as Eddie. He's rarely off screen and he feels very real indeed, not just because Ortiz subtly explores how much of an emotional rollercoaster Eddie is on, but because Thomas wrote the character surprisingly deeply for someone we know from the outset is going to end up dead. I loved scenes like the one where he orchestrates an interview with a park maintenance worker who had been questioned about Kasey's death, without ever having a clue that the man doesn't speak English. It's a solid combination of emotionally driven success and amateur failure, and it underpins Eddie's journey magnificently. He simply keeps on going because he has to, whatever. Tying this character into a monster movie framework works a lot better than shoehorning 'The Lakeside Killer' into 'The Mud Pond Monster', but the final showdown is surprisingly effective. Just don't make us wait three more years, Bret, for your next short.

Update: the film can now be viewed at the film's website.

Anywhere But Here (2009)

Director: Bret Thomas
Stars: Bret Thomas and John Lolmaugh

It's always good to see new local filmmakers presenting their work on the big screen at FilmBar in Phoenix. It's especially good to see them sell out the venue. Bret Thomas was here on Monday night to present The Lakeside Killer, a new long short film he wrote and directed. To warm us up, he treated us to his previous short, Anywhere But Here, shot in 2009 with him unrecognisable in the lead. It's an interesting piece but tough to review, because all the talking points it generates begin at the end, which I can't reveal. There's a reason why the mysterious protagonist wakes up in the middle of the desert without any apparent understanding of where he is. There's a reason why, after he takes a fork in a desert path, he immediately finds himself timeshifted a couple of minutes back to take the other one. There's a reason why, when he finds himself among people, he appears to be invisible. I'd love to discuss these reasons but I can't without a spoiler.

What's more, the ending is the best bit. It begins promisingly with a good setting, an unspoken mystery and some neatly framed shots, but the sound is problematic just as quickly. With very little dialogue and very little need for background sound, the desert wind promptly establishes itself as a noisy character with no part to play except to distract us with thoughts of earthquakes that don't happen. This problem is never overcome, and I wonder if the film would work better silent. Certainly it's visually capable, with interesting shots like a striking one of our protagonist against the sun and sky. The progression keeps us interested too, as reality mistreats our lost character and we want to know why. These blips escalate in frequency, depth and meaning until the final revelation, with the title admirably left unspoken. Ambitious and intriguing, it's worthy of multiple viewings and much discussion, but it deserves a lot less sonic distraction.

Man/Woman/Motel Room (2010)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Dean Veglia and Kelsi Zahl

I'm happy to fall into the habit of letting the first review of the month be of a Travis Mills film and this one may be the most important of all: it's the first picture from Running Wild Films and it set the stage admirably for what would follow, epitomising what this production company has come to stand for. If it isn't the most prolific in Arizona already, with two capable features and twenty five or so short films in a mere couple of years, it surely soon will be, with no less than 52 short film adaptations scheduled for 2013. That's one a week, every week, for the whole year, on top of a couple more features. In other hands that would be insanely optimistic but Mills is a master of the art of guerrilla filmmaking, shooting quickly and cheaply without sacrificing substance or quality. To illustrate, this short film took six hours to shoot on a sixty buck budget with a single set and a cast and crew of two each. This isn't just Running Wild's beginning, its their manifesto.

The minimalist title really sets the scene, because it's almost everything we get. Excluding the establishing shot at the outset, there's a man and a woman in a motel room and that's about it. Oh, and a story, of course, courtesy of Gus Edwards, who co-founded Running Wild with Mills. It's an intriguing little story, given that it tells us next to nothing. We aren't given character names or even their relationship. We have to figure it all out for ourselves. Running Wild regular Dean Veglia plays the unnamed man with the seedy, down to earth calm he put on in The Detective's Lover. It's his motel room and there's not much more there than the unnamed woman played by Kelsi Zahl, who I haven't seen before. Surprisingly, he's the grounding for her, as she's the one with character, lounging seductively on the rumpled sheets of his bed while telling him that he's a pervert who disgusts her. We can't tell if she's a girlfriend, a pickup or a whore.

Zahl fittingly plays her like a cat throughout, pouting one moment and preening the next. She's continually manipulative, but good at playing disappointed when all she gets is blatant honesty in return. She's good at playing curious too, ably switching from doe eyed rejection to intrigued seduction in a single moment. The only thing she can't put on is integrity, as this character will do anything if only it'll get her what she wants. It's a rich character, detail notwithstanding, and Zahl does a great job. I wonder why she hasn't acted more. Countering this fluid portrayal, Dean Veglia is constant and unchanging as her host, brutally honest but still stubbornly not telling us much about who he really is. It doesn't matter particularly. This isn't a whodunit where we need to pick up on clues, it's a one act dramatic scene where the interplay is all. This couple dance their little dance and we're drawn into the drama rather than into any semblance of plot.

It's fascinating to see how much Edwards gives us without really telling us much of anything. The dialogue feels almost throwaway but there's not a word spoken that isn't there for good reason. Don't come to this one expecting Tarantino-style quips. This isn't a script to quote, it's a script to reread and admire for its leanness. Emilio Mejía, Jr's camerawork and editing follow in a similar vein, so good that we don't even notice them until we rewatch and realise that they've quietly done everything that needs to be done. There's nothing here that's remotely flash but then there's nothing here that needs to be. That's not what Running Wild is about, after all. What Mills achieves here as producer/director is the essence of everything that he does want Running Wild to be: character-based story, stripped down to its bare bones, acted and shot well. It's somewhat like theatre could be if it didn't have reality to constrain it. Now go watch it on Vimeo.

Slumber Party Slaughter (2012)

Director: Rebekah Chaney
Stars: Tom Sizemore, Ryan O'Neal, Rebekah Chaney and Robert Carradine

This film was an official selection at the 8th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012 films.

I wanted to like Slumber Party Slaughter a lot more than I did. It's an independent horror movie for a start. It's a debut feature from a filmmaker progressing from an award winning short, Waste Land. That filmmaker, Rebekah Chaney, is both young and female, neither attribute as common in the industry as it should be. Not content with merely being that rare critter, a female director, she also wrote and produced, as well as playing one of the leading roles herself. She didn't hog the spotlight, sharing it instead with a few other lovely ladies, as well as some recognisable men: Tom Sizemore, Robert Carradine and the actor she played opposite in Waste Land, Ryan O'Neal, who liked that film enough to return for its successor. She also has a heritage to live up to, given that she's the great-grandniece of Lon Chaney, the first real American horror star and one of the most legendary men in the business. It ought to be my sort of movie.

And, to be fair, there's much that I liked. In the main, it's an affectionate homage to the eighties slasher genre, playing it a little gorier and with a little more substance than might be expected. The key locations are perfect for this sort of material: a strip club called the Lingerie Lounge, an Indian burial ground turned haunted cemetery and a millionaire's mansion empty, while he's at a business convention. Each of these would be a great setting for an eighties slasher movie and all of them probably were; we can hardly complain when this film gives us all three of them. It sets up capably, introducing us to a surprising number of characters. None get enough background to become great or iconic but there's more effort given to them than was the norm in the genre's heyday. The story follows suit, with inventive death scenes and fair plot twists. The eye candy is nothing to complain about either, the leading ladies (or gentlemen) well worth looking at.

Where it falls down is in the consistency and the tone, perhaps because Chaney is too young to have experienced the slasher genre as it should have been experienced. She was born alongside the genre, being a mere two months old when John Carpenter released Halloween, so she's less like the babysitter from so many slashers and more like the kids being sat. While Slumber Party Slaughter generally aims at the eighties, it opens with very seventies aerial footage that doesn't go anywhere and there are nods to more recent decades throughout, meaning that the camp ambience that should be everywhere simply isn't. That's the key ingredient that's missing here; anyone seeking this out for its retro feel will come up empty. It's too thought out to be a slasher, but too ambitious to be a postmodern homage. The subplots are too fleshed out and the main plot not defined enough for us to really be sure what we're watching.

We start at the Lingerie Lounge where the strippers are easily delineated: Casey is the nice girl stuck there to support her little brother, Bobby. She'll leave as soon as opportunity knocks with Nicole, the popular girl next door type. Vicky is the statuesque blonde bitch who's been there longest, has seen it all and is as cynical about it as she can be. Bobby has a huge crush on her and she knows it. That leaves Felicia, the dumb bimbo who counts her successes by how many plastic surgeries they pay for, and Nadia, the wannabe pop star who's so bad that she should never be. Watching them work is taxi driver Dave, a creepy regular, and a trio of college kids with more bravado than sense. They all get pissed off when Tom Sizemore shows up and steals all the girls. He has a blast parodying himself as Tom Kingsford, a drug addled movie star who collects bad habits. Coincidentally the part was based on his appearance in celebrity rehab.

As tends to happen in horror movies, the characters that play together stay together. When the movie star hires all the strippers for a private party that night and they breeze off into the dark in his limo, everyone else follows and Dave shows up just at the wrong moment, with Kingsford murdered, his chauffeur vanished and the girls figuring out what to do with the body. A year on, we pick the story back up as the limo is discovered at the bottom of the lake in the Indian burial ground turned haunted cemetery. At this point, Nicole has left the Lingerie Lounge for a cushier job working for millionaire art dealer William O'Toole. As the girls start to talk about their crime, they find out that Nicole is housesitting his mansion while he's away on business, so talk of murder and fear of discovery quickly turns into party time, with all those same characters finding their way back into the story from wherever they'd managed to escape to.

It's here that I started getting confused. Sure, we realise that O'Toole, played by near namesake Ryan O'Neal, is some sort of freaky voyeur, not away on business at all but camping out in the guesthouse watching proceedings on monitors, but did he just expect to see Nicole or the party that soon erupts? He and his sidekick sit back longer than seems natural, given that people start dying in the memorable ways that victims tend to find in slasher movies. He doesn't even call a halt when guests start to rob him blind or discover his kinky secrets. Did he set up the large but apparently retarded gardener to massacre the partygoers? Or is all this complete coincidence? I never could quite figure this character/subplot combo out. I couldn't figure out how Nadia had got a recording deal either, as she sounds awful, but Casey is working hard to become a cop and the other girls are still at the Lingerie Lounge, where the college kids are now as regular as Dave.

And all of them show up for the inevitable slaughter, with a host of romantic subplots in tow, and we settle back to watch the fun. While the tone is too serious and not campy enough, and the story is over-complicated, there is quite a bit of fun to be had. Felicia in particular gets a joyous death scene, combining plot conveniences galore with an inventive sense of humour and some very nice touches indeed. It's no surprise to find out she's not the only one who gets hers but I'm not going to spoil who, how or why. I'll merely point out that hers is the most memorable of the many death scenes on offer. They're handled well for the most part, though the imagination is in the denoument rather than the setup. It's pretty clear throughout who the next victim is going to be and how soon it's going to happen, while the actual method of dispatch and the style of the scene are much more up for grabs.

At the end of the day, there's a lot here to see but it's all on the micro scale, which means that this review probably makes the film sound more interesting than it is. The actors are consistently good but none of them are good enough to carry the picture. The characters they play are drawn better than is the norm but none of them are drawn well enough to be a real focus. The various subplots are worthy but distracting from the bigger picture. Rebekah Chaney can write and she seems to have a lot to say, but she doesn't seem to be able to stand back and see her script at a distance. She needed to slice off a lot of material, some good and some not, in order to focus the remainder into a leaner and tighter story. So much potential here simply isn't realised as it's lost in the mix. I enjoyed so many moments but was disappointed with the film. However I'm hopeful for Chaney's future. If she can learn from this, her next film may be something to see.

Scalene (2011)

Director: Zack Parker
Stars: Margo Martindale, Adam Scarimbolo and Hanna Hall

Rashomon, Memento and The Usual Suspects didn't call themselves perceptual thrillers but it feels like a fair description. The more recent Scalene, which coined the term to describe itself, takes a few different approaches from films like those and combines them into something that's almost like a whodunit, but only from the perspective of the viewer. It's a challenge: Zack Parker, who wrote, produced and directed, is going to play with our heads and our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to figure out where he's going to take us before we find ourselves there. Scalene is a single story, but told from three different perspectives; what's more, one unfolds backwards and one forwards, with the third being a deliberate jumble that links varied events together as surreal segues. It isn't possible to watch this film without continual reevaluation. If we stood up in court to explain the facts in this story, our testimony would depend on how far we got.

While this is ruthless and unashamed manipulation of the audience, we do at least know we're being manipulated, as the film opens with the aftermath then proceeds backwards to explain what it's the aftermath of. Janice Trimble wants her son back and it's Paige Alexander who took him away, so she shows up at her house with a gun. This scene is the most awkward in the film because neither participant has a clue either how to threaten or be threatened and it gets very farcical and overblown very quickly. Yet it's a fair microcosm of the film to come, which doesn't feel awkward at all. As we watch the weapons change, gun to towel rail to umbrella, we wonder what we're watching and we ask questions about what we see. This is far from your run of the mill thriller. Sure, Hanna Hall, who plays Paige, is pretty close to the stereotype of a victim of a home invasion, but Margo Martindale is as far from the usual invader as they come.

Martindale is one of those character actors who most people will recognise, probably from a host of different films and TV shows, but few will be able to name. She looks like an everyday person, one reason why she's so good at playing everyday people on screen, and it's wonderful to see her in a role of such substance. She and Hall are the leads, with Adam Scarambolo supporting them as Jakob Trimble. In lesser hands, Jakob would be the focal point: a handicapped adult, almost thirty but damaged mentally and unable to speak. A Hollywood writer would use the part to aim at an Oscar, but Parker makes him a living, breathing MacGuffin instead. He's what the other characters care about most but that's about it. The real story is in the other characters, in their actions and motivations, and, given the way in which those things are explored, in the depth of the performances that bring them to life. Both Martindale and Hall are superlative.

Because of the nature of this picture, it's impossible to give a fair synopsis. With most films, just outlining the first ten minutes is enough; sometimes it's less, sometimes much more, but there's almost always a point that must be reached to set up the plot but which can't be passed without providing spoilers. Here that's utterly not the case. Parker may never lie to us about who these characters are but he doesn't tell us the whole truth either, withholding important information to dish out a bit at a time to move the plot forward. This means that there are very few facts to provide as bedrock, everything else being perspective that changes continually. All I can really say is that Janice is a single mother, Jakob is her handicapped son and Paige his caregiver. After a few years, he's sentenced to three to five years of treatment in an institution for raping Paige. But those are just the facts, ma'am. There's a great deal more to proceedings than that.

I'd very much recommend that you pick up a copy of the film, which was released by Breaking Glass Pictures last month on DVD and BluRay, among other more modern formats, to find out just how much more. It's an understatement to suggest that there are depths here to explore. The revelations, and our subsequent reevaluations of them, keep on coming until we end up where we began, but with background enough to understand the context. Yet, by the time we get there, we're so in tune with Parker's conjecture that there is no truth, merely our perception of it, and so aware of just how often our perception has changed as the story unfolded, that I for one don't want to assume that it's a neatly tied up bundle and we're done. The ending is also a number of beginnings and there are many, many ramifications to consider. More than any other recent movie I can think of, this would be fascinating to sit down and discuss with people.

One key to the 'perceptual thriller' tag is that there are hints everywhere, most of which are not revealed as truths, which is frustrating but appropriate. This isn't your average Hollywood movie where everything we see is guaranteed to be put to use at a later point. Some of these hints may well hide truths, while others are less important in themselves than in how they're perceived by other characters, who then act upon those perceptions and drive the plot forward. Certainly the plot is shaped as much by perceptions as by facts, just as Memento was, or going further back, just as The Big Sleep was. Reality is what we make it, after all. The other key is that it isn't just about what the characters perceive but what we perceive. This is a film that makes us think, not just about the internal logic of the piece but about perception itself and how we make judgement calls in our own lives without context. Scalene is one of those films that could change its viewers.

This is very much Zack Parker's film, with a mention for long term collaborator Brandon Owens who co-wrote it with him. He directed it, he produced it and he edited it. He is utterly in control over what we see, especially important here as everything is about perception. Yet it had to be brought to life by the actors he hired, and as the scene that bookends the film testifies, that's not an easy task. I'm still not convinced by this scene, which I feel is still overplayed, even after factoring in the unfamiliarity the characters would have in such a situation. I'm sure, however, that I don't have that problem with anything in between and I'm thankful that Parker, who is still an independent filmmaker, landed his two leading ladies for this, only his third feature. They're very different, but they do have a couple of things in common: neither are particularly known for their leading roles in features and both of them deserve to be.

Martindale is a character actress, though her recent Emmy for playing the matriarch of a crime family in Justified may well deservedly propel her into more substantial roles. I probably first saw her in The Rocketeer, but she's played in everything from Days of Thunder to Hannah Montana: The Movie via Million Dollar Baby. On TV, her latest of many regular slots is in A Gifted Man. 'I think all actors should be character actors,' she says, and I couldn't agree more. She dominates for at least the first half of Scalene, Janice being our initial focus of attention and the grounding to the film. She stays our focus for quite a while, even as we shift over to scenes with Paige and Jakob, but gradually she lets Hanna Hall take the spotlight in the third act. Just as Hall appears to phone it in for a while but is really highlighting a lack of purpose, I wonder how much a second viewing will add to Martindale's brief contributions later on in the film.

Still under thirty, Hall had appeared in both Forrest Gump and The Virgin Suicides before turning sixteen. However these and many of her subsequent roles, including one as Michael Myers's sister and victim in Rob Zombie's Halloween, were short. Scalene shows what she can do with a lot more screen time, especially given that she has to follow Martindale's performance. While initially appearing to be a throwaway character, rarely visible, she grows magnificently during the second half of the film. The more involved she gets, the more thoughtful she becomes, the more depth she acquires and the more watchable she is. As the film runs on, she really takes over, dominating the film with powerful performances in her big scenes, which are handled very well indeed. Of course, by the end Martindale is back, but they're on much more even terms as characters, underlining just how much this film has relied on both of them.

Backing them up, Adam Scarimbolo does a good job in what is the only non-speaking role in the film. He's background in a lot of shots but he's always doing something, even if it's just some sort of twitch. When he gets more to do, he adds some character into proceedings even though we're not really sure how much character he really has. Jim Dougherty is worthy of mention too, though I'm still not sure how much actual substance his character provides. Everything here is solid, except for that framing scene and the picture quality of the screener I got from Breaking Glass. It was so bad that it looked like I was watching something with the resolution of a VCD, plagued with scary amounts of pixellation. After following up with other reviewers, I can happily report that this does not appear to be a problem with the film itself, just the screener. What you see when you go out and buy your copy should look fine. I'll know how fine when I buy mine.

Screaming in High Heels: The Rise & Fall of the Scream Queen Era (2011)

Director: Jason Paul Collum
Stars: Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer

It's almost surprising to find a documentary that lives up to its subtitle, but this one does exactly what it set out to do. Any horror fan remotely close to my age will realise that it's talking about the straight to video era of the late eighties, a relatively short but prolific period for the three ladies whose interviews constitute much of this film. No, we're not talking about people like Fay Wray or Janet Leigh. While they, and others, were justly famous for screaming in horror movies, they weren't scream queens. However great Fay Wray was, and I'm a great fan, she's nobody's primary reason for watching King Kong. Yet in the late eighties, people began renting this movie over that one purely because it starred Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens or Michelle Bauer. If you were lucky, it starred all of them. As Fred Olen Ray points out, the filmmakers realised that they 'didn't need Erik Estrada or Jan Michael Vincent any more.' The scream queen era was born.

It makes sense for writer/director Jason Paul Collum to make this film. He's documented scream queens before, in 2003's Something to Scream About and covered the topic in Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres, but this is a focused attempt to define the genre. He's also a fan, someone who grew up watching these movies and deciding that he wanted to make things like them himself. When he's not documenting the genre, he's adding to it, with films like 5 Dark Souls, Julia Wept and October Moon, films starring scream queens like Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon, along with Judith O'Dea from Night of the Living Dead, who came along a decade too early to be a scream queen but wouldn't have got naked even if the timing was right. Collum is definitely of the next generation, his first film as a director not coming until 1995, and he's by far the youngest of the various interview subjects we see here.

This film would have benefitted from Collum staying behind the camera. It's not that he doesn't have anything valid to say, it's that everyone else was an active participant in the era and their comments don't need anyone else to guide the history forward. Another flaw is that, while the people he interviews are certainly some of the right people, there aren't that many of them. Of course, the focus is on the ladies and the unholy trinity of scream queens are here, interviewed at length, but there are only six other subjects. Prolific directors Fred Olen Ray, David DeCoteau and Ted Newsom get most screen time, with some left over for actor, writer and director Richard Gabai, writer Kenneth Hall and omnipresent actor Jay Richardson. With so much from the same people, it quickly began to feel like Collum's presence on screen was merely because he couldn't reach anyone else to take his place. Many names are conspicuous only through their absence.

Those flaws aside, this is a notable success. The whole era is covered, from its beginnings as the home video boom began and mom and pop rental stores began to steal the focus for cheap films away from the drive in theatres. We find out about where these three scream queens came from and how they found this particular niche. We see clips from their debuts and their breakthrough roles, as well as all the key movies that I remember. Everyone's favourite will be here. We learn about how these films were made and how it differed from the B movies that went before them. Eventually we hear about the end, as the market reached saturation point and the scream queen epithet got co-opted by every actress who'd ever appeared in a horror movie or taken off her top on screen. At that point, the era was dead, though Collum gives fair credit to the few others who earned the title, including much love for Tiffany Shepis, who's keeping it alive today.

The biggest success is that the film works on multiple levels simultaneously, a trick that most documentaries never quite manage. It feels like an introduction, an accessible starting point for people to discover what scream queens were and why they were special for that brief, colourful slice of cinematic history. Yet there's enough depth here that I learned a great deal, even though I also grew up watching these movies, reading up on them afterwards in Fangoria and trawling market stalls to flesh out filmographies. I wouldn't call myself an expert on the subject, but I know a good deal, certainly enough to notice if Collum took a wrong turn. He didn't, but perhaps he glossed over a few things. What I discovered here was that I already had the era down pretty well, but knew less than I thought I did about the scream queens themselves. Most of what I learned here was from them, especially from early on before they defined the era.

One reason why these three were so successful as scream queens was because they were fans and they had a blast being in these sort of movies. That they were willing to get naked and killed a lot couldn't hurt, but anyone could do that. It was the enjoyment they brought that made the difference. They arrived around the same time, but from different directions. Quigley was a shy girl from a small town, still shy when she got naked and abused in 1975's Psycho from Texas. She arrived in film through modelling, as did Bauer, a self confessed 'free spirit', though Collum omits her time in porn as Pia Snow. Stevens is the eye opener: a Mensa member with a masters degree, she left oceanography when the science jobs dried up and was led into a casting office by the posters. Her breakthrough was earliest, in The Slumber Party Massacre in 1982. Quigley's came with The Return of the Living Dead in 1985, Bauer's a year later again in The Tomb.

The girls have a lot of fun remembering back, though Bauer seems to have mixed feelings about what she did. While she doesn't hide it and she still makes films today, she doesn't tell anyone outside the industry about her career. Stevens relishes it most, the grin on her face contagious as she talks about the lurid covers and titles. I found it funny that she mentioned Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama as an example, given that it was renamed The Imp for UK release. The guys add a lot of background. They churned these movies out without time in between to breathe. Films were shot in a week or less, for a tenth the budget of a drive in B movie. Hall wrote Nightmare Sisters in seven days, DeCoteau shot it in four. Ray describes the late eighties as the most exciting time in American film from a filmmaker's perspective, as everything was opportunity. If you could bring pictures in on time and on budget, you never stopped working.

I liked this film a lot, but I wanted a lot more. I couldn't help but compare it to Machete Maidens Unleashed!, another recent exploitation film documentary that I thoroughly enjoyed. It ran to feature length, while this struggles to make it past an hour. It was built from interviews with a vast array of actors, producers and directors, while this has six guys and three scream queens, plus the director linking bits together. It had so much interview footage that there was another hour and half of further material on the DVD, while this one just has a Q&A from the Flashback Weekend of Horrors. Screaming in High Heels does better with its movie clips and its assorted ephemera, including clips from workout videos, old interviews, even Quigley singing with her band, the Skirts. The bones are really solid, and the flesh is pretty good too but there needs to be more of it. As it stands, it's just a little anorexic.

Pattern: Response (2009)

Director: Stephen C Krystek
Stars: Noel Allison, Mallory Adams and Jason David Young

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.

'You can't do this!' cries a man in chains. 'I'm an American, for Christ's sake!' He's panicked but he has a right to be, it would seem, locked up in the dark with only another man for company, a far more laid back man who examines how he got there, right down to the discovery that his entire life is online, in video footage that is timestamped and searchable. It's a classic Philip K Dick type paranoia story, updated to include terms like 'extraordinary rendition' that Dick would certainly have used in his work had he lived long enough to hear them. It's a great setup because it's simple in the extreme but opens the possibility of untold complexity. Who knows where Stephen Krystek, the director and co-writer, is going to take the story. There are so many possibilities that we can only either get bored and quickly drift away or get hooked into the story and try to outguess the direction. Krystek makes his film lean and mean and we can't help but get hooked.

Noel Allison is excellent as Joseph, the focus of the film, who spends the entirety in a surreal state, progressing from doubt and confusion to full blown paranoia. You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you, but he pays his bills, he pays his taxes and he loves his wife; why would anyone want a regular Joe like him? Towards the end of this ten minute short we find out, sort of. Like all the best Dick stories, it leaves us with more questions, however well it's wrapped up. The credits unfold as blackouts in confidential documents, reversed to reveal instead of conceal and they're great to see. This is excellent, superior to the last couple of Krysteks I've seen. Not Quite Dead, his debut as a writer/director, wasn't essential, though it may still be the most honest zombie movie I've ever seen. Her Special Day, which he edited and produced, didn't impress me first time but is growing on me with each viewing. This one is spot on and there are a few more Krysteks to find.

Freeborn (2010)

Director: Carlo Treviso
Stars: Chris Agos, Kristen Kruchowski and Megan Farris

'Every generation needs a new revolution,' said Thomas Jefferson, and that sets our tone for a rather short take on Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Trying to condense that sort of depth and parallel to history into a six minute short is ambitious almost to the point of insanity but writer/director Carlo Treviso gives it a pretty good shot. He transfers the story from the Moon to Mars, though we remain Earthbound. It's fifty years after the colonisation of Mars began and we watch a pivotal moment in time unfold through faux CNN footage, with decent photography of Washington, DC, and solid acting from Chris Agos and Kristen Kruchowski. Agos is Andrew Ashur, a freeborn Martian, who serves as some sort of resistance leader fighting against growing oppression from the Earth, but he's been captured and beaten. Kruchowski is Orlena, his friend and lawyer, who wants him to play ball to save his neck, but he won't swear his allegiance to Earth.

Treviso made a short in 2005 called The Vitruvian Man and he plays the same roles here: as writer, producer, editor and director. He also works the visual effects here, though they're inconsistent. The story is a neat encapsulation of a macro event into a micro scale, cleverly written not just by showing us certain things but by not showing us everything else. What's not shown here is just as important as what is shown. The direction is solid and the editing is slick. The computer graphics aren't bad at all, though I don't know how well they'd play on a big screen. The faux CNN footage is good and Megan Farris is an able narrator. The spaceship action shots are excellent, though the detail isn't there and is hidden mostly by fast editing. The fire on the ground is less capable but it's good to see that we don't need Jerry Bruckheimer to take out American landmarks. I'd happily watch this six minute short another couple of times rather than face Independence Day.

Apparition (2009)

Director: Travis Gerndt
Stars: Kelli Blissard and L Michael Burt

A young multiracial couple get lost in the woods, as young multiracial couples tend to do in short horror films. They're Kristin and Stouder and they end up at an apparently empty cabin, empty that is except for a number of strange dolls scattered on the bed and around the floor, dolls that make strange noises when you tread on them. This pair lie down for the night together but Kristin wakes up alone. Stouder is outside taking a leak and when he gets back, he finds his girlfriend gone and a pair of multiracial dolls on the bed in their place. She becomes the apparition of the title, moving quirkily towards him with a slit throat, because she moved at a quarter speed while the camera shooting her was slowed down to six frames per second. However, not all is what it seems and there's a cool twist to the story to come that turns it into more of an urban legend film. The ten minute running time is relatively unrushed and just seems right.

The man behind the film is Travis Gerndt, who appears late on as a sheriff but is hardly a focal point on screen. However offscreen he did almost everything, presumably building on experience earned as an assistant director, production coordinator or director of photography on a number of films by other people. This is the first he made for himself and he served not just as writer and director, but also as actor, producer, editor and sound technician. Surprisingly for someone who has worked as a DP in the past, he brought in a different DP and someone else to compose the score, but mostly it's his show. The actors on screen don't have much to do, but they're capable. While the film didn't knock my socks off, it's a capable piece, perhaps let down only by some dim lighting in the night scenes. The lack of background to define a framework for the story could be seen by some as a flaw but I think it works generically, as such a generic title would suggest.

Darker Suggestion (2003)

Director: Joseph J Greenberg
Stars: Melina Zarafonits, C R Oberlin, Karen Kweitniak, Kristin Hammond and Vincent DiConstanzo

The opening text explains what telekinesis is, just in case we'd never seen it used in a dozen films this week. The credits unfold over varied texts in a progression of different written languages, from hieroglyphics to modern French and English, which looks awesome but has nothing to do with the movie. Then we switch to St Francis Medical Center where Pam is explaining to Reg in the car park why it's OK not to worry about her mum because now the doctors know what's wrong and they're fixing it. Mum is in the hospital with really bad grey streaks in her hair, but we're not sure quite what the problem is. Reg is the lead character (a girl by the way, it's short for Regina), as she's the one who discovers that she's blessed and cursed with telekinesis. Initially it's a blessing, because she can do some really cool things even by the time her egotist boyfriend Frank turns up, but then she tells her mother, who explains that it's a hereditary thing and it comes with a curse.

Thus far this short film has been a capable thing: the camerawork decent rather than memorable, acting decent rather than great, the story opening up with potential. There are downsides though. There's what appears to be a tendency towards product placement, with a Clorox here and a VO5 there, even though I'm guessing it's coincidental. Every male character is an egotist, starting with Frank. 'I love you,' Reg tells him. 'You're only human,' comes the reply. If Frank is bad, Skip is even worse, even when he's just playing a video game. However from here the flaws start to take over. Now Reg has found her power, the dark men are going to come for her, her mother explains. There will probably be two of them, different for each generation, but she doesn't explain who they are or why they're coming. They're just 'of the night', which is a little vague given the circumstances. Sure enough, they arrive and attempt to take her down, cut rate zombies with no motivation.

There's still good work in the second half of the short, most obviously with the effects which are excellent, full of animated wires and flying implements. I shouldn't have noticed the fish though. When the world stops except for Reg and the dark men, three of them this time, the fish carry on regardless. The make up is terrible. One guy has a large burn mark literally stuck onto his face and the edges are all turned up. They move slowly and stupidly, like zombies with guns, and the entire point of their existence seems to be to attack Reg and lose. I'd like this film a lot more if there was a reason given for Flannel Dark Man, Denim Dark Man and T-Shirt Dark Man to do what they do, but that's entirely ignored in the grand scheme of things. Presumably the point of the picture is to illustrate a point in time where a young lady grows up and comes into her own, and that's fine, but if you're going to build a mythology, give it some reasons to exist. Without that this is minor.