The Abducted (2009)

Director: Jon Bonnell
Stars: Kathleen Benner, James Ray, Michael Harrelson, Greg Joseph and Ashley Francis

I must have spent an hour chatting away with Jon Bonnell a year ago at DarkCon without realising who he was. When I did, I had to point out that a year earlier still, I'd slated a film he'd directed, though to be fair, I did defend it a little because it was merely awful, not the worst film ever made. He asked which film and when I replied, Star Quest: The Odyssey, he fully agreed with me about its lack of quality. He said that he had been hamstrung by the producer, who wanted to make a serious film; he knew it would have been a lot better played for laughs. At the end of that review, I had written off the film's writer, Carlos Perez, but suggested that I was willing to give Bonnell another chance by watching Match.Dead aka The Abducted. It's taken me two years because the copy I had was broken, but Bonnell himself gave me a DVD so that I could watch and review. While I'm grateful to him for that courtesy, it has no bearing on my views on the film, which are that it's flawed but much better than that other movie released the same year.

It's notable that this picture has also suffered from a slew of negative reviews on IMDb, albeit not quite to the same degree as its lesser sibling. It's easy to see why though: like Star Quest: The Odyssey it's a long way from what people expected. In this instance, it isn't the DVD covers that did the damage, it's the way writer Alyssa Alexandria plays with the genre. In 2009, this would have appeared like a torture porn, with a man, Ridley Thompson, holding a young lady, Valora Smith, captive for almost the entire running time. The catch is that there's no nudity, very little violence and even less gore. A few people do get killed, but not in any gratuitious fashion; we don't see heads blown off and we don't hear overblown death cries. It's a matter of fact thing and that surely disappointed people. One reviewer highlighted his priorities through rating it on gore, nudity, effects, story and comedy, in that order. Another actively complained about the lack of nudity, which he felt would have spiced it up considerably. They don't get the point.

The Abducted does have real problems but lack of nudity, violence and gore aren't anywhere on the list. I didn't have a problem with the talky nature of the piece, as it allowed both of the leads to sink their teeth into their roles. Kathleen Benner does a decent job, though I don't believe it's up to what she delivered in Running on Empty Dreams, but James Ray has an absolute blast. Out of the eight James Ray movies that I've reviewed thus far, this is surely my favourite of his roles because he's so clearly acting with relish. He does try for a sort of Clint Eastwood voice early on, which soon lapses, but for a character so dedicated to death he's stunningly alive. He's having more fun than almost anyone I know and he's consistently doing it throughout the entire movie, even when his captive is trying to kill him. He's so infuriatingly happy that we want to kill him too, but it makes him so much fun to watch. Ironically, my next favourite of his roles is probably Death Investigator Theodore Davis in The Last Responders, almost the exact opposite to this.

The most obvious problems stem from the lack of budget, which drives its restrictions. The vast majority of the picture unfolds on one property, for a start, which doesn't help the lack of variety in the script. The cast is also notably limited, with Ray and Benner fleshing out most of the running time on their own but with a little held back for Michael Harrelson as Valora's grandpa, who long ago set her on the path she needs to get out of this situation and who's searching for her now. Only two other actors get more than glimpse time: Ashley Francis as the younger Valora and Greg Joseph as Guy, a friend of the family who's aiding in the search for her. Clearly there was no budget left for aging make up, as Harrelson looks no different in the present day scenes as he does at least a decade earlier. There's a pacing issue too, as things start to slow around the middle of the film and, once we realise the change, we feel them slowing even more. It doesn't help either that the ending is flubbed in a way that's so easy to fix but wasn't.

So there wasn't any money for anything flash; that means that the crew had to step up and do as much as they could with what they had and the results are a mixed bag. The writing is the most schizophrenic, because it might just be the best and the worst. The best is surely James Ray's dialogue, because it kept raising smiles on my face throughout the movie, from the tough catchphrases to his attempts to keep a 'second date' going when his captive won't eat. 'Don't make me do the choo choo!' he grins at her and I couldn't help but grin too. The worst is the lack of variety and, frankly, the lack of much of anything new happening throughout the film. It's set up quickly and well, but pretty much stays in the same place for eighty minutes, relying on Ray's charisma to keep us going. I do like what Alexandria does, unlike those IMDb reviewers, but there's maybe 45 minutes of material here that take 90 minutes to unfold. Maybe a bigger budget would have helped her, but I feel she could have shaken it up more without that help.

What she tries to do is let the characters build. There's no mystery here at all, as we discover that Ridley Thompson has kidnapped Valora Smith after setting up a meeting with her on a dating site. We don't see any of this as there wasn't the budget for it, but we do wonder why a young single lady would choose to drive out to a date's home in the Apache Junction countryside. He quickly explains that she's not the first but she is the first that he's actually sat down and talked with, perhaps because he offers each date the opportunity to run and the rest took it, only to be promptly shot down by his hunting rifle. Valora lost her parents at a young age, so was brought up by her grandpa who taught her never to run, to always stand and fight instead. She's the first to do so, which makes her special in this psychopath's eyes. He's clearly in love with her, so she uses that fact as leverage but she's rather inept at doing so. I wonder why she's not given more initiative, because it really hurts Valora as a sympathetic character.

If anything we find a little more sympathy for Ridley, which is strange to say because we're hardly in tune with his cause. It's just that he's having contagious fun and he does at least have a consistent and mostly believable flaw, which is that, while he can shoot people dead all day long, he can't actually touch a body without needing to cleanse himself afterwards. There's no explanation given for this at all, which is weird, but it is at least freaky enough to help his character. For a character we like, there's only one choice, and again it isn't Valora. It's her grandpa, who Michael Harrelson endows with a comforting voice that makes him feel like a sort of John Wayne next door. He broadcasts the feeling of being safe like radio waves, all the while teaching the young Valora how to actually be safe, which does make us wonder why she really needs those lessons and why she's forgotten so much of what he taught her by the time that they seem important again. That's all on her though, as he makes it seem like a gimme.

If Alexandria's writing is schizophrenic, offering much that's good but much that's bad too, it's mimicked a little by the rest of the crew, which includes a couple of major names in the local scene; Kevin R Phipps was the first assistant director and Webb Pickersgill shot and edited the film. There are points where the latter shines with both hats, such as a chase scene early on. Valora finds an axe, but her captor sees her and hunts her down. Pickersgill manages to keep on her for the most part, while never losing track of his movements; it's cleverly done. Unfortunately his introduction of shakycam for one scene later on acts as a counter, because it wasn't needed at all. On the editing front, he does reasonably well with the way he gradually weaves the flashbacks tighter to the present, but they're a necessary evil in this film and not a highlight. It would have been impossible for Alexandria to set up what she needed without them, but for the most part, they're just screen time without James Ray laughing at something inappropriate.

At the end of the day, he's the big winner here. For a psychopathic lunatic who has killed some 43 people before he captures Valora and takes care of a few more afterwards, Ray doesn't go overboard. Instead of playing up the lunacy, he plays up the normality, to the degree that he remains disturbingly normal even in the face of violence, intransigence or understandable hate. He's a strong character without much of a grounding who succeeds much more through Ray's portrayal than Alexandria's writing. Try to write down what he actually is and you'll end up with Ray's dialogue, grins and inappropriately cheerful disposition, little else. This is a few rungs up the ladder on every front from Star Quest: The Odyssey, Bonnell's other directorial effort of 2009, and it's a good deal more consistent than Running on Empty Dreams, on which he was an assistant director and both Ray and Benner were in the cast, the latter as a strong lead. It still isn't a great picture but at least it's fun, which Star Quest: The Odyssey emphatically wasn't.

The Other Woman (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Kyle Gerkin, Rachel Tullio, Jennifer Lind, Michael Coleman and William Long

At almost fifteen minutes, The Other Woman is another longer, more thoughtful entry into the 52 Films in 52 Weeks series. It's also a welcome updating of Sherwood Anderson's short story, first published in 1920 and notably dated today. The original story reads like a manifesto of male privilege, the tale of one man's transition from bachelor to husband through one last desperate fling. It's difficult to see either of the two ladies involved as anything other than objects, one being cheated on unrepentently and the other used and discarded. Adapting this sorry state of affairs to contemporary Arizona, Mills preserves the majority of the story for a change, but he carefully updates it so that 'the other woman' of the title is progressive and refreshing, the most well adjusted, knowing and understanding character in the entire piece. She's not incompatible with her source story equivalent, but that's because the 1920 character has little to no definition. Here, she's worthy of being the title character, even if she's not the focus of the story.

She's Patricia and to reflect modern Arizona more than 'a fat tobacconist's wife' would, she's a barista at a coffee shop, Cartel. She's good at her job, enough so that she recognises Robert when he comes in and has his drink ready before he orders it, correct in every detail right down to the receipt not being needed. He's a regular who shows up at the same time every day, but he may not have really noticed her before now. From this point on, however, he can't get her out of his mind, right down to a dreamlike party scene where only Robert is in focus until she walks up and kisses him, with increasing passion until reverting to being his fiancée, Mary, which switch ably highlights Robert's quandary. He's about to be married and he apparently loves the young lady whom he has asked to be his wife, but his abundant second thoughts are wrapped up in the neat little package that is this knowing barista. This story isn't about whether the pair will do anything about it, it's about how and what he'll feel before and after they do.

Generally speaking, I've enjoyed the longer short films in this series more than the shorter ones, perhaps inevitably because there's more room for their stories to develop and more opportunity for Mills and his Running Wild crew to leave us with something to ponder after they're done. It gives the actors something to get their teeth into, which both Kyle Gerkin and Rachel Tullio achieve here, the former a natural casting choice for a role that is both manly and clearly confused and the latter nailing her part as a strange piece in someone else's puzzle. In the story, the unnamed other woman is 'a very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her,' except that she's ten years older than the man telling the story, but she's a contemporary here who's a lot more than very ordinary. I don't remember Tullio's role in Awesome Guy: A New Identity but I called her out for special notice in Wouldn't Be Love, though she was hampered by the sound guy clearly not being James Alire. She's support here, but she's very good indeed.

The fifteen minute running time also allows Mills to add moments of clarification that aren't in the source story. In Anderson's original, the chain of events is fragmented by tortuous prose so that we struggle with the timeframes involved, while Mills sets everything up chronologically by day. The other woman doesn't know in the original that the man who propositions her is about to be married, but Mills makes sure that Robert explains that to Patricia immediately, before he even knows her name. He even has Mary give him a coffeemaker as a wedding present, unwittingly removing the reason why he might ever see the barista again; in the original, there's no such device as the man simply chooses to avoid the tobacconist's wife by never going down that street ever again. While this remains a story about a man cheating on his wife on the night before his wedding, these details help to make it a little more understandable and a little less offensive; it also raises the title character to prominence by giving her awareness.

Mills also blurs the line a little between reality and fantasy. Anderson's prose is clumsy and confusing but it mimics the mindset of the lead character. He's all over the place, trying to explain why he cheated and what it meant and didn't mean to him. Mills has the benefit of visuals to help get this over and they help a lot. The daydream scene is the centerpiece of this approach and it's beautifully shot with a good choice of music to accompany it. There are other scenes too where we switch back and forth between Mary and Patricia, because that's how it's going in Robert's mind. However, I did wonder if some of the new scenes that Mills added were literal or imaginary, like the basketball scene. While Michael Coleman shows off his dribbling skills, he tries to set up a bachelor's night for Robert, but this is entirely detached from the rest of the film, so could easily mean that he's a little devil on Robert's shoulder, merely one with mad skills. It's even possible to read that Robert never cheats for real, just in his mind, though I don't buy it.

Many of the earlier 52 Films in 52 Weeks films were shorter and more experimental, while The Test Case and The Other Woman are a solid pair of exceptions. While they still capture particular moments, as do the majority of these films, they take their time about doing so and thus allow them to expand naturally into their own spaces rather than being confined into a particular shape. While they're still crafted, they feel a lot more relaxed than many of the earlier films, which in this case hides another catastrophe that was averted close to the shoot. The web series episode that covered The Other Woman explained how a key location, the coffee bar, was lost during the week leading up to the shoot, leading to a good deal of scrambling to find a replacement. It also meant an increased financial cost, which highlighted how little Running Wild were spending on these films; their $10,000 Kickstarter budget was split over 52 of them, so averaging only $192 each. That's pretty incredible and it highlights why this series is so important.

The Test Case (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Angela Haines, Brian DeMarco, Michael Hanelin and Tenley Dene

Week 16 in Running Wild's 52 Films in 52 Weeks project proved to be a huge departure for many reasons. For a start, Travis Mills aimed 'to lighten up the mood amongst our Joyce adaptations' with a comedy, but chose one by P G Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Wooster, so it's about as far from contemporary Arizona as could be imagined. While almost all of the non-Joyce stories adapted thus far were by classic American names like Hawthorne, Twain and Conrad, P G Wodehouse was emphatically English. I couldn't highlight this better than by quoting the opening line of The Test Case, which was first published in 1915 in Pearson's Magazine: 'Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me on the wishbone, and say 'Reggie, old top,'—my name’s Reggie Pepper—'you ought to get married, old man.'' I can't help but see any attempted adaptation to modern Arizona as a Gordian knot level puzzle. Mills had an Alexander the Great moment and discarded almost everything in the story.

Wodehouse's story revolves around Pepper, a blusterer in the vein of Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson, whose girl, Ann Selby, describes him to his face as 'entirely vapid and brainless' and suffering from 'the handicap of large private means.' Reggie and Ann are now serious, but she's having second thoughts about marriage for precisely the reasons she mentions above. 'You're one of the idle rich, and your brain, if you ever had one, has atrophied,' she tells him and he determines to impress her by doing something notably clever to prove otherwise. 'Suppose I pull off some stunt which only a deuced brainy chappie could get away with?' he asks her. 'Would you marry me then?' She answers in the positive only because she doesn't believe he could do such a thing, but a discussion about a mutual friend, Harold Bodkin, inspires him. Harold lost his first wife, Amelia, five years earlier and has married again, to Hilda. He loves both wives, but is alienating the latter by idolising the former. Pepper decides to simultaneously fix the problem and win Ann's hand.

Of this story, Mills retains only two things. His adaptation revolves around two couples, albeit neither Ann and Reggie nor Harold and Hilda, and one of them isn't yet married and may just never be. That's it. His version follows an awkward couple called Alfred and Judy, who are engaged and planning a honeymoon in Paris but don't seem to have much of a clue about the whole marriage thing. Beyond gender, Alfred's only similarity to Reggie is his awkwardness and Judy may not have anything at all in common with Ann; she's more like a female version of Alfred. Deciding that they should learn more about what they have in store for them as man and wife, they visit another couple who have been married for over a decade. I'm not sure if they expect to gain insight or that Gary and Alexandra might take them under their wing, but the evening to which we're made privy is surely far from what they might have imagined. The last scene is a strange but satisfying one, which might just show what Mills took away from The Test Case.

Alfred and Judy are portrayed with suitable awkwardness by Brian DeMarco and Angela Haines, but Mills needed them to be shocked too and only DeMarco seemed able to find that reaction. I like the situations into which their hosts relentlessly placed them and I love the acute discomfort that Michael Hanelin and Tenley Dene sent their way in waves. Paired off by gender, the first question Gary asks Alfred is, 'Do you like guns?' and Angela's first to Judy is, 'How big's his dick?' Perhaps partly because Gary and Alexandra are completely in control of the evening, Hanelin and Dene automatically find themselves in the driving seat, but they milk it throughout. Hanelin especially shines in a comedic role, something I don't believe I've seen him in before; his timing is pristine and his reaction when Alfred assumes his guns equate to a love of hunting is priceless (they're vegetarians who don't eat anything with a face). Dene keeps up with him well in the scenes they share and takes over when alone with Judy. They own the film.

While it's fair to say that anyone watching this because it was written by P G Wodehouse is going to feel rather misled if not utterly outraged, I enjoyed the new story Mills put together. In fact I can laugh at the idea of dialogue like, 'All any man really wants is a home cooked meal and a place to put his wiener' in a Wodehouse adaptation. Trying to imagine the dry wit of Fry and Laurie in a conversation like the one that Alexandra leads Judy into in the appliance room is a riot all on its own. Certainly I want to see Hanelin in more comedy; all I can remember prior to this is Star Babies, but he's hardly the focus of attention there, more of an in joke for people who are used to seeing him paired off with Colleen Hartnett. I appreciated a longer running time, twenty minutes or so, in a series where even the longest stories Mills adapted got a lot less than that. It allowed the actors to play things slower, build in awkward silences and react with the thoughtfulness that the characters deserved.

I also appreciated some of the technical decisions behind the film. While I do wonder why Angela Haines, tasked with playing a stunningly naive young lady, would be placed in a dress that shows off her tattoos, not to mention emphasises her bust, she did otherwise look the part, as did the other actors. When they meet for the first time, 'the newlyweds' are in the dark while their evening's hosts are in the light, a clear analogy for their respective experience levels. The camera's focus is also consistently well chosen, some scenes focused on the characters rather than what they're looking at (of course, that also helps budget concerns) and others focused on reactions rather than actions. The dinner scene in particular highlights both connection and disconnection and, in tandem with the editing, it's superb. As Gary moans in delight at his wife's salad, we don't watch him; we watch in turn Alexandra enjoying the tease and their lost and embarrassed guests. It's also the film in microcosm; it's those who get it who will enjoy it most.

The Bad Days (2013)

Director: Greg Keras
Stars: Diana Miller Streater and John McCann

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

If the Horror Shorts B set at the 2014 International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival was the most depressingly poor selection I've seen in years, at least it ended on a notably strong note. Bright Eyes was a brief bright moment midway but it took until film seven, One More for the Road, for things to look up and that left just one short left to save the day. Fortunately The Bad Days is easily the best film in the set, just as powerful on a second viewing when I knew the twist and what everything was building up to. In fact, this is one of those films that deserves a couple of viewings, one to be rooked between the eyes by the realisation that arrives at the end and another to ponder the ramifications of what that means. The seemingly blasé title is actually highly appropriate as it has three very strong meanings: an obvious one as we watch, one that only becomes clear at the finalé and a third that reflects the current situation that society is in when this sort of material resonates beyond the screen. Extra kudos to writer/director Greg Keras for that.

Almost all of the twelve minutes that this picture runs are spent confined to the apartment of Richard and Marjorie Davies, appropriately given the circumstances. They're stuck in the big city while the apocalypse rages outside, for reasons that become clear through television news footage and a brief flashback to the beginning of the end. Diana Streater is surprisingly short of credits given how well she emotes Marjorie's plight; she only has one other to her name and that's as part of an ensemble cast in a 2012 thriller called The Class Reunion. She really sells this story, as she struggles to stay strong as civilisation collapses, not only for her own sake but for her husband's. Richard has become infected and she's keeping him tied up in the bedroom, where he lies in his own effluent, parched and restless with overt struggle marks around his wrists where he's fought against the ropes. She updates her diary in the bath by candlelight and tries to keep quiet, because they're out there.

I really want to talk in detail about this film because there's so much here to comment on, but all of it can only be brought up by exposing the twist, which I won't do because you really deserve to see it without a spoiler first. Instead I'll have to settle for doling out praise, beginning with Streater and her co-star, John McCann, who needed to be good for the film to succeed and were thankfully excellent. I've seen McCann before, in Eternal Damn Nation, an ambitious but massively flawed horror short, and I'm not surprised to discover that my notes call out his acting there too. The choice to remain inside almost throughout is the best one that could have been made to maintain the tension. In fact, I wish they'd have repositioned the flashback so as to have not affected that; it would have played better earlier on. The set decoration is a plus too, because, while Marjorie is coping, the pressure is telling and the place is a mess, right down to an effective dead cat. And surrounding it all is Greg Keras's script, which is a neat, topical gem.

One More for the Road (2013)

Director: Navin Ramaswaran
Stars: Lindsay Smith and Jeff Sinasac

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

I was beginning to despair for a great horror short in this second set, but it finally started ramping up with this one and ended strongly with The Bad Days. This one is another longer short, 17 minutes of Canadian revenge story with an agreeable pair of leads. Bill picks up Diane from Marty Moos Chicken & Ribs to take her to the Sunnyside Inn out in the countryside. They're married, but clearly their relationship has broken and Bill seems to want to rekindle the spark. He just as clearly isn't going to get anywhere because, while Diane might look pretty in her pink sundress, dirty blonde hair and Lolita sunglasses, she's an utter bitch and she doesn't have a problem being as contrary as possible. Then again, Bill is no catch either. That's a notably receding hairline if she cares about looks and a bitter attitude if she doesn't. He doesn't talk a lot because he's trying not to say all the things he wants to. Sex is off the agenda quickly; Bill thinks that she stopped being kinky and became a prude, but Diane thinks he's a pervert. This isn't going anywhere nice.

Where it goes is the middle of nowhere. Diane wakes up after a nap to find that darkness has fallen, their car is stopped and Bill is in the road with a crowbar. We're not shocked in the slightest to find out that she cheated on him and he has photo evidence behind her visor. So far, so expected, but from this point on it isn't quite so predictable. I liked the way that writer Kelly Michael Stewart spent some time to build these two characters before venturing into horror territory and I loved the way that they behave once it all hits the fan. Neither of these is remotely a good catch and they've ventured so far away from each other that there's only history to share, but Jeff Sinasac and Lindsay Smith ably demonstrate the darker side of love. They believably feel like a couple who used to love each other back in the good times but whose love has become disgust; they only exist in the same place out of habit and a sense of duty and use their time to needle each other incessantly. Their hate is all the more strong because it used to be love.

I liked this a lot when I saw it at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, but even then I knew that it must partly have been because of how lackluster the set had been up until then. After a second look, I'm still fond of it but I have some problems with how the twists unfold. There are a few of them, but while I thoroughly dug the key ones, the final shot being a victory just as much as it is a defeat, I didn't buy into all the details of how we get there; there seems to be a notable hole that could have been easily plugged but wasn't. I wonder why. If the lead actors are the strongest part and the road the story takes them onto follows close behind, I should mention that nobody else really lets the side down, Bruce William Harper's cinematography, Stewart's bitchy dialogue and the fight choreography by Tyler Williams all easily worthy of note. Those needling little questions about the details of the plot within the plot are by far the biggest problem the film has; but, while those issues are mildly annoying, they're not showstoppers.

My Love, Our Time is Now (2013)

Director: Kyle Dunleavy

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

Of all the horror shorts I've seen at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival over the years, this must be the most unlikely. It's not even a film, it's a music video for a band called the Hemmingbirds. I've seen a music video programmed at the festival before but The Baby Shredder Song was a comedy narrative in verse, appropriate because of its outré subject matter and forbidden imagery; this, however, is entirely a music video, sans any narrative flow and without any apparent point. Sure, there are a horde of bizarrely mysterious black figures hovering in the sky while the camera jerks its timelapse circle around a guy in a lumberjack shirt in a field, but what are they and why are they there? All I can figure is that he has some personal demons to deal with that are affecting his ability to get with the pastoral chick in the dangerous white dress who he clearly wants to be with. If he's a manifestation of the lead singer, the lyrics suggest that, 'I can't leave you there to fend off all the demons.' That's not much to go on.

It might have helped if the song had been more memorable (or more strange), but it's just not my thing. The official YouTube channel for the Hemmingbirds describes them as an 'atmospheric indie rock band from Chicago', but they sounded like easy listening hipster music to me. I didn't dislike the song and the band clearly played it deeply enough to find their way inside it, but it didn't do anything for me at all. I wasn't even impressed by the video, however evocative the lighting and Instagram colour play and the bizarre way the black demons blip in and out, but it all felt rather like the closing minutes of a television show with the end credits digitally removed. I'm sure there are teenage girls hating at me through their phone screens right now because their favourite Hemmingbird is dreamy and how dare I put them down, but I really don't care. This is a way to help you meditate for five minutes; it isn't a horror movie and it really had no place in a set of shorts at a genre festival. Most pointless selection ever.

My Love, Our Time is Now can be watched for free on YouTube.

The Carriage, or Dracula and My Mother (2013)

Director: Ben Gordon
Stars: Charlotte Gordon, Ben Gordon, Laura Mayoral, Cloe Gordon and Francisco Aguirre

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

It has a great poster, I'll give it that. It also has quite a few artistically interesting shots and some freakily cool effects work. However, I utterly don't understand why the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival judges voted it the Best Horror Short of 2014. It wasn't my least favourite of what was screened but it was a lot closer to that than my favourite. In fact, when I screened it again later as a submission to a different festival, I didn't even select it for my two sets of shorts. Maybe it's because I'm not finding myself on the same wavelength as Ben Gordon, who wrote and directed the film and starred as its lead actor, alongside other people with the same surname; so presumably that's his real mother playing his screen mother and his real wife playing his screen wife. In fact, the entire cast play characters named for themselves, so it's no stretch to assume that there's a statement of some sort here, presumably one about filmmakers that Gordon phrased in a very personal way. The question is what.

The titles refer to the two threads of the story. One revolves around an awesome looking old horse drawn carriage which mysteriously appears one night at Char's house. She doesn't know where it came from or how it got there, but she laughs about how it's sinister enough to have Dracula inside. Of course, she's a lot closer than she might believe. The other revolves around Char herself, as it's her rather than the thing in the carriage that we see most of. She's Ben's mother and naturally she calls her son to talk about what this carriage might mean; he naturally shows up with his wife and daughter to see it, to film it and... well, to let it take over his mind, apparently. Why else would he wheel his baby daughter in her pram right up to the carriage and retreat to the other end of a long rope? He's clearly using her as bait, but we're never given the reasons as to why. There are a lot of cool visuals here, well framed static shots or neatly edited montages, but there's never much of an attempt at explaining why.

Gordon keeps dropping more and more hints, but never explains any of them. If the feel wasn't so firmly artistic, I'd think there was nothing here, but I can't lose the feeling that everything he does here is for a reason and I just need to figure it out. Why do we keep getting distracted from the object of the title, for banal alternatives such as decorating the Christmas tree, stuffing a turkey or talking about nothing. What is the meaning of the vampire, if he even is a vampire? The delightfully odd and quirky Francisco Aguirre certainly plays him like one, even if he pulls back from the Star of David rather than a cross, but the end credits call him a demon. All I could find in the film was that the cinematic arts are a vampiric entity that hypnotises artistic souls into doing things that jeopardise their relationships with their families, but that's a heck of a stretch. If it isn't that, I have no idea. Fortunately there's much here to enjoy, even if we can't make sense of the film, especially visually, but the lack of engagement ended up leaving me very dry.

The Sperm (2007)

Director: Taweewat Wantha
Stars: Leo Putt and Pimpaporn Leenutapong

Index: Weird Wednesdays.

Back in the late eighties when I was really beginning to immerse myself in the ocean of underground film, one of my primary guides was a documentary show (and its sequel) in which Jonathan Ross profiled and interviewed some of its legends. It was called The Incredibly Strange Film Show and the title wasn't lying; I'd found a few of the subjects before the show but it certainly introduced me to many more and I'm very grateful to Ross for the discovery. A quarter of a century later, I've done a lot more than immerse myself; I've been dancing in delight on the ocean floor for years watching outrageous shipwrecks of movies. The view down here is truly surreal; you should hitch a ride on a B-movie shark and join me for a whole slew of truly bizarre movies that go beyond merely 'incredibly strange'. I'll be showcasing these at Apocalypse Later in a series called Weird Wednesdays, with one astounding picture a week to bludgeon you into an astounding state of mind. And I'm kicking it all off with a teen comedy from Thailand called The Sperm.

Once I'd read about The Sperm, whose original Thai title is, courtesy of the synchronicity gods, Asujaak, I knew I had to see it and, while it wasn't quite what I expected, I wasn't disappointed. How can any movie go wrong with a set of inflatable alien sex doll ninjas who can do synchronised dance routines? Well, for all that this contains more masturbation, more flying sperm and more sex-crazed babies than any movie ever should, it's really just a teen comedy, a coming of age yarn (if you don't mind the pun) that is oddly almost Mormon-friendly. Everything has to do with sex, but we don't actually get to see any, even with a number of porn movies broadcast during the film, and the only nudity is a brief shot of boobies on a DVD case being filed away. If there was any swearing, and it wasn't prominent in a couple of viewings, it could be easily replaced in the English subtitles. Just like the lead character, Sutin, this picture is obsessed with sex but it doesn't ever get any. That would only happen in a theoretical sequel once he grows up.

We meet him at a crucial time in his life. He's moved to Bangkok to become a rock star, but he spends a lot more time dreaming and obsessing over a teen idol. She's called Lammy in the version I have, Laem-Mee on the film's IMDb page and La-Mai on Wikipedia. Whatever the real Anglicised spelling is, she's an irresistably cute girl next door type model who appears on billboards and magazine covers, acts as the draw in an advertising campaign for Addict body spray and judges the local battle of the bands. It's like she was designed to be everywhere in Sutin's life, but he even sees her when his eyes are closed, as all his dreams are erotic fantasies featuring Lammy. One night she's saving him from a mob of ravenous fan girls in return for the privilege of giving him a blow job, the next she's knocking on his door in underwear and bubbles because her bath ran out of water and she needs to finish up by pouring his bottle over her head. If only he didn't wake up before the climax, as it were.

While he wants to be famous, he isn't, at least not yet. Soon he'll be famous in ways he'd never dreamed of and would rather be undone. When his local grocery store erupts in a fanfare because he's picked the winning can of Addict and he's asked to say something impressive to Lammy, he just hopes that he'll be able to screw her, even if it is just a dream. Which it isn't. He's live on national TV, promptly becoming a laughing stock for the whole country. No wonder he gets blistering drunk and has to be carried back to his apartment by his bandmates. But the next erotic dream goes horribly wrong and he finds himself back on the streets, trousers half undone, being accused of attempted rape by the first woman he literally bumps into. She calls the cops, who arrest him while whacking off to a poster of Lammy in the dark street. If that sounds like a detailed synopsis, it's just the beginning. We're 19 minutes in but we've only just got to the animated title credits, with his sperm finding their way into the sewers and sprouting faces.

And now it gets weird. Those sperm find their way back to the surface, where they float around like a icky swarm, impregnating every woman they can find, all of whom suddenly turn up pregnant. Very pregnant. After a day, they find themselves ready to give birth. Lives are suddenly ruined all over Bangkok, couples breaking up because of clear infidelity, and both the media and the army are all over it. And when all 400 women promptly give birth to babies with Sutin's face, there's a 500,000 baht reward out for information on the father. Even though he's just met up with Lammy in the grocery store, where she tells him that his words were refreshing because nobody ever talks straight to her, his life has just got considerably worse and is about to take a swan dive down the crapper because his sperm children are growing at the rate of four years per day, utterly obsessed with sex and reproducing by whacking off and dissolving, while their sperm impregnate women afresh. Sutin's sperm children might just bring about doomsday!

Everything I write seems to be dripping with semen, because it's everywhere here, but then the film aims to recount the growing pains of a young man so that's entirely appropriate. Sutin is really a nice guy, with the usual problems magnified because he's one of those people who the world seems to happen to. Sure, he has Marilyn Manson on his door and he wears a Cocknoose shirt, but he's just a sweet kid who's polite to everyone. He's played by Leo Putt, whose real name is Putthipong Sriwat (yes, every name is going to sound juvenile when associated with a movie like this). While he has a number of films to his credit, such as Dynamite Warrior, he also hilariously turns out to be the Thai dubbed voice of Spider-Man in the Sam Raimi movies. I'll never look at Peter Parker the same way again. Putt has oodles of fun being placed into hilariously awkward situations. How would you react if you had to masturbate to save the world? Or if an army of sex-obsessed babies with your face rush your girl? Or a giant child you threatens Bangkok?

If Sutin is a sweet kid, Lammy is the nicest and most grounded celebrity I've ever seen in film. Pimpaporn Leenutapong (what did I tell you about those names?) is the sort of young lady who could spark your lust and warm your grandma's heart at the same time. She's not conventionally beautiful but her smile is the work of angels and it's easy to understand Sutin's obsession. She's only made one other picture, Sayew, another coming of age comedy feature that revolves around sex, this time with her in the lead, playing a tomboy who writes the reader's experience column in a porn mag, even though she has a severe lack of experience in the subject, so decides to seek the reality of the subject from the public at large. I wonder why she hasn't done more, because she glides through this picture with a grace that is astounding given the subject matter. She's believable on those magazine covers and billboards, doing her shopping in the grocery store and as a damsel in distress stuck in the breast pocket of a giant child with the hots for her.

While Sutin and Lammy are by far the most prominent characters, there are a host of fascinating ones in support. Sutin's bandmates are an odd bunch, with the slow but UFO-obsessed Prasert and Surachai, the drummer, who apparently decides partway through the movie that he's a transvestite, playing the battle of the bands set in full drag, right down to a serious upturned hairdo. They're a thoroughly normal bunch when compared to the mystery man who reappears with his daughter in a barrage of increasingly surreal scenes until we figure out who he is. Apparently his character is called Dr Satifeung, though I didn't hear a name in the movie itself, and he's played by Somlek Sakdikul from the Buppah Rahtree movies with an agreeable relish. His hair is grey and wild, he creates miniature dogs for fun and he gets insane lines like, 'Such a genius... showing porno movies to children.' His daughter and assistant gets the dirty jobs, some of which fit every meaning of that word you can think of.

In Hollywood, coming of age movies tend to revolve around mundane things like being left at home while your family go on holiday or your dance group needing to win some talent show to avoid breaking up. It's no surprise that I find most of them depressingly dull. Sure, some have nuns and corpses and tongues on frozen poles, but how many of them have inflatable alien sex-doll ninjas, porno drive-in movie theatres or armies of identical masturbating children. Nah, I couldn't think of any either. That's a shame, because this is a lot more fun than anything I grew up watching. Sure, the pace is wildly inconsistent and the CGI faces make Sutin's bastard sperm children look like football players from a twentieth century video game, but I don't care. What they look like is far less important than the fact that they're bastard sperm children in a movie that could be shown on network television. You owe it to yourself to watch this and drink a shot for each scene that features flying sperm. 'For the human race,' says Lammy. You can do it too!

Bright Eyes (2013)

Director: Jamie Rivera
Stars: Scarlett O'Neil and Robert Davis

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

It says a lot about the Horror Shorts B set at this year's International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival that this four minute riff on a single joke was easily my favourite out of the first half a dozen films. I'd enjoyed the first set but, as much as I appreciated that there was a second set to accompany it for the first time in a few years, it disappointed me right out of the gate and seemed intent on doing so all the way. This one is far from groundbreaking cinema but it's aware, so it settles down to do its one thing right. I was thankful for that; it brought me my first real smile of the set, four films in, and it sustained me at least a little over the next pair. So thank you, writer/director Jamie Rivera, former Not Quite Dead zombie and former editor and cinematographer for Eva's Light, for keeping me going. Thank you too, actress Scarlett O'Neil, former blood spattered bikini girl in Piranha and former leading lady in Second Chances, for really staying in the moment for way longer than anyone should ever have to do so. And thank you, actor Robert Davis, for...

Well, as much as we spend almost the whole film with O'Neil front and foremost, stuck in that serial killer movie moment where you're alone and scantily clad in your own house and just convinced that there's a crazy lunatic right behind you, Davis is... well, he's the crazy lunatic right behind her and he's who we're watching throughout. He has a huge hat, a long white wig and the de rigeur scary clown mask and you'll have to watch the movie yourself to find out what he does while O'Neil wonders if he's there or not. That is the entire point of the movie; there's no twist like in Whispering Pines, no freaky historical source like Edward the Damned and no subversive programming like Tasha and Friends. There's just a bunch of fun surrounding that one joke and whether this film will work for you will depend on whether you find Smilin' Jack, the Masked Killer, funny or not. If you don't, this will be a waste of four minutes of your life, but the rest of us, waiting for a great movie in this set, were very happy indeed for his shenanigans.

Bright Eyes can be watched for free on YouTube.

Tasha and Friends (2013)

Director: Greg Kovacs
Stars: Stephanie Christiaens, John Williams, Nathan Hawkins and John Cross

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

Peter Jackson opened a dangerous door when he made Meet the Feebles in 1989. It wasn't the first adult puppet movie (Gerard Damiano's puppet porn, Let My Puppets Come, predated it by over a decade) but it was arguably the most prominent, especially after Brain Dead when his star rose considerably, until Trey Parker and Matt Stone made their marionette blockbuster Team America: World Police fifteen years later. This short film, which mixes a live cast with a set of puppets, is clearly influenced more by the Feebles than Team America, with at least three overt Jackson homages and probably many more, depending on how you count them. As it's a Canadian rather than a Kiwi production, I would expect that it also pays homage to the Canadian show Puppets Who Kill, given that it shifts quickly from sickly sweet children's show to full on slasher nightmare within fifteen minutes. Tasha may have friends at the outset, but those friendships don't last until the end credits.

In a neat bookend, we even begin with the end credits, at least of the TV show Tasha and Friends, which is decidedly kid friendly, even with a puppet named Spew. Tasha is the pink-wigged host and she works with a quartet of muppet knockoffs; the others are Boppy, Jingles and Groopa (who only speaks a single word, like Groot's three). It plays like Sesame Street on a sugar overdose, as they sing the alphabet and wave us goodbye with a long 'Keep on smiling!' mantra. And then we back out of the show to find that it really isn't unicorns and rainbows on the Tasha and Friends set. In fact, Tasha flat out demands that Ross the director fire the puppeteer whose hand works Boppy because he keeps stealing the last lines of the show. Ross won't take her seriously, even when she quits, but we watch her putting the puppets up for sale on eBay. What she doesn't realise is that they don't want to leave the show; they believe that she should leave instead and they're rather serious about how they'll achieve that goal.

For a film that doesn't attempt to provide any on screen validation for what happens, this is a good deal of fun. It's a little slower than it ought to be and it takes a little longer to get going, but it punctuates the downtime with funny lines in funny little moments. After Tasha puts the puppets in the drier and her feet up on the couch, we see clips from other Greg Kovacs comedy shorts like The Post-Lifers and Cookin' the Shit Outta Things with Mike. Stephanie Christiaens has a lot of fun as Tasha and she fights back with a lot of passion. I was less sold on the puppets though, partly because they're far from original (unlike most of the feebles in Meet the Feebles) and partly because the voices play for laughs rather than realism. Yeah, I know, who expects realism in animated muppets, right? Well, I'd have liked this more if it had played the whole film straight. As it stands, I enjoyed the effects work far more than the puppetry, as Mitchell Stacey of Inde Fx Studio wasn't messing around. My better half liked this more than I did; I found it too familiar.