Apparition (2009)

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

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

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

Darker Suggestion (2003)

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

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

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

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

Carter's Abyss (2000)

Director: Joseph J Greenberg
Stars: Jason Romas and Joseph J Greenberg

We're in North Woods, Maine, in 1920, shot in what appears to be a historical village by a bunch of young reenactors. Day one just sees Carter Rittenhouse beaten up and thrown in the abyss of the title, a well underneath the toolshed, leaving him with a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder. Day two sees his cousin Arthur suggesting to the rather young sheriff that he's disappeared, nobody having seen Carter since the funeral of the elder Rittenhouse, naturally rich and influential. By day nine, the rather substantial estate will be signed over to Arthur in his cousin's absence, unless Carter, the true heir, shows back up with an explanation of his disappearance. As the days add up, as they do very rapidly, Carter finds himself trying to conjure up clever ways of staying sane but also finds himself talking to a rat. The aim here is obviously to invoke Edgar Allan Poe and it's not a bad attempt, all told, the flaws being with the people trying to flesh out the characters.

Kudos is due to filmmaker Joseph J Greenberg for putting together everything needed to invoke the period. It isn't just the setting, which is authentic, but the costumes, the cars, the details here and there that I couldn't catch out, even though my contrary nature kept looking for a satellite dish on a roof somewhere. The amateur actors are almost entirely too young for their parts, including the leads, Jason Romas as Arthur and co-writer/director Joseph J Greenberg as Carter. Worst of them all is J Marc Boissonnault, through no fault of his own, who is just insanely young to be a sheriff. None of the younger actors are entirely at home in the twenties costumes, but their two elders carry it off. John Devenney plays a capable lawyer and J C Platt, who plays James, the Rittenhouse butler, looks like a civil war reenactor, though remains conveniently mute. I've seen later Greenberg films and some of the actors remained with him for a decade. This is a capable start but he got better.

Kuriosity Killz (2009)

Director: Trey McGriff
Stars: Trey McGriff and Caron Alisha McGriff

Filmmaker Trey McGriff makes a fine redneck narrator, somehow jolly without being over the top. As Ray Junior, he has that edge where he's not quite sane but could get by for the longest time without anyone calling him on it. Given that the character is from Georgia, I can easily buy into the act, because while I've met some wonderful people in southern Georgia, it has areas that felt like the closest I've ever been to Deliverance country. Ray Junior has the usual redneck hobbies: beer, guns and cowboy hats with skull and crossbones on them. Then again, when Candy comes over on an internet date and to appear in his movie, he plays Go Fish with her rather than some flavour of poker. She's a jolly young thing too, cute as a button and polite as punch, and I'm sure it wouldn't take much imagination to fathom what's going to happen to her soon enough. The handheld style gives it away before we even meet anyone. Fortunately there's a twist coming.

Unfortunately I enjoyed McGriff more as an actor than as a filmmaker. This is utterly his picture, as he didn't just write and direct but handled every other technical aspect of the film from composing the score through designing the sets and costumes to handling the camera, in addition to playing two of the three characters we see. I liked the story, not that it was deep but because it was jovial and engaging and has a neat twist, but that's about all. I don't like handheld camerawork at the best of times and McGriff didn't have the budget of a Cloverfield to play with here. He worked in black and white throughout which comes off as grey and featureless. The jolly tone meant that the pace was lethargic rather than suspenseful. The electronic music is jarring. In the end, I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, but it really needs a lot of tightening up to turn it into what it really wants to be. I have a feeling the bits McGriff is most proud of are the bits I liked the least.

Andrew Bird: Fever Year (2011)

Director: Xan Aranda
Stars: Martin Dosh, Jeremy Ylvisaker, Michael Lewis, Annie Clark and Andrew Bird

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2012. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012 films.

I'd never heard of Andrew Bird before seeing this documentary, so it became my introduction to him and his work. I don't like going in blind, preferring documentaries about subjects I know at least a little about. Partly it's because they're at once familiar and enlightening, but mostly it's because I appreciate having a frame of reference to work from. I'm likely to notice pretty quickly whether they're biased in a particular direction or whether they're even remotely accurate. The successful ones enhance my knowledge and understanding of the subject. The less successful ones range from fun but inconsequential to completely worthless, but I'll have an idea which. If the subject is entirely new to me, I'm entirely without reference points to determine whether the treatment is fair or accurate. So here, while the film introduced me to a couple of musicians I'd be happy to know more about, I can only really judge it on its cinematic merits.

My wishlist for music documentaries is twofold: a copious amount of performance to give me a feel for what the subject does by listening to them play, with an additional something to validate why they deserve a feature all of their own. What makes them special and why? Fever Year does well at the former, but not particularly well at the latter. I enjoyed Bird's music so I'm thankful for the introduction to his work, but I'm less sold on the insight into why he warrants a documentary. In many ways, Bird as a person is lost in this picture, surrounded by and consumed by his music. There's some poetry to be found in his playfulness with language and in his obvious affection for the visual, even though he closes his eyes while playing. Perhaps this comes from growing up on a gorgeous farm in the countryside, thinking about distance. His delightful speakers look like old Victrola horns. Even his choice of coffee maker highlights a visual aesthetic.

Yet, these are small moments. The big picture is Bird's music, not Bird himself. Talking about his life, his background, himself, he just doesn't seem to be that interesting. It's when he talks about his music that he comes alive and it's when he plays his music that he turns into someone truly magnetic to watch. There's so little of Bird himself here that we wonder if he even exists outside his music. What's more, he seems to know it. He makes some very telling comments during the film. 'Music just swallowed me whole,' he tells us. 'I am what I do.' At one point he goes deeper. 'When I'm solo,' he says, 'I get to really crawl inside the songs and lose myself.' We're left with the impression that he did this early in life, given that he was trained on violin from the age of four, and he hasn't found his way out again yet. I wonder if the titular fever made a difference there. He ends up on crutches by the end credits, surely life's way of telling him to refocus.

And so we see Bird only through his art. He's a highly regarded multi-instrumentalist with a particular focus on the violin, who moved from classical music through jazz and indie rock to a folk influenced sound. We open and close with him on stage in ostentatiously sparkly shoes that don't fit the rest of the experience. He seems unassuming, down to earth, someone who might have just walked in from busking on the street, down to the consistently unkempt hair. Yet the shoes are something Liberace might wear. Maybe they help him feel like a showman, but we're not given an explanation. The song that he plays is unusual, with a fun and surprisingly overt use of whistling. We're treated to many songs, mostly performed live. I found that I preferred the the quirky material to the conventional and the instrumental material to the vocal. Bird does quirky really well and his core collaborators are up to the challenge.

Many of the stories we hear are so routine for music documentaries that we can almost close our eyes and imagine the words coming out of the mouths of any artist we like. He spends much of his time on the road, working at a ferocious pace. He feels more alive on stage, often unsatisfied in the studio. He plays new instruments for hours to put them through the sonic tests he needs to know they're right, rather than just looking at himself in the mirror with them. None of this is remotely surprising. The only real twist to the usual stories is that, as the title suggests, Bird was suffering from a fever for most of the year he was being filmed. It didn't seem to slow him down. Visually, there's much of the same. We see him on stage, we see him backstage. It's fun to see a variety of the poster art from his long tours but again, it's hardly groundbreaking. While the film ran smoothly, it felt like it needed something more to emerge from the background.

It never got there. I enjoyed the film, but after the credits rolled I found that it had made so little impact that it was almost like it hadn't been. Left in its wake were a few vague memories that I should seek out some of Bird's albums and write his name on a virtual post-it note in the back of my mind in case he comes through town. More than that, I felt I should read up on what Martin Dosh has done. Dosh is Bird's percussionist and he's portrayed as something of a kindred spirit, not only because of his multi-instrumental talents and his strong use of loop pedals. There isn't much of a focus on him, of course, as this isn't his film, but the brief moments we have hint that a documentary about him has the potential to be what this one isn't. Of course, if he's as similar to Bird as a person as he is as a musician, maybe it would succeed and fail in precisely the same ways as this film. It takes more than music to enliven a documentary about a musician.

Below Zero (2011)

Director: Justin Thomas Ostensen
Stars: Edward Furlong, Michael Berryman and Kristin Booth

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

This is a Twilight Picture, apparently, but not a Twilight picture. Let me make that clear right off the bat. You'd really think they'd change their name. More promising is the setting, the middle of Canadian nowhere, and the cast, which isn't big but is impressive. Kristin Booth is Penny, a small town single mother who's desperately trying to be Frances McDormand in Fargo and doing a pretty decent job of it. She picks up Edward Furlong, who's a screenwriter from California known as Jack the Hack. He's suffering from writer's block and his agent is going to drop him if he can't produce a script in a week, so perhaps locking him inside an Alberta meat freezer might do the trick. Jack tries to pass it off as method writing, but he really doesn't have a choice: Penny isn't to let him out until he's done. I get the concept. So does the screenwriter of this film, Signe Olynyk, who apparently did for real what Jack gets to do, and in the same meat freezer to boot.

Given that we can't fail to merge the two of them in our imaginations as we watch the product of theirs, it seems surprising that Jack is pretty much a waste of space. Sure, he wrote a successful movie, but that was four years ago and Penny saw it. 'But I'm sure this one'll be good,' she tells him. The cleverest thing he says is the tagline to the movie: 'There's nothing scarier than a blank page.' It sounds like he's said it many times before; his nickname is presumably a lot truer than he'd like it to be. He's as lacking outside of work too. While Penny is taking good care of her son, the silent Cole who's 'a good kid, just different', Jack hasn't seen his son in three years, a shock when he realises it. I was shocked to realise that this marks a full two decades since Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but Furlong has worked through American History X, The Crow: Wicked Prayer and Detroit Rock City to end up looking somewhat like a young Sam Raimi.

And so off we go. Penny has set everything up as per his agent's instructions. He gets a bed, a set of books and a school desk to put his laptop on. There's food, of course, but no toilet, just a bucket. There's no internet and the phone is broken. A cork board, a goldfish in a bowl and Elvis the dead pig hanging from the roof ought to be less distracting. He does get a ball, which is all Steve McQueen needed in The Great Escape. There's also a screenplay Penny wrote, just in case he gets bored. He may well need it, because without it he starts out with, 'What if someone was accidentally locked in a meat freezer by a serial killer... who doesn't know he's in there?' That's all the setup we get. She locks him in and we're ready to be stuck with Jack and his writer's block for five full days. That isn't promising, as it sounds a lot cooler than it's likely to look, something that feels more like a novel than a feature length film. Clocks ticking in movies are annoying.

What we get instead is a neat blurring of reality and imagination, as we see what Jack starts to conjure up. I was reminded of a Tom Waits interview. 'Some songs come out of the ground just like a potato,' he explained about his inspirations. 'Others you have to make out of things you've found: like your mother's pool cue, your dad's army buddy, your sister's wristwatch.' Waits has the luxury of time, of course, while Jack the Hack is stuck in a meat freezer with Elvis the dead pig and the most important deadline of his life. There's not a lot to find, by design, so he builds his screenplay out of the things he, and we, saw in the first twenty minutes: hooks, cows, a tarp, a silent little kid and a locking door. Of course, he imagines a decor that's dirtier, grittier, darker, more horror movie. The walls are bloody, with partial skeletons on those hooks, a woman hung from the ceiling along with the pigs. Oh, and Michael Berryman, of course. Let's not forget him.

It's an interesting approach, especially when you factor in the real life layer. Just as Signe Olynyk apparently imagined herself into Jack the Hack, Jack in turn imagines himself into Frank, a tow truck driver who's a take on Cole's mysterious and absent father. It's relatively predictable, but it's capable enough. Of course the silent kid is a fictionalised version of Cole, called Golem. The woman hanging from the ceiling is Paige, a social worker investigating him. Just as Furlong plays both Jack and Frank, Kristin Booth plays both Penny and Paige and Sadie Madu plays both Cole and Golem. She's an Edmonton local, only nine years old, cast because she knew this location well, having visited the slaughterhouse for Hallowe'en parties. The film's website suggests that appearing in this film inspired her to join a youth theatre group. It's a pretty cool way to start a career. Now I need to be shocked to realise it's 2031 so I can look back at her achievements.

There are a couple of new characters. Michael Eisner (no, not the billionaire former Disney CEO) gets a little screen time as Morty, Frank's colleague in the towing business. Michael Berryman gets much more, of course. He channels a Karloff as the Mummy vibe as Gunnar, a completely cuckoo serial killer in a leather butcher's apron. He's worth watching whatever the material, but Berryman can do freaky in his sleep. To stand out against anything else in his filmography, this would need substance, much more than just Jack rewinding the footage he imagines to slip in new plot devices. Some substance arrives the moment we shift back to reality, only to discover that Jack is his own worst enemy because he's not there alone. He's been locked into this meat freezer with his inner demons, which blur the line between reality and his imagination as they torment him. They also seriously boost Jack the Hack as a character.

What follows is less a horror movie and more an exploration of the writing process and how hard it is to write. It's not just about writer's block, it's about doubt, motivation, integrity and a special brand of insanity which only writers will recognise. It's this last third of the film that will matter most when people determine what they think of it, as the first two acts are pretty accessible and straightforward. The first is all setup, played entirely straight, while the second reimagines the reality as fiction and begins to blur the two together. The third ratchets it all up a notch, as you might expect, but it also convolutes the story and makes us unsure whether what we see is real or not. When a fictional version of the film's writer imagines a fictional version of a character real to him and she tells him that a further fictional version of herself who has been interacting with a fictional version of himself could really be fictional to his fictional self, it may be a little too far.

I felt that the last act started out well but lost itself and I watched the film twice to be sure. It got to the point where I started to wonder whether any of this was real or whether the key to it all is Jack's T-shirt, which reads 'Insanity'. I see the cues that tell us what's real and what's not, but I'm not convinced that they're the only ones. That second viewing did help and I won't discount the possibility that a third might clear up the rest, but somehow I doubt it. I think I may now have got out what was put in. I wonder how much of an idea Signe Olynyk had about what she was going to write before getting locked in that real meat freezer, but maybe she took a journey inside her head, just like Jack does, and found herself a good story, only to lose it again before wrapping it up. At least it isn't BOSH, the term Penny uses to highlight how Jack's work is the same ol' same ol'. It stands for Bunch Of Shit Happens. Whatever else it is, at least this isn't BOSH.

The Theatre Bizarre (2011)

Directors: Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini and Richard Stanley
Stars: Udo Kier, Guilford Adams, Suzan Anbeh, Lindsay Goranson, André Hennicke, Kaniehtiio Horn, Lena Kleine, Catriona MacColl, Victoria Maurette, Virginia Newcomb, Debbie Rochon, Tom Savini and Melodie Simard

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

Horror anthology films are often hit and miss affairs but this one's even more hit and miss than usual. There are six segments from six different directors and eight different writers, along with a vague framing story from another one each of each, and none of them seem to have anything remotely in common with any of the others with regards to actors, tone or genre. Not even the language is consistent. At the time I wondered if it wasn't a real anthology at all, perhaps just a few unrelated short films which someone acquired the rights to and decided to pass off as an anthology, but I now see commonalities within the crew. Douglas Buck, for instance, wrote and directed The Accident, but edited Wet Dreams, Vision Stains and Sweets too. Karim Hussain, who wrote, shot and directed Vision Stains, was also the cinematographer on The Mother of Toads and The Accident. So it appears to be a real anthology, all other evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately the first segment is by far the worst. It's Mother of Toads, an adaptation of a Clark Ashton Smith story by Richard Stanley of Hardware and Dust Devil fame. I'm a big fan of Smith, a contemporary of H P Lovecraft and contributor to Weird Tales. What set Smith apart from other writers was his vocabulary; reading a Smith story is a lush, immersive experience unmatched in weird fiction, but precisely none of that was translated to the screen here. What we get instead is thoroughly routine. An anthropologist and his wife tour France so he can research and she can buy things, but they stumble upon a copy of the Necronomicon in the hands of a local witch and that never ends well. It isn't all bad, as the imagery is decent, if not remotely new, and Catriona MacColl is fine, but it all feels flimsy and predictable. I'll never complain about a nubile, naked witch, but this needed freakiness and tension and only the toads in the forest come close.

I Love You is an improvement, but is so different it's impossible to compare. New York writer and director Buddy Giovinazzo, still best known for his debut film, Combat Shock, gets psychological in Berlin with a neatly arced story about Axel and Simone, an obsessive German and his former French girlfriend. They're played by German actors, André Hennicke and Suzan Anbeh, who are much better in their native language than they are in English and they know it. Axel wakes up in the bathroom covered in blood, recovering from a fight that he doesn't remember. Outside is Mo with her new boyfriend George, and our story begins when she comes in and comes clean. It's a brutal psychological piece, which plays with our sympathies and ends well, though I did want a twist on the twist. Hennicke is excellent, like a young Polanski mixed with Robert Carlyle and a little Viggo Mortensen. I'd like to see more of his work, which is increasingly not in German.

After a Lovecraftian tale and a psychological foreign drama, next up is a more traditional horror yarn all about sex, violence and dreams. Oh, and special effects. It's directed by the legendary Tom Savini, after all. I liked it, but more for the many layers of reality and dream that it travels through than the gore, which is still agreeably solid and rarely off screen. There's more here to remember in a short segment than in most features, beginning with a POV shot where we follow a girl in a thong and progressing through torture, genital mutilation, amputation, you name it, all done capably and gratuitously. The biggest problem that Wet Dreams has is that it has precious little time to work with, so can't really build anything in such a way that we can try to figure any of it out. Without intellectual engagement, it becomes merely a set of revelations, all fun ones to be sure, but revelations nonetheless. It deserves more length to be explored properly.

Slow and atmospheric from moment one, The Accident is a jarring shift in the pace of the film, which is a shame because it's the best segment thus far. It's beautifully shot, both the leisurely motion and the photographic stills; it's scored well; and it unfolds superbly, inevitable in plot but ambiguous in effect, which is a neat little combo to have. 'Why do people die, mummy?' the little girl asks, as the film flashes back to the title scene where a biker who waved to her hit a deer. It isn't clear on one viewing exactly what writer/director Douglas Buck, an unfortunate name given the circumstances, was aiming at here. Obviously there are many questions asked about death, not just by the little girl and not just about the biker. There's a gruesome scene that I won't spoil that takes that deeper. Yet I wonder if there's more: it seems notable that the mother/daughter are in a car but the unrelated father/son are on motorbikes. I'd love to see this again.

Almost to underline how the common thread of these segments is to not have a common thread, the fifth piece mixes science fiction and horror into a story that aims to find the secret of life in an unusual way. The protagonist in Vision Stains, credited simply as the Writer, extracts fluid from the eyes of dying women and injects it into her own. In doing so, she extracts the important things from their lives, which presumably flash before their eyes at the moment of their death, to document for posterity. Being their biographer is a calling and she has a lot of notebooks. This is a neat take on an old idea, which calls on actress Kaniehtiio Horn to get into freaky locations and do icky things. I last saw her in The Wild Hunt and I appreciated her work there too. I'm not sure I caught everything Karim Hussain aimed at, but it's telling that he's known as a cinematographer more than a writer/director, a worker in the visual. It's original and it has a great escalation.

Last up is a metaphor from David Gregory, the prolific biographer in film whose work tends to be found by clicking on the 'Extras' button on DVD menus rather than 'Play Movie'. However I was a big fan of his last feature, Plague Town, and I liked this short piece, Sweets, very much too. It has to do with a compulsive eater called Greg, a complete slob in a mess of a place, but who still has a lovely girlfriend in Estelle. Well, maybe not. As she wheels out all the leaving lines and he gets progressively grosser, they flashback to increasingly weird foot fetish scenes and we realise that she isn't real, or at least isn't any more. Then we switch from Greg's suitably gross environs to a chic party, a wonderful contrast in style and setting but still very much about food fetishes and eating disorders. This is far from your average chic party, folks, and it gets less so from there. It's a very European piece, weird but arty, and put together very well indeed.

Our host and guide is the ever-freaky Udo Kier, sharing the stage of the Theatre Guignol with a host of automatons during the linking segments. These segments are weak but the name of this theatre is important, as the film was apparently inspired by the legendary Grand Guignol theatre in Paris, which, at the height of its success from 1898-1930, specialised in short gory plays with shocking special effects. An average of two audience members fainted every evening. I knew of the Grand Guignol but hadn't realised that its shows varied in style as much as the segments of this film, even alternating horror plays with comedies to heighten the effect. Each director built their own tribute from a consistent budget, schedule and directive to follow the Grand Guignol themes, but with complete artistic freedom otherwise. With each segment featuring something icky or gross to focus on, this would seem to be fair tribute, but it's still annoyingly disjointed.

The Horror Show (1989)

Director: James Isaac
Stars: Lance Henriksen, Brion James, Rita Taggert, Dedee Pfeiffer, Aron Eisenberg, Thom Bray and Matt Clark

How good must a movie be if a director as good as David Blyth can't do it justice? No, that's both wishful and backward thinking. Let's try again. How bad must be a movie be if a director as good as David Blyth gets fired and one of the two writers, Allyn Warner, has his credit switched to Alan Smithee? It doesn't help that it was promoted outside the States as part of the House series, to which it's connected only by a few crew members. So, much of the film is set in a house? That's almost every non-western out there, right? That's all the distributors needed, apparently, so now it serves mostly to confuse people looking back, like Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I don't remember it being that bad, though it's been a couple of decades, and it stars Lance Henriksen and Brion James, two of my favourite actors. James has even said that the role he plays here, of mass murderer Max Jenke, was his favourite of all his roles. Let's watch again and find out.

Jenke is a real piece of work, not just your average, run of the mill serial killer but a candidate for Olympic gold if the Americans get their national pastime added to the event roster. He racked up a hundred and ten or so victims, seven of whom were cops. He leaves Det Lucas McCarthy, the cop who finally caught him, with nightmares so bad that he feels he has to see Jenke executed in order to find peace. That quickly turns out to be a terrible idea because pretty it isn't. Jenke is a stereotypical Hollywood badass: he spits his communion wafer back at the priest; his last words are profanity, directed at no less a warden than Lawrence Tierney; his final request is even to be buried with his treasured meat cleaver. In lesser hands, all this would be annoyingly cheesy, but this is Brion James. His electrocution scene is a peach; when he breaks out of the chair, burning alive, and swears to McCarthy that he's coming back for him, we'd better pay attention.

And of course, he does. His spirit takes up residence in the furnace in McCarthy's basement and has a ball playing around with his captor's mind, appearing at every opportunity, manipulating reality and threatening violence. Only McCarthy notices for a while, which makes him look as crazy as he starts to feel, stabbing the turkey when it grows Jenke's head on its own or shooting the TV when Jenke takes over the role of a stand up comedian. While the basic idea could easily be seen as a take on Obi Wan Kenobi's 'If you kill me, I'll become more powerful than you could ever imagine' line from Star Wars, the approach is totally A Nightmare on Elm Street with every opportunity taken to set up a shock moment. Not all are telegraphed and not all follow through, which helps the suspense to build nicely. The biggest difference is that this focuses far more on Det McCarthy than his kids, who would have been the main targets in most horror movies.

I really like this approach. It means that when McCarthy's daughter Bonnie brings her boyfriend Vinnie home against orders and Jenke takes his cleaver to him, it's McCarthy who's set up as the prime suspect. Given that he almost strangled his wife in a nightmare even before Jenke is put into the electric chair, maybe he really is and the whole reincarnated evil spirit thing is just him stuck in a nightmarish attack of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's the sort of thing that you might expect in a traditional thriller and it's refreshing to see an actor as good and as good at playing tough as Henriksen stuck in that sort of helpless scenario, where even the people he's trying to protect wonder if he's actually the one hurting them. He resists the horror aspects and plays McCarthy like he's in a psychological thriller, while the rest of the cast are happy to go for the stereotypical horror movie victim approach instead.

The often jarring disconnect between these different approaches ought to be a big problem, but bizarrely it's something of a success because it plays well into Jenke's surreal nightmare logic. I wonder if it was consciously aimed at. I'm guessing not, given that otherwise this really isn't that cleverly written. There are many holes in the internal consistency to deal with, even restricted to those we can confidently assume happen outside of nightmares. Some are little, like McCarthy's apparent non-concern about his son's habit of ripping off companies by pretending that he found icky things in their products. Others are larger, like what Prof Peter Campbell gets up to for most of the movie. He's a parapsychologist interested in pure evil as electromagnetic energy, so he's at once the key to the plot and a character who hardly gets to take part in it. I'm still confused about the final scene. Where does it takes place and how does everyone get there?

Story aside, the cast are capable, even though they gel about as well as the approaches taken by the actors. Henriksen does his usual solid job and the ladies will enjoy the fact that he spends quite a bit of it topless. He was in awesome shape and he was happy to show it, though he gets even more physical and even more frequently topless in Pumpkinhead and Survival Quest, both made only a year earlier. Rita Taggart is impressive as his wife Donna, but her character is badly built, spending half the film as a pillar of strength and then turning weak at a moment's notice. Bonnie is as stereotypical a horror movie daughter as I've seen, and her brother Scott isn't far off being as stereotypical a horror movie son. Dedee Pfeiffer and Aron Eisenberg aren't bad at all, however much the latter is trying to be Corey Haim, but there's not much for them to do. Thom Bray has a Norman Bates feel to him as Prof Campbell, but he gets no opportunities either.

And that leaves Brion James. After a string of important character roles in films like Blade Runner and the 48 Hrs movies in the early eighties, which highlighted his versatility, he gradually found himself typecast as a stereotypical villain or sidekick. He remained consistently solid, as material decreased in quality, but he rarely got the chance to really shine. This movie, at the other end of the eighties from his best, was the exception. He's a riot throughout, as cheesy as his lines get, and the film's commercial success ought to have meant a return to the role in a sequel or two. The horror genre has always loved series and it fell utterly in lust with franchises in the eighties. Perhaps getting lumped in with the House series around the world made it tougher to become its own franchise. Whatever the reason, it's easy to see why he was so fond of the character and he's why I'm more fond of The Horror Show than Wes Craven's Shocker, its overt rival in 1989.

The Photon Effect (2010)

Director: Dan Poole
Stars: Dan Poole and Derek Minter

It would be easy to wonder what sort of story we're watching here. Before the title screen we get a trio of young men in body armour and spine sheaths with neon blue lights pretending to be X-Men. They seem to be mounting some sort of mission to plant explosives on industrial equipment but it isn't particularly clear what they're doing. The one subtly named Damage sticks his hands in what looks like a photocopier and apparently gains the power to throw fireballs at people. It's all a little much but when he leaves the building, he explodes. It's comic book superhero stuff. After the title screen, we find ourselves grounded in blue collar reality with a couple of cousins who work for American Antenna. They're refreshingly real, down to earth workers, all the way down to Jay and Derek Powers being played by a couple of actors who are great fun to watch but are far from slick Hollywood star material. They're given good dialogue too, which is enjoyably free of cool inanity.

You know the two stories are going to meet at some point and they do so in explosive fashion. The cut rate X-Men work for a company called Randall Communications Inc, as human test subjects in an experimental weapons program. American Antenna contracts to RCI because, as Derek points out, they're the only company willing to put up unknown, untested electronic transmitters. It's on a trip to RCI that Jay notices Tina, his ex-fiancée, working there and he's dying to get an opportunity to win her back after eight years. So he pops round after hours to talk to her and ends up taking on the security guard outside instead. She eventually shows up, with the guys in body armour. One of them fires an oversized penis extension of a ray gun at his car which promptly gets tossed up in the air like a pancake. Another flips sparks out of his fingers, just as a suggestion that he might want to get the heck out of Dodge. He's bright enough to realise when he's outgunned.

It's fun to watch a couple of protagonists who are bright and dumb at the same time instead of just concentrating on the latter. Most of this is due to the efforts of Dan Poole, who was something of a one man crew on this movie. He wrote, produced and directed; he served as production designer and stunt coordinator; and he also played one of the two leads, Derek Powers. It's entirely his film and it's not a particularly surprising progression from his first film, a 46 minute demo reel called The Green Goblin's Last Stand, made for $500 and sent to James Cameron, at the time the director assigned to Spider-Man. Derek is a good guy. Even though he starts out in a shirt that reads 'Authentic Lifesaver', he's a realistic hero. As the tagline to the movie runs, 'not everyone wants the power to change things,' and the evolution of his superpowers, because yes, he gets them, is far more believable than anything Marvel or DC conjured up over the last century.

RCI are working on a secret weapons program tied to experimental microwave antennae, which Jay and Derek get to attach to towers. As Jay fools around while his cousin is fitting one of them, the accident happens and Derek turns into Photon, the Human Antenna. Jay turns into the Black Hole, a little more deliberately, essentially to impress Tina and win her back from Destroy. All this sounds impeccably cheesy but it isn't, it's character driven and thoroughly grounded. The cheese is kept in reserve for the various appearances of the Dial-a-Hurt Squad, those guys in body armour who get precisely no depth and no background. They're even called dumb names: Damage, Degrade, Deny and Destroy. I get the impression that Poole made them deliberately cheesy to epitomise the Hollywood superhero genre, while letting the Powers boys show what the indie scene can do. I may be reading too much into it, but that's what it felt like to me and it felt good.

Poole is excellent as Derek Powers, but fortunately he has Derek Minter to play off as his cousin Jay. They have different acting styles and play very different characters, but they work very well together, not least through the power of sarcasm which is used to joyous effect here in a literate script. Jay is far more volatile than his cousin, a textbook underachiever who's a little fond of the bottle and a little quick to anger. 'I knew you'd be a baby when I got my superpowers!' he tells Derek, as they face off against each other for the first time, and that's a line that could sum up Hollywood today all on its own. Poole has a talent for dialogue, which is intelligent but believable, even when he stoops to homage with lines like, 'You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.' Dialogue doesn't cost anything but it often seems like the last thing low budget filmmakers try to build up when compensating for a lack of financing. Poole likes dialogue and character as well as effects.

The Powers boys are magnificently fleshed out for a low budget feature like this. Apparently it cost a mere $117,000 which is truly amazing given the technical quality of what Poole gets up onto his screen. Some of the overlay and rear projection work needs improvement but most of the rest is surprisingly good and I found that I enjoyed the result a lot more than the last dozen superhero films I saw with a thousand times the budget to play with. No, it's not going to stand up against what Weta Digital might conjure up but it doesn't have to. It only has to be good enough to prompt us to marvel a little at the spectacle while we care about the characters, and it's easily up to that. It didn't take any effort to look past some of the flimsy walls they break through or the instability of Photon running alongside a purse snatcher on his motorbike. I cared more about Derek's doctor and Kelly Hammond's assistant at Biolabs than I did about Iron Man. They had better lines too.

In fact there are a whole host of supporting characters who are great fun to watch. The acting is consistently capable, even though these folks don't all seem to be incredibly experienced. Most inherently obvious are the Dial-a-Hurt guys, because they're a macho dream with their huge guns and body armour. They are also the most wooden actors in the film but that's probably by design. The real supporting characters are led by Ariana Almajan and Brian Razzino. Almajan plays Jay's old flame, Tina Viccarini, and she does so with stunning matter of factness. Razzino is Bob Chase, the head of RCI, and he's a suitable wiener of a villain for someone who has no powers of his own. Alex Baker plays Kelly Hammond, who progresses from a purse snatch victim to a key player in helping Derek deal with his new found abilities. I didn't catch the names of some of the lesser characters but they were all good fun. I hope I see many of them again in the inevitable sequel.

The Ruffians (2009)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Gordon Clark, Dani Danger and Dean Veglia

Through no deliberate design, my first review in July was of a Travis Mills short film. Now we're in August, it felt like a good idea to kick off the month by reviewing another one. There are plenty to catch up on, after all, and he remains as prolific as ever. The way he's going, I could make my first review of every month a Travis Mills short film and I'd still never catch up. This one predates Running Wild Pictures, being a GuerillaStar Production from 2009, his earliest directorial credit at IMDb, and it's a particularly interesting piece. It's long for a short, running nineteen minutes. It's accessible but experimental, with an overlay of interference that would make us wonder if there was a problem if only Jim wasn't obviously hearing it too. He's our lead character and he takes us on a primal journey that we can read as a literal one, a metaphorical one or a psychological one. I'm not sure which was intended, but it could well have been all of them.

Jim works in a law office and he's apparently good at his job, but his work has been slipping for a while. His boss tells him he's slowing down when he should be speeding up, but he doesn't hear too much of it because of the static that seems to sit between him and the world. The camera is a swooping thing too, keeping him perpetually off balance. The sound follows him wherever he goes, only disappearing inside the tunnel opposite his office, to which he naturally feels drawn. On the literal level, I've heard of remote places where people who hear wireless signals can go to escape them. On the metaphorical level, it's an quick and easy respite from a world full of suits, deadlines and paperwork. On the psychological level, maybe Jim is just going dramatically crazy. Whichever viewpoint we're taking, Gordon Clark is on target as Jim, both tormented by the world he can't live in any more and engaged by the strange new one he finds within the tunnel.

Given that Kikei, the first character he meets, is played by the legendary Dani Danger, Arizona locals will quickly realise how strange it might be. For those unfamiliar with the lovely Miss Dani, she's a singular vision and a wake up call to the eyes on a daily basis. Here, she's barefoot, everything including her forward hanging dreads caked in clay and the subdermal cross in her cleavage even more apparent than usual. I guess we can understand why Jim runs, a kneejerk reaction, but we can also understand why he comes back later. I mean, think about it. This guy clearly wants out of the real world, whichever level we believe he's doing it on. If the possibility of escape involved shacking up with Dani Danger and her Ruffians in a primitive, almost silent, underground world of food, fire and freedom, wouldn't you jump at it? Your decision should be made even before she strips naked in front of you. By that point, who would want reality?

Quite what Mills was aiming at here, I'm not entirely sure. His screenplay, based on a story he co-wrote with Drew Koshar, is long on tone and short on detail, with what little dialogue there is often hidden behind walls of sonic pollution. It's much more like an impressionistic painting than a draughtsman's drawing, but there is an underlying structure to what happens to Jim. Maybe it's more like a vision quest, each of us tasked with seeking out a hidden truth about ourselves from within the film. This is enhanced by Brandon Reader's ritualistic tribal score and Dave Surber's effectively loose camerawork, which mirrors how out of sync Jim is with the world. I'm leaning towards a psychological take, a minimalistic but outré riff on the end of Brazil, but I'm enticed by the metaphorical one too. The Ruffians are all about rejection of norms and Jim has many norms to reject, from credit cards to American football. Maybe it's both. Now, where's this tunnel?

The Ruffians can be viewed for free at Vimeo.