Ninah's Dowry (2012)

Director: Victor Viyuoh
Stars: Mbufung Seikeh and Anurin Nwunembom

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Ninah's Dowry is one of those features that thrives on the festival circuit, screening to audiences who don't require multi-million dollar budgets and relish films that take them to places they have never seen before, however brutal and shocking those places might be. It took home the audience award at the Phoenix Film Festival, as it did at the Big Muddy Film Festival earlier in the year; it'll surely pick up more such awards as it works its way around the circuit and writer/director Victor Viyuoh will become gradually less surprised as those awards start to rack up. His leading lady, an actress by the name of Mbufung Seikeh, will also find that the best actress in a foreign film award she won at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival will be but the first of many. However, Ninah's Dowry is also one of those features which deserves to be seen by a much wider audience and I truly hope it finds that, not just here in the States but back home in west Africa too.

The story appears to be as simple as they come: Ninah has run away from her abusive husband, Memfi, who eventually tries to bring her back home. The depth comes not only from discovering why she ran and what she goes through to be free, but from the cultural norms that explain why this is not only commonplace but frankly ignored. We watch this story unfold with western eyes and find ourselves shocked that it isn't seen by the characters as horrific, unsanctionable and inhuman, but of course farmers in rural Cameroon don't look at themselves with western eyes. However many recognisable western brand names crop up in the most unlikely places and at the most unlikely moments, they have their own customs and laws, built up around their own culture, and they live their lives according to them. Viyuoh's fascinating Q&A at the Phoenix Film Festival highlighted how few rights women actually have in Cameroon.

And so to the details. For a start, Ninah didn't marry Memfi because she wanted to; she was sold to him by her father, who received the payment due. That means that she remains his property unless she refunds that dowry to him, which of course she doesn't have. Reading up afterwards, I discovered that Ninah is twenty years old at the start of the picture, seven years into a marriage in which she has given her husband three children. That means that she wasn't merely sold into this life by her father, she was sold at the age of thirteen. The most impactful section of Viyuoh's Q&A was when he explained that this is effectively a true story; what Ninah goes through in this film, Viyuoh's cousin went through in real life, except the reality was much worse than he could viably adapt to the screen. She's safe and doing well, he told us, away from her abusive husband, but, amazingly, that same abusive husband, also named Memfi, showed up on set one day.

In the movie, Memfi is a bearded farmer who looks like a Jamaican yardie. The violence he dishes out is rooted in the streets, right down to his penchant for kicks to the gut. I came in a couple of minutes late, as he was brutally beating one of his young sons. Why he was doing this, I have no idea, though it's not likely to be anything substantial, but it's enough for Ninah to say that enough is enough and to walk out right in front of Memfi and their kids with her head held high. It doesn't work, of course, as Memfi promptly stops her in her tracks, beats her for the effort and hangs her by her arms from the farm's ceiling for the night. It isn't all brutality, as there's a lot here about face, especially shown in front of others. It seems to be culturally worse for her to leave in front of her kids as to just leave. Similarly, when Memfi reaches the limits of his tab at a bar, it's seen as worse for the landlord to deny him more credit in front of his son than it is to just deny him.

There's a lot more about face after the kids cut Ninah down and she leaves more surreptitiously. Beyond trying to leave Memfi just because of the constant abuse, she's also trying to get back to her seriously ill father before he dies, not to spend precious time with him but to berate him for what he did to her and her life. Her brother takes care of the funeral and isn't happy with her for staying indoors instead of taking her place at the grave. He doesn't appear to feel for his father either, but he has to run through the motions for the sake of face, apparently hiring professional mourners to wail at the graveside and spending money they don't have on a lavish funeral feast. When Ninah explains that the money would be better spent on the living, she isn't being selfish; she's bitter enough to not care about face. After all, after seven years as one of Memfi's animals (her words), respect is clearly not something easily given.

Initially the direction of the film is about Ninah's escape from such conditions, first to her brother Robert's house and then into town, where she starts a small restaurant called Ninah's Eatery. Life is hardly worth shouting about, but compared to enduring the farm with Memfi it's bliss. She even finds a smile on occasion, which is more than welcome in a film with a tone as oppressive as this, but the title was always going to come back into play. It does so when Memfi discovers that Ninah is pregnant again, not to him this time but to some new boyfriend called Yunus. So Memfi walks the long road into town, with a couple of friends in tow, to take her back home, ready to use force if necessary and quite likely even if not. Because she was sold to him, she can't resist unless she pays back that dowry and that's clearly not an option. So off they they process, all through town, with her being carried or dragged, pushed or pulled, whatever works.

Where it goes from here is something you'll need to experience yourself, and I use that word very deliberately. This isn't a film to watch, it's a film to experience. We can't help but put ourselves in Ninah's flipflops (only men have shoes) as she struggles to find a way to escape her situation. The way that Seikeh plays Ninah is mostly sympathetic, as indeed it would be hard not to be as she suffers through this film, but she's no angel. We don't wonder at her resolve but we do wonder at why she doesn't even attempt to take her kids with her. The fact that she has every reason to be bitter doesn't alter the fact that she's very bitter indeed. The powerful ending, which I won't spoil but which I will say unfolds in a highly appropriate manner, audibly not visually, the camera remaining throughout on Ninah's defiant face, is a morally ambiguous one. Some viewers will lose some sympathy for her because of it, though others will applaud her actions with a cheer.

The most obvious comparison I can reach for is a strange one indeed: The Passion of the Christ. In that film, Mel Gibson showed the torment of Jesus in every detail, flinching from nothing. The point was to make it impossible not to realise what he went through. Viyuoh's aims are similar here. The point of Ninah's Dowry is to make it impossible for us to fail to realise the dire straits that women like Ninah find themselves in, often through no fault of their own, and the laws and cultural mores that make it almost impossible for them to find a way out again. It does offer a little hope, though only a little and in a backhanded fashion, but it ably illustrates the mindset of a country. There's a telling scene when one of Memfi's friends tries to explain to him a parable about crabs in a bucket. His point is that the Cameroonian people are like those crabs because while one can simply climb out, two can't because one will pull it back in. Memfi simply cannot understand the concept.

The standout here is Seikeh, who has no prior credits at IMDb but who has apparently appeared in a number of short films and three previous features, though this is her first leading role. She owns this film, pure and simple. While many of the supporting actors get moments to make themselves noticed, they quickly vanish from memory because the whole story is so fundamentally about her and she dominates so utterly throughout. Only Anurin Nwunembom is able to stand up and fight for our attention, as indeed he should as the abusive Memfi. His brutality is seared into my brain, though he's not a black and white character. He's deliberately painted not just as a man but as an archetype of the rural Cameroonian farmer. He does seem to care about some things, such as his kids, but his ignorance, violence and stubbornness mean that they don't do well once Ninah is gone. Nwunembom was also important behind the camera, as the unit production manager.

Like most of my fellow festivalgoers, Ninah's Dowry hit me hard. It has a strong message delivered just as strongly and the real life background Viyouh provided after the screening enhanced that. The acting is uneven, but generally much better than I'm used to seeing in African cinema, though to be fair my experience is mostly with shot on video Nollywood films, so not particularly high up the quality scale. Seikeh's performance is amazing and dedicated and truly grounds the picture. The scenery is gorgeous, especially in long shots, and the quieter moments of African culture are fascinating: the influence of Christianity in a people who still fear witchcraft, the way superstition shapes honesty and the mixture of English, pidgin and Cameroonian dialect. In a country of 19m people, which is half English and half French, there are 270 spoken languages. In the end though, this is a call for awareness, a shaming of a culture and a plea for change. It deserves to be heard.

Nailbiter (2013)

Director: Patrick Rea
Stars: Erin McGrane, Meg Saricks, Emily Boresow and Sally Spurgeon

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Unfortunately I got to see Nailbiter while the theatre was experiencing technical problems with a projector, thus causing problems with the colour balance. Even so, it was clear that prolific short film director Patrick Rea had done something just a little different with a very familiar story. The question of the day is whether he did enough, because the familiar is commonplace throughout, and I feel that he did enough to make this a good film but not a great one. There are two tweaks to the usual, one with regards to the monsters of the piece who are given an original origin and another with regards to the stars, all four of which are female. Rea co-wrote with Kendal Sinn, so there's no overt female influence in the production, but the tone is completely different from the expected comparisons, which are either testosterone fuelled or mixed in outlook because they're mixed in actors. Here, it's all about women and their reactions are refreshingly different.

The one nominally in charge is Janet Maguire, a recovering alcoholic whose husband is deployed overseas in the forces. That leaves her to juggle AA meetings with bringing up three daughters who are all clearly rebelling against her in their own way. Most overtly, there's Jennifer, who's a textbook bad girl who's stringing along some dorky young guy because he has a car and is more than happy to be at her beck and call. We meet them as he drops her off at home, but she keeps him there while she finishes her cigarette. Next youngest is Sally, who wants to change her name to Sarah. That leaves Alice, who retreats into the world of books and stays very quiet indeed. Jen may be wearing the rebel card on her sleeve, but all three seem like nice kids who are just stuck in a bad situation and don't know how to reengage with mum now that she's sober. That reading is reenforced as the story progresses and teamwork becomes a must.

They live close to the border between Kansas and Missouri and, as the film begins, they're getting ready to drive up to Kansas City so that they can be the first people Dad sees when he gets home from deployment. The storm that will presumably erupt as he finds his family this dysfunctional is mirrored by a more literal storm whose coming kicks off the movie in impressive style. Initially the screen is entirely black, while we listen to the radio talk about approaching storms; then lightning splits the sky and our eyeballs engage. Dad's plane isn't going to wait, so the Maguires head north in conditions that are rapidly deteriorating. Interestingly, Jen has never seen a tornado in her life, even though she's the eldest and she was even born during one. They are a little east of Tornado Alley but not much, so maybe she's just been lucky. By the time they reach Wellsville, where folk are battening down the hatches and boarding up the storefronts, her luck runs out.

With a tornado following them up the road, they abandon the car and take shelter in the nearest storm cellar they can find, not knowing who it belongs to, to ride out the storm. Unfortunately for them, this is just the beginning. It's been a slow, characterful build, though not a long one, as Rea initially plays the story in thriller fashion. The first enemy is the tornado and the second a tree, which falls onto the cellar door, preventing them from being able to leave. The third is human, as they realise that there's someone upstairs, someone who not only won't respond to their cries for help, but who actively boards up the cellar from outside to ensure that they can't leave. We enjoy the very feminine reactions of Mrs Maguire and her girls, which may be a little underdone but are still refreshing in this sort of tense scenario. There's a balance of strength, as Janet faces despair and eyes their unknown host's liquor but recovers as the others band together.

Things enter horror territory just before the boarding up of windows, as Sally decides that, with a little assistance, she can climb out through one of them and find help outside. She gets bitten for her trouble, by something that clearly ain't no man. What it is we aren't exactly sure, because Rea wisely only hints at his monsters until it's time for them to come out and play, beginning with the moment that nice deputy Barney finds the Maguires' car and comes looking for them. It won't be a surprise to find that he's quickly dragged off and eaten, but what we discover right before that is enough to neatly set the scene for the rest of the movie. The good news is that this is all different enough to keep us guessing a little as to what's out there with the storms, as the Maguires slowly make discoveries that fill in the background for them and for us. The bad news is that the picture slows down here for a weak, only mildly suspenseful middle that lasts into the final act.

The film's title would like to be an appropriate one in a number of ways and it is in some, but the obvious meaning hints at the suspense of the piece and sadly that's not consistently maintained. The story builds pretty well and we care about the characters; the arrival of the tornado and the tension sparked by the falling tree are handled very capably too, but here, the suspense begins to fade and the film drags as the Maguires attempt to figure out both what's going on and how they can get out of the cellar to face it. I should emphasise that it isn't particularly bad, and there are some very nice scenes within this part of the film; it's that they can't live up to what came before and don't bode well for what we hope is still to come. The framework is familiar enough for us to build expectations rather easily and Rea delivers some of what we do expect to see, but he keeps it surprisingly low key towards the end, moving back from a horror to a thriller mindset.

All four Maguire ladies are decently played and the family is well nuanced, with each of the actors bringing something different to the table. Erin McGrane has a surprisingly short filmography, this being only her seventh feature in over two decades, but she brings a believably fragile strength to her role, as befits a mother of three who's struggling with drink. Meg Saricks, as Jennifer, is brand new to features, with only an anthology segment and a handful of shorts previously to her name, one of those being Hell Week for Patrick Rea. Her arc is from bad girl to good then back to bad in the name of survival and she lives up to it reasonably well. Sally Spurgeon and Emily Boresow as her younger sisters have even less credits to their name but are surprisingly capable nonetheless. I wanted to see more from both of them. Trumping all of them though is Joicie Appell, who steals the show as old Mrs Shurman, a much more important character than she might initially appear.

There are male characters in the film, but none of them get to do much of anything. It's as if they all took their lead from Lt Maguire, Janet's husband, who is referenced early and often but doesn't even make it on screen until the story is all wrapped up and put to bed. He's there only to provide a solid ending and the promise of a testosterone fuelled mirror image of the movie in sequel form. Any traditionally male scenes here are handled by the women, who prove that though they may be the weaker sex, that doesn't mean they can't take care of business anyway. It's this angle that impressed me, along with the mildly subversive concept that while the Maguires may be victims in a stereotypical horror way, the story clearly happening to them, they're also the protagonists of the reverse story, in which they adversely impact the Wellsville community in return. It's a shame that this wasn't taken further, because it's far more interesting than the routine story it's built on.

Inbred (2011)

Director: Alex Chandon
Stars: Jo Hartley, James Doherty and Seamus O'Neill

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012 films.

Inbred was an easy pick for Jim and Chris McLennan to headline FearCon V and it had nothing to do with producer/director Alex Chandon being a friend who attended their wedding. It's a British film, thus cementing their already impressive international reach; three of the four features and six of the ten short films that they screened in 2012 came from foreign shores. It's capably done, Chandon hardly a new kid on this block, and it contains much that's memorable. It also highlights a different horror angle than the other features shown, as each belongs to a different sub-genre; this one is a gory effects film, following a thriller, a documentary and a dark snuff comedy. It has most in common with the first feature, The Holding; these bookends were both made in the UK (as were Jim and I), they're set in rural areas of northern England and they serve as a British response to earlier iconic pictures made by others. Other than that, they couldn't be more different.

The Holding is a British response to The Stepfather; Inbred to gory backwoods American films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, as well as earlier British responses such as Eden Lake, which shares an actor, James Burrows. The Holding is set in the Peak District, centered around the holding of the title; Inbred is set on the North York Moors, outside of Thirsk, where co-writer Paul Shrimpton lives. Incidentally, both the film's writers have connections to short films shown at the previous FearFest in 2010; Shrimpton directed Teleportal, while Chandon did effects work on Neon Killer. Those similarities aside, they're very different films. The Holding has a lot of depth in its approach, which is told from a notably feminist perspective; Inbred doesn't give a monkey's about depth. The Holding gets brutal on occasion, through violence, but it relies on a tense atmosphere; Inbred gets brutal as often as it can, through able use of gore effects.

What's more, Inbred is a comedy, though it doesn't play particularly for laughs and those that it finds are dark indeed, as befits an influence from the cult sketch show The League of Gentlemen. Gore effects aside, which are a Chandon specialty, it's the black humour and local flavour that is most successful. Derek Adamson, mayor of Thirsk, objected to the picture, saying that, 'We don't want that sort of publicity... it's quite probable that people will think the characters in the film are like real Thirsk people and that is not a good impression.' Chandon responded that this gift of free publicity was 'integral to the whole Inbred machine'. In truth, the characters are surprisingly good. Yes, the locals we meet are clearly extrapolated into overdone horror conventions and the script is happy to embrace stereotypes, including an actual ferret down the trousers scene, but they're well rooted in Yorkshire reality and surreality, and I ought to know, given that I grew up there.

Before we get to the fictional Yorkshire village of Mortlake where everything goes down, we meet the outsiders who will stir up an inevitably horrible response from the locals. Almost to underline how alien they are to rural Yorkshire life, they show up as a six pack: two social workers and the four juvenile delinquents that they're responsible for. The goal is for them to spend a weekend at the inevitably large and derelict Ravenswood Cottage and find a way to work together as a team. They do surprisingly well, though of course they're forced to for the most part by circumstances. This is a horror movie, after all. They're a stereotypical bunch of kids, led by a stereotypical pair of care workers, but all six of them are well portrayed by the actors, and manage on occasion to get past the stereotypical and add a little bit of depth. Given that depth is hardly the goal of the film, it's notable that the actors do manage to add a little bit here and there.

Jeff is in charge; he's the stereotypical social worker who wants to be everyone's friend and see everything in a positive light. 'A little ramshackle,' is how he describes Ravenswood, when they're all bitching about the damage and the dust. Kate is a little more in touch, both with the kids and reality. Much of what she achieves is through her not being Jeff. 'Rules are meant to be broken,' she tells him, though he has difficulty understanding the concept. The most obvious of their four charges is Dwight, the stereotypical obnoxious loudmouth. 'Is he always such a prick?' Kate asks. 'Yep,' says Jeff, and Dwight goes on to prove it. Zeb is his black sidekick, who plays along with him as Dwight Lite. Sam is the girl who doesn't talk much, but builds a connection with skinhead Tim, a pyro who tried to burn down his school. These kids share a mistrust of authority, but there's little attempt made to build a theme around their lack of connection to society.

There's much more attempt to build character into the village of Mortlake and I wonder how close Shrimpton based some of his observations. As with all Yorkshire villages, this one is centered on a local pub, the Dirty Hole, built in 1582 and feeling all too true to life as a dark place full of locals playing dominoes. There's no food. 'We don't cater to that crowd,' says Jim, the landlord, who is a treat of a character for Seamus O'Neill, a Yorkshireman himself who has just the right tone. When he tells Kate, 'We don't serve Coke, miss,' it sounds just like the old classic, 'You ain't from around here, are you?' that begins so many westerns. Here's where we start to feel the meaning of the title, as Sam gets hassled by an apparent retard with a love for carrots. He's Gris, Jim's son, and while we were given hints through gaps in the hedges on the way into town, it's Gris who soon sparks the touchpaper to the plot in an intriguing graveyard where train carriages go to die.

Thus far it's been a little slow and a little boring, but that's mostly due to the story, which aims for a slow build. There's some character development, but there isn't a character here who isn't easily delineated and whose behaviour isn't easily predicted. It's hard to fault the actors as every one of their performances is solid, however unstretched they may have been. They all get their moments but most obvious early on is Dwight, the sort of complete and utter prick of a kid that everyone wishes they didn't have to deal with but probably does. Chris Waller doesn't bring anything new at all to the role but he's really good at it nonetheless and the same goes for all the other kids and their care workers. I've known people like every single one of them, more's the pity. Once we get to the Dirty Hole though, O'Neill effortlessly takes over as Jim, stamping his authority on this film just as emphatically as Jim stamps his authority on the village of Mortlake.

Once things get serious, as we know they surely will, O'Neill adds a surreal second role. He's still playing Jim, but he's playing Jim in blackface and hosting a twisted set of variety performances in a barn. It's clearly rooted in music hall, but music hall was never quite like this. The audience are terrible, a stereotypical set of inbred retards cracking rocks together, and the naked organist is a blatant steal from Monty Python's Flying Circus, but Jim is a priceless host and the performances he introduces are clear opportunities for Chandon's effects folk to provide innovative gore shots and for Shrimpton to neatly subvert the down to earth Yorkshire mindset into something horrific. These folk don't just call a spade a bloody shovel, they have an innovative use for it to boot. How would you use a muckspreader as a horror prop? If your ideas are as outrageous as the ones put to use here, you should be making pictures with Alex Chandon.

There's stuff here from all the expected sources. Beyond the obvious influence of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, there's plenty that's lifted from Straw Dogs, The Wicker Man and Deliverance. Most of it is pointless borrowing, because it's the weirdness that works, the twisted inventiveness of the show in the barn and the inappropriateness of the betting scenes at the end. These scenes worked best for me because they're shown as entirely routine, nothing out of the ordinary or worthy of mention. The same goes for the use of characters apparently played by actors with real physical handicaps. Some critics have complained about this, suggesting that it's demeaning to have them play inbred hicks, but the point is that they're not treated differently from anyone else. They're simply members of this society, just like anyone else. If you're born in a Yorkshire village to a Yorkshire family, you're a Yorkshireman. Nobody cares about anything else.

Chandon clearly knows what he has here and has no pretensions of grandeur. He throws in a set of easily delineated characters to chip away at, but it's beyond obvious that he's never on their side. We don't need to know who survives until the end credits, we know from moment one that he's firmly on the side of the warped locals and he doesn't care how warped they get. In fact, the more warped the better, which works when they're solid characters like Jim but fails entirely when they have nothing to do except leer at the outsiders or wave a chainsaw about. It's an irony that every major actor in this film gives a good showing, but the people who made it don't care about any of their characters, just Jim, the one who makes it possible for this film to happen. I enjoyed Inbred twice, because of the dark humour and inventiveness, but I doubt I'll come back to it again because there's no heart below the gore to give it any deeper value.

Child Bride (1938)

Director: Harry J Revier
Stars: Shirley Mills and Bob Bollinger

While many films reviewed in my upcoming book, Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic Bad American Films Were Made, were riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, three have particular strong ties to that show. The folk who wrote it saw Monster a-Go Go as the worst picture ever made until they discovered Manos: The Hands of Fate, which promptly took over the title until the 20th anniversary celebration of the show at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. With almost every major contributor to the show sharing a panel, they were asked if they'd ever passed on anything even worse. Their answer was 1938's Child Bride, which they described as 'Appalachian kiddie porn from the '30s'. They chose not to screen it, even though it wouldn't have been difficult to use a cut version that doesn't include the controversial skinny dipping scene. The film is in the public domain and almost every version available omits that scene, for obvious reasons. Only Alpha Video have it available uncut and while the MST3K description is a little unfair, it's definitely a disturbing film.

It's also a rather unique one in many ways because it doesn't fit well with the only obvious category of films that springs to mind. Back in the thirties, the studio system had control of both production and distribution and, as of 1934, their films were subject to the Production Code, which substantially restricted the content of the pictures they made. To include salacious subject matter in your movie, you had to make it independently and book it into theatres not owned by the studios. Many people enjoyed this creative freedom and made outrageous pictures, often drumming up custom as if they were carnival barkers and then skipping town after the show. While these folk weren't subject to the restrictions of the Production Code, they still had to stay on the right side of local censorship laws, which varied from town to town, so they tended to phrase their stories in educational terms, often with a speaker warning about the dangers of the topic at hand and selling pamphlets decrying it.

And so there were indie pictures about every social ill known to 1930s America: drug use, teenage pregnancy, abortion, prostitution... you name it. In every instance, these films spun melodramatic stories around these topics, occasionally illustrated with nudity, which ended up highlighting in no uncertain terms how dangerous it was not to be an upstanding moral citizen. Thus the films got by whatever local censorship was in place and audiences saw things that they couldn't possibly see in pictures from the major Hollywood studios. One notorious example is 1945's Mom and Dad, which was shot in six days for $63,000 but grossed over $80m, ranking it the third highest grossing film of the 1940s and still one of the most successful films ever made, based on return of investment, up there with The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Inept in most regards, it had one magic ingredient to draw in the crowds: it included real footage of a baby being born. That's all it took.

Child Bride may appear to fit in that sort of company, especially as it was made by a fly by night producer whose cheques bounced and promises remained unfulfilled, but the more you analyse it the more it's an uneasy fit. Sure, it's a crusading picture, but its particular cause stands up today as valid, perhaps as it didn't need to rely on misinformation. Sure, it has an outrageous story, but it's a believable one for a change, because it plucked an outrageous story from the headlines and didn't need to embellish it. Most anomalous, though, is the fact that its lead actor remained proud of the film and her part in it until the day she died. Reactions like that are so rare with this sort of film that I can't cite another instance. Real actors, not that many real actors were involved in such films, tend to look back with raised eyebrows at such low points in their careers, or just avoid looking back at all. If they had careers, they tended to predate these pictures rather than follow them.

Yet Shirley Mills, who was only twelve at the time she shot Child Bride, remained proud of the film and work in it until her death in 2010. She had every opportunity to avoid remembering this, her feature film debut, but she played up to it and what she felt it had achieved. She was already established on stage, singing and dancing in vaudeville venues as 'Seattle's Shirley Temple' since she was a toddler. She also built a minor career, especially in the forties, as a supporting actress in Hollywood, including a slot as the young daughter of the Joads in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. Before she retired from the screen at 26, she had made 27 films for directors as well regarded as Michael Curtiz, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet she highlighted Child Bride, saying that, 'I was proud to appear in that film,' and explaining on her website that it took a filmmaker working outside of the system to make a picture that educated the public on a very real issue.

That issue was child marriage, of course, but it hadn't sprung out of nowhere. It was inspired by a real wedding that took place on a dirt road in Hancock County, TN on 19th January, 1937 when Rev Walter Lamb, a Baptist preacher, married Charlie Johns and Eunice Winstead. They had a license, albeit one obtained with false information; Tennessee law prohibited issuing them to girls under twelve, so Johns claimed Winstead was eighteen. Nobody checked. In reality she was nine to his twenty-two. Lamb dismissed criticism on the basis that they'd have got another preacher to marry them if he'd said no. There was no undue influence as they really wanted to wed. It was a shock to Winstead's parents but they gave their approval on the basis that they'd been married under God and they didn't want to risk hellfire for their daughter. Winstead found the concern unfathomable. They remained married until Charlie died at 82 and she gave him nine children.

But the country took notice. After word got out, the story was covered by major newspapers, such as The New York Times, and major magazines, such as Life, who visited the couple in their cabin and published photos which brought home to the American public just how young Eunice Winstead was. Married for less than a month, they had sparked a national debate. It soon became apparent that child brides were far from uncommon, ten states allowing boys to marry at fourteen and girls at twelve, so with opposition building nationwide and states hastily updating their laws, it was all ripe for adaptation to the screen by an enterprising producer. So Frederick Falcon of Falcon Pictures rolled into rural Columbia, CA in 1938 to lease the recreation park for a year so he could shoot Child Bride on location with a few stars and a host of local talent and follow up with a new picture every six weeks. However, Falcon was really Raymond L Friedgen and Falcon Pictures didn't exist.

Naturally the locals, naive to the ways of huckster filmmakers, leapt on board, extending credit all around town and eagerly helping out in any way that they could, building sets and playing extras. Of course all they got out of it was an experience, because 'Frederick Falcon' rolled on out of town again at the end of the two week shoot, never to return, and paid all his bills with rubber cheques. It was an eye opener for Columbia, whose residents unwittingly paid in time, money and effort to be volunteers on a movie being shot in their town. Most of them probably never even saw the finished product, which gradually found its way onto the exploitation circuit under the inevitable collection of alternative titles like Child Brides of the Ozarks or Dust to Dust. At least, in this instance, the film was shot professionally enough and it did get finished. Many rural towns, especially in California, probably have similar stories to tell about films that never even got finished.

I wonder what those townsfolk who did get to see Child Bride thought about it, because it's a heavy handed morality tale, one that somehow stamps its approval on a range of inappropriate behaviour while consistently opposing the institution of child marriage. For instance, it's apparently fine to be an alcoholic wifebeating bootlegger or to kill someone in cold blood in front of already traumatised children, as long as you're against child marriage. Emotional blackmail is fine, thrusting cleavage is fine and giving up your kids to save your own neck is perfectly fine, just no child marriage. This sort of thing starts at the very beginning, as the Coltons, good guys because they read Child Marriage: A Crime, happily dress their twelve year old in a skimpy outfit conveniently ripped up the front to highlight that she doesn't wear underwear. Within the first two minutes, young Jennie sprawls in the pigpen mud and indulges in a water fight with her friend, Freddie Nulty. No exploitation here, right?

The story is instigated by Jennie's teacher, the only one in this fictional community of Thunderhead Mountain, so her class is attended by children of all ages. Miss Carol is a local girl made good, who claims to be a mountain girl even though she wears posh frills and make up and won't leave to be with her boyfriend, the assistant DA, until she's obliterated child marriage in the area. She stirs up enough resentment in the local men for them to robe up and kidnap her by torchlight to be tarred and feathered at somewhere called Spooky Hollow, but she's rescued by Ira Colton before we can see any more of her than her naked back. Colton is an equal opportunity bootlegger, his staff consisting of Angelo the dwarf, Happy the retard and Jake Bolby, the villain of the piece, who of course is one of the riled up torch carriers. Colton has already beaten him up for robbing Angelo, so he mounts a dastardly plan for murderous revenge that, not accidentally, ends up with him landing Jennie as a wife. He's seen her swim naked in the creek, you see, and he's completely smitten.

Now if seeing twelve year olds skinny dipping in the creek is enough to turn a hot blooded man into a murderous paedophile, then we're all in trouble because that's what we get for what feels like a two hour scene. Really it's a few minutes but they're long minutes indeed. The reasoning for it is so that Jennie can explain to Freddie that he can't go skinny dipping with her any more because Miss Carol says it's not OK. So he's stuck on the bank, wondering why he can only kiss her when they're both fully clothed, while she swims around naked. Clearly it's there to get child nudity past local censors, which is possibly the most exploitative thing any exploitation filmmaker can do. Shirley Mills, twelve at the time, really did strip down to the buff and doggy paddle around in the shallows on camera, but she couldn't swim, so the longer shots are of thirteen year old body double Bernice Stobaugh Ray, who looked different enough from Mills that her pubic hair had to be shaved for the scene.

By the time we get to the just as exploitative finalé, we're not sure who we're supposed to root for. Never mind character ambiguity, the good guys are clearly bad guys. Ira Colton, hero of the day on two separate occasions, bootlegs liquor for a living, drinks like a fish and beats his wife. Even Miss Carol, the saintly schoolma'am, conducts her crusade through emotional blackmail and gives up on it the moment she's confronted with a clear example. She wins out in the end, when her boyfriend persuades the governor to sign a law banning child marriage, but can't be bothered to save the girl from being ravaged in the matrimonial bed after being hitched under threat of blackmail. The hero who saves the day in her stead does so in a way that nobody should ever condone. None of this is ever addressed by the plot, so unlike the rest of the dubious educational exploitation pictures of the time, I can't see how they imagined this would get past local censors. In many instances it didn't.

At heart, Child Bride was made for the most classic of all reasons: to make money. Friedgen was a crook who offset his costs by getting the town of Columbia to foot most of the bill. I have no idea if he followed that model on his further films, but it wouldn't surprise me. Director Harry Revier was at the end of his career and probably thankful for a last shot; he never directed again. They cut costs by having their respective ladies play prominent parts: Dorothy Carrol, who plays Jennie's mother, may or may not have been Revier's wife, and Diana Durrell, who plays Miss Carol, may or may not have been Friedgen's fiancée. It's within the bounds of possibility that they were merely mistresses. Only 2'11" Angelo Rossitto is recognisable today, credited as Don Barrett but playing a character with his own name, Angelo the dwarf. His career spanned seven decades, memorable in films like Freaks and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and TV shows like HR Pufnstuf and Baretta.

What makes Child Bride unique amongst its peers is that, to hindsight, it seems to have achieved something. It didn't directly, as by the time it was ready for release in late 1938, the problem had already been taken care of, at least to the satisfaction of the offended public. States had brought in new laws to enforce minimum ages for marriage. While young girls continued to be married, as in some states wives didn't have to go to school, none would be quite so young as Winstead was and occasionally their husbands would be whisked off to jail. Yet the film, unlike every single one of its peers, finds itself to hindsight firmly on the side of justice. Until her death Shirley Mills continued to proclaim how proud she was to be part of a film that helped change the social fabric of her country, thus elevating it in the eyes of posterity. Really it was made for money, a con on a lesser level than The Creeping Terror. Over time it morphed into what it pretended to be, a crusader for justice.

Monster a-Go Go (1965)

Director: Bill Rebane
Stars: Phil Morton, June Travis and George Perry

Until they discovered Manos: The Hands of Fate, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 folk regarded Monster a-Go Go as the worst movie that they had ever riffed. It's certainly a bad film, with bad acting, bad dialogue and bad music, along with bad sound and bad lighting that makes it tough to keep up with what's actually going on, even with a clear narration laid over the top. What makes it so notably bad is that it's also boring, which is the death knell to a picture like this. While 'bad' can be forgiven or even enjoyed, 'boring' is a much harder obstacle to overcome. The only interesting thing about it is its history, because the man responsible for releasing it, Herschell Gordon Lewis, didn't care about it in the slightest. He merely needed a movie, any movie, to back one of his own at drive in theatres, because theatre owners couldn't withhold payment on the grounds that it was the other picture that made money when you owned both halves of the double bill.

The film he had was 1964's Moonshine Mountain, which cemented Lewis's stature as a pioneer of the hicksploitation genre by following on the heels of Two Thousand Maniacs! but with a focus on country music and comedy rather than gore. What he found to back it up was Terror at Half Day, a science fiction thriller in the Roger Corman vein, which had been in production between 1961 and 1963 but which was left languishing on the shelf of a film processing lab because the budget had evaporated. Lewis knew about Terror at Half Day as he'd been brought in as a cinematographer late on; maybe Bill Rebane, who was directing his first feature, hired him for his experience, the fact that he was cheap and because he'd worked for Lewis in 1959, doing part time sales in his commercial studio. When the lab told Lewis that the footage was available, he knew precisely what he could do with it, so he bought it, reedited it completely, added a narration and gave it a new title, Monster a-Go Go.

He was so proud of the results that he didn't even put his name on them. He's uncredited both as a director and the film's narrator, not to mention for the cinematography that he did even before he bought the footage. For everything else he did, he used pseudonyms: for his dialogue he's Sheldon Seymour, as a producer he added an S as a middle initial and for production design he's Seymour Sheldon. If the awful new title wasn't enough, his disdain for Terror at Half Day is made clear by the fact that he turned the serious, if probably still inept, thriller into a parody of itself, with what may well be the worst ending ever committed to celluloid, only Chained for Life even coming close on that front. Surprisingly, he also ditched a large amount of footage, thus minimising the presence of Henry Hite, the 7'6" vaudevillian who portrays the titular monster. I can understand much of what Lewis did and why, but I can't understand why he'd throw away what are probably the best bits.

While necessity drove Lewis's purchase of the Terror at Half Day footage, to a lesser degree it also drove the making of the original picture. Rebane had done very well for himself as a young man but had fallen on hard times and aimed this feature film to restore some of his success. He'd arrived in the US from Germany in 1952 as Ito von Rebane, a 14 year old Latvian kid fluent in four languages but not English; he learned by watching four movies a day for six months. After working his way up the ranks at WGN-TV in Chicago, he went back to Germany, where he did the same thing at Baltes Film, eventually directing shorts and presumably impressing Adalbert Baltes in the process. Baltes wasn't just a documentarian, producer and founder of the company, he had also designed a 360° projection system called Cinetarium that screened movies in a similar way to a planetarium. With exclusive US distribution rights to this system in his pocket, Rebane was a millionaire at 22.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. The companies he'd formed couldn't take the strain of patent disputes, legal fees and ongoing development. Picking himself up by his bootstraps, he returned to making films, starting out with a couple of successful AIP distributed musical shorts, Twist Craze and Dance Craze, hardly what you might expect given the sci-fi/horror films that he would become known for, but understandable when you realise that his idol was Donald O'Connor and his English immersion was through classic musicals and westerns. The connections he'd built during his Cinetarium days, the success of his shorts and a clear confidence in his own abilities led him to shoot Terror at Half Day, named for a small Illinois town north of Chicago. He failed as, in his words, 'going union killed the movie', but in hindsight, it was also a first step towards building a legitimate film industry in the midwest, something he's pushed consistently and successfully ever since. That's his real legacy.

What going union meant to this film was that the entire budget, all $50,000 of it, was used up by the end of the first week and by that point Rebane hadn't even shot a single scene with Henry Hite, the terror in Terror at Half Day. Interviews highlight that the union crew was very professional, and certainly the best footage is from that week's shoot, but also that they had no problem spending all the money without any concern as to whether the movie would get finished. Rebane's inexperience meant that he was out of budget and in a major hole with perhaps a quarter of the film shot. When he raised a little more financing, he'd learned his lesson so hired Lewis to finish the picture without a union bleeding him dry. These scenes are all notably inferior, especially with regards to lighting, but eventually the money ran out for good, leaving the movie unfinished until Lewis bought the footage and reworked it into his own picture for his own purposes.

What we see today in Monster a-Go Go is almost entirely footage from Terror at Half Day but it's clearly not the same film in any other way. The commonality ties to the core idea of an astronaut being launched into space but coming back fundamentally altered. Rebane's version is serious, the physical and mental change in astronaut Frank Douglas caused by radioactivity outside the Earth's atmosphere, meaning that the six foot tall man who went up returned as a ten foot tall radioactive monster, killing those he meets through proximity alone. The time was absolutely right. Rebane sought funding in 1960 and began production in the winter of 1961; in between those dates, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to reach orbit in April 1961, with Alan Shepard coming close a month later and John Glenn orbiting the Earth three times in February 1962. Studios naturally saw great subject matter, with films like 1959's First Man into Space even beating reality to the punch.

Rebane also had connections within Chicago, including Mayor Daley, who was interested in seeing film production return to the city for the first time since Essenay shot Chaplin one reelers there in 1915. Edison's strongarm tactics in patent enforcement had pushed the studios as far west as they could go, Hollywood emerging as somewhere they could make a stand and literally throw Edison's thugs out on their ear. We're used to seeing Chicago on film today, many of its landmarks obvious in movies like The Blues Brothers, Risky Business or The Untouchables, but it wasn't until 1959 and another Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, The Prime Time, that anyone returned to shoot there. That's why Daley and the City of Chicago happily closed down the busy intersection of Michigan Ave and Oak St for two hours around rush hour for a tense scene right under Wacker Dr that has the military catch the monster. This is groundbreaking stuff, but very little of it made it into Monster a-Go Go.

Nothing that Rebane aimed to follow that scene made it into the released version either. He wanted a different sort of ending to the usual. After the monster is caught, he wouldn't be destroyed in the way we've come to expect. Instead, he's taken alive and eventually cured through injections of an antidote serum. 'I wanted a happy ending,' said Rebane. 'I'm a happy ending guy.' Needless to say, that's not what he got. It's not known why Lewis changed everything in the way he did, but perhaps he saw the existing footage as a joke. There are certainly obvious flaws that put it on shaky ground immediately. Douglas's seven foot capsule clearly couldn't contain a ten foot monster. We're used to seeing such capsules land in the ocean to minimise impact but this one apparently touches down gently in an Illinois field without even generating a crater. Having the monster walk away from this crash is a precursor to the beginning of Crank: High Voltage and it's just as outrageous here.

Whatever the reasons Lewis had for changing the tone of the picture, he did it with a vengeance and he shattered any continuity the original film had in the process. He didn't actually add much new footage, just a few linking shots to support the rewritten story and an attack scene with the monster, as Henry Hite was still available. Continuity ought to have been easy to preserve, as he worked with the original cameraman, Bill Johnson, too but it apparently wasn't deemed important, as Lewis's new ending underlines. I should emphasise that not everything Lewis did was detrimental. Most viewers remember the shot of the spaceman striding across the cosmos over the opening credits, and that was a Lewis contribution. The catchy theme tune by The Other Three that accompanies it was his too. Mostly though, he mangled, and most of his mangling was through ditching existing footage rather than adding new, although the new attack scene is bizarrely incompetent.

To be fair, I should also add that the bad continuity began in Terror at Half Day. Rebane only had his lead actor, Peter Thompson, for that first week that ate up his budget. So, once he raised more money, he simply replaced Thompson's character, Dr Manning, with Dr Brent, with no explanation beyond a line of dialogue to suggest he handed over the reins. Presumably this is also why George Perry's character, Dr Logan, is killed off early in the film, but the actor promptly returns to play his brother. Perry was a beautician who dearly wanted to be an actor; he ponied up financing in return for a major part and ended up with two. At least shooting sequentially, something else Rebane did through inexperience, helped these transitions. It may be inept storytelling but it doesn't break the story. Lewis's most unforgivable contribution to the film does, in such a blatant and unapologetic way that it perhaps singlehandedly caused the elevation of the picture to cult status.

After the Wacker Dr scene, the biggest looking scene in the picture which Lewis cut significantly, the authorities chase the monster into the sewers. We're shown Henry Hite walking underground and, in a more traditional ending to the one Rebane wanted, Lewis planned to have him encased in concrete by pouring it into the tunnels from above. What he actually did beggars belief and I should quote verbatim: 'As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called Douglas to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!' Yeah, the ending is that the monster never existed. Everything thus far has revolved around a non-existent monster that held the entire city of Chicago in a panic for absolutely no reason.

But wait, there's more, as they say. Dr Logan passes Col Steve Connors a telegram and Lewis dives even further into the abyss of idiocy. 'With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends,' he tells us. 'Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: the line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?' It's hard to imagine a more incoherent or belittling end. At least Robot Monster was honest! This is just Lewis raising his middle finger to drive in audiences, highlighting that he has their money and there's nothing they can do about it. It gave him his double bill and his percentage. Screw the rest.

Friday Nights Alone (2012)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Hanelin, Colleen Hartnett, Jonathan Medina, Corey Busboom, Renee Anne and Wolfie

I really ought to be reviewing The Memory Ride this month for my Travis Mills review, given that it's my favourite of his films thus far and it's being screened at this year's Phoenix Film Festival, which starts tonight. It's part of the selection of films from the last year's IFP challenges, showing on Monday night, as each winner, runner up and audience favourite gets a last chance to win out as the best of the year. Awards will be presented after the screening. It's in tough company, as I've seen seven of the eight films showing and there isn't a bad one among them. Of course, one of them is the film that nudged it into second place at the 2012 Beat the Clock Challenge, UAT's excellent Screaming in Silence, though Mills won out for Best Director. The only catch is that I reviewed it in January, so I'll go for the next best option and review another Running Wild picture directed by Mills and starring Michael Hanelin and Colleen Hartnett, Friday Nights Alone.

This one isn't in the same class but it still has much to warrant a look. The Running Wild website calls it 'a police romance' but that makes it sound like a cheap Hollywood romcom, which it isn't. As the immediately whimsical tone suggests, not to mention the soft piano backing, it isn't going to work out the way our narrator wants. We are kept wondering how it will end up but the ending is as unsurprising as it is appropriate. There's one point that takes us a little by surprise, which is the point right before the knee to the groin scene, and I should emphasise that neither the knee nor the groin belong to who you might expect. While the story unfolds well enough, the action is clearly a substitute for the lack of action, if you catch my drift. As our lead characters chase and catch someone they've been waiting for, even the rise and fall in the music is there to serve as a substitute for the sex the characters aren't having. It's not really about story.

Where it really shines is the acting. Michael Hanelin seems to be in every other Running Wild film nowadays, and he does a solid job here too. He's less ambiguous than usual, at least to us, for he provides the narration as well as playing one of the two undercover cops we follow. The other is the even better Colleen Hartnett, his potential hookup in The Memory Ride and certainly the one who brings him out of his shell in that film. Here he'd like her to be his hookup, but she's married, albeit not very happily, as her husband Kevin apparently prefers to spend Friday nights talking to Maggie rather than her. She isn't invited. It would be awkward, she says. And so we watch these two detectives wait around for their target and the two actors playing them tell us what we want to know in spite of their words rather than through them. The best scene in the film has Hanelin raise a litany of concerns while Hartnett deflects them all, while clearly agreeing with every word.

Really that scene is a microcosm of the film as a whole. Very little happens in this film in the ways you might expect, but there's plenty going on behind it all that we can see in the body language and the facial movements of the characters. Some of what's said is clearly redundant, most of it isn't what's important. It would be an interesting experiment to have someone who doesn't know the English language at all watch Friday Nights Alone to see if they understand it from the visuals alone, how it all progresses outside the dialogue and narration. I have a feeling that they'd get it just as much as I did and probably enjoy it just as much to boot. It can't hurt to have Hanelin and Hartnett duelling facial expressions. I'm enjoying what I've seen of both of them thus far, not only in Running Wild films, and I'm looking forward to seeing more. I'd especially like to see them in a feature, which means The Men Who Robbed the Bank, due later this year.

Friday Nights Alone can be viewed for free on Vimeo or YouTube.

Eel Girl (2008)

Director: Paul Campion
Stars: Julia Rose, Euan Dempsey, Nick Blake and Robyn Paterson

While there's some Night of the Hell Hamsters in The Devil's Rock, it's mostly the technique that allows Campion to turn a little into a lot. It's a feature distilled down to its essence and played out over a quarter of an hour, with only two characters visible on screen. The skills Campion showed there, especially on the writing front, were put to good use in his debut feature. Eel Girl provides the rest of the skills that he needed, as well as some of the themes that he would later spin into an occult Nazi framework. Most of the praise deserved here could be copied and pasted from my review of The Devil's Rock. What it's missing is the background and the story, playing out instead like an extended scene from a feature that doesn't exist. That's not to say that the beginning and the end don't work, it's more to say that it could be inserted partway into an extended story with no changes required. There aren't even any opening credits to suggest a beginning.

While Night of the Hell Hamsters only used two actors, Eel Girl uses and discards two as it begins, as a crisp military type collects a scientist to meet their commanding officer in a briefing room. The details don't matter, only that Protocol 482 is ignored, leaving an obsessive junior scientist on his own with the title character only a few important doors away. There don't appear to be occult shenanigans in play here, though we're given little background to build onto, but a military force has unleashed on itself something very similar to what Col Meyer unleashed on his Nazi troops in The Devil's Rock: a naked, female, non-human creature who looks frickin' awesome but who has an agenda of her own and absolutely cannot be trusted. The sets are superbly realised, costumes no less and even the technology is believable, unlike almost every other movie ever made. The colour palette is especially notable: alien white on superbly lit and textured green and black.

Most obviously there are the make up effects. This five minute short was shot at Weta Workshop, after all, with make up by Weta Digital. Julia Rose is magnetic as the title character, even though she never speaks. She looks roughly as you might expect: naked, with pale, possibly luminescent skin, gills in her cheeks, sharp pointed teeth and webbing between her fingers. She's memorable not only as a Weta make up job but for the way Rose carries her. She commands attention, which is what she gets from the obsessed scientist on the other side of the protective glass. What goes down from there isn't entirely surprising, especially to those who have seen The Devil's Rock, as the signature move is not far removed from one which the demon bitch uses in that film. Without the context of the later feature, this would play much more Lovecraftian, as Eel Girl feels a lot like a solid realisation of a denizen of Innsmouth, where men consorted with the Deep Ones.

The technical quality here on every front and the effortless dominance of Julie Rose as the Eel Girl scream out for a more substantial story, but one is not forthcoming. We're given no background to ground the story, just a hint at military experimentation that doesn't go far enough to determine whether this creature was created or found. She could be from Innsmouth or a sinister relative of Abe Sapien, but she could equally have been the product of unsanctioned genetic engineering. It really doesn't matter, as Campion was obviously concerned less about story here and more about tone and texture, in which aspects Eel Girl shines, figuratively if not literally. Rarely does a short film look this good, but of course rarely does a short film get shot at Weta Workshop. We viewers can't help but want a story to surround this weird creature and her bath of black ichor but we're left resoundingly wanting. If Campion had a story, it presumably morphed into The Devil's Rock.

Eel Girl can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

Night of the Hell Hamsters (2006)

Director: Paul Campion
Stars: Stephanie Ratcliff and Paul O'Neill

After watching and enjoying The Devil's Rock, I just had to follow up with Paul Campion's previous short films. How can anyone resist titles like Night of the Hell Hamsters and Eel Girl? Well, they're an interesting pair, two very different pieces that each point to The Devil's Rock in their own way. Night of the Hell Hamsters is the more fun of the two, with a surprisingly well defined story built around a tiny cast and a confined setting. Eel Girl is far more accomplished technically, not only because of the outstanding creature effects but through excellent costumes, sets and a capably subdued colour palette. Yet what it has in tone it lacks in story, to the degree that it's more like a small slice of a much bigger picture that doesn't exist. More directly, it's centred around a naked non-human female creature and there's a shared gruesome effects shot. Looking back, it's clear that the two films are two halves of the bedrock that Campion needed to make his first feature.

Night of the Hell Hamsters is surprisingly solid for a debut director. It even kicks off with a neat bit of distraction, the scream that opens proceedings not sourced from Julie, the Williams' babysitter, but from some cheesy movie about giant zombie rabbits on the TV. She seems comfortable and capable, very much the trustworthy girl next door, even when her boyfriend Karl shows up. She's disappointed only because she wanted him to bring a ouija board but he only brought the box. He sissied out, which fits the perhaps unintentional feminist tone. She improvises though, setting up her own with a kids' alphabet puzzle and a shot glass, the crowning touch being a drop of blood from Karl's finger after one of the Williams' hamsters bit it. He plays along and fakes a spiritualist conjuration, summoning the almighty Spozgar, which name he found spelled out on the letter blocks left by the kids Julie is babysitting. As you can imagine, Spozgar turns out to be real.

It's easy to slate this film for terrible effects, as the giant zombie rabbits are clearly crew in giant rabbit suits and the hell hamsters with their glowing red eyes couldn't be cheesier, but I'm pretty sure Campion was aiming for the level of cheese he reached. Certainly the film is technically solid; the camera angles are capable, the lighting is fair and the sound is fine, though the hamsters do sound as cheesy as they look. Rob Hall's editing is especially solid, everything flowing together so efficiently that it's a short sixteen minute ride to the finalé. Campion gifts us with some very well phrased shots too, not least a superb gore scene that will have every male viewer cringing in his seat. Yet what it depicts is a stereotypical male fantasy shot, very possibly exactly what Karl was aiming at for his evening in with Julie, but with a simple change of liquid that turns everything on its head, pun very much intended. And yes, it's probably popular in Japanese porn.

Paul O'Neill does a fair job as Karl, though he's cut off in his prime in more than one meaning of that phrase all at once. Mostly he's there to be a slightly dorky but decent boyfriend for Julie, but he adds a lot of grounding to the film and he delivers a simple and clichéd line impeccably. 'Make it stop,' he pleads in a small voice and Julie's response underlines why she's the lead, not only in this picture but in their relationship too. While Stephanie Ratcliff is not a great actor, she delivers everything that Campion needed her to do here. She believably takes Julie through the story arc that Karl could never have managed, all the way to the iconic final line which underpins the film. Even though we're hauled through cheap Exorcist knockoff lines and cheesy hell hamsters along with her, we never lose sight of the moral of the story which is surely to never piss off Kiwi chicks because they can take care of anything. Either that or ouija boards and hamsters don't mix.

Night of the Hell Hamsters can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

The Devil's Rock (2011)

Director: Paul Campion
Stars: Craig Hall, Matthew Sunderland, Gina Varela and Karlos Drinkwater

Given this week's announcement that our beloved local grindhouse gore girl, the Midnite Movie Mamacita, is back with fresh fodder at FilmBar, it felt appropriate to celebrate with a Kiwi triple bill. The Devil's Rock is so indie that writer/director Paul Campion re-mortgaged his house to pay for it, though fortunately the New Zealand Film Commission then stepped in to help out too. It's his debut as a feature director, though he's made a couple of award winning and intriguingly titled shorts: Night of the Hell Hamsters and Eel Girl. He also worked on many of the biggest pictures of the last decade, crafting textures, painting mattes and creating conceptual art at Weta Digital. Working for Peter Jackson is hardly the worst way you can kick off a career in the film industry, especially if you're working in New Zealand and your personal tastes draw you towards the gore genre. This film's success certainly placed him firmly on the cinematic map.

It kicks off quietly and darkly, as a couple of Kiwi commandos land on Forau Island, northeast of Guernsey, in the German occupied Channel Islands. It's the day before D-Day and the allies want sabotage raids to distract the Nazis away from Normandy. Capt Ben Grogan and Sgt Joe Tane are supposed to blow up some big gun, but they're led into a bunker that looks like the Black Knight's helmet in Monty Python and the Holy Grail by the eerie screams and moans escaping from it, not to mention the Nazi who bursts out of the door to puke in front of them. They soon discover what makes this picture such an attractive proposition to begin with. Using an antique occult text, Les Veritables Arts Noirs, these Nazis are attempting to harness demonic forces to supplement their more conventional arsenal, and if there's anything better than a horror movie with Nazis, it's a horror movie with Nazis, demons and arcane occult practices in the name of der Führer.

The neatly disconcerting ambient soundtrack underpins the progress these Nazis are making, but most of them appear to be dead, surely demonstrating just how much trouble they're in, trouble that our Kiwi commandos soon walk into. It turns out that the only living Nazi is an officer, SS Col Klaus Meyer, who promptly shoots Tane and takes Grogan prisoner. The rest of his men are dead, some shredded into lumps of meat that are almost unrecognisable as human beings. From them, Meyer even shovels up gouts of grue to feed to his other prisoner, the young lady whose voice we've been hearing throughout. Grogan escapes but, attempting to help her, discovers that she looks and sounds exactly like his dead wife. Of course, she's really the Nazi-invoked demon bitch who wreaked havoc on the Colonel's men. So Grogan and Meyer, the only two live human beings in the bunker, must put their differences aside and join forces to dispel her.

The Devil's Rock is something of a textbook in how to make a low budget horror feature. While there are some agreeably gruesome effects, notably including a corpse with a rifle rammed down its throat in an homage to Cannibal Holocaust, it focuses more on the characters. To be brutally honest, it had to, because they really aren't many of them and it was always going to succeed or fail on whether our attention is ably courted by such a small cast. In fact, the reason that Sgt Tane dies quickly is because at that point Campion was financing the film himself and couldn't afford to pay for more than three actors to flesh out the story. Anyone else was stuck in the extra bracket or at least not far above it. To keep things interesting, he forged these three characters into a dynamic triangle, each one with its own unique antagonism towards the others. Then he keeps us guessing as to which of those connections will develop the inevitable twist.

Campion, who co-wrote with Paul Finch and Brett Ihaka, deserves most of the credit. This could easily have been a mess. The concept is great but the money wasn't and hanging a feature film on three major characters is a gamble. By coincidence, the last feature film I saw with a cast this minimal was Lo, another picture about a demon, but that one aimed to build a plot with theatrical and cinematic invention, while this one aims to do it while keeping things traditional. It may not have a lot of locations to play with, but it does have them and they're well put together. We see solid sets, solid props and solid effects, the latter being very much in the old school physical vein rather than using new school CGI. The story unfolds chronologically, with each progression built and executed slowly but surely. There's little here to suggest at a 2011 release date except the quality of those effects. It could easily have been a found picture from the seventies otherwise.

Of course, that timeless feeling is never hurt by a cast of new faces. I didn't recognise anybody here, though everyone in the cast has at least a little experience. Capt Grogan is played reliably by Craig Hall, who may well be a familiar face on television down under, judging from his credits. His movie career has included films as widely seen as 30 Days of Night, The Water Horse and the remake of King Kong, the latter two alongside Geraldine Brophy, who provides some voice work here as the demon bitch. Physically she's played by Gina Varela, who brings more than merely enticing sensuality to the role, in and out of clothes or bodypaint. She was in a highly regarded Kiwi crime series called Bloodlines, for which Hall won an best supporting actor award. Best of them in my book was Matthew Sunderland as Col Meyer, who serves as both the grounding of the film and the catalyst for most of the plot movement, but all three act well off each other.

Any downside surely has to tie to the budget. While Campion did a fine job of throwing as much of it as he could onto the screen where we can see it, he would have benefitted from having more of it to throw. It would have allowed for more actors, for a start, to nip and harass the core dynamics of the three leads. It would also have allowed for more versatility in the locations. The few we see are used well and Campion did a fair job turning the bunker into a claustrophobic jail cell rather than letting the familiarity degrade into boredom. There are also many places where more effects work could have been beneficial, though I'm not going to complain that a good deal of what we see is there to add texture to the background rather than for cheap shock value. The more I think about this picture, the more I see it as bedrock on which Campion can construct his next few features. I'll surely be following up on them and going back to his short films too.

The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912)

Director: Harold M Shaw
Stars: Martin Fuller and Mrs William Bechtel

The Land Beyond the Sunset isn't just utterly different from the last Thomas A Edison Inc picture I reviewed, 1903's Electrocuting an Elephant, it's utterly different from anything else being made at the time. In 1912, movies were still short affairs, usually running under fourteen minutes and thus fitting on a single reel of film. Over a decade of improvements in storytelling techniques had led filmmakers to push the boundaries of what could be done in so short a timeframe, but they made busy films, crammed with gags or melodramatic moments, depending on the tone. This one is a rare exception. It isn't crammed with anything, playing out in a slow, relaxed way. It doesn't have a consistent tone, apparently unaware of what it wants to be and happy to break all the rules to become something else entirely every couple of minutes. It can't even focus on why it was even made, ending in bizarre whimsy that apparently counters the whole point of the film.

It was made as an advert, of all things, a promotional film to point out how awesome the Fresh Air Fund was. This non-profit organisation is still in operation today, even though it was celebrating its 35th anniversary in 1912. Founded in 1877 by Rev Willard Parsons, a pastor in rural Sherman, PA, it aimed to provide disadvantaged children with holidays in the countryside, courtesy of a network of volunteer host families. It succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, outlasting the newspaper that assisted it, The New York Tribune, and thus far helping over 1.7m children. Within the framework of this story it helps young Joe, a newsboy in the slums of the big city, who lives in squalour with his abusive, alcoholic grandmother. Instead of buying a paper from him, a lady gives him a ticket to a Fresh Air Fund picnic in the countryside and he sneaks out to catch the train and discover the colour green for the first time. You'd think that tells you the whole story but you'd be wrong.

It's no surprise to find that a promotional piece for a charitable organisation dedicated to helping needy kids would start in an overblown Dickensian manner. It's no surprise to find the Fresh Air Fund coming to the rescue, literally gifting young Joe with a mindblowing trip of a lifetime. As he reaches the picnic area, he looks around as if he doesn't understand what he's seeing, treating the grass, trees and flowers with a suspicious wonder as if they're about to spring to life and eat him. He brightens up and, after the picnic itself, is bewitched by the storytelling. The volunteer ladies tell fairy tales, you see, and we get to see them reenacted in his imagination. As Joe hears about young Jack, we see him. He's rescued from a wicked witch by a flutter of fairies who guide him to a flower clad boat which they launch onto the sea, 'along the path of shining light, to the Land Beyond the Sunset, where he lived happily ever after.'

If the film ended here, it would have been less notable than it becomes. It would still have been unusual for morphing Dickensian social commentary into promotional home video into fairy tale fancy, complete with a little cinematic trickery. The naturalistic acting is refreshing, hardly what you might expect from an early silent film. Yet it's writer Dorothy Shore's finalé that sears it all onto the memory. With one subtle shot that still impresses over a hundred years later, she kicks into motion the wild ending that still has me puzzled as to what she really aimed to say. As the fairy tale ends, the happy reenactment in Joe's imagination is countered by a darker reenactment in his memory of his grandmother beating him, projected onto the side of the barn behind the still seated children. Clearly he doesn't want to go home, so he hides away until everyone has gone, then walks down to the shore to find a way to reenact his fairy tale for real.

The problem is that it unfolds about as well as it could, given the circumstances. Joe finds a boat and drifts off 'to the land beyond the sunset' but without anything to suggest that he might reach such a mythical land in reality. He has neither food nor water. He has no sunscreen, no means of navigation. He has no idea where he even begins his journey, let alone where the sea might take him from there. So the picture ends before we can discover whether his inevitably horrible death will be from starvation, dehydration, exposure or just plain drowning. Are we supposed to see this as a preferrable fate to returning home to his wicked witch of a grandma? Should we appreciate that at least he ends the story on his own terms, apparently the master of his destiny, however scarily soon that might arrive. And how are we supposed to view the Fresh Air Fund, whose good deeds it was all supposed to showcase?

And that's what I can't get past here. There is much to enjoy in this film, which is in a category of its own, unfolding unconventionally from grim reality to ambiguous finalé that could be a dream within a dream, unbridled romantic lunacy or a subconcious manifesto that death is better than poverty for young boys. The shifting tones play out like Joe elevates through planes of existence, ascending to higher and higher levels of imagination, like an acid trip that unfolds blissfully but is about to go horribly wrong. Simply changing the title cards could warp this unashamedly. And at the heart of it is the Fresh Air Fund, depicted initially as lifesavers, helping kids like Joe to escape their lot in life for a brief window to revel in the countryside, but then as well meaning bumblers, ineptly losing track of one of their charges who surely dies on their watch. How could this possibly have been the sort of promotion that they were looking for? Thanks, Edison!