I am Nancy (2011)

Director: Arlene Marechal
Star: Heather Langenkamp

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

I missed I am Nancy at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2011 for a variety of reasons, but I wasn't heartbroken about it. It didn't appear to be a particularly important documentary, even if its subject was there in person as a special guest. Sure, Heather Langenkamp played a pivotal character in modern horror, Nancy Thompson, the heroine of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but she hadn't done a heck of a lot else. She returned to this franchise twice, reprising her character in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and starring as herself in the later meta version, New Nightmare, but didn't spin that into other work. By that point, she'd appeared in only eight other pictures over almost three decades. Counting screen time alone, she worked more on the TV show Just the Ten of Us, a spinoff from Growing Pains, than the entire rest of her film career combined. She'd shifted mostly off screen into make up effects work, running the special effects shop AFX Studio with her husband, David Anderson.

So when I finally caught up with I am Nancy, I found that I ran through a little of what Langenkamp ran through while making the movie, which was an enlightening experience. It's a surprising documentary, which has a very different approach to 2010's far more traditional Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, which Langenkamp narrated and executive produced. That was an exhaustive four hour sweep through the entire franchise to coincide with its reboot after 25 years. This one looks very specifically at the character of Nancy Thompson and at Langenkamp herself, as she reengages with the character and the franchise just ahead of its silver anniversary and struggles with her part in its legacy. It's a far more personal approach that appears to be insubstantial fluff for most of its running time, but has substance waiting to creep in as it moves forward. It even has a story arc, as we follow Langenkamp on what could fairly be called a voyage of discovery without hyperbole.

After a well set up opening, in which Freddy Krueger pops in the VHS of A Nightmare on Elm Street for us to see video clips of how he's affected popular culture, and the opening credits, which unfold neatly through the assistance of Langenkamp, her silver Sharpie and a set of 8x10s, we settle in to the first of three acts. This one appears to be the most insubstantial, but it's highlighting how far out of the picture she'd actually got. We're at the superbly named Clandestine Rabbit, where a tattoo artist called Twelve is inking Freddy Krueger onto the leg of a horror nut, Mikey Rotella. No doubt you're wondering why I'm including all this detail, but it's to highlight how I was wondering why the movie includes all this detail as it was doing so. Initially it appears that it's only because Rotella works at AFX Studio and thus has a direct connection to Langenkamp, his boss, who pops in to watch. Only later do we realise that it's the quirk of circumstance that brought her into contact with the legacy of her character.

In and amongst meandering discussions with Rotella and others, we get to why the entire 'It Began with a Tattoo' section is included. It's just to point out that everyone in horror fandom cares about Freddy while nobody cares about Nancy. Like duh. To Langenkamp's credit, her disappointment is clear but not overt and she merely comes off a little whiny as she asks questions like whether Rotella would follow up with a Nancy tattoo and gets awkward silences in response. This sort of thing continues on throughout the film, but especially this early third, as she goes out on tour to celebrate 25 years of A Nightmare on Elm Street with six cons in three countries. We continue to wonder how substantial this material is as we discover a lot more about conventions in general than we do about either Heather or Nancy and not much of it is particularly new to anyone who's ever attended one. Do we care that some dedicated fans fly out from Kuwait to see the stars, or that one man sold plasma for eight weeks to finance his trip?

There's a lot more character here than substance, but the character is on the other side of the table to what we might expect in a film called I am Nancy. Langenkamp appears to be discovering this world or at least questioning it for the first time, while joking that her career might have been more substantial had Nancy's wardrobe been more revealing, but that's about it. Her character shows mostly in how she handles the disappointing answers to her questions about Nancy's, and by extension her, impact on the world and in how the editing of the movie demonstrates a notable sense of humour. There's a running joke about how the merchandising is clearly centred around Freddy Krueger, whether it's brought to her table to sign or whether she's asking the event vendors. There's a wonderful moment where she finally discovers a Nancy toy, the 2008 one from Mezco that depicts the famous bath scene in the first movie, only for the vendor to point out that it's discontinued and the editing to cut into a comedy skit.

And so on it goes. Freddy gets the merchandise; Robert Englund gets the applause and the lines. Nancy may have been an important character in the original film and the series, but Langenkamp seems to be an extra in the minds of the fans. To be fair, so are many of the other celebrities manning tables but this isn't their film. What unfolds is sad and depressing, but lightened considerably by the clever editing and Langenkamp's quips, such as when she suggests to one attendee that her signing a Freddy action figure may decrease its value. These moments are often simultaneously funny and sad, especially as there's a truth in the quips; Langenkamp is only half kidding. I enjoyed these scenes, which are often personable and engaging, but, even as I enjoyed them, I wondered why we were being consistently hammered over the head with the same point. We get it! Few remember the heroes in horror movies; the villains are the iconic ones who return time after time and so dominate our memories.

Ironically, for perhaps three quarters of an hour, Langenkamp does little to suggest that we'll remember her here either, in a movie which, after all, is supposedly all about her. We're more likely to remember some of the fans who come up to her table, even if they often do so because they have nothing else to do while they wait for their number to come up in Robert Englund's line. Some are memorable because they're odd, like the girl who takes pictures of herself with celery or the guy whose girl is moving out at that very moment; others are memorable because they're different, like the deaf girl or the amputee in a wheelchair. Again, their scenes are enjoyable, highlighting the diversity of conventions and breaking the stereotypical view of them, but they don't seem to have any real purpose in this film. At least some of these scenes are phrased in an interesting way, such as the neatly edited responses to the question of how old people were when they first saw A Nightmare on Elm Street. How low can they go?

The substance starts to arrive in the third act, as Langenkamp talks with other key players in the series: its star, Robert Englund, and its creator, Wes Craven. Englund is lucid and interesting, though grounded enough to highlight the nerd sin his former co-star is committing by ripping open her new purchases so he can sign the figures rather than the boxes. Craven, who wrote and directed the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and whose involvement in the ensuing series was restricted to the same three movies she starred in, is still more insightful, expounding on the philosophy that underpinned the film. There's even a neat anecdote to explain Nancy's derivation; watching an earlier Wes Craven movie, Swamp Thing, his daughter Jessica was upset that Adrienne Barbeau tripped while being chased. She asked him why girls always tripped and he took it to heart, writing a strong female hero for A Nightmare on Elm Street, able to stand up and face truth and fear. It's a feminist reading of an anomalous character in '80s horror.

And here, finally, is where this documentary finds its feet and adds some perspective to all that's gone before. One of the toughest human truths, explains Craven, is that you can only save yourself and that spirit is what both Nancy Thompson and Heather Langenkamp epitomise in these movies. This is a far different legacy to that of Freddy Krueger but it's a fundamentally more important one, as we soon see manifested in the form of Jude, the convention goer in a wheelchair. Parts of her story are reminiscent of Freddy's (she came back from being clinically dead after a car accident that left her in need of skin grafts), but she turns out to be the personification of Nancy instead. The surprisingly cheerful take she has on a horrific event brings tears to Langenkamp as she listens to the mirror image of her character, summing up what Nancy Thompson's legacy is in a single, emphatic sentence: 'You just have to face it, man!' Langenkamp has described it since as 'a mantra of strength'.

This scene has clearly stayed with her and she's called it out in interviews. 'It's the best part,' she told Steven Murray at BellaOnline, 'It's the very, very best part.' Not only is it the best part but it's precisely what I am Nancy needed. In one scene, Jude gives the entire film a purpose and explains to us why the structure was so strange. You can't begin a voyage of discovery with the discovery; you have to find a starting point and work your way to it. So it went for Heather Langenkamp, a minor celebrity interested in finding her part in the legacy of a film she made decades earlier and which refuses to die. She doesn't find what she wants, though perhaps she finds what she expects, until we get to Jude and everything she's learned up until that point is rocked. No, Nancy is never going to get the attention that Freddy gets, but she has changed people in startling ways and the title of the film gains a double meaning. It's true that Langenkamp is Nancy, but as she finds, she's not the only one. I am Nancy, indeed.

Important Sources:
Heather Langenkamp - I am Nancy blog entries, especially Freddy on My Street.
Steven Casey Murray - Heather Langenkamp Interview at BellaOnline.

A Film Johnnie (1914)

Director: George Nichols
Star: Charlie Chaplin

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

A Film Johnnie was Charlie Chaplin's sixth film, released only two days after his fifth, Between Showers, on 2nd March, 1914. I'm finding dates fascinating as I work through these early pictures, for a number of reasons, not only because Keystone Studios churned out these farce comedies at frenetic speed. For instance, this is the first of Chaplin's pictures to see release in a new month, all five of its predecessors having first screened to the public in February of 1914. What's most amazing to modern day audiences used to the concept of test screenings is that A Film Johnnie began shooting on Sunday, 1st February, a day before Making a Living opened in theatres. In other words, by the time Chaplin's first film had been seen by the public, he had already begun work on his sixth. It wrapped on the 6th, post-production was complete by the 11th and the negative was in the post for New York. This sort of speed was typical: the average film was shot in under a week, on the road a week later and in theatres three weeks after that.

It's surprising to me that A Film Johnnie, which would be described as a meta movie today, could have been made so early in Chaplin's career, his first lead performance before the public knew who he was. Sure, Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal was all about him, but it was a simple gag not a story based movie. Mabel's Strange Predicament was framed around him and he had the most screen time, but the lead was Mabel Normand. Even Between Showers, which he dominates, tasks him only to co-star with Ford Sterling. In A Film Johnnie, he's clearly the lead actor and the only major character, in a picture with a real story, or at least what passed for one at Keystone. What's more, his antics unfold against a Who's Who of Keystone talent, sourced from either side of the camera, including the established stars of the day. The only conclusion that could be fairly drawn is that, after only a month, it was becoming obvious just what a talent Keystone suddenly had.

It's a fascinating film today, one of the most fascinating of Chaplin's historic early pictures, as it shows us something of what it was like to be on a Keystone set. What's more, it shows us, using exaggerated fiction, what Chaplin may have been feeling only a couple of months earlier, in his earliest days at the studio. He arrived at Keystone in early December 1913 but wasn't put to work until early January 1914. While he was generally kept frantically busy during his contracted year, working long hours six days a week, that wasn't the case during his initial month and he must have felt particularly out of place. As Simon Louvish phrased it in Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, 'Chaplin's problem was a familiar one of stage training, longing for the linear continuity of acting, building the pantomime gag and following it through without interruption, as against the stop and start of the films.' I wonder how much frustration he foresaw during that first month and what he imagined to counter it.

It opens with the Little Tramp outside a nickoledeon, where enticing posters are displayed. These are for real 1913 pictures: The Open Door from the Broncho Film Company and a couple from the Reliance Film Company, including The Alternative. However, the Little Tramp only has eyes for the leading lady on the poster for The Champion Driver, a Keystone picture which is presumably what IMDb lists as 1913's The Champion, though this one is a war movie rather than a motor racing picture. You see, he's infatuated with 'the Keystone Girl', played here by Virginia Kirtley, enough to blow kisses at her poster and go all moon faced right there in the street. Kirtley was an odd casting choice, not because she wasn't up to the task but because she had appeared in a few pictures with the real Keystone Girl, Mabel Normand, the real star of The Champion, while Normand appears in this film as herself, or at least as her regular character, Mabel. Are you confused yet? No wonder the Little Tramp is all in a tizzy.

After a brief but hilarious scene inside the nickelodeon, in which Chaplin effortlessly causes chaos with both his accident prone nature and his inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, he's thrown out on his ear. What else could a love stricken fan do but hightail it out to the Keystone studios to catch a glimpse of his dream girl? He meets many of the leading Keystone lights as they arrive for work, not least Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, from whom he cadges a coin, and Ford Sterling, sans trademark goatee, who promptly steals it back. Here's where the picture's title finds meaning: a 'stage door Johnny' was a man who hung around the stage doors of theatres to meet and pick up stage actresses (or more likely, chorus girls). This merely adapts the concept to film, a good idea for Keystone, whose studio front looks like stereotypical Californian money, even if it's far more workmanlike inside. And, of course, being the Little Tramp, Chaplin doesn't just hang around, he follows the girls right on in.

As you can imagine from the speed that Mack Sennett's studio churned out movies, the Keystone set is a notably busy place, both in the amount of action and in the amount of distraction. The Little Tramp is presumably so stunned by what he sees that he disappears from frame and we watch what is valuable footage of a real Keystone set. One man carries a board reading, 'Pict No 148. Sce No 36. Munt-Myers.' I have no idea which picture this would have been, but it seems to be going well. Another man holds up a board containing the words 'good scene' surrounded by prominent swastikas, which in the first decades of the twentieth century were commonplace good luck symbols in the west; the Nazi party didn't adopt the symbol until the 1920s. A cameraman captures it, while above his head we see a sign, that appears to be telling extras to keep off the set unless they're in scenes being shot. Clearly the Little Tramp is far too lost in the busy scene to even notice it. Then again, he'd ignore it even if he saw it.

On this set, nothing can be taken for granted. If you're in the wrong place, as the Little Tramp clearly is, it's the easiest thing in the world to be knocked down by an unfurling carpet or trapped by the closing walls of a set, all of which spring up out of nowhere because fast working Keystone stagehands expect nobody to be in their way. These sets are modular, designed to be assembled and populated with props in no time flat. With everything kept close at hand, a wall to lean on might not be a wall and it might be needed somewhere else very shortly; the same goes for something as simple as a chair. Chaplin, who was a seasoned vaudevillian, understood this sort of stage work, but would have been as struck as we the viewers by the chaos of the studio. In a theatre, everything's backstage until it's on stage. If these scenes are believable, it's difficult to tell what's a Keystone set and what isn't at any point in time. No wonder the Little Tramp is crosseyed by the time he finds the Keystone Girl standing next to him!

And, of course, the source of all his problems in this film is his abiding inability to distinguish between what's real and what's staged for a movie. Naturally, once the camera rolls on the set that's appeared out of nowhere, he gets caught up in the action, just as he did in the nickelodeon. However, instead of interrupting the enjoyment of other filmgoers, he interrupts the film itself, leaping into the fray to save his dream girl from the hands of a typically moustachioed Keystone villain. Needless to say, the chaos he wrought in the nickelodeon is nothing to what he wreaks here, especially with the aid of a gun from the prop department, and he isn't done yet because we're about to learn something else that Keystone did: react to situations just as quickly as they built sets. We know this from Between Showers, a movie which only exists as a reaction to torrential rain hitting California, but we actually see it here, as a man spies a fire and notifies the studio. 'A fire!' reads the intertitle. 'Just what we need to finish the picture'.

And so we chase into act three, with the Little Tramp reprising his studio antics as the filmmakers shift to guerrilla shooting at the fire scene. The action is too fast paced for the audience to even consider the morals in play, as we only see the man who found the fire calling the studio and we never see the film crew calling anyone. Presumably somebody had the decency to call the fire department, as they show up and join in the fun. It's all capably done, but the real shots here are the last ones. The Keystone Girl is a little unhappy about the Little Tramp's selfless interventions on her behalf and she shows him in no uncertain terms how unhappy. By the time she's finished with him, he's surely as devastated inside as he is outside, courtesy of a well aimed firehose. The film ends with the bedraggled tramp breaking the fourth wall and showing us how fed up with the whole thing he is. Goodbye to the movie business, he tells us. Ironically, at exactly the same time, his first films hit theatres and he emphatically said hello.

Important Sources:
Simon Louvish - Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (2003)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

A Film Johnnie can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of all 36 of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory (if we count the first half of A Thief Catcher, previously thought lost), it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone.

Belly of the Whale (2014)

Director: Kyle Gerkin
Stars: Eric Almassy, Stacie Stocker, Greg Lutz, Desiree Srinivas, Bill Wetherill, Travis Mills and Scruffy

This film was an official selection at Filmstock 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of all 2014 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

IFP Phoenix run three film challenges every year and the Breakout Challenge wraps up the 2013/2014 season. All entries were screened at the Phoenix Art Museum on the 6th of last month and the Running Wild family made out like bandits again. Technically, they only won one of the three Best Picture awards this year, for Star Babies at Beat the Clock, but most other awards went to regular cast and crew. As an example, Catch the Frog, their official Mystery Box entry, won nothing, but Best Picture winner After the Beep had a Running Wild cast and a Running Wild director, Kyle Gerkin, who also directed this film. The same happened at Breakout where Belly of the Whale 'only' landed third place and won for Best Music. It was beaten by Conundrum and Blue, the two big films of the event, both of which won acting awards for members of the Running Wild stock company: Bill Wetherill, who's also here in support, and Colleen Hartnett, who in Blue, reprised her perennial Running Wild screen partnership with Michael Hanelin.

Belly of the Whale is another strong film challenge entry but it ends unexpectedly weakly. We open at a bible study session, which in a Running Wild film surely tells us that something is up; a recurring theme in the 52 Films/52 Weeks shorts that Travis Mills directed in 2013 was anti-Catholicism, though that may partly have tied to the large number of James Joyce adaptations. Barry, the leader of the group, explains how Jonah could have survived in the whale for days, as if he knows from experience. The others clearly don't see what we see, a hard quality in the look between Barry and his wife Kate as he wraps things up for the week. And, as Peter recites the Lord's Prayer to end the session, we discover what's really going on. Tellingly, it's as Peter gets to 'Give us this day our daily bread' that we see Kate feeding dog food to the ball gagged prisoner they have chained up in a back room. It would appear that perhaps Barry was talking from experience if we see their house as a whale of bricks and mortar.

I've seen and reviewed many of these actors before, not only in IFP challenge entries. Mills and Wetherill make up two thirds of the bible study guests, the last participant being Eric Almassy. The hosts are Greg Lutz and Stacie Stocker. Desiree Srinivas, such a seductive and powerful witch/vampire in Helsing, is the unnamed prisoner here, as if Barry's really covering for Abraham van Helsing and setting her free would mean death to everyone. Lutz and Almassy are the new faces to me here and both are solid additions to this company. Technically I've seen Almassy before, in the short comedy Eduardo and Ted, but he didn't register. I'd soon see a lot more of him during the 52 Films/52 Weeks festival immediately following the Breakout Challenge; he was all over those credits like a rash, meaning that while this was the first of his Running Wild films for me, it was far from the first for him. Within only a few days, he became a very familiar face, not to mention a very capable and very versatile one. He'll surely be back often.

The dialogue is deceptively bare once the bible study group goes home, because the tension and action is ratcheted up by a small number of key lines. Almassy gets the first, because Peter is a sharp cop and he comes back to investigate. 'Who's in that room, Barry?' is his line and his delivery is perfect. Stocker gets the next one and she nails that too, with powerful backup in her arms. Finally it's up to Srinivas to bring it home by adding suitable gravitas to a line comprised of only a single word. The first half may be too crafted a setup but it's good and the second half is excellent, but the whole piece really suffers from a poorly thought out ending. I can't go deeper without spoilers, but you'll surely wonder the same thing I did during the finalé. That's followed by quotes from the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, which unfortunately lessens a powerful fictional story by morphing it into a PSA. The message is a valid one and it's why the film exists, but it feels like a cheap thing to spring on us. It deserved better.

Belly of the Whale can be watched for free at YouTube.

Between Showers (1914)

Director: Henry Lehrman
Stars: Ford Sterling and Charlie Chaplin

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

Between Showers, the fifth and last film in Charlie Chaplin's busy debut month, was a transitional film, highlighting both the evolution of his Little Tramp character and his growing importance at Keystone Studios. Like A Thief Catcher, it's a Ford Sterling movie, but Chaplin is elevated from a minor supporting role as a Keystone Kop, just helping out on a day when the studio was short of actors, to Sterling's co-star. In fact, if we didn't know that Sterling was preparing to leave Keystone to form his own studio, we might be forgiven for seeing this as the start of a new double act. At just over fourteen minutes, it's the longest short Chaplin had yet made, though it was still only a one reeler; it would remain the longest until his first two reeler, Mabel at the Wheel, six pictures away in mid April. It's also the last of his films to be directed by Henry Lehrman, who left for L-Ko Studios after this one. Lehrman had directed four out of his first five pictures, just as his replacement, George Nichols, would direct four out of his next five.

The framework of the story is as flimsy as Keystone got and highlights how quickly they made pictures. Hollywood had been experiencing torrential rain in early February 1914, so Mack Sennett, producer and studio head, had the unknown writer conjure up a comedy about it. He did so quickly enough that they could use a particularly large puddle at the side of a road as a prominent prop, but that's not surprising given how little there is in what passed for a script at Keystone. The story arc follows an umbrella, which Sterling's character steals at the beginning of the film, daringly from a Keystone Kop. He leaves it with a lady in distress, who he's eager to help across that prominent puddle, only to find that retrieving it from her again is a tough proposition, one complicated by the involvement of Chaplin's Little Tramp, who also wants to help the lady. As was usually the case in Keystone shorts, slapstick comedy is improvised until the umbrella is reunited with its rightful owner through a particularly dumb move by the thief.

And, of course, the umbrella is a MacGuffin, an object that drives the characters but has no importance to the audience. This was a couple of decades before Hitchcock popularised the term, but it had other names back in the silent era; Pearl White, the 'Queen of the Serials', called it a 'weenie'. We don't care about the umbrella at all, but we're very interested in the shenanigans that the characters get up to in order to have it, starting with Sterling's antics as the film begins. He wants it because more rain is due and his own umbrella is shredded and useless. Given that he's a thief, Mr Snookie by name in the print I saw, he's happy to steal one and there's one close by in the hands of a cop, who is clearly distracted by the attentions of a pretty girl. The cop is Keystone regular Chester Conklin, who has little to do here, and the lady is probably Sadie Lampe, who decorated the screen nicely in small supporting roles in a few of Chaplin's early shorts. Sterling dominates this scene though and it's interesting to see how.

Sterling was a pantomime artist, the sort of actor people see in their mind if they're asked to think of a silent screen comedian. He never stops moving, even when he can't go anywhere. His very expressive hands are always in motion, just like his mouth and the rest of his face. He telegraphs every move with flamboyant gestures and indulges in overt internal conversation to get that across, as if he's explaining himself to an imaginary companion. If this was animation, there would be a little devil on his shoulders, goading him into a heinous act, and a little angel making a little effort to stop him before it's too late. He doesn't walk; he creeps portentiously. Later in the film, as the action speeds up, he jumps in the air before running. Here, he turns round and runs on the spot for effect before making his escape. Oddly, we never see him in the same frame as the cop and his lady friend; just his hand in their shots and the end of the umbrella when he's on screen. It helps to highlight how this is all about him.

And so to the vast puddle, where he measures its depths with the umbrella and wonders if he can cross the road without getting soaked. Before he tries it, a young lady shows up, played by Emma Clifton, and wonders the same thing; our thief is instantly smitten. He goes in search of a plank to use as a bridge, only to discover that during his absence, the Little Tramp shows up and runs through exactly the same setup. Now they are rivals for this young lady's affections, but they both lose out to a helpful policeman who politely carries her over the road. He's played by Eddie Nolan, a lesser name at Keystone Studios who debuted with Chaplin in Making a Living; his first five films were all Chaplin shorts and he'd play a number of roles in their first feature, Tillie's Punctured Romance. Nolan's acting style is even more realistic than Chaplin's, but it's much more limited. He's subdued and comfortable in his actions, but doesn't have the expressions of the lead comics; he served best as a tall prop for them to work off.

Five minutes in, Sterling and Chaplin return to the puddle with their respective planks to interact for the first time. We've already contrasted them in our minds, as their styles are completely different, but we can't fail to do so afresh as they share a screen. At the time, the most obvious contrast may have been between Sterling's goatee and Chaplin's toothbrush moustache, but today it's between styles, the old one that Sterling did so well and the new one that Chaplin was pioneering. Like Sterling, Chaplin never stops moving, but his movements are all small ones, much more restrained. Instead of jumping up and down, he shuffles on the spot. Instead of flailing around, he gestures calmly and builds his portfolio of personal tics. He interacts with the other characters rather than imaginary ones for our benefit. As the pair share both screen and gags, it's impossible not to see the difference between them. Only in more active moments does Chaplin imitate a lighter version of Sterling.

Another major difference that becomes more and more apparent as the film goes on is in the tone of their characters. Both play mashers, an archaic term for men who make advances to women they don't know, but they do so in completely different ways. Mr Snookie is a long way from the lovable rogue that the Little Tramp was quickly becoming; he's an angry and violent would be rapist, literally hopping mad, attacking the young lady who won't return his stolen umbrella. He orders her around, grabs her by the hair and even bites her nose. By comparison, Chaplin uses subtlety to woo her, gently taking her elbow and tipping his hat, and offering protection that she doesn't need. Women are strong in this short. The cop's lady friend at the beginning emphatically sends him packing when she sees the broken umbrella Mr Snookie left him. This former lady in distress saves herself, belting her assailant, pushing him around and knocking him down, all while two other women applaud in the distance. Emma Clifton had fun.

Chaplin does well in the slapstick fight scenes, but his most memorable moment is a charming one that helps to build his pixielike anti-establishment character. Both mashers face off against the gallant cop who carried the object of their affections over the road and both inevitably lose out, but how they do so is very telling. Sterling looks threatening but backs off like a coward when the cop slowly draws out his truncheon and their scene is over and forgotten by the character. Chaplin, by comparison, dominates his scene even with his back to the camera. He's just as wary and he doesn't back down, but he never threatens so the cop doesn't need to react. He also maintains control after the cop leaves, as his arms record the story of what he'd like to have done. He cocks a snoot at the departing cop, then breaks the fourth wall and grins his cheeky grin to the audience, sharing the event with us before covering that grin with his hand as if embarrassed by his thoughts. It's charming and infectious.

Audiences didn't know it then but we'd see this movement repeated a lot in future Chaplin films, along with a number of others that he makes here. Some might have looked familiar even at this point, such as the way he twirls the umbrella and knocks himself in the head; he did this a couple of times with a cane in Mabel's Strange Predicament and he would return to it again and again in later films. The well known Chaplin run is debuted here, as he skids into turns and makes them balanced on one foot. He'd get better at it later on but it arrived fully formed here. They're quirky little character depths that are so much more memorable than the inevitable slapstick antics that populate the fights and pratfalls. Yes, the Little Tramp literally kicks Mr Snookie in the ass and both of them are knocked down more than once. Between Showers isn't a great film, but it's a decent one that serves well as a hint of the future. The Little Tramp was clearly coming into his own and it's not surprising that audiences responded.

Important Sources:
Gerald McDonald, Michael Conway & Mark Ricci - The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin (1988)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Between Showers can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of all 36 of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory (if we count the first half of A Thief Catcher, previously thought lost), it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone.

A Thief Catcher (1914)

Director: Henry Lehrman
Stars: Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and Edgar Kennedy

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

A Thief Catcher is possibly the oddest entry in Charlie Chaplin's filmography and writing this review will feel strange, given that I've only seen the first half. At least we know that it exists now and that it does indeed feature Chaplin, in an unusual role as a Keystone Kop. Until 2010, we didn't know that, because the title had been discounted by the standard biographers, starting with the pioneering research of H D Waley, the Technical Director of the British Film Institute, which was published in 1938. The suggestion is that he conflated this title, A Thief Catcher, with The Thief Catcher, the reported title for a reissue of Her Friend the Bandit, another film Chaplin made at Keystone Studios in 1914. This is understandable, given that Chaplin made so many films that year and they were widely reissued, often under different names. It's especially understandable here, as Her Friend the Bandit is the only one of Chaplin films to be confirmed as lost. If A Thief Catcher was also lost, there was no way to prove it wasn't the same one.

It was rediscovered in 2009 by Paul Gierucki, a film historian who is currently the head of restorations for CineMuseum, LLC, which focuses on silent comedy. They've restored and released much from this era, including highly regarded box sets like The Forgotten Films of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, which I can personally vouch for, and Industrial Strength Keaton. They're currently finishing up The Mack Sennett Collection, which is slated for a June release by Flicker Alley; it will include the complete version of A Thief Catcher. Currently, we can only see the first six minutes on the Chaplin at Keystone box set, also from Flicker Alley, which contains the restored versions of these films and has thus been important to me in writing my reviews of them to celebrate Chaplin's debut year a century on. I won't complain, as six minutes, or just over half the film, is more than anyone knew existed for the longest time. It's very possible that, until Gierucki's rediscovery, nobody had seen it since the end of World War I.

He found it in 2009 at an antiques show in Michigan among a stack of old 16mm reels. This particular can was labelled Keystone but not Chaplin, so he left it for a few weeks before screening it. When he did, he knew what he had, even though the print is actually of His Regular Job, a reissue by the Tower Film Company of A Thief Catcher. This is for two reasons: the quality was decent and, as we can now see, there's just no mistaking this particular Keystone Kop for anyone else. This isn't Chaplin playing a Keystone Kop, it's Chaplin playing the Little Tramp playing a Keystone Kop. Presumably he was free for a day and put on that famous uniform to help out when Keystone was short of actors, a theory backed up by the fact that one of the other Kops is played by Bill Hauber, who had appeared earlier in the film in a short second role as one of the crooks. If Keystone were recycling their crooks into cops within the very same picture, they were surely short on hands that day.

Of course, Chaplin isn't the star of this film. He was still new to Keystone Studios and to the big screen generally. He'd made three pictures before this one, the first of which had been completed and shipped on 14th January, 1914. A Thief Catcher reached screens on 19th February, only ten days after his third and still less than two and a half weeks after his first. All told, he'd be on screen in five different movies in February 1914 alone. The world was quickly discovering who he was and what he could do, but they needed time to do so and there had been precious little of it thus far. In a twist of irony, the star who he supports here is Ford Sterling, whose decision to leave Keystone to start his own company is what led Mack Sennett, the studio boss, to hire Chaplin to begin with. Sterling was a huge star for Keystone who, like Mabel Normand, had followed Sennett to California when he left Biograph Studios, and became a key player; he was the original leader of the Keystone Kops, playing Chief Teeheezel.

As can be seen here, Sterling belongs firmly to the old school tradition of silent comedy, full of gestures and flamboyance to compensate for the lack of speech. Surprisingly, for anyone who has seen him in a silent movie, he successfully made the transition to sound films and continued to make them until 1937. For instance, he played the White King in the star studded 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland and he even returned to Keystone to reprise the Chief of Police in 1935's Keystone Hotel, four years before his death. He plays another man with a badge here, albeit a cowardly rural sheriff rather than a bumbling Keystone Kop. He apparently stumbled upon a trio of what the intertitles call 'yeggmen', an antiquated term for safecrackers, witnessing two of them disposing of the third over a cliff. This scene is easily the best shot of the first six minutes, because it looks completely fake until movement shows us that it's as real as any other location in the picture. It's a neat bit of illusion.

Being a cowardly soul, he hightails it out of there, pausing only to snap a quick picture of the murder, and the yeggmen pursue him. After a few capably shot but entirely predictable slapstick gags, he finds himself out in the sticks where, in a quintessentially slapstick slice of conveniently bad judgement, he hides out in the yeggmen's own hideout. If you've ever seen a silent comedy, you can imagine where this setup will take us and you won't be far wrong. The positive side of it comes through what they do. Sterling is so nervous at one point that his fingers lock together, as if they were in Chinese handcuffs, and there's a brutal scene where the two yeggmen toss a coin to see which of them will be the one to shoot their captive. This is literally hair raising for Sterling. The negative side is in how they do it, as all three of them pantomime far more than they act. This was silent movie tradition, because if characters got their point over with gestures, intertitles weren't needed and the action sped up considerably.

Sterling was capable enough at this to have become one of Keystone's biggest stars. The yeggmen he reacts to are played by other experienced Keystone hands, Mack Swain and Edgar Kennedy, and they knew exactly how to do this too. All three of them were good at it, which is why Sennett gave them the opportunity here. The catch is that, to our jaded eyes with a hundred years of hindsight, they're dated beyond belief. It isn't the lack of sound, as many recent silent movies have demonstrated, it's in their chewing of scenery with reckless abandon. Ironically, the movement away from that sort of overacting came with the arrival on screen of Charlie Chaplin and we see that paradigm shift in microcosm as an uncredited but highly recognisable Keystone Kop arrives towards the six minute mark. It's impossible not to compare his subtle and controlled movements with their flailing around, even in what is merely thirty seconds or so of screen time. Apparently he gets about three minutes in the complete film.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else he gets up to in this picture. Given that he doesn't arrive until the halfway mark, he's clearly not going to be able to steal the entire movie in the way that he did in Mabel's Strange Predicament, but the little he does in the first six minutes is easily enough to suggest that he may well ruthlessly dominate the second half. I'll find out soon enough, when Flicker Alley put out the complete short in The Mack Sennett Collection. I'm also looking forward to seeing how soon his fellow actors start to follow his lead with this new style of acting. He began 1914 as the new kid on the block, supporting others in their pictures, but he gradually took on more control. He began to write and direct his films, until they were closer to what he wanted them to be. He directed only one of his first twenty, and partially a second, but he directed all fifteen of his shorts after that, relinquishing control back to Sennett only for his last picture of the year, the feature film, Tillie's Punctured Romance.

At some point during 1914 he became a star and it certainly wasn't at the end, when he left Keystone for a much higher salary at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. Watching these films afresh, in newly restored editions, it's easy to see why; even in these earliest titles he's so far ahead of his peers that it's almost surreal. What I wonder is when they realised that; it certainly wasn't during the filming of his first picture, Making a Living, because everybody involved thought it was a disaster. Watching afresh, it ought to have been during Mabel's Strange Predicament, because he completely dominated, but it's hard to see that without hindsight. Surely the true moment in which he took over will be in the film where his fellow actors start to slow down, to cease pantomiming everything so flamboyantly, to follow his lead. He made 32 more pictures in 1914 and I'll be reviewing them all on the anniversary of their original releases, so I'll be keenly searching for that moment. Watch this space.

Important Sources:
Associated Press - Long-lost Charlie Chaplin film, found in Michigan, to debut at Virginia festival (2010)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)
Brent Evan Walker - Charlie Chaplin in A Thief Catcher, and other rarities at Slapsticon (2010)

The first six minutes of A Thief Catcher can be watched for free at YouTube, though the quality is terrible. It's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone, or wait for The Mack Sennett Collection, hopefully due in June.

ICE (2013)

Director: Adam Coppola
Star: Melissa Farley

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

Like Alone, another local short film without an IMDb page that played the Holy Moly Horror Shorts set at the Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival, ICE is intriguing but not for the usual reasons. In fact, ICE is more notable for what it doesn't do than what it does. It doesn't have a plot, for a start, just a very personal account of the discovery that a particular urban legend is real, but with none of what might have come before it and not a heck of a lot of what comes after. Given the simple one word title, it's no stretch to figure out which one. ICE only features a single set, a very confined one which we never leave, and only one actress, Melissa Farley, here credited without her usual middle names. She doesn't get any lines, just fraught utterances as she discovers what's happened to her. She does get to act though, because that's almost all this film gives us: her acting performance as she reacts to her discovery and attempts to escape it. Fortunately she does a fine job because, if she didn't, this would have been empty.

And enough with the vague hints, this is the urban legend where you wake up in a bathtub of ice with a surgical scar where your kidney used to be. You're shocked, right? Well, surprise is clearly not what this short is aiming for, but I'm not sure what it is aiming for. It's shot with some style, the camera panning around the abundant layered graffiti in this particular bathroom before it finds the girl in the cheap tub, one of those huge plastic things you can buy at Home Depot. The set's well created and decorated, but it's not what we're here to see. We're here to see this young lady wake up and react, which she does in a thoroughly believable manner for someone whose lips are blue from the cold. Something is going on at the end of the film, but I'm not sure if it's a twist, an emphatic period or the trigger for everything to become a metaphor. It made me wonder if the camera movement as the end credits roll is traditional or not. In fact, the entire film may just be an exercise in placement. It's well done but inconsequential.

Oh, and I presume the title is in capitals because it adds a second meaning of In Case of Emergency. Maybe ICE is a PSA.

ICE can be watched for free on YouTube or Mindplate.

Alone (2013)

Director: Anthony R Pisano
Stars: Jonathan J Joyce, Tammy Drewett, Anthony Harrell, Scot Haskins and Spencer Haskins

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

Regular readers at Apocalypse Later will know that I'm emphatically not a fan of handheld footage. It's not that the technique doesn't have a place and it's not that there aren't decent shakycam pictures out there; it's that they tend to give me motion sickness and I have to watch them in my peripheral vision, hardly the best way to experience a movie. It's also that many (though not all) microbudget filmmakers haul out the technique not because it's the appropriate one for their story, but because it's cheap and it excuses them from doing all the things filmmakers have to do to make their movies look good. This film from the Scottsdale Community College Film School fortunately avoids most of the usual problems. For one, it runs a mere three minutes and that includes the end credits. It's also really not a horror picture, where the concept has been overused; it's more of an experimental science fiction piece. It maintains internal consistency because we're never quite sure what's happening, so have to figure it out.

And I'm not sure I've quite got there yet, but there are a few facts to base our interpretations on. What we see is a man running around at night and, for the most part, we see things from his perspective. He tries to avoid all the normal people, who stand still in some sort of somnambulist state doing precisely nothing. He especially tries to avoid the strange folk in white masks who keep popping up wherever he least expects, folk who are certainly not oblivious to his presence in their midst. He finds a hiding place, but is eventually caught, only to escape again and again. We have no idea who this man is, where he is or why he's there. We have no idea who any of the other people are either, as there isn't a framework for us to build on. There's also no resolution, which is why I can theorise without any fear of providing spoilers; this is emphatically a film to watch half a dozen times with thoughtful company to see if you can understand what it's trying to tell us. Maybe it isn't telling us anything.

The initial feeling is that the man is fleeing someone or something. He avoids everyone he meets and hides out in a bathroom. However, the white masks are right there, so they know exactly where he is; yet they let him be, suggesting that they're not pursuing him, merely herding him. It's notable that his second attempt to flee, having been caught and subdued but apparently left alone, follows exactly the same path as the first, including some of the same movements. Maybe he's participating in some kind of experiment and they're merely tracking their subject. The play with masks suggests a riff on the last episode of The Prisoner, where this unnamed man discovers that he's one of the very people that he's so keen to run away from. That would be the obvious psychiatric interpretation. It could be a recurring nightmare that explores that fear of being what he fears the most. There's certainly a lot of possibility for something that's only three minutes long. That's a plus.

Another plus is the style that director Anthony R Pisano and his crew conjure up. The concept of using masks may be a story element, but it's a visual one too. The first man in a mask we see is entering a room from the dark outside, which makes him look like a disembodied head for a moment. Positioning actors in patterns is a little freaky too, especially with the masks potentially doing the choreography. It reaches into our minds and triggers a surprising amount of reactions for something so short and vague. I also enjoyed the sound design, which sets up what could easily be listened to as dark ambient music. It's a combination of weird whispering, high pitched drones and a well timed tolling bell. The heartbeat that bookends the piece feels appropriate, as is the minimal theme by Jason McNeil that accompanies the end credits. I'm not going to pretend that I've figured this out yet but it did make me think and it's still doing that. I can even forgive the handheld footage. That must say something.

Alone can be viewed for free on YouTube.

App of Time (2010)

Director: John D'Agostino
Stars: Will Hightower and Ruben Angelo

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

As I'm revisiting old selections from the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival and I've just caught up with Children of the Dust, a new short starring Will Hightower, I thought I'd combine the two approaches and look back at an earlier short of Hightower's that played that festival in 2010, padding out the slot of the short 78 minute feature, Everything's Eventual. Unfortunately it's not remotely of the same quality, being a cheap and cheerful piece that will make science fiction purists cringe. It does raise a few laughs here and there, but those are the high points of a mostly inconsequential short film which surely works best as the introduction for a more substantial feature. It does enough to quieten down an audience and settle them in their seats before the main attraction, but it doesn't do much more. Hightower's co-star, Ruben Angelo, has moved light years on from this, which is his earliest acting credit on IMDb, to helm a company of his own, Rangelo Productions, which has eagerly awaited titles due this year like Grief.

Hightower takes the lead, playing a nerdy programmer called Matt. He doesn't seem to be a particularly good nerd, given that the obligatory fantasy novel on his desk is by Stephen King and the movie poster above it is of The Phantom Menace. C'mon, The Phantom Menace in 2010? He needs to revoke his nerd card with immediate effect. I can buy the Watchmen background on his monitor, but I can't buy the fact that he only has one of them. What sort of programmer only has one monitor? Anyway, he turns out to be far better than he thinks he is, because the new cellphone app he's written not only works perfectly on its first run, without a single test, but works perfectly at a completely different task to which it was designed. The one time I see a film where the code actually looks like real code (at least as far as I can tell), it turns out to back up outrageous sci-fi gibberish. Given the title of the movie and the fact that the app Matt is creating is called 'The Time Machine', you can see where it's going to go.

Sure, 'The Time Machine' is supposed to just tell you what happened on any date in the past, but what it really does is actually send you back in time. That's what Bobby finds out when he drops in to see his friend and gets to use the app for the first time. Off he goes and back he comes, scared silly. From that point, you can write most of the rest of the story yourself, predictability being only one of its flaws. App of Time could have been a lot worse, given that we see and hear everything we're supposed to and the effects work is pretty cool. I was surprised when Bobby disappears, but only because the effect looks so good when compared to everything else. Hightower and Angelo only do what they need to like this was a rehearsal and I got the impression they should have been ten years younger; the camera is jerky as if it missed a couple of upgrades; and the whole thing is restricted to two characters in basic sets. So App of Time could have been a heck of a lot better too. It's a cute timewaster, pun intended, but no more.

App of Time can be watched for free on YouTube.

Children of the Dust (2014)

Director: Chris Wilembrecht
Stars: Will Hightower, Carrie Fee, Anne Gentry, Mina Mirkhah and Kat Bingham

I watched Children of the Dust last month in an incomplete state and it still stayed with me. Watching it afresh with only the opening bumpers still missing, I can see why. While the story's progression is clear enough, the real story comes from the atmosphere that it builds. There are a lot of hallucinatory visuals here, spawned from dreams, narcotics and conditioning that help us to realise that there's always more than one way to see anything. The sound follows the visuals on those little trips, which arrive in waves to unsettle us before jarring back crisply into a reality that slides from the sacred to the profane. All this cinematic trickery makes Children of the Dust an infectious, contagious piece, which is emphasised still further by the superb third act, which is a real treat, combining stunning composition of frame with the perfect choice of score. The imagery that it accompanies is suitably powerful too, something of a visual poem or dark litany, appropriately given the religious focus of the piece.

When those missing bumpers are added in, we'll see that this long short is a creation of Octopus Army and Valor Media rather than Cool Wave Pictures, but many of the names involved, both on screen and off, are those we've seen many times before in the latter's films. Carrie Fee is a regular there, leading films like Sex and Violence and The Greatest Lie Ever Told, while Anne Gentry and Kat Bingham were both memorable in Dust Jacket. The directors of each of those films also lent their assistance here. Ken Miller, who wrote and directed Dust Jacket, co-produced here and served as assistant director. Charles Peterson, director and co-writer of Sex and Violence, co-edited this short and handled the crane work. Cody Everett, who wrote and directed The Greatest Lie Ever Told, provided voice work here. Even Chris Wilembrecht, the main name behind Children of the Dust as its writer and director, amongst a slew of other roles, co-produced Dust Jacket and edited The Greatest Lie Ever Told.

One of the new names to this group of creative jacks of all trades is the lead actor, Will Hightower, who I've only seen before in App of Time. He certainly landed an interesting role in young and naive Vincent, the lead character and main focus of this film but, depending on how we read it, he may actually be its most inconsequential character. I'm wondering if he's really the walking, talking MacGuffin because all the other characters care what happens to him, for one reason or another, but that's the main reason that he's here. He has no real presence of his own; the nearest he gets to one is to dream it, the future he wants being to hook up with his favourite waitress at the A Touch of European Café. She apparently isn't averse to the idea either, once we meet her and watch them interact, but obviously nothing has happened yet. Perhaps the main reason for this is that Vincent has an overbearing mother with strong religious beliefs that she uses as a weapon to batter him with.

Mum is Anne Gentry, who shows us her scary side here, even while remaining polite. She's not the sort of mother any of us would want and fear of her shows in Vincent's few actions and the notable absence of the rest. She does seem to want the best for him, her approach clearly mirrored in the talk radio chat we hear early on that speaks to training children to avoid the sinful world, which she describes as 'pure trash'. He gives in to her at every step but finds his escape at the café and his waitress, played by Kat Bingham, who bizarrely may actually do more here in a crucial supporting slot than she did as the lead in Dust Jacket. Unfortunately for Vincent, escaping to the café also means entering into the sinful world, for which he is woefully unprepared, as he discovers when his eyes stray up Carrie Fee's short skirt. Fee may be the most fearless actress working in the valley today, though I'm not sure whether that's better highlighted in Sex and Violence or The Greatest Lie Ever Told. She always keeps us on our toes.

Here she's Christine, Temptation with a capital T, perhaps the Devil herself, and Vincent is putty in her hands from moment one. Having lived with one dominant woman all his life, he knows exactly what to do with another: anything she wants. Everything unravels from there, spectacularly for twenty minutes. How it does so is open to interpretation. Christine may just be an opportunitistic girl, seducing Vincent just for kicks because she can see how defenceless he is. The first thing she does that isn't to him is to vomit out of his bedroom window; it just wouldn't be a Carrie Fee movie without at least one bodily fluid making an appearance. However, the film was built from a religious framework and that continues as Christine teases Vincent about his odds of going to Heaven or Hell, so perhaps she's something more, like a demon or a succubus; perhaps Vincent merely visualises her that way because he's conditioned to do so. These twin readings continue, enhanced by pharmaceuticals and laced with the sacrilegious.

The film's biggest achievement is the third act, but that may prove to be its biggest problem too, as it's a step above everything else. Had Children of the Dust ended at the end of part two, with Christine and her sister, played by an even more confident Mina Mirkhah, sharing Vincent's mother's bed, under one of the film's huge and outrageously gaudy religious paintings, it would have been a decent short with a controversial edge. However it continues on with a vengeance. 'Hey, it's time,' mutters Mirkhah and she isn't kidding. The third act is far more than a decent film, from its startling opening visual, a 45 second sustained long shot with human beings a tiny detail against the hills. The ominous clouds are matched by the ominous chords of the Raveonettes, for whose blissfully distorted song, Belly of the Beast, this could serve as a music video. Everything here is magnificent: the editing, the dream flashbacks, the imagery, the lighting, the gorgeous shot through the flames. It's masterful stuff.

That's a huge deal, but in good and bad ways. It leaves us breathless and wanting more, which is every film's dream, after all. I would dearly love to see a full feature that plays like this masterful third act. It's open enough to easily allow it and Mirkhah and Fee are more than capable. But, when the euphoria dies down, we remember how we got there and the first two acts, as strong as they are and as much as they could stand on their own, can't compete when followed by something with this power. Of course, they're required to allow the picture to build, to underline how this could all come about, but they're balanced strangely: the first act runs fifteen minutes, while the other two are only five each. Looking back during the end credits, it feels like twenty minutes of setup for a powerful finalé, which is unfair because that's not how it felt as it unfolded. There's much to appreciate in the first two acts but they're not anchored anywhere near as well as the third.

As the title might suggest, Children of the Dust is a cynical piece; it isn't afraid to let us sympathise with the good guy but it won't let us get behind him. It's almost Aryan in its philosophy that the strong must always dominate the weak, but it's never political, always religious. The film allies itself firmly with Fee's character, so that it's seducing us as she seduces Vincent. The religious framework forces us to consider it in those terms, especially with the symbolism that we're treated to during the finalé. But, if this is a warning to keep us from the pit, it's phrased in an interesting way. It tells us that in training Vincent so strictly to avoid temptation, his mother left him wide open to the world, not protected from it. Everyone in his life manipulated him, with good intentions or bad, with the one ironic exception of his dream girl, who chose not to. As women drive everything here, we could easily read Christine as Eve as much as the serpent on the poster and Kat Bingham's waitress as the Virgin Mary. Who would we fall for?

Midnight Son (2011)

Director: Scott Leberecht
Stars: Zak Kilberg, Maya Parish, Jo D Jonz, Arlen Escarpeta, Larry Cedar, Juanita Jennings and Tracey Walter

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Scott Leberecht, who wrote, produced and directed Midnight Son, is far better known as a visual effects arts director at Industrial Light and Magic. Having films like Eraser, 101 Dalmations and Sleepy Hollow behind you can hardly be seen as a bad training ground for a start in making the films you really want to make. He wrote and directed a short film in 2003 called Underdog, around the time he also directed a couple of other shorts he didn't write, but this is his debut feature as a writer/director, one that perhaps took him eight years to get going. It's a solid film too that made a few ripples on the festival circuit back in 2011. Perhaps its biggest problem is that it doesn't feel like a 2011 movie, more like the sort of novel that more ambitious horror authors were trying to write back in the eighties when vampires were being reinvented. It's slow, careful and thoughtful. It has a strangely hopeful ending. It's a vampire movie that only mentions the V word once and only ever hints at the possibility of showing us fangs.

Our hero, if such a word is remotely appropriate here, is Jacob Gray, who works security for a faceless corporation. It's very apparent that something is wrong with him, not only because he collapses in the lobby but because he does so while listening to Gary the janitor's heartbeat from a few feet away, over the noise of the floor polisher, even over conversation. He's showing signs of malnourishment, although he eats a lot of junk food; the doctor thinks cirrhosis, jaundice and anaemia and recommends tests. He's very pale and he suffers from a serious skin condition, serious enough that he burns in sunlight, and I do mean burns, not just turns red. Only when he drinks the bloody juices from an undercooked steak does his stomach begin to feel happy. He may not have much of a clue what's happening to his body, but it's pretty obvious to us with ninety years of vampire movies behind us. He already works nights, third shift. 'It's like you're a vampire,' a girl tells him and it's something he's obviously thought about.

Why it manifests itself now is the real question and the only hint we get in that direction comes from the janitor, who is a believable fount of hidden knowledge because he's played by Tracey Walter, Miller from Repo Man. When Jacob tells him that he's 24, Gary replies that the human body stops growing at 25, so he must be in the last stages of something, not the early ones. Maybe he's 'like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly'. That's how this film is phrased: there are no undead armies, no Transylvanian counts, not a single dubious accent; it's about Jacob struggling to find himself when he's not like anyone else around him. After half an hour I realised I wasn't even thinking of this as a horror movie, more like a coming of age story, merely a little later in the protagonist's life than usual. It's a romance, a thriller, a drama. It's a drug movie, one whose drug happens to be blood rather than cocaine or heroin. It could even be seen as a nature film, a lost animal discovering his potential and transforming into what he could be.

It's only hokey briefly, as Jacob rents Fright Night (on VHS, no less, our only hint at a timeframe) to test the lore. None of it proves accurate. He can see himself in the mirror. He sticks a cross on his forehead but nothing happens. We never see fangs. We do see other things though, like how the film is sparsely populated as if to highlight how sparsely populated Jacob's life is. We wonder a lot about him, not only about what he is right now and what he's becoming but about what he used to be like. It doesn't seem to come up, apparent only in a few photos, knick-knacks and an abiding memory of the sun which he paints from photographs. He lives in a basement apartment with a heavy blanket over the door, which doesn't seem unusual to him. Gary the janitor and Mary, a girl he meets outside a club, are the only people he connects with and then not easily. He's likeable but he's just not a social creature. He seems to have drifted thoughtlessly into self medication as his condition worsened. He just got used to it.

Mary proves to be as much a catalyst for change as Jacob's condition. Zak Kilberg, an experienced but hardly prolific actor who seems to be transitioning into production, underplays Jacob throughout the film because he's a nonentity. He isn't anyone we would be watching a feature about if he wasn't becoming some sort of vampire butterfly. The differences between him and Mary are major from the moment we first see her, hawking candy and cigarettes. He's dressed simply in black and white; she's colourfully adorned with bangles, ribbons and glowing things. She's experienced; she works multiple jobs, she smokes and does drugs, she's had and ended relationships. He's done none of the above. Maya Parish, another experienced but not prolific actor, plays Mary as someone who has been there, done that often enough to be confident but still remain somehow empty. Meeting Jacob is an opportunity for her to change too. He's nice and he's different. He's a way out of a life she isn't particularly happy about.

It's through Maya that we find an analogy between vampirism and drug addiction. Realising how much animal blood agrees with him, he starts drinking it out of coffee cups, hiding his drug of choice; it only wanes when he inadvertently gets a taste of human blood for the first time. At Jacob's for a date, Maya snorts some coke in his bathroom and gets a nosebleed while making out. His reaction shakes her and prompts her to stop doing drugs, but it also prompts him to escalate, to the point where he scavenges from the biohazard trash at a hospital. An orderly called Marcus rumbles him, but gives him an expired blood pack with the promise of more, at $150 each. The drug analogy couldn't be more obvious at this point, but it's continued. Later when his shirt is splashed with blood he cuts a piece out to suck, like an acid dot. We even see production, the opportunistic Marcus draining a man in a wheelchair. Jacob tries to go legal after that, looking up blood sales online. It isn't quite that simple, as you can imagine.

Leberecht achieves much with Midnight Son but I'm not sure quite what he aimed it to be. I saw it at a horror film festival, perhaps appropriately given that it revolves around a man who can only be seen as a vampire, even if all the supernatural elements have been excised. It may well appeal to fans of more unusual vampire movies as Near Dark, Grace or Let the Right One In, but it's certainly not for the usual horror throngs. It probably plays best as a drama, with strong acting and a slow but sure progression as Jacob discovers who and what he really is. Yet the people who watch dramas don't tend to expect to be given a vampire as a lead character, however much it avoids the use of the word. Perhaps I'm seeing all this as a potential issue because it feels out of time. Nowadays, pictures like Let the Right One In have found an audience that appreciates artistic filmmaking, whatever the subject. Midnight Son plays like it was made in the late eighties but took 25 years to find a release. Back then, 'genre' was a dirty word.

From some angles Zak Kilberg has a Brendan Fraser thing going for him, albeit a rather anorexic Fraser, maybe crossed with Richard E Grant. From others there's some early Russell Crowe. Yet he's grounded, appearing like an everyday person rather than some A list movie star. He doesn't have the charisma for that but he does have the acting chops to draw us into his plight anyway, like a new face in a random TV show that you find yourself watching more than the leads. Yet an hour later, you'd walk past him on the street without even thinking. This may not have the star power of Zombie Strippers! but it's surely a number of notches up on the quality scale. Maya Parish also has plenty of talent and promise. She gets a substantial role here, not remotely close to the average character for a leading lady. Sure, she's the love interest, but she's also the driving force for the story in a number of different ways, often far more than the more passive Jacob. It falls more for Parish to push it forward than to Kilberg.

The supporting cast are capable too. Jo D Jonz and Aren Escarpeta fit the same category as Kilberg and Parish; they're both experienced but neither has made it big yet. Like them, this film can't hurt to be an entry on their resumes and they will surely make themselves noticed in the future. While Midnight Son belongs to the two leads, Jonz and Escarpeta bring depth to their characters as Marcus and his brother Russell. They also grow well, even without a substantial amount of screen time. The most recognisable name is Tracey Walter, but he gets very little to do; it's a reassurance that he does a lot with it. Juanita Jennings and Larry Cedar are both highly experienced, but their characters are restricted to subplots as Liz, the proprietor of an art gallery, who Mary persuades to exhibit Jacob's paintings, and Det Ginslegh, a cop investigating a string of murders which may or may not tie back to Jacob. All of them could easily have done more and done it well, but expanding their roles would have detracted from the core story.

And that all comes back to Jacob Gray, who remains an enigma past the end credits. We discover much about his condition as the film runs on, but not so much about him, not through any fault of Kilberg but because Leberecht obviously didn't want to tell. Everyone Jacob bites becomes like him and those who don't learn as he obviously did soon burn; this is consistent throughout, so helps us to find a grounding in what is to come, but it doesn't explain how Gray managed to make it this far. The difference is clearly that he was made vampire at a much younger age, maybe even at birth, but we're shown none of that. How did he survive as a vampire child? How did he make it to the point where he could self medicate by closing off the windows, putting up the blankets and taking a job working nights? Who are his parents and where are they? Why didn't they prepare him? Leberecht could easily make a prequel to explain to us where Jacob came from; maybe that was always the idea. I'm certainly not averse to it.