Frankenweenie (1984)

Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Shelley Duvall, Daniel Stern and Barret Oliver

With Tim Burton's Frankenweenie released on DVD this month, it seems like an appropriate time to highlight that it's an animated remake of a live action short that he shot back in 1984. Not only is it a pretty close remake, with the story merely expanded to feature length and fleshed out a bit more, but there's a glorious irony in the fact that it's doing pretty well for distributor, Walt Disney Pictures, the company which fired Burton after he made the original short. Back then, they saw it as a waste of company resources, far too scary for the young audiences who would see it play as a supporting piece to their theatrical reissue of Pinocchio. Perhaps this was all an excuse to avoid bringing up an unhappy working relationship. After all, it fits well with the other original films he'd made for them: the glorious but even more morbid Vincent and a take on Hansel and Gretel that was infused with Japanese culture and shown precisely once on the Disney channel at Halloween.

So realistically, Disney had no idea what to do with Burton. It must have stuck in their craw that he went on to great success, both on a cult level with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and with blockbusters like Batman and Batman Returns. Above anything else, Disney is a business and so they were open to discussions in 1990 when he came to them with ideas for a feature length stop motion musical based on a poem he'd written in 1982 while working for them. They still baulked at releasing The Nightmare Before Christmas as a Disney picture, being yet another dark tale that they saw as too scary for kids, so it was released under the Touchstone Pictures banner instead. Quite when they came to the realisation that the best children's films are accessible to adults and reflect a little more darkness than the soporific fare they're used to, I have no idea, but that is Disney above the title on the Frankenweenie remake.

The original Frankenweenie is a long short film, around thirty minutes, and it's live action, with many names and faces you'll recognise. Young Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist, is played by Barret Oliver, riding high after The NeverEnding Story; his parents, Susan and Ben, are Shelley Duvall, a major star after The Shining, and Daniel Stern, who at this point was mostly known for Diner. They're a happy family with an imaginative son, devoted enough to his bull terrier, Sparky, to feature him in his home made monster movies. One opens the film in the style of the Donald F Glut fan films, featuring pterodactyls, a volcano and Sparky dressed up as a giant lizard. It's good fun, as is everything until Sparky runs out into the road to retrieve a baseball and promptly gets hit by a car. Everything here, the home movie, the collision, the graveyard scene where Sparky is laid to rest, is so quintessential Burton that it's hard to imagine Disney not seeing a future in it.

Perhaps it's where it goes next that they had issues with. Victor is inspired by Mr Walsh's class demonstration of electricity generating muscle movement in a dead frog, but it is a little morbid for Disney. He reads up on the subject and builds a decent junior equivalent of a mad scientist's laboratory in the attic, complete with a movable platform to raise his dead dog into the heavens to harness the power of lightning during a storm. Yeah, I can totally see Disney execs fearing a spate of lawsuits drawn from copycat behaviour gone wrong and, while they were attempting to expand into mature filmmaking with movies like Something Wicked This Way Comes, a boy raising his dog from the dead is, frankly, a heck of an expansion. Their reaction must have been similar to that of Victor's neighbours when Sparky gets out and, if you've ever seen a Burton movie and a Frankenstein picture, you'll have a pretty good idea what that looks like.

I really enjoyed Frankenweenie, but then I was a weird kid who always wanted more than Disney could ever offer. It didn't have to be gothic, per se, it just had to have a lot more substance than cutesy singing teapots could ever provide. Looking back, I wanted Studio Ghibli without knowing that animation was even made in Japan, let alone who Hayao Miyazaki was. From the early shorts I've seen from Tim Burton, Vincent reigns supreme because of its oddball charm and the glorious narration by Vincent Price, even though it cost a fraction of this one. Yet Frankenweenie can't be ignored. It's a film to enjoy over and over, even without added perspective from what Burton went on to. That adds much, as there's a great deal of Edward Scissorhands here, both in the tone and the style. Given that Burton's script for that film was primarily autobiographical, it's not surprising to discover that it wasn't really the first time he'd written a character around himself.

The flaws are few and far between and most of them are inherent to the material and the running time. The script works well as a riff on the Universal version of Frankenstein, but perhaps it does so a little closer than it should, especially during the finalé. In some ways there's as much James Whale here as there is Tim Burton. The length is an awkward one, allowing the story more time to grow than is usual for a short film but nowhere near what a feature can offer. The hardest flaw to forgive is the casting of Sofia Coppola as the neighbour's daughter, Anne. She's a highly regarded writer and director, who won an Oscar for writing Lost in Translation, but she's certainly no actor. This was the first film she acted in not to be directed by her father, Francis Ford Coppola, and I'm only surprised that Burton cast her. No wonder she went on to a Razzie for The Godfather Part III. Sparky is much more watchable, as I'm sure his animated version will be when I catch up with it.

Beyond the Grave (2010)

Director: Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro
Stars: Rafael Tombini, Alvaro Rosacosta, Ricardo Seffner, Amanda Grimaldi, Leandro Lefa, Luciana Verch, Tatiana Paganella and Adriano Basegio

The first time I saw Beyond the Grave, the DVD was a workprint submitted for festival review with temporary visual effects and sound design. I was impressed and rated it highly, but it didn't make it past the selection committee for that particular festival. What I liked most was the film's feel, a far cry from the usual. Built from horror movie imagery, it felt more like a spaghetti western and not only because of the whistling, the coats and the hats. It's in the iconography and sparseness, the lyrical philosophy of the piece. I liked the music and the silence, the sets and the costumes. I didn't like the jump cuts at all. I was on the fence about the fight scenes, which unfold slowly and with very deliberate choreography. I really liked its genre hopping nature, as it seemed to cover a host of battles (cop vs serial killer, angels vs demons and Heaven vs Hell), all wrapped up within a post apocalyptic, spaghetti western, zombie infested road movie setting. It was surely different.

Watching afresh on Netflix with completed visuals and sound, I found that it played out in a very similar way to before. Netflix ratings seem to be either really low or really high, which may well have to do with the terrible start. An eighties style hero enters a building containing what appear to be hillbilly cannibals. He shoots them dead, slowly enough to demonstrate how incompetent or stupid they are. For some reason, the room also contains a swordsman with burns, though their gun vs sword battle quickly becomes a kung fu fight. The choreography is bizarre and, frankly, I hated it. It's jerky, stagy and unrealistic, though I presume it aimed to be stylish and archetypal. Most of those low Netflix ratings may tie to viewers not making it to the opening credits, missing out on the joys that are to come, and I can understand that. It doesn't bode well, but even as the film improves, it never plays to expectations. Those who know what they want may still hate it.

For me, it improved immediately afterwards. Instead of a stupid looking Turkish action hero, our lead turns out to be a grim cop, hunting villains with his souped up police car. He's half Mad Max and half William Petersen, an overly serious anti-hero with a heavy weight on his shoulders. He totally needs to loosen up, but here's where his car radio points out that the world has already ended. I guess we can accept some issues, then! He's more adjusted than the DJ, who talks about being the last man on Earth, happy to be alone. Being alone only risks his sanity, he tells us, while being with someone else risks his life. He broadcasts to an empty world anyway, just because. And here's where we focus on the opening text. We're nowhere in particular, in 'another time, another place'. The key is in a quote from Nietzche: 'No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.' I wondered about that throughout, but never really quite felt it gel.

Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro, who wrote and directed, is clearly a genre fan who knows what he wants to take from the work of others, not only from films but books too. It's no surprise to find that his three favourite movies, as listed at IMDb, are combinations of influences with psychological depth: Once Upon a Time in the West, Big Trouble in Little China and Blow Out. Beyond the Grave doesn't approach the heights of those films but it sits well with them on those terms, an ambitious journey through new material often constructed from old influence, less overt than a Tarantino picture but still clear nonetheless. He's obviously both well read and connected, as his career is full of movies about films and filmmakers, whether they're pure documentaries or not. I get the impression that he's an experimental soul who wants to dabble in popular culture and be recognised for his work, but never stop experimenting and never go mainstream. Think Jodorowsky, not Tarantino.

So the opening credits unfold to the yellow lines our cop's car travels along. This may come from The Road Warrior, as that film is referenced later through a music box and some of the costumes, not to mention the empty post-apocalyptic setting, but here it feels more like the early seventies driving movies like Vanishing Point or Two-Lane Blacktop. As the credits end, the cop confronts a young couple breaking into a store, before taking them under his wing. Outside are zombies, but not remotely standard zombies, perhaps explaining why they're never called that, like Cemetery Man. They're slow and mindless, but mostly ignored, even though at least one can fire a gun. The make up is varied, with one looking like an alien from They Live. Perhaps this is where Nietzche comes in: the survivors of this apocalypse own themselves, while the zombies don't. The young man from the store certainly philosophises like he's Coffin Joe, who surely owns himself.

The main influence that I didn't initially recognise comes as we find out what these folk are up to. The kids are after revenge, on someone they only know from a photograph. The cop is hunting a serial killer, the Dark Rider, who he's been chasing since before the end of the world, before the seven gateways of Hell opened up. I took this as a reference to Italian horror, perhaps an homage to Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, but a little research highlighted a connection to Stephen King that grows stronger as the film moves on, with even graffiti being lifted from his novels. I haven't read The Dark Tower, unfortunately, so I can't know whether the cop we're following is a take on Roland Deschain, the hero of that series, or Randall Flagg, one of its villains. Deschain was partly inspired by Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, which fits here, and he's on a quest that is both physical and metaphorical. Flagg appears in that series as the Man in Black, which also fits.

Certainly Beyond the Grave seems far more of a journey than a destination, as such a voluminous influence would surely inspire. The cop is clearly our general focus of attention but he frequently vanishes from the film, as if he's less a protagonist and more the bus driver on our ride through the apocalypse. For all the car shots, we don't move much physically, more through time, which here, as in the world of The Dark Tower, is unreliable. This presumably explains the jump cuts I didn't like, as well as some of the DJ's monologue, which I had initially written off as merely his madness. For all the zombies we see, whatever name they go by, and for all the gore scenes, this isn't a Fulci picture. It's the moments of life that are the magic ones here, not those of death, the latter pictured as pointless and wasteful. So we linger on a dance at night, the gift of a music box, the rumble of a powerful engine, the empty road.

The characters that populate this world are colourful. At one point the cop explores a house full of black magic paraphernalia: a magic circle, candles, severed ears, the works. He leaves to find his young companions threatened by an Indian with a bow, a woman in a gas mask and a harmonica player whose playing incapacitates those around him. Like most of the rest of the cast, they don't have names, and they function as icons more than characters. They're obstacles to be overcome or challenges to be met, the owners of roles that have meaning to the key players, as links from the past to the future. Even peripheral characters have meaning, such as a zombie who enjoys the cop's protection because he used to work for him, or the obese zombie in a bathtub who is unable to move but who can still eat. Each of these provides a slice of insight to a major character, and it's in doing this, rather than following a story, that we find meaning.

I'm still not sure how to place this picture. It's not the sort of film that can be easily recommended to someone based on anything other than itself. It certainly won't appeal to fans of zombie flicks. For all the iconography of horror, it's really a metaphysical western, though the metaphysics are more important than the western tropes. Its audience is likely to be filmgoers who look inside as much as out, who care less about genres than they do they about about film and technique. The fight scenes that I still dislike may highlight that. They unfold slowly and technically, almost as a turn based game, hardly an approach that works as action but perhaps one that works as insight. For my part, I loved the art of this film, the dreamlike lyricism, the hallucinatory philosophy and the audiovisual poetry, but I feel sure that I'm still missing out on the insight with which it seems to want to gift me. Perhaps a third viewing, after reading The Dark Tower, might help with that.

The Guy Knows Everything (2012)

Director: Joops Fragale
Stars: Joe Coffey, Reggie Peters, Jayvo Scott, Ken Luzadder, Sheryl Carbonell and Paul Phillips

At 26 minutes, The Guy Knows Everything is the most ambitious 386 Films production yet and that length may be the only awkwardness in play, as it's long for a short film but too short for anything else. Otherwise it's an accomplished piece, pulling together successes from previous films, most obviously Parting and Date Night, as this film combines the intoxicating charm of the latter with the dialogue driven slow burn towards a twist approach of the former. There's even some of the visual style of Simone, albeit mostly at the beginning as what we see expands during the opening credits from insanely letterboxed to a more expected level of widescreen, surely highlighting that we're going to start with very little understanding which, slowly but surely, will expand until we see the big picture. The result is utterly engaging: well acted, well shot and well written, with just enough left unspoken at the end to keep us wanting more.

The setup is pretty straight forward. Four interestingly diverse friends at a pub table challenge each other with sports trivia for small but fiercely fought money. Holding court as we join them is Kenny, an emphatic man with an Art Garfunkel look who doesn't like to be beaten, while Len is a polite and proper spectacled gentleman of colour, Brick is a more dedicated sports fan in a team shirt and a whole bundle of character, with Jerry filling out the quartet as the oldest and drunkest. It's a heated but friendly night until the new guy walks in with his tattoos and his jaunty hat and his Johnny Depp stylings. He chimes in when it looks like Kenny has won and in so doing sets up a whole new game. He throws four hundred bucks down on the table and challenges these friends to come up with a question he can't answer by midnight. If any of them does, he'll take the pot, growing at the rate of ten bucks a question. They do have two hours to catch him out though.

For a while it proceeds as you might expect; it is called The Guy Knows Everything, after all. By the fourth question, he's answering before it finishes, quietly pressuring them to try harder. It's when Patricia joins in and he knows her name as well as the answer to her question that we start wondering about him, but our four leads don't, as full of Dutch courage as they are. With sober clarity, we see how strongly they're throwing their money away but they're just too close. The montage that arrives ten minutes in, accompanied by cool drinking music, allows us both a break from the questions and an opportunity to pose our own. Clearly this newcomer is somebody, but who? Is he the Devil, up to no good? Or God, walking in mysterious ways? Is he merely psychic, a mind reader plucking answers from their heads? Maybe he's Death in a modern retelling of The Seventh Seal, replacing chess with trivia. It's a good intermission before a sinister second half.

We continue to wonder about him, as his knowledge gets scarier and acutely more intimate, not merely restricted to sports and general knowledge, but we wonder about the others too. While the stranger clearly holds all the cards and knows it, these competitors can't acknowledge that some games can't be won; their sawbucks add up as they reach for increasingly desperate measures to trap him. We might excuse them on the grounds that they're drunk but there's a lot more subtlety to the script than that. What this outsider knows about hockey scores doesn't mean a thing, but what he knows about their darkest secrets does. This is a wonderful device to build character, all their characters, and the four actors live up to that, especially Joe Coffey who is gifted with most focus as Kenny. Paul Phillips fortunately has enough character of his own to avoid overstaying his welcome as the stranger, in a role that could easily have become annoyingly smug and obnoxious.

And so we march inexorably onward to the finalé, which comes in a few neat layers. Not only is there the twist we expect, but much more, all the way to a long outtake at the end of the piece that may just be the funniest such that I've ever seen. When I first read the brief synopsis for the film, it was obvious that there was serious potential to be had, but this goes beyond what I had expected. Andrew Fisk, who wrote the script, with help from director Joops Fragale, did a superb job combining drama, comedy, suspense and horror into one short. The technical side is a notch up again from the previous 386 Films production, even though it's a huge expansion from their usual small casts. When the most obvious flaw is that the end credits misspell 'photographer', surely the big winner of this game is the film itself. The next step is presumably to expand out of the single locations that have characterised all of their films thus far. The sky really is the limit.

Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

Director: Michael Pataki
Stars: Richard Basehart, Gloria Grahame, Trish Stewart and Lance Henriksen

Charles Band, the man behind the Full Moon empire, considers Mansion of the Doomed to be his first movie, his first genre film in a career packed full of such creatures. In reality, it's his second. IMDb lists him as the director of Last Foxtrot in Burbank, a 65 minute short parody of Last Tango in Paris released three years earlier, with hardcore inserts in at least one market. He was only 22 at the time of release and he remembers it as an anomaly. 'It's sort of not my first movie,' he told Rogue Cinema in an interview, 'because it was something I did to help Frankie.' Frankie is Frank Ray Perilla, who wrote both that film and this one. Michael Pataki, the star of that film, took the director's chair here. Band himself shifted from director to producer. Unfortunately for us, Last Foxtrot in Burbank is a lost film, a footnote in a long career spiced up by the fact that two of the few who saw it premiére at the Pacific Theater in Hollywood were John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

It's almost surprising that, after a jolt like that, it took Band three years to make another picture. After all, as history has shown, he's a prolific man and he's not known for having qualms about releasing utter crud along with the good stuff. Whatever the reason, this film is a great start to a career, be it a first or second start. It looks forward to the future of Charles Band Productions by looking back at the horror movies of the past, obvious from moment one as the lead character is named Dr Leonard Chaney. Had he still been alive, Lon Chaney Jr would have been a good fit for Len Chaney, but he died in 1973, when Band was making that first film that doesn't count. Instead he cast Richard Basehart, a distinguished actor late in his career who was starting to focus on TV movies and guest slots in TV shows. He'd only make three more pictures for the big screen. Gloria Grahame, a screen siren similarly close to the end of her career, plays his assistant, Katherine.

Fourth in the credits is a future star, Lance Henriksen, in only his sixth role. After an early part in 1961's The Outsider, he'd made a picture a year since 1972 but only got busy after this one, the first of four in 1976. He looks young in an odd way, as if he hadn't quite grown into himself yet but doing that would somehow rejuvenate him. Maybe it's the hair. He plays Dr Dan Bryan, the first victim of what would in a lesser picture be just another mad doctor, but Dr Chaney is a little more complex. He's both a talented doctor and a loving father, but circumstances, in the form of a car accident, take his ethics along with his daughter Nancy's vision. Suddenly, theories he rejected as being a step too far become just a step closer to restoring Nancy's sight, a step he happily takes, even if it means stealing someone's eyes, someone like Dr Dan Bryan, who not only works for him but is also engaged to his daughter, or at least he was. She's not sure he'll continue to be.

And so it goes. He invites Dan over, has Katherine spike his drink, and once he's out cold, takes him to his surgery to extract his eyes and transplant them into his daughter. It even works, the vision through Nancy's new eyes being blurry and needing of exercise but there nonetheless. As for Dr Bryan, he surprisingly doesn't leave the story. As we discover in a neat shock moment, Dr Bryan is still alive, merely locked in a huge cage downstairs. His eye sockets are empty, a freaky look for Henriksen to play up well, as his former boss and future father-in-law doesn't even fit him with glass eyes, just pushes him out of sight and mind. This does bode well for a gruesome horror movie but the final push we need comes when Nancy goes swimming and finds that her vision disappears once more. The increasingly desperate Dr Chaney is therefore forced to rack up more victims with growing levels of sophistication but, conversely, less attention to detail.

Clearly Perilli's script aims at a number of levels. What's less clear is exactly what he was aiming at. There's a lot of looking backwards to the mad doctor films of the past, as we look at the lead character struggling with his ethics as the number of eyeless victims in the cellar cage continues to grow. He honestly has every intention to help them too, once he's helped Nancy, but a number of scenes show him clearly arranging his priorities with them not remotely near the top. The chief influences are surely films like The Face Behind the Mask or Eyes without a Face, but surprisingly, for a movie that doesn't shy away from the grisly, there's a touch of Val Lewton flavour here too. The growing number of eyeless victims in the cellar remind of Bedlam even before the homage to the famous hand scene. Perhaps it's the Bedlam influence that shaped the subtext for me into one of class. The longer the film ran, the clearer this subtext became until it couldn't be ignored.

The film clearly alternates between two utterly different tones, and it's not a stretch to classify them by class. Upstairs and downstairs, to use the classic euphemisms for masters and servants, are completely different worlds. Upstairs, everything is so old school that it could easily have been shot in black and white. Dr Chaney is the sort of respected professional who took the lead in the old Universal horrors. He's driven and dedicated, periodically justifying his actions to himself, but he's civilised and polite throughout. He uses drugs to subdue his victims, not crude weaponry. He doesn't kill any of them. Occasionally he even plays at being the saviour he feels that he really is, like when he tries to help a bum who has been literally kicked out of a spot to sleep, only to get mugged for his trouble. When he's caught abducting a little girl, he leads the two men chasing him to his house to politely bribe them before adding them to the donor pool.

Yet downstairs, it's new school seventies grue, painted in dark but lurid colour. Like the servants in an Edwardian manor house, these victims are promptly forgotten about once they've served their purpose. Katherine feeds them but Dr Chaney doesn't visit. He may honestly believe that he'll help them some day, but he never does. There's no post-op treatment. Their sockets remain empty. There's no sanitation and little opportunity to exercise. One girl even dies in the cage. It becomes a constrained society where these victims struggle to stay human while listening to the monkeys next door, an obvious comparison. In addition to Bedlam, this feels like a throwback to Island of Lost Souls, the Universal take on The Island of Dr Moreau. Ironically Basehart's next film wouuld be the 1977 remake of this story, in which he played the Sayer of the Law, the character in charge of maintaining the rules the human/animal hybrids must follow.

I enjoyed Mansion of the Doomed a lot more than I expected to. It's hardly one of the great horror movies but it is suitably creepy and surprisingly deep. Basehart had worked for the best, not least Federico Fellini for La strada, so he knew how to play with nuance. His performance here is rather disconnected, but I'm sure that was deliberate, highlighting how disconnected Dr Chaney gets as he descends into a more subtle form of madness than mad doctors usually reach. Gloria Grahame was experienced in film noir, from In a Lonely Place to The Big Heat, so the darkness she channels here was hardly a stretch, especially in a surprisingly small part. She still looks great at 53 years young, but the immobility of her face is striking. Plastic surgery back in the fifties had paralysed her upper lip and it's very noticeable here. She was also in remission for breast cancer, which sadly returned in 1980. She died a year later with four more pictures under her belt.

As Nancy, Trish Stewart gets third billing behind the two Hollywood stars in decline. Mostly known for a recurring role on daytime soap, The Young and the Restless, she's also surprisingly sidelined here, but this time it's appropriate. Initially we see a lot of her, literally, swimming around in her skimpy suit and having a great time, telling her daddy that she loves him in a blatant setup that explains why he's so driven to return that love by saving her eyesight. A more subtle scene is the sympathy shot as she laments that her fiancé may not care for her as much now that she's blind. We look down on him for being so shallow and not paying appropriate attention to her in her time of need. Yet, frankly, Perilla suckers us into doing exactly the same thing as he turns her from the leading lady into the MacGuffin of the piece. Our realisation that we've been suckered is another point where we realise that this is a much more subtle script than it might initially seem.

Where it really keeps us on the hop is in the juggling of tones, which plays out like a battle for the tone of the future. In one corner is Dr Chaney, whose very name is a throwback, still transplanting organs in secret as if it might prompt villagers to come a-knocking with torches and pitchforks. In the thirties, that was still a viable plot, especially in period pieces, but Christian Barnard's famous heart transplant was in 1967. In fact the first successful transplants were with eyes, Eduard Zirm successfully transplanting a cornea as far back as 1905. In the other corner are the victims in the cage in the cellar with their gruesome empty eye sockets. Perhaps the fight was always going to be won according to whether those victims, who look like monsters from the outset, actually lose their fight with sanity and become actual monsters. To discover the result, you'll have to watch yourself. I'll just point out that it ends with a neat irony, the film itself a surprising winner.

Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost (1901)

Director: Walter R Booth

One of my goals for Apocalypse Later in 2013 is to diversify this year's reviews a little more than I was able to do in 2012. To achieve that, I plan every month to review at least one film from each of the last dozen decades, from the 1900s to the 2010s. Given that we're just emerging from the holiday season, it seemed appropriate to kick off the oldies with a look at the earliest adaptation to the screen of the Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol, especially as the story is fresh in my mind after enjoying a Theater Works stage production last month in Peoria. It was released in November 1901 and was regarded as the earliest surviving adaptation of any Dickens work until last February, the day after the Dickens bicentennial, when British Film Institute curator Bryony Dixon discovered The Death of Poor Joe, previously misfiled in their archive. While only eight months separate the two films the difference in quality and approach is astounding.

It is believed that The Death of Poor Joe was directed by George Albert Smith, one of the Brighton set of pioneering British filmmakers, who learned much of his cinematic art by working with magic lanterns. Having seen films by the Lumière brothers and Robert W Paul in 1896, he leapt into action and within a single year had patented his own camera and projection system, set up a film factory to develop and print films and begun screening 'animated photographs' at the Brighton Aquarium. He'd even corresponded with French effects wizard, Georges Méliès, and subsequently developed double exposure and split screen techniques seen in films like The Haunted Castle, Photographing a Ghost and Santa Claus, all made in 1897. He'd go on to invent Kinemacolor, the first successful colour film process. Yet The Death of Poor Joe is a slight work, a minute long single take of Jo, the child street sweeper in Bleak House, dying in the arms and lamplight of a watchman.

By comparison, Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost, is a much more ambitious work. It aimed to depict not just a single scene from a Dickens novel but the entire novel, albeit in substantially reduced form in order to fit in the original eleven minute running time. It broke up the story into twelve scenes, only four of which survive today, and separated them by the cinema's first ever use of intertitles. Those are the only guidance we have to who the characters are, as it was a given that audiences of the day would be familiar with the story and so recognise it on screen without help. Of course, it's a stagebound affair, but one with notable effects work and some of that stands up today, such as when Ebenezer Scrooge's door knocker turns into the face of Jacob Marley, his former partner. The ghostly visions begin to unfold against the black curtain in Scrooge's bedroom, obvious today as an easy way to combine two shots on the same frame, a precursor to modern day greenscreen.

With the three different ghosts all replaced by Marley, the film's take on the story is adapted as much from the popular stage adaptation by J C Buckstone as from the novel. The surviving scenes show Scrooge shutting up shop for the night and going home, only to be visited by Marley's ghost as he prepares for bed, who conjures up visions from his past, present and future. The past shows up on those black curtains, but the present unfolds on different sets as Marley shows Scrooge the Cratchitt family and his nephew Fred, all toasting him. The future has Scrooge see his own grave before the surviving footage runs out. It's impressive as it stands, even with over half the picture gone. Yes, it's clear that we're looking at sets on a stage and the unknown actor in the lead hams it up royally, especially when looking at his past; his reactions aren't far off convulsions. The film also relies on the audience's knowledge and can't stand alone from it, but it's still ambitious stuff.

It was produced by Paul's Animatograph Works, the Paul in that name being Robert W Paul, who had inspired George Albert Smith to start working on film. Paul was a pioneer when Smith began, a maker of scientific instruments who had been asked in 1894 by a pair of Greek businessmen to copy an Edison Kinetoscope. He didn't, but when he realised that Edison hadn't patented his work in Britain, he bought a Kinetoscope, took it apart and built a few copies, supplying one to Georges Méliès. However, because Edison's machine was a closed device, a concept currently very much alive in the world of Apple, the only films that could be shown were Edison's, so Paul worked with Birt Acres to design their own camera, the Paul-Acres camera, in 1895. Paul also thought up the concept of projecting images onto a screen, something Edison hadn't considered, and both Acres and Paul premiéred their respective projectors in 1896, as the Lumière films arrived in London.

Paul made many films, over six hundred by the time he retired in 1910, initially directing them all himself but soon partnering with people like Walter R Booth, like Méliès a stage magician by trade, who obviously saw the same potential in film. I've seen 43 earlier Paul films, dating back to Rough Sea at Dover in 1895, and watching them in chronological order offers a similiar education in the progression of the cinematic art as watching all Charlie Chaplin's shorts from 1914, but more entertaining. That first film is a single shot of the ocean striking a sea wall, dynamic in 1895 perhaps but not today. Many of his 1896 films, like The Derby, Royal Train or Hyde Park Bicycling Scene are static shots of exactly what you think passing the camera at an angle, but others mix it up a little. Up the River has a boat pass the camera but it adds a child falling overboard and being rescued. Unfortunately the choreography isn't great so we're stuck watching the rescuers' backs.

Things did get interesting in 1896 though. Westminster Bridge would be just like those other films but it unfolds like it's a flipbook, complete with the spine attached. This is early picture in picture action and Paul returned to it often in 1896. 2am, or The Husband's Return hints at slapstick that year but Paul didn't quite get there until 1898's A Favourite Domestic Scene and Tommy Atkins in the Park. The Launch of HMS Albion introduced multiple shots and editing in 1898. Trickery shows up in 1899 with Upside Down, or The Human Flies, which has a magician levitate a hat, disappear into thin air and leave everyone dancing on the ceiling. A Railway Collision is obviously done with models but it presumably felt more real in 1900. In and amongst all the tedious procession films, some realities are fascinating, such as Tetherball, or Do-Do and An Exciting Pillow Fight, which are apparently serious sports on board ship in 1900.

It's Paul's 1901 output that's most fascinating though. All nine of his films from that year are worth seeing, though some more than others. Most are well constructed trick films, such as Undressing Extraordinary, in which a man attempts to strip for bed, only to find that the clothes he takes off are mysteriously replaced by others, or The Over-Incubated Baby, which promises twelve months of growth in an hour; one mishap with fire and the subject we see ages a number of years instead. The most fun may be Artistic Creation, in which a man draws a woman, part by part, to assemble as they come to life, but The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures is more important. It's certainly the first time I've seen film be aware of itself, as it comically riffs on the famous Train Pulling into a Station. While Robert W Paul isn't as well known as many of his contemporaries, watching these films and reading up on his achievements highlights how important he really was.

Many of Robert W Paul's surviving films can be watched for free on YouTube, including Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost. The best way may be through the Robert W Paul channel at NemKino. YouTube also has The Death of Poor Joe.

The Memory Ride (2012)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Hanelin, Colleen Hartnett, Michael Coleman and Kira Fredrickson

It's a new month and a new year so it's time for another Travis Mills movie. January's pick is The Memory Ride, which works well in a few ways as a companion piece to Shine Like Gold, the first Mills movie that I reviewed back in July. It's another slice of Americana, which swaps its setting of baseball and kids' trophies for one of classic cars and blondes. The story is about grief again and the way it's told is just as timeless, but it's handled with a little more grit this time out; it's all the more powerful for not playing quite so unashamedly in the pool of sentimentality. Most obviously, it's another film made for the annual IFP Beat the Clock Challenge, which saw Mills awarded Best Director, while The Memory Ride played runner up to UAT's Screaming in Silence for Best Picture. That's a clean reversal of 2011, when Shine Like Gold won Best Picture, beating out UAT's Covet. All four of these are superb, even before you factor in that they were made in under 48 hours.

I much prefer this one to Shine Like Gold, even though it's not as technically flawless. The camera isn't always quite as steady as it should be and a couple of shots, one in particular, really should have been longer, but those are the breaks when you're working with limitations. Beat the Clock submissions have to be between three and five minutes in length and that may well be a tougher restriction to work to than the required inclusion of a specific prop and line of dialogue. The latter are incorporated here perfectly. What makes this one work so well is its cleverly written parallel story, filled with archetypal characters brought superbly to life. Only one gets a name, but that's as it should be; these characters don't need them. If anything, Colleen Hartnett's character works better without one, named instead simply 'that blonde' or ''55 Chevy', spoken with a hint of long suppressed interest by Michael Hanelin, who plays the heart of the film.

That's Jerry, a down to earth mechanic working out of his home. He's clearly a decent and honest man but one with a painful past that he's keeping locked away inside a crate in an old car. 'What happened that you're so afraid of?' asks his young assistant, who realises that Jerry's living safely at the cost of being alone. In the film's required line of dialogue, he asks, 'Do you think it's worth it?' The reason this all comes up is that they've been repairing a '55 Chevy for a blonde, who may also be interested in Jerry. More particularly, it's because she sees another car when she comes to pick up hers: an old one, a '41, that contains that crate with all the things Jerry can't let go. 'She's beautiful,' says the blonde, seeing past the years that haven't treated it well, leaving it a rusted shell of a vehicle that doesn't even run. 'It's not for sale,' Jerry emphasises a little too strongly and that's what leads his assistant to the crate and to break its lock, the film's required prop.

It's easy to read levels into this story, because it's painted that well. Jerry and his '41 are clearly interchangeable from moment one, not just because they share a past but because they ought to share a future. The blonde's eyes are either on Jerry or the '41 and Hartnett's subtle eye flutter as she gives Jerry her number cements it. 'In case you change your mind,' she says, before bashfully adding, 'about the car.' When Jerry calls the '41 'just a pile of rust', he's talking about himself too, but of course both can be fixed up, with the right care and attention. Whether intended or not, I felt the archetypes ran deeper. Michael Hanelin grounds the whole film, Michael Coleman gives it character and life and Colleen Hartnett is the spark for change. They play out like metaphors for the country, its spirit and its future, all underpinned by a highly appropriate song, sung by Gregg Caraway in a Kris Kristoffersen sort of exquisitely broken voice.

I'm really happy that I chose The Memory Ride to start out 2013. It's a great film for a start, with depth and emotional impact far beyond what could reasonably be expected for something made in a mere 48 hours. Shine Like Gold was technically exquisite but it left me dry. I've watched this one half a dozen times already today and it's only getting better. It may well be the best Running Wild short I've seen thus far. It certainly kicked off a successful 2012 for Travis Mills and Michael Coleman, one that most filmmakers would be envious of, yet one that's likely to end up looking like a warm up compared to the ambitious schedule they've set for themselves: two features in the works and no less than 52 short films in 52 weeks. No doubt we'll see plenty of both Mills and Coleman in those, but we'll see Hanelin and Hartnett too: they were in a short called Friday Nights Alone and they'll be in one of those features, The Men Who Robbed the Bank. Here's to 2013!

The Memory Ride can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

Astro-Zombies: M3 - Cloned (2010)

Director: Ted V Mikels
Stars: Fletcher Sharp and Donna Hamblin

After avoiding sequels for almost forty years, Ted V Mikels began to embrace them as the century changed. His first was The Corpse Grinders 2 in 2000 and his second, Mark of the Astro-Zombies quickly followed in 2002. Then came three more originals, a couple of horror movies and a family film called Heart of a Boy, but Mikels apparently decided that what the world really needed most was more astro-zombies. Initially aiming at a trilogy, to be completed by the clumsily titled Astro-Zombies: M3 - Cloned, Mikels has already followed it up with Astro-Zombies: M4 - Invaders from Cyberspace, and as he isn't remotely out of energy at 83 years young, who knows how more may yet see the light of day. Next up looks like The Corpse Grinders 3, but surprisingly Mikels is only serving as its executive producer, the director's chair instead being relinquished in favour of a young Spanish filmmaker, Manolito Motosierra. Perhaps he's passing the torch.

As I'm a fan of the astro-zombies themselves far more than the films I've seen them in thus far, I'm not particularly against the concept of more pictures, but they aren't working out quite how I'd hoped. The first sequel fixed every one of the problems that plagued the original film, filling the screen with machete wielding astro-zombies rampaging through strip malls and the back streets of America. Yet it was ambitious enough in its use of early digital effects that it's painfully dated after only a decade, and the traditional effects were wildly inconsistent too. It was so full of detail that it often looked like a cinematic equivalent of the Bloomberg channel. Worst of all, the acting was, with a few notable exceptions, painfully amateurish. Mikels solves all those issues here but returns to some of the original ones. It's almost as if he's in constant reaction mode to the last film, aiming to improve on it in every way but forgetting the lessons he learned when making it.

That means that Astro Zombies: M3 - Cloned isn't the next step at all, it's an amalgam of its two predecessors. In fact, it's more than that. Mikels aims a little wider than he's ever done before to combine some of his other previous work into a single chronology. There's a DC universe; now we have a TVM universe. So, to combat the astro-zombie menace, we're given the Doll Squad. I even noticed a couple of cans of Lotus Cat Food, tying us into The Corpse Grinders too. I quite like this approach, but sadly it's done almost entirely the wrong way round. This is emphatically an astro-zombies picture with the Doll Squad only brought in at the end to clean up. I couldn't feel more strongly that the film would have been a much bigger success if these two sides had been given equal bandwidth. If this had been a Full Moon picture it would have been titled Doll Squad vs Astro-Zombies and that's really how the script should have been developed.

The plot is as complex and character filled as Mark of the Astro-Zombies, but it has a much better focus. Thankfully gone are the cheesy aliens with their papier maché crocodile heads, the Jar Jar Binkses of the TVM universe. Gone too are characters like Crystal Collins, who was quirky and fun but entirely unrelated to the story at hand. Instead we're grounded in a traditional story that pits the US government against itself. On one hand, we have the astro-man project, now government funded and run out of Area 51 because the military needs insane numbers of expendable killing machines. On the other hand, we have the Doll Squad, brought in to save the day, when shock horror, the astro-zombies run wild and start to massacre the general public. The subplots tie in, such as Leonard Bullock, a conspiracy theorist who writes books about this stuff, and Malvina Satana, some sort of enemy agent with her own troupe of men in black in dark sunglasses.

Many of the actors from Mark of the Astro-Zombies return here, but in Andy Sidaris style, none of them play the same roles, making this something of a surreal experience. At least the actors who shone brightest in the last film get the bigger roles in this one. I'd called out Donna Hamblin as being worth a lot more than just a mere secretary; sure enough, this time she's playing a major character: Dr Stephanie DeMarco, granddaughter of the creator of the astro-zombies. Volmar Franz, the George Carlin lookalike, switches from a linking character to the man in black who pressures Bullock. Scott Blacksher moves up from an angry henchman to a master sergeant with a Hitler moustache, overacting hilariously. He grew on me in the second film but he's like a force of nature in the third, yakking about 'cerebral cortex tampons' and hurling out lines like, 'I don't want any more brain dissertations. I want vicious killing machines that I can control!'

Going further back, two ladies return from much earlier pictures. Tura Satana returns for her third astro-zombies movie and her last screen role, though in a rather bizarre fashion. This time she's Malvina Satana, presumably the third in a family that carelessly loses a member every time out. This sibling gets less screen time than her sisters, presumably because of health concerns, Tura spending time in hospital around this point. Her dialogue is new, recorded specially for this film, but what we see is archive footage from The Astro-Zombies of Satana in her pink outfit, displayed as a hologram. Francine York reprises her role as Sabrina from The Doll Squad, looking great and still in charge of the squad at the age of 72, even though it's been fully 37 years since we last saw her. That's over half her lifetime, but she's going strong. Sadly, she only interacts with the story over the phone, like Henry Fonda in Tentacles, as she's supposedly stuck on assignment.

The thrust of the story follows the attempts of this new Dr DeMarco to raise a viable astro-zombie from DNA recovered from the Astro-Zombie Disintegration Grounds and then clone it. How she's supposed to achieve this, given that astro-zombies are Frankenstein-like constructs of parts from many human beings, I have no idea, but continuity has always been a tenuous concept in astro-zombie movies. This makes a lot more sense than bringing aliens into the mix like Mikels did in the last picture, though it does beggar belief that the doctor would raise her first zombie with a machete ready in his hand. I liked Donna Hamblin as Stephanie De Marco. She brags a little about feeling like God as her subject comes to life, but she's a truly dedicated scientist who won't allow herself to be distracted by things like husbands. She's also down to earth enough to wear glasses and constantly tousled hair, all the more sexy for not trying to be.

Unfortunately her superiors aren't quite so dedicated and, of course, one of them is a traitor to the cause, secretly working for the holographic Malvina Satana, who now owns the disembodied head of Dr Septimus DeMarco, Stephanie's grandfather, which chatters away in the background. Fletcher Sharp is apparently one of the focal points as Randolph, some sort of agent who fits into the chain of command somewhere, but he gets worse as the film runs on. It's only when he gets longer speeches towards the end that we realise how bad he is. Higher up the chain is Gen Ivan Mikacev, in the form of Ted V Mikels himself, who sets the project in motion at, get this, an Area 51 Bioterrorism Conference. There's no way that could ever be misconstrued, right? He believes the US army needs man-killing machines, hundreds of thousands of the things. Mikels is good as the general, but goes way over the top as his happy hippy twin brother, Crazy Peter.

To keep us on our toes, there are a host of other characters dotted around this story who we can't fail but recognise from the previous one, even though they're in new roles here. As Agent WQ9, Shanti takes a keen interest in the conference. She's as wonderful in her dark hat, glasses and coat as Agent WQ9 as she wasn't as Dr Owens, the remote viewer, in Mark of the Astro-Zombies. She works for Sen Caldwell, who was Gen Kingston in that film. Most confusingly, the President of the United States in the last picture has been apparently demoted to just Dr DeMarco's boss here. Fortunately the army of amateur actors who woodenly read their way through cue cards as lesser characters in the last film either don't reappear in this one at all or, at least, take much smaller roles with maybe just a single line of dialogue. Unfortunately Scott Miller doesn't return, which possibly explains why he's missing an IMDb credit for his role in Mark of the Astro-Zombies.

I mention all these characters because I get the feeling that the script grew around them. The heart of the story is simple: the army raises more astro-zombies, they go on a rampage and the Doll Squad gets called in to dispose of them. Unfortunately, getting to the rampage is a long and tedious process that seems designed mostly to give a large ensemble of actors something to do. I'd hazard a guess that Mikels rewrote every time a new actor committed to the project, entirely so that each of them would have something to do. As you can imagine, the wider picture suffers greatly from this approach, to the point that we wish everyone would quit talking and let us see some astro-zombies rampaging around somewhere with machetes. We don't get clones until 67 minutes in, very strange clones that are different shapes and sizes, but even then they escape their cloning room only to go hang out in the desert looking moody.

It's no less than 79 minutes in when the action really starts. The astro-zombies go wild out in the sticks and the Doll Squad finally show up with cool blowguns and explosive darts to take them down. It gets serious at the 85 minute mark, when their leader escapes captivity to join them. She's Queen Amazon, so named because Sara Dunn is a voluptuous bundle of curves, and she's a promising character, but she's unfortunately absent for much of the picture, having been torn away from it before she could join in by a drag queen assassin played by the legendary Peaches Christ. It's always great to see Peaches, a midnight movie maven and champion of underground film in San Francisco, on screen again but one reading of this story could suggest that she, by neatly crippling the Doll Squad, is the reason the movie derails. Film four should have followed a movie fan back in time to assassinate the assassin and so shift the thrust of the story back to the Doll Squad vs Astro-Zombies concept it should always have been.

And that's how I left this film. So much is improved on Mark of the Astro-Zombies. The production quality is stronger, the acting is more accomplished and the effects are notably improved. Even the continuity, hardly a key focus in a Ted V Mikels picture, is more consistent. Yet on the flipside, the frenetic energy of the second film is gone too, leaving this one overlong and a little boring. It isn't like the original 1968 picture, which was boring because nothing much happened. Here, it's that what happens isn't what we want to see. We want to see a slew of rampaging astro-zombies like we were gifted with in the second film. We want to see the Doll Squad infiltrating the military and tracking down the menace at hand. The Doll Squad is my favourite Mikels film thus far and I was excited at the opportunity to watch them kick ass again. Unfortunately we get very little of either: leaving this scant on Doll Squad and scant on astro-zombies. So what's the point?

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009)

Director: Rob Zombie
Stars: Tom Papa, Sheri Moon Zombie, Rosario Dawson and Paul Giamatti

Obviously a labour of love for Rob Zombie, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, an old school animated feature based on his comic book series, was stuck in production for years while other, more commercial propositions, concentrated his attention, especially the reboot of the Halloween franchise. However, he stuck at it and, as his name became more important within the industry, the budget ballooned from a half million dollars to ten. The catch is that the film is so effectively an outpouring of everything that Zombie loves from a hundred years of pop culture that the target audience is effectively him. Others may get kicks out of it, but they're only going to get a fraction of what Zombie threw in and, especially to young audiences, that fraction could end up as a tiny one indeed. I recognised a lot but I missed a lot too. I left it amused but unimpressed, interested more in the musical cartoon series cited as its key influence, Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies.

Now, Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies was a children's show, a spinoff of Sabrina and the Teenage Witch, itself a spinoff of The Archie Comedy Hour, all shown by CBS on network television. As you might imagine, Zombie's version isn't remotely kid friendly, though frankly it's kids who may just love it the most. It maintains a ten year old's level of humour, but transplants it into a very adult feature full of sex, violence and bad language, not to mention death. If anyone was insane enough to try to screen this on CBS, they'd need to trim it down from 77 minutes to about 10, and they'd still get complaints. Common comparisons to Ralph Bakshi's adult animations are almost entirely invalid, as the tone is utterly different. Comparisons to John Krikfalusi's Ren & Stimpy are fairer, as they share both a look and some of the same animators, but this film goes far beyond that show's ​​​innuendo. Zombie has said that it's what would happen 'if SpongeBob and Scooby-Doo were filthy.'

While it's almost impossible to focus on the big picture here because there's so much to distract us, there is an actual story and it's a pretty simple one. We're given a hero, El Superbeasto, and a villain, Dr Satan, who used to be nerdy little Steve Wachowski but turned to the diabolic side after receiving one too many wedgies at school from the hero. From his secret lair, Dr Satan searches the globe for a woman whose body sports the mark of the beast, so he can make her his unholy bride in the high school gym and so, in accordance with legend, become all-powerful, but villain and hero are destined to tussle again as Dr Satan's intended turns out to be Velvet von Black, a stripper whose magnificent mammaries El Superbeasto has fallen head over heels in lust with. To get her back and stop Dr Satan's quest for power, he needs the help of his sister, an eyepatched super agent on a quest to head off the second coming of the Third Reich. You know, the usual.

Realistically though, nobody cares about the story. We care about the characters and where they came from, because half the fun is in riding the attention deficit rollercoaster without a care in the world and the other half is in figuring out the plethora of pop culture references. El Superbeasto in particular, did nothing for me, being as egotistical as cartoonly possible and driven entirely by his appetites. That's not to detract from the voicework of Tom Papa, the stand up comedian who wrote the script from Zombie's material, because he does a great job. I just wasn't interested in the hero at all, except for the fact that he's a Mexican wrestler turned actor in a suit and a luchador mask, just like El Santo, Blue Demon and their cohorts. The movies he shoots are far more exploitational than anything I've ever seen in Mexican wrestling cinema, but it's truly refreshing for this film fan to see the lead character in an American film be a masked luchador not played by Jack Black.

I was more impressed by Suzy-X, not just because she's a bodacious and hyper version of Christina Lindberg but because she's forever kicking ass in spectacular fashion. We first meet her infiltrating a mountaintop castle full of Nazi werewolves in search of a jar that contains the disembodied but still very much alive head of Adolf Hitler. Yes, that's a reference to They Saved Hitler's Brain. She makes it out alive with der Führer's head, only to be chased by an army of Nazi zombies. Luckily she has her very own transforming robot sidekick, Murray, a take on the robot in the Bela Lugosi serial The Phantom Creeps, who is both smitten with his mistress and hornier than a ten peckered owl. Even with the innuendo stripped away for mass consumption, I'd love to see a Suzy-X cartoon show. Talk about action packed! Sheri Moon Zombie, who's more than a little cartoonish to begin with, is utterly perfect for the part. This is by far her best role and she nails it absolutely.

Of course, younger audiences aren't going to get these references and I wonder how much it will matter. Even if they haven't seen an El Santo movie they may get the Mexican wrestling concept from ¡Mucha Lucha! or Nacho Libre. They may not have seen Thriller: A Cruel Picture, but they'll recognise its influence in the Bride from Tarantino's Kill Bill. What they'll think of Murray, I have no idea, but it'll probably tie to anime rather than classic movie serials. I'd doubt if many even know what classic movie serials were. The whole movie is full of this sort of cultural disconnect. It even begins in black and white with an introduction, title screen and score reminiscent of the Universal version of Frankenstein. Most tellingly, Velvet von Black is a sure nod to old school go go dancers and blaxploitation, with Rosario Dawson's foul mouthed voicework exceeding anything I've seen from the seventies, but nowadays she's probably going to be interpreted as a Jerry Springer guest.

I can't even nail many of the references and, as a reviewer of fringe movies across the decades, I ought to do pretty well at it. While clearly there's a lot of German expressionism in Dr Satan's first appearance, I'm sure I recognise the mask he wears but I just can't place it. I swear I know where his assistant, Otto the talking gorilla with a smart screw in his head, is sourced from as well, but it eludes me for now. Of course, what felt like every B movie back in the forties had its own man in a gorilla suit, but one day I might stumble back onto the one with a screw in its head. It's difficult to concentrate on that here with so many other characters to recognise spattered up onto the screen like buckshot. The majority vanish as soon as they arrive, just there to be a background reference, so we have to either try to recognise what we can on the assumption that, like Pokémon, we can't catch 'em all, or we go back and watch the whole damn film on slow frame advance.

To illustrate the problem, let's just look at the Haunted Palace, the titty bar that El Superbeasto frequents and is itself a Roger Corman reference. He runs over Michael Myers getting there, but inside are many more characters who may or may not be deliberate references. Many certainly are: I caught Leatherface, an alien exploding from John Hurt's chest, the fifties Fly, Jack Torrance from The Shining, the Bride of Frankenstein and the Christopher Lee era Count Dracula just from his first visit. Velvet von Black's routine is introduced by Peter Lorre, while Rudy Vallée croons her theme song through his megaphone. Baby and Captain Spaulding from House of 1000 Corpses sit at a table with Otis B Driftwood, The Devil's Rejects version. Later, he tries to get fresh with Varla from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! I saw Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc and the Phantom of the Opera too, but are the rest merely generic monsters in this world of Monsterland? Who did I miss?

Certainly I missed some of the guest stars. I did catch Danny Trejo as one of El Superbeasto's old homies, in a Hispanic scene that's painfully stereotypical until it's turned neatly on its head; Ken Foree as a presumed Fritz the Cat homage by the name of Luke St Luke who spends most of the picture stuck inside El Superbeasto's trousers; and Tura Satana briefly revisiting her most famous character for a mere thirteen seconds. She's denied the opportunity to take down Driftwood, which would have been fun to see but it's good to hear Varla again regardless. Bill Moseley and Sid Haig reprise their regular roles for Zombie as Driftwood and Spaulding. Clint Howard is Joe Cthulhu, the bartender at the Haunted Palace, Cassandra Petersen is one of the vapid bimbos auditioning for El Superbeasto's kinky porn movie and Dee Wallace is... well, I haven't quite figured out who she is yet but she's in here too. None of these roles are large, but some are tiny even for cameos.

Spotting references for 77 minutes can be tiring, even under the influence, strangely a vice not brought into the story, so Zombie distracts us by making it a musical with original songs from a comedy duo called Hard & Phirm, who do a fair job of providing a versatile set of songs that don't just entertain but help provide background to some of the characters. Some descend too easily into the puerile tone and become quickly forgettable, but a few are real gems. My favourite is the recurring theme of the zombie Nazis, which is a stream of consciousness piece that describes in precise detail exactly what's going on, just like Weird Al Yankovic's Trapped in the Drive-Thru. It also highlights how much detail is king here, because Suzy-X's action aside, the best bits are the little bits: the Benny Hill homage, the QVC moments or El Superbeasto's Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto ringtone. It's a shame that they outshine the big picture, which works best when being described.

Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2002)

Director: Ted V Mikels
Stars: Tura Satana, Liz Renay and Brinke Stevens

The Astro-Zombies­ was one of those cheap B-movies that I really want to love but can't quite find the conviction to do so. It had everything it needed to succeed: an imaginative horror/scifi monster with a cool mask and a quirky gimmick, John Carradine as a mad scientist with a bizarrely hunched mute assistant and Tura Satana as a dangerous and exotic foreign agent. Yet it fell short in almost every way. There was only a single astro-zombie for a start, even though there was nothing to the costume but the mask. He didn't get to kill often and when he did it was painfully slow. The various subplots took a long while to connect together, so we weren't sure quite what we should be paying attention to. Almost every scene was drawn out through lackluster editing. It looks awesome as a three minute trailer, but it didn't extend out well to the feature length, ending up as nothing more than a sad disappointment and a lost opportunity. And a Misfits song, of course.

When filmmaker Ted V Mikels returned to the concept no less than 34 years later to shoot a sequel and reinvention, he seems to have aimed very deliberately at avoiding every single one of those complaints. In fact he begins Mark of the Astro-Zombies with a rampaging mob of astro-zombies, raging through a strip mall with their machetes and killing with abandon. There are literally more kills by astro-zombies within the first three minutes of this film than during its entire predecessor, and that's just the first rampage. A couple of minutes later, there's another one, with more yet to come. The pace and editing are so fast that, for a while, we read the background as much as we hear it. Mikels doesn't even slow down to introduce characters or situations, substituting creative dialogue for scrolling text thrown onto the screen. He brings back Tura Satana for her first picture since 1973's The Doll Squad and even resurrects John Carradine in the form of a special effect.

So you can't accuse Mikels of not paying attention to criticism, and frankly he delivers everything an astro-zombie nut might possibly request, along with a whole lot more, updating the franchise to a new generation. Does that make this film a good one, though? Well, no. Not remotely. In many ways it's more of an unholy mess than the last one. It's a sprawling nightmare of a picture with a cast that may just include half the city of Las Vegas, most of whom couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. It's also obviously shot on video with a bizarrely inconsistent set of special effects: the CGI is primitive but actually pretty good for a 2002 movie with this lack of budget; the gore work is transparent but reasonably effective; but the aliens are awful beyond description. Most of them are like Saturday morning cartoon nightmares with half fish, half crocodile heads that don't move. Their leader, Zekith, is a humanoid reptilian, like an alien from V in burned papier-maché and a barbarian robe. He's an action figure sprung to life.

And yes, aliens. In 1968, the astro-zombie was the creation of a human being, Dr DeMarco, a mad scientist sacked from the US space programme. In 2002, that hasn't changed because he's here too as a disembodied head kept alive by a rival for its insight. Tura Satana's character is the sister of the agent he killed in the first film and she seeks her revenge in this one. Yet, the astro-zombies here are created by evil aliens from a giant asteroid who, according to the opening, 'have come to force their intentions upon us'. Presumably 'their intentions' translates into 'bloody death' and little else, because their instructions to their creations are as simple as could be: 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' doesn't leave much room for misinterpretation. This is the reinvention part, this somehow being a sequel, a remake and a reboot all in one. With aliens. Who speak in the deep manipulated voices that bad cartoons use. So get used to that, OK? If you can't get past the aliens, you might as well give up.

As crazy as the story gets, there is one and it has a whole ensemble of characters. I got the feeling that Mikels cast anyone who agreed to show up, whenever they showed up, shot their entire parts in a single day and then spliced it all together later. Certainly every scene with either Tura Satana or Brinke Stevens was shot over a mere two days. At least they're experienced actors, especially Stevens, who's a delight here as Cindy Natale, a pleasingly short skirted TV reporter for News 13. It's hardly the deepest or most substantial role she's ever landed, but she does everything asked of her with a twinkle in her eye and a spring in her step. Except when she's kidnapped by Malvira Satana, of course. As her namesake, Tura Satana gets more to do than she's had since Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which was shot 37 years earlier when she was 27. She's a lot older and a lot larger here but the old Varla magic still shows when she shouts at Zokar, her obnoxious assistant.

Of course, with an alien invasion going on, if you can call rampaging astro-zombies with machetes an alien invasion, the President has to get called. Here that's Ward Pennington, who in the form of Gene Paul Jones looks rather Reagan-esque, but the similarities stop there. Pennington can't even get the Oval Office for his debriefing, because it wasn't available. What could be going on that's so important that the president can't meet in the Oval Office to remediate an alien invasion? Well, the sort that won't call in the big guns, that's who, because it's too soon. Instead he has his military attaché, Gen Kingston, assemble a crack team of doctors, scientists and experts to figure out how to respond. Yeah, that's totally what Reagan would do. Of course he'd let Kingston hire a 'specialist in interplanetary communications' who's more than a little reminiscent of George Carlin to consult with a lecturer on remote viewing who looks like a bad fortune teller. Of course he would.

Actually, Volmar Franz, the George Carlin lookalike who plays Dr Randolph West, is one of the few lesser names here who can actually act, even though he's only made it into one film not directed by Mikels. There are a few budding hopefuls, to be fair, but none get much screen time. Donna Hamblin is capable, but she only plays a secretary. Scott Miller lives up to his brief part as a capable FBI agent even though he tries a little too hard. He's still head and shoulders above most of the cast, who are often unintentionally hilarious. I wouldn't even call them amateur actors, as that would suggest that they actually have a calling. Most of them feel like fifty-something office workers who got stuck in scrubs or suits and given a card to read. A conspiracy theorist might suggest that Mikels hypnotised them first or drugged them with serum to make them comply with his directions, if in word only. Few of them could have heard of intonation, let alone what it means.

Some of them are here because they're characters in real life. Second billed is Liz Renay, the sort of larger than life celeb who makes it into John Waters movies. Hers was Desperate Living. Renay was a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, a stripper who worked an act with her daughter and a convicted felon, earning three years as the girlfriend of mobster Mickey Cohen. She divorced five husbands and outlived two more, which helps make her role here as Crystal Collins, a bloated Liz Taylor-ish actress who was abducted by aliens, all the more believable. She has precisely nothing to do with the rest of the plot, only there to add colour to proceedings. Shanti does likewise as the remote viewer, Dr Owens, with her oversize rings, clipped accent and wild make up, but she doesn't have Renay's charisma. Best known as Dr Wendy Altamura, Mikels' latter day companion, she shouldn't be on screen. 'I'm very uncomfortable with what I'm getting,' she says and we can believe it.

There's so much in this film that it's hard to decide what to focus on next. It feels like that was a challenge for Mikels too, when trying to hold the script together. Every shot seems to bring in a new character, setting or concept, perhaps all three. Oh look, there's a gratuitous shower scene! Hey, is that a completely different set of three-eyed aliens? Here's Mikels in a cameo with his hair mussed up but his trademark handlebar moustache left intact. There's the disembodied head of John Carradine bickering with Tura Satana. 'All you are is a bad form of taxidermy,' she tells him. 'Your cerebellum has long since expired from neglect,' he replies. One minute we're at NASA, the next in a morgue, then the president's briefing room. All of them look like hotel conference rooms with that recognisaby generic decoration. And whenever we might blink, there's another horde of machete wielding astro-zombies massacring another slew of willing locals.

Watching Mark of the Astro-Zombies feels like watching a half dozen exploitation movies thrown into a blender with scenes rearranged so that they make some sort of sense. The production cost was obviously not high with Mikels shooting on digital video rather than his usual film stock, but we get past that pretty quickly. Generalising horrendously, if you make it past ten minutes, you're going to stick it out; while you're likely to shake your head at the end of it and wonder how to get that hour and a half of your life back, somewhere deep inside you're going to be a little happier for having made the effort. Never mind the aliens, there's old school fun to be had in Tura Satana's hokey auction routine, Brinke Stevens will charm everyone and I defy you not to grin a huge grin through each astro-zombie rampage. I want to follow up right now with the clumsily titled Astro-Zombies: M3 - Cloned, with Francine York, Peaches Christ and, in her last film, Tura Satana.

Breaking Val (2007)

Directors: Joops Fragale and Michael Long
Stars: Lindy Star Taylor and Buddy Hyde

Florida based 386 Films now have a half dozen short films under their belt, with the most recent being The Guy Knows Everything, surely to be appearing at film festivals soon. I came in at film five, the excellent Date Night, then worked backwards through Simone and Parting to Breaking Val, the second of two shorts that kicked off 386 Films as a production company in 2007. While it's clear that co-founders Joops Fragale and Michael Long, who co-directed these first two shorts, have notably improved as filmmakers since that point, the vision that they've followed through the years was already in place here. Certainly there are obvious themes. The four that I've seen thus far are all dramas centered around women. I wouldn't call them feminist, but they certainly take a solid aim at traditional gender roles and it's telling that the only one with a strong male character is the one that Fragale didn't write. He's obviously drawn to strong female characters.

This time out, the strong female character is the Val of the title, but she couldn't find herself in a less strong position than the one she's in as the film opens. She's duct taped to a chair, looking up at the looming figure of her abusive husband, unable to escape a textureless tarped area that looks rather like a Dexter kill zone. She's a mess, purple from bruises and blood, but still sassy. 'Is that all you got, pussy?' she spits at her captor. She constantly puts him down. 'I have the balls,' she emphasises. It's almost like she's abusing him, but she's the one tied up and fearing for her life. He's tasked with little, merely to occupy the shadows as a silent, unsure and obviously unstable oppressor. Her voice is all we hear for a while, but eventually he speaks and we realise that he's a joke, stereotypical and clichéd, not because of bad writing but because he's not the character of substance that she is. He's just big and powerful, while she's everything else.

The film's synopsis tells us that they're Valarie and Tom, a blue collar couple in their fourth year of marriage. Clearly they're not as happy as others might imagine them to be. This latest spat is ostensibly about her sleeping with someone else, something he's been doing for years. It's only the setting for the film though, its focus is the relationship as a whole and the dynamics that led it down a dangerous path to this point. I'm not going to fault Buddy Hyde, who plays Tom, as he's given very little to do and all of it is to show that he's just a big dumb hunk of meat, not the most flattering role for an actor to play. It's Lindy Star Taylor under the spotlight, quite literally, and she dominates so effortlessly that I wondered if the few scenes where we see anyone else could have been cut to turn this into a one woman show. Maybe not, but the thought abides. As Fragale has pointed out, this isn't a 'girl tied to a chair' movie, this is a 'chair tied to a girl' movie.

Whenever Tom is in the room, she's a sassy bitch that hurls verbal abuse calculated to belittle him and diminish his control. Whenever he's gone, she demonstrates how panicked she really is, underlining her predicament, expressing her frustration and summoning the energy needed to enter another round. Eventually, of course, as the deceptively clever title suggests, someone or something has to break, and while I wasn't surprised at the outcome, I was still happy about it. The way it lingers into the end credits is especially appreciated. It's a very nice touch, and there are a few of those on offer to enhance what is really a very minimal set, with few props, lights or cast members to attract our attention. The camera moves pretty well around this confined space and the few glimpses of flashback are capably handled. This is clearly an early 386 Films piece and they've progressed since, but it's not an embarrassing resumé filler, it's a solid beginning.

Breaking Val can be viewed for free at Vimeo.