Cyborg 2087 (1966)

Director: Franklin Adreon
Stars: Michael Rennie, Karen Steele, Wendell Corey, Warren Stevens and Eduard Franz

I've wanted to see Cyborg 2087 ever since I first heard about it, because it's basically Terminator 2: Judgment Day shot a quarter of a century earlier. Having finally seen it, I find myself intrigued by the similarities but laughing as I compare the two. After all, T2 is that rarest of pictures: one that's commercially successful, critically acclaimed and culturally important. It won four Oscars, ranks in the Top 40 at IMDb and appears on three AFI Top 100 lists. Its pioneering special effects are still mimicked today, its dynamic action shaped American cinema and its iconic performances entered the cultural fabric of the world. Cyborg 2087 is precisely none of those things, but it still tells a remarkably similar story. Given that James Cameron, while clearly the most successful film director of all time, is hardly known for his original ideas, evident most obviously through the lack of even one within the three hour running time of Avatar, I can't help but wonder if he saw this.

In T2, a T-800 cyborg is sent back in time from a future where the human race has been enslaved by cyborgs to stop a scientist, Dr Miles Dyson, from perfecting a microprocessor he's working on at Cyberdyne Systems that will allow that future to happen. Here, Garth A7 is a cyborg sent back in time from a future where the human race has been enslaved by cyborgs to stop a scientist, Prof Sigmund Marx, from demonstrating his invention of radio-telepathy at Future Industries Inc that will allow that future to happen. In T2, that 'good' cyborg is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, an imposing 6'2" actor who is ordered by John Connor not to kill anyone. Here, it's Michael Rennie, an imposing 6'4" actor whose raygun paralyses rather than kills. In T2, this hero is pursued by a T-1000 cyborg killing machine. Here, it's pursued by a pair of tracers, cyborg killing machines of course. And the similarities don't stop there.

There are differences too, most obviously with the production values. T2 cost an unprecedented $100m or so, took 171 days to film at 20 different sites with up to 1,000 crew members. Cameron also required special effects so advanced that they were still being invented as the picture was made. The groundbreaking CGI that takes up only five minutes of screen time took 25 man years to create. I haven't been able to track down equivalent numbers for Cyborg 2087, but it's pretty clear that they're low on every front, even for a mid sixties indie picture. The effects, especially, are unreedemably awful, courtesy of a man named Roger George. At this point, he was relatively new to the industry and was known mostly for beach movies, hardly effects heavy pictures. No doubt he was given little to work with here. Yet he would go on to much better things in a prolific career that lasted into the late eighties and included a stint on, drum roll please, The Terminator.

While the often eerie similarities to T2 are the primary reason to watch this, there is another: the star, Michael Rennie. Beyond being a watchable actor, whatever he's tasked to elevate, he made precisely two science fiction films: The Day the Earth Stood Still and this. That these movies sit at different ends of the quality scale isn't important, but it is notable that he was cast as an alien in that film primarily because American audiences wouldn't recognise him, but in this one primarily because they would. He isn't bad here, keeping some of the calm feel he exuded as Klaatu, while adding both toughness and a wooden demeanour to fit a cyborg nature with its lack of emotions. The catch is that we can't help but look at him and think terminator, that's how pervasive Arnie has become in popular culture. Rennie actually has two inches on Schwarzenegger and he'd put on a little weight since 1951, but he clearly isn't the 'human Panzer tank' that Arnie was.

However, he's clearly above the material and he just as clearly knows it, though he plays along professionally. He arrives in 1966 on schedule with instructions to proceed to Desert City, locate Future Industries Inc, find Marx and bring him back, alive if possible but dead if necessary. That's straight forward enough, but where the script doesn't have holes it has gaps, so for a while he's stuck in a ghost town hiding from Sam Gilmore and his uncle who are heading for an old casino. He's also hindered by his costume. Never mind 'your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle', Garth has a tight beige outfit that hints at a uniform with dinky silver boots, so he just borrows Sam's jeep while he isn't looking. None of this enforces Garth as tough or dangerous, though he does zap these locals with his raygun. Klaatu was polite for a lot of reasons; Garth has some edge but is still far too passive for someone tasked with saving the world from future enslavement.

It takes a while for us to warm up to Garth and I'm not quite sure when we get there. It might be when he starts to interact with characters that actually matter, such as Dr Sharon Mason, at the professor's lab. He hypnotises her, then uses radio-telepathy to convince her to help him, while clearing her mind of the reasons why. I think it's more likely to be when the tracers show up, the cyborg killing machines that follow him through time to destroy him before he can destroy them by destroying their future. They're unceasing because it's what they do it's all they do. It's no stretch for the inherently trustworthy Rennie to appear superior as these guys are morons, though it's hardly the fault of the stuntmen given the job of playing them. They run around like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in GI Joe outfits, tracking Garth with the sundials on their wrists. I wasn't expecting the carefully liquid movements of a T-1000, but this is as stupid as it sounds.

One bright moment in the script highlights that Garth realises that making the wrong change in the past could adversely affect the future and, by extension, his mission. If he kills someone, for instance, that could erase him from the future. Unfortunately this means that he can't go all hell for leather and so finds himself stuck avoiding the law and being nice to people. Without Rennie dominating the screen, we're forced to notice the rest of the cast, who are a varied but mostly inconsequential bunch. Karen Steele is most obvious as Dr Mason, as she's very pleasing to the eye. This was the same year that she appeared as Eve McHuron, the leader of Mudd's Women in that episode of Star Trek, and she didn't need Venus drug to land that role. However, while she does reasonably well early on, especially in scenes opposite Eduard Franz and Warren Stevens, she overdoes things later in the film, especially during the finalé.

Franz, perhaps best known for The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, is generic as Prof Marx, a pale shadow of the Sam Jaffe role from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Stevens is a decent love interest though he had much more to do in Forbidden Planet. I have no doubt that both of these actors would have done better with better material, but it just wasn't on offer. Surprisingly, it's Wendell Corey who emerges from the background as a sheriff who remains a day late and a dollar short throughout. Sure, he's as obviously drunk as he was in The Astro-Zombies, but he's a lively drunk this time out. He doesn't believe anyone and asks plenty of questions but never quite manages to put two and two together to make four. 'That's impossible,' he slurs. 'You're all imagining things.' Also recognisable are Harry Carey Jr, who offers a little comic relief as the town's journalist, and dancing John Beck in his screen debut, almost a decade before playing Moonpie on Rollerball.

In short, this isn't a good film, but it's probably fair to say that it was a better film in 1966 than it appears today. Compared to regular sixties sci-fi schlock, it's a relatively intelligent piece with a number of interesting ideas. Writer Arthur C Pierce wasn't known for quality material, his career full of pictures like Women of the Prehistoric Planet, The Navy vs the Night Monsters and The Las Vegas Hillbillys. For all its many plot holes, this and its companion piece, Dimension 5, are high points in his filmography. Director Franklin Adreon ended his career with these two movies, after a couple of decades working on movie serials and TV shows. As his directorial career began with the late Republic serial, Canadian Mounties vs Atomic Invaders, at least it ended well. The challenge today is to watch without thinking about Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a challenge I failed utterly. Cameron made a worse Pocahontas with Avatar but he made a better Cyborg 2087 with T2.

Doctor of Doom (1979)

Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Tim Burton, Harry Sabin, Cynthia Price and Michael Giaimo

The companion piece to Tim Burton's Luau is Doctor of Doom, shot three years earlier and clearly influenced by the sort of Mexican horror movies that were released to American audiences in English dubs by K Gordon Murray. René Cardona, who directed many such films, even made one called Doctor of Doom in 1963, though it goes by many names and is perhaps best known as The Wrestling Women vs The Aztec Ape. This isn't a direct take on that film, more of an attempt to tap into the mindset of its genre generally and create something fresh with both homage and parody in mind. As with Luau, this was never intended for a public release, serving instead as catharsis through creative outpouring for Burton and his frustrated colleagues at Disney Animation. It's a difficult film to follow because the sound is terrible and the voices deliberately obscured. I'm not even convinced that some of the dialogue isn't gibberish.

That said, I think I enjoy it more than Luau, even though it's a third the length, shot in black and white and with only a fraction of the frenetic insanity of the later film. In fact, perhaps I enjoy it more than Luau for precisely those reasons. While there's nothing at IMDb to back this up, it's clearly Tim Burton himself playing the mad doctor, Don Carlo, and the character is perhaps the same one that Burton reprises in Luau as a disembodied head, given their similarity in dialogue. Here he visits a wealthy man with a smoking jacket and long cigar and no need for a name; the usual mansion is replaced through necessity by the apartment of Jerry Rees, Burton's partner in crime on Luau. Don Carlo doesn't enjoy dinner, rambling on instead about his poor upbringing as an organgrinder's monkey or some such, and threatens this family with destruction as he leaves. Next day he sends a monster from his lab to destroy all beauty, starting with them.

While there's much here that's awful, most of it is deliberate. The details of Don Carlo's lab are quite obviously taken from another source, not only because it was cheaper but because of the effect. Similarly the monster is clearly meant to be cheap with a terrible mask; the seams are supposed to show. All the voices are deliberately dubbed and with comedic intent, to the degree that Randy Cartwright dubs both male and female characters, as well as the monster. He didn't aim for impeccable lip synching. It's also notable that none of the actors dub the characters they actually play, presumably a deliberate decision. Cartwright doesn't voice everyone, so Jerry Rees takes care of one other character and Brad Bird, who would go on to direct The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, a couple more, including dubbing Burton as Don Carlo. I wonder why he didn't return for Luau. Perhaps he was less in need of catharsis at that point.

Not everything is awful. The sleight of hand in the opening scene is well handled and the various archetypal characters are capably riffed on. Harry Sabin is suitably decadent as the rich Mexican with the best line: 'My wife died ten years ago,' he says at the dinner table and everyone cracks up laughing. He was also a surfer in Luau, but went on to do a lot of character design for animated TV shows like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power and BraveStarr. Cynthia Price is suitably simpering as his daughter Rosita, mostly in close up gazing into mirrors but she surprisingly never earned another credit. Michael Giaimo reminds of Graham Chapman as her fiancé, Bob Garcia, long before he became art director on Pocahontas. I'm not sure which of the characters is Pepe, but that's Chris Buck, two decades before he directed Tarzan and eight more years before earning an Oscar nomination for Surf's Up.

Many of the names behind both Doctor of Doom and Luau also worked on Fun with Mr Future in 1982, a short film that combined live action with animation and starred Vincent Price as a mad scientist. Had it not begun work as an Epcot television special, perhaps it would inevitably have involved Tim Burton, who had long idolised Price and had befriended him that year while making Vincent. It was the directorial debut of Darrell Van Citters, who is concealed beneath the terrible mask of the monster in this film but would go on to be known for The Mr Men Show and Emmy-nominated Noah Comprende. All these connections are eye opening to me, as are these short films. Both Luau and Doctor of Doom are just home video curiosities, though fun ones that get better with repeat viewings and serve as a fascinating glimpse into a set of creative personalities, most of whom would go on to great things, satisfying the urge to satiate their creative needs.

Luau (1982)

Directors: Tim Burton & Jerry Rees
Stars: Mike Gabriel, Sue Frankenberger and Terrey Hamada

I grew up watching Tim Burton pictures, with Beetlejuice my favourite and Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns not far behind, so it isn't surprising to find that I've seen all his features, at least up to Sweeney Todd; somehow I can't drum up the courage to watch Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows. What's more surprising is that I haven't gone backwards yet; of his various early short films, I've only seen Vincent, albeit a number of times. The release of Frankenweenie, the 2012 animated feature, prompted me to do just that, as it was based on a live action short that Burton directed back in 1984 when working at Disney. So I began to work backwards from Frankenweenie, a black and white piece that runs half an hour and plays as you might expect, something of a test run for Edward Scissorhands. Vincent also fits easily in Burton's career, an autobiographical stop motion poem about a boy who wants to be the narrator, Vincent Price.

Yet going back another step, I was truly floored. What was 1982's Luau? Where did it come from? It was as unexpected and jarring as Frankenweenie and Vincent were expected and natural. It took a little background to figure out what was going on. In the late seventies, Burton certainly seemed to be on the right track. He'd studied at the California Institute of Arts, the school that continues to supply the animation industry with almost everyone you've ever heard of. Like so many CalArts graduates, he was hired by Walt Disney Animation, perhaps especially because of the stir generated by his short animation, Stalk of the Celery Monster, which had impressed his classmates, including John Lasseter, future head of Pixar and now chief creative officer at Disney Animation. He must have felt on top of the world. Unfortunately, he'd picked exactly the wrong time. In the early eighties, Disney were at their lowest creative ebb.

Burton himself has said that the company was floundering at the time. Walt Disney had died in 1966 but a number of his talented peers survived him. Gradually, though, they left the company, retired or died themselves, and by 1980 Disney was being run by what Burton calls 'people who were the third or fourth on the tier', simply because they were the only ones left. He was far from the only employee feeling pain at the rampant confusion in the company. He's said that he 'felt like a trapped princess', with the creative freedom to draw whatever he wanted but a frustration born from none of it ever being used. He worked as a conceptual artist on The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, but none of his work is visible in those films. So, he and a set of similarly frustrated colleagues made a couple of live action shorts to let their imaginations and cinematic influences run riot in a way that they could actually see.

Luau was the second of these, shot on video in 1982, written, produced and directed by Burton and Jerry Rees, whose next film as a writer/director would be The Brave Little Toaster in 1987. It's a wild mashup of influences that veers frenetically every which way all at once, not merely the braindumps of a host of frustrated creative souls but an acid trip through them. The framework is a parady of an AIP beach movie, with a very reminiscent plot, such as it is, centering around Bob forgetting about his girl Arlene because she introduces him to Princess Yakamoshi, who's staying with her family for the summer. This prompts every sort of gag, from low puns through Japanese accent jokes and dialogue overdubs to Three Stooges slapstick and eventually to Monty Python surrealism. There's even a running joke, as Kahuna changes his name back to Vladimir Moonface Jr, then disappears, only to reappear vicariously through Kahuna sightings all around the country.

Much of what we see is there because it has to be in this sort of parody, such as the luau of the title because there's always a party in a beach movie. There's always a celebrity guest too and here that's Ray Wonder Jr, a cross between Stevie Wonder and Ray Parker Jr. There's a musical number and a fight scene and a surfing contest and all the other things you'll expect if you've ever seen anything featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. There is fun to be had here, but it's the sort of fun that prompts laughing and cringing at the same time, because yes, they really did that. None of it is remotely groundbreaking, though the catharsis these folk enjoy is in your face obvious. Technically it's as inconsistent as everything else, which means that on one side there's some some adventurous editing, some minor live action animation and some good ideas for camera movements, but on the other there's a great deal of terrible lighting.

It's the surreal side that carries most interest. Ten minutes in, IQ finds a disembodied head inside some sort of metal can, one that's very much alive and played by Tim Burton himself. 'I am the most powerful force in the universe,' he tells everyone. 'You are here to do my bidding.' He can even hypnotise people with haunting tunes but for the most part he's completely ignored, until he challenges Bob to a surfing contest. Given the effects they had to work with, this isn't nearly as wild as it should be, even when he elicits the assistance of a killer crab, but it's very telling when you think about what it really means. Burton was feeling as ignored as crippled and this head and the businessmen who ask them all to keep quiet on the beach are surely their bosses at work. No wonder they're the enemies in the fight scene. Luau would be just another home movie, albeit an ambitious and imaginative one, if it wasn't for this background.

Almost everyone here stayed in the animation industry, eventually getting past the down times and going on to important work. Bob is played by Mike Gabriel, who wrote the story for Oliver & Company and directed The Rescuers Down Under and Pocahontas. IQ, the chunky kid who finds the head, is Joe Ranft, now a voice actor for Pixar, voicing characters like Wheezy in Toy Story 2 and Jacques in Finding Nemo. He also wrote or co-wrote a number of major features, including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Toy Story. Randy Cartwright animated Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Zazu in The Lion King. Jay Jackson animated Milo in Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Morph in Treasure Planet. Philip Young, who plays Kahuna, animated Mufasa in The Lion King and Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove. Of course, because we don't know what animators look like, only Tim Burton remains recognisable. It's good to see him actually act.

Vincent (1982)

Director: Tim Burton
Star: Vincent Price

1984's Frankenweenie ran thirty minutes and cost a cool million bucks. Two years earlier, having only worked on less personal projects, like The Fox and the Hound, as an animator or conceptual artist, Walt Disney Animations only trusted Burton with $60,000 for a six minute short, adapted from a poem he'd written with the original idea of turning it into a children's book. While I happily talked down Disney in my Frankenweenie review, I should redress the balance by talking them up here, because this Dr Seuss inspired poem is the weakest part of the film. Julie Hickson, a Disney executive, and Tom Wilhite, the company's head of creative development, saw potential in Burton and his 'rather unique talent' as the book Burton on Burton puts it. Maybe they saw the potential of the poem too, once animated and well recited, maybe they just wanted a stop motion test or to see what Burton could do with creative freedom, but that shot deserves credit.

Burton seized the opportunity and his four man crew knocked the film out in two months. There was a fifth player, of course, one as inextricably linked to the piece as Burton himself, who wrote seven year old Vincent Malloy autobiographically so deeply that the character even looks like him. It's Vincent Price, who reads Burton's poem with his unmistakeable voice. Given that we learn in verse one that Vincent Malloy dearly wants to be Vincent Price, there's a self referential charm to the piece, aided by frequent references to his career, from House of Wax to the Edgar Allan Poe pictures. Malloy plunges headlong into the world of the macabre in a heartfelt attempt to emulate his hero and Price has a blast bringing him to life. The text is basic AABB rhyme without too much care given to the meter but, as Price could clearly wring charm out of reading an instruction manual, it's no trouble for him whatsoever to elevate this material.

The excellent animation helps too. That crew of four included animator Rick Heinrichs; Steven Chiodo, a stop motion animator; and cameraman Victor Abdalov, in addition to Burton himself. Ignoring the American influences of most of Burton's films, like the Universal horrors, Corman pictures and fifties monster movies, they surely sourced this from the silent expressionist films made in Germany in the twenties. That this is silent, but for the narration, aids that, as does the choice to shoot in black and white and the psychological sweep of the poem that surpasses its language. Burton claims that he hadn't seen The Cabinet of Dr Caligari before making this and if that's true, its angles must have filtered through to him by cultural osmosis. It's good spooky fun, and Price deserves the last word. He described Vincent as 'the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality: better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard.'

Frankenweenie (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Grave (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guy Knows Everything (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost (1901)

Director: Walter R Booth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Memory Ride (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Memory Ride can be viewed for free on Vimeo.