Stake Land (2010)

Director: Jim Mickle
Stars: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Michael Cerveris, Sean Nelson, Kelly McGillis and Danielle Harris

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

No, this isn't a vampire version of Zombieland, a much more prominent film with a much bigger budget that was released the year before. However there are similarities if we ignore the tone and the money. At $625,000, this didn't cost much more than the rounding error introduced if I cited Zombieland as costing $24m instead of $23.6m, while the tone is utterly serious, with no Bill Murray cameo, no Twinkie search and no David Letterman-esque list of rules. Otherwise, it might feel familiar, as the plot has a young man taken under the wing of a pseudonymous anti-hero experienced in the art of hunting monsters, so they can travel through the remnants of America in search of somewhere safe where they can live free of the plague that's taken down the nation. On the road, they encounter a number of other survivors, good and bad, who shape their journey. Zombieland would feel like a spoof of Stake Land, if only it hadn't arrived first, while its more serious twin, The Walking Dead, didn't launch until a month after this film.

Even though this is a vampire picture, I was surprised to find that it started with vampires, or at least a vampire hunter, as the religious subtext is so prominent that I expected to find that the genre side grew out of it. The writers, Jim Mickle (who also directed) and Nick Damici (who stars as that pseudonymous anti-hero), had served the same roles on an even lower budget post-apocalyptic movie in 2006. Mulberry Street, which also avoided zombies in favour of mutant ratmen, cost only $60,000 but garnered a host of great reviews from the genre press. Eager to work together again, they thought up a web series that they could shoot on weekends for cheap and wrote forty eight-minute scripts that actor turned producer Larry Fessenden suggested should be turned into a feature instead. He strongly affected the development of the tone too, pressing Mickle to give it a heart and emphasise feelings of isolation over bloodshed. 'It's a road movie and a western,' he told the New York Times. 'It should never be horror for horror's sake.'

What came much later was the religious angle which infects the film like a virus. Initially they just aimed for something that felt real, rather than make another movie with what Mickle described to Crave Online as 'super over-stylized over-choreographed zombie vampire action'. They also wanted a post-9/11 feel as they remembered the way that everyone came together then rather than bicker the way they tended to do in such situations on film, but perhaps inevitably, 'the extremists come along and fuck it up.' I found the religious angle stronger than anything here because it grounds this approach. With the country they know gone, people team up to try to rebuild what they know and love and they often make a pretty good go of it, but there's always someone out there who takes it in another direction. We hear old time gospel music before we even see a visual in this movie, so it's no surprise to find so many religious references dotted throughout and religious extremists hijacking the plot just as they try to hijack the survivors in it.

First we're introduced to the little picture. Martin, a telling name for a lead character in a vampire movie, is a young man who lives with his parents who are massacred by a vampire shortly into the apocalypse, even as the radio is explaining what's coming and they're preparing to escape it. He's saved by Mister, a passing vampire hunter who lends a hand. It shrugs off a pitchfork through the neck, a shotgun blast and a pounding by a car bonnet. It doesn't survive the stake that Martin pounds into its heart though. It's one heck of a coming of age moment for Martin, who then has to witness his father ask Mister to save him as the last words before he's taken down too. It's a bloody, horrific and traumatising wake-up call, one that's emphasised by the training opportunity that Mister gives him as we build to the opening title. He traps a vampire in the boot of his car, then dresses Martin up in American football armour and gives him a spear to defend himself. 'Welcome to Stake Land, kid,' he tells him as he opens the boot.

We're given no explanation of why this apocalypse came about, thrown into this new world just as Martin is. All he and Mister know is to keep travelling north, to escape the chaos that the southern states turned into. 'Cults spread like wildfire,' Martin tells us, 'waiting for the messiah, but he never came. Death came instead. He came with teeth.' North is where the possibly mythical New Eden is supposed to be, which is the only real hope they can cling to. They avoid the cities, of course, taking the back roads and spending time with the clumps of civilisation which banded together to survive. For a while they fall into a routine. They keep on northward. They pick up supplies wherever they can find them. Mister trains Martin as best he can, both combat training and survival skills. Each is as important as the other in this post-apocalyptic landscape where you can starve as easily as you can fall prey to a vampire. In fact, the numbers we see suggest that the former is even more likely than the latter.

And always there's that religious undercurrent. The shots of abandoned America are evocative ones, the location scout perhaps doing as important work as the set decorator. I'd guess that the latter is the most responsible for the little notes and signs we see everywhere, like one reading 'And God Smote the World Asunder' that decorates a corpse hanging by a roadside, but they're so quintessentially southern gothic that many could well be real. In another time, so would the corpses. We see a lot of religious people and religious signs. We see religious communities, which are usually seen in a more cynical light than those comprised of people banding together for the common good. The cynicism is encapsulated into Martin's observation that, 'In desperate times, false Gods abound. People put their faith in the loudest preacher and hope they're right.' Here, in a horror take on a western road movie, that extends to the Brotherhood, a fundamentalist militia which sees vampires as sent by God to cleanse the world for them.

When the religious subtext reaches the point where a pair of these Brotherhood nutjobs attempt to rape a nun, we can't help but believe that it's no longer a subtext, it's the text. Vampires are merely a means to tell it. This nun, known only as Sister, is a key player in the film, even as she flits peripherally through it. She escapes her would be rapists when Mister kills them both without warning. Unfortunately, one of the pair turns out to be the son of Jebedia Loven, leader of the Brotherhood, which prompts the redirection of their trek north for a while. The actress in the nun's habit is also the most famous name in the film, Nick Damici building his reputation here and Connor Paolo best known at this point for a supporting role in the TV show, Gossip Girl. Horror fans ought to recognise Danielle Harris, though Mickle knew her more from sitcoms. Sister, however, is played by Kelly McGillis, looking more like my mum than the hot chick in Top Gun. This marked her return to the big screen after nine years and she brought some power with her.

Not everything is solid. Some scenes are too obviously set up, like the little girl vampire hiding upstairs in a house they stay in. Some of the effects work is obvious, such as a bloody cross carved into a back to be a homing beacon for vampires clearly not breaking the skin in the slightest. The camerawork is strong for the most part, with a lot of good composition of frame, but occasionally it aims for a gritty feel with some handheld footage that actually distracts instead of helps. Unfortunately, this tends to be married to dark scenes, which become doubly awkward, though flares do help. The pace is slow, deliberately so but with the inevitably depressing tone and the sadness inherent in Martin's narration, even when he's aiming at hopeful, it can be a little much. Strangely, the second half is slower than the first, though perhaps this is partly due to the progression of their trek north and the focusing of the dangers around them from wider, open ones to narrower, more defined ones. Some of these dangers are not surprising at all.

For the most part though, this is a capable, thoughtful and well grounded attempt to recount the zombie apocalypse without zombies and, in a major way, not even as a horror movie. The vampires aren't really villains, they're just obstacles. The real villains are the religious nutjobs, who manipulate a disaster into their own personal deliverance and, in so doing, only serve to make survival even tougher for the decent folk who try to salvage something of civilisation for the future. Change the vampires into aliens and it's a sci-fi movie; into Apaches and it would be a straight western; into sharks and you'd have a SyFy Channel Original. It's really a drama surrounding the universal quest for a better life, with a strong anti-religious undercurrent. This makes it a clear analogy for modern America, even more so than on its release four years ago. The good news for those of us living here is that there is always hope; the bad is that happy endings aren't always what we expect. Respect is due for that observation as much as for the film.

Key sources:
Eric Kohn - A Kingmaker in the Realm of Cheapie Horror (New York Times)
Fred Topel - Stake Land's Jim Mickle Talks Vampires (Crave Online)

The People vs George Lucas (2010)

Director: Alexandre O Philippe

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

One of the most unconventional documentaries on film, The People vs George Lucas isn't successful at all it aims to do but it's an interesting ride nonetheless and it's only going to become more relevant over the coming decades. Right now, many of the arguments that director Alexandre Philippe hauls out of the nerd forums or convention panels to which they've long been relegated are, for the most part, only about Star Wars, details that only the most dedicated fanatics really care about. Yet, as technology progresses and a wider set of filmmakers, distributors and copyright holders continue precedents set by George Lucas, this will become a much wider issue. It's already becoming a much wider issue and these arguments will only become more relevant and more important to mainstream culture and the ongoing fight to preserve it for the public domain. In many ways, Philippe is documenting the easy to discount tip of an iceberg that will over time become a serious danger to how we interact with culture.

The biggest problem his film has is that it's far from impartial. It's not really propaganda, but it finds itself unable to stay in the middle ground because there is no middle ground. There's the side of the public, the consumers, the creators of culture and then there's the side of the corporation, which exists only to make money off art. Before Star Wars, when George Lucas was an auteur filmmaker, shooting features like THX 1138 and American Graffiti, he was on the same side as us. He was a lucky film nerd who got to play with the biggest and best electric train set of them all, to paraphrase Orson Welles, which is Hollywood. After Star Wars, however, he gradually became the thing he most hated: he became the corporation. In 1988, when Ted Turner was releasing colorised versions of classic black and white films, Lucas testified to the United States Congress to push for legislation that would preserve cultural artefacts like films so that the public, who eventually owns them, would continue to be able to see them as they were intended.

He was lucid and convincing. 'A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain,' he outlined. 'American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history.' He even went so far as to suggest that, 'People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.' Yet his words weren't heeded, nor were the words of many of his esteemed colleagues. While the US did eventually recognise the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, it did not apply it to movies because of the collaborative nature of their creation. Therefore, ironically, his failure to persuade the American government to protect motion pictures is the only reason that he was then able not only to fundamentally change the Star Wars films but also to suppress their original versions, thus effectively changing history. Unfortunately, George Lucas only appears here in archive footage. He is not present to put his new case against his old self.

Like the Star Wars films, it's phrased like a trilogy. The first episode, A Nerf Herder from Modesto, is by far the most conventional, outlining where Star Wars came from and how George Lucas got to that point. It's also the least substantial, skimming the surface to get through the material quickly. Where it starts to find validity is in explaining how and why the first Star Wars movie was fundamentally different from anything else that had come before. To do so, it casts its net particularly wide, hauling in writers like Joe Haldeman and Neil Gaiman; the editor of Empire and the director of Troops; fans from Spain, Japan or the UK; a very wide range of interview subjects indeed. The key, it appears, is the unprecedented merchandising, which transformed it from merely a feature film into what Henry Jenkins describes as 'participatory culture'. The clips from fan films and productions, old and new, obscure to Star Wars Uncut, are another plus point, as they all serve as a substantial underline to the point that Philippe is making.

Unfortunately and inevitably for one short segment in an hour and a half feature, it merely scratches the surface. I'd like to have seen more than teasing frames of Lucas's early short films. I'd like to have seen a good deal more than one line of dialogue about his relationship with Francis Ford Coppola. I'd like to have seen more about his struggles with the mainstream studio system and his part in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, but that's a different movie. It seems fair to forgive Philippe for avoiding a detour into territory that deserves its own documentary (and has it, in the 2003 adaptation of Peter Biskind's excellent book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). However, on the flipside, he can't then get away with extending his sweep of Star Wars fan films into Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. I'm very thankful to him for making that production known to the world at large, me included, but it stands out as footage that should have been better used by more to the point material. It's far from the only instance of that here too.

If there's material in the first section that seems superfluous, that's not the case with the second. When Philippe introduces the New Edition of A New Hope that Lucas released to theatres in 1997 in The Great Tinkerer, the aptly named second section, things get very serious very quickly and The People vs George Lucas suddenly finds itself. While the archive footage Lucas pushes this as what he'd always aimed to do but didn't have the money twenty years earlier, everyone else in the film unites in opposition. Many are on board with the updating of the special effects or the fleshing out of backgrounds with new technology, which is what the publicity for this anniversary edition pushed, though others highlight how disrespectful this is to the original artists who won Oscars for their special effects work in 1977. However, the publicity didn't mention other changes and that's when the united front forms. 'The other versions will disappear,' Lucas said in an interview with American Cinematographer magazine and everyone hated him for it.

Every since that release, the fanboys have debated the pointless new scene to introduce Jabba the Hutt and decried the change that Han no longer shot first. The mainstream public laughs at this stuff, what an interview subject calls 'super nerd nitpicking over something that's not important.' But it is important. As another retorts, 'It's not geeky nitpicking when you go into the heart of a character and you do something that changes that character's dynamic. That's destroying story. That's betrayal.' I was especially taken by Steven Vrooman, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Texas Lutheran University. His take is that Lucas made a fan film, where he's uniquely the fan of his own work. In changing his own material, 'George Lucas took away your sandbox, he took away your colouring book and said, 'No, no no! It belongs to me again and I'm going to continue to rewrite my stories.'' Many comments stand out here like, 'It's going to take the edge of Star Wars and make it a safer, dumber place.' In other words, it's revisionism.

And here's where the film really ceases to be The People vs George Lucas, it becomes 1988 George Lucas vs 1997 George Lucas and all the many interview subjects who speak for The People are redundant. If the man himself testified to Congress to stop people like he would become doing what he would go on to do, we really don't need the reinforcement. I enjoyed it anyway, of course, because Philippe edits down crazy amounts of hours of footage to golden nuggets like, 'Thanks to Lucas, VHS is still alive.' One speaker here gloriously underlines the disconnect between the law and the moral high ground by explaining that fans created digital files from laserdiscs and released them for free online. 'Certainly this is illegal,' he points out, 'but from a moral standpoint they are preserving our cultural heritage.' And with a Lucasfilm letter stating that the original negatives were destroyed to make the New Edition, Philippe wisely quotes 1988 Lucas citing this precise future. 'Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten,' he testified.

This second section is so strong that it deserves to be its own documentary. In fact, it deserves to be this documentary, but it's sadly only a small part of it. It especially deserves to be this documentary because the discussion in how this shift in Lucas's morals happened leads to a natural conclusion, the matching bookend to the one that began the story with his early days. We see here that the change in his outlook coincided with him becoming the Man, the Machine, the Corporation he always hated. Rather than keep his burgeoning career as a massively important filmmaker going, he instead turned into 'a producer, an entrepreneur', 'the evil genius of marketing', the end result of what happened when 'the storyteller went away and the businessman took over.' We've now seen Lucas's story arc, his rise, his success and his fall, echoing Anakin to Vader, but Philippe has a different structure in mind that really prompts the beginning of a new documentary. His pivot, almost to the second, is the announcement of The Phantom Menace.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the second half of this film, especially the early parts that accompany the insane hype that surrounded the release of Episode 1. It's tough to imagine anything that underlines the success of Star Wars more than people lining up around the block to buy tickets to films they don't care about and that they won't even watch, only so that they can see the two minute trailer to The Phantom Menace. That's as eye-opening to me, writing in the age of YouTube, as the realisation that back in 1977, an underestimation of demand meant that fans bought empty boxes that would be populated by action figures later when the toy companies actually caught up with production. It's frankly hilarious to watch those who travelled from continent to continent to see Episode 1 being asked in line, 'What are you going to do if the movie really sucks?' That it wouldn't was a given, an article of faith. People were seriously going to enjoy a moment that they would be able to tell their kids about. How's that going now?

There are moments of substance in Revenge of the Geeks, about how people went back to see Episode 1 time and time again to come to terms with their abuse, to convince themselves that they had somehow missed a point first time around or to desperately hold on to the possibility that they might just come to like it, but mostly it's fluff compared to The Great Tinkerer section. In fact, the best parts of the second half emphasise or enhance it. Talk about Jar Jar Binks and racial stereotyping, mitichlorians and the shift from spirituality to biology, those sorts of slaps in the face pale when compared to the talk about control, like Lucas stating in interviews that he doesn't want anyone else messing with his stuff. What Philippe achieves here is to remind us that even The Star Wars Holiday Special should be preserved, as it isn't merely George Lucas's history, it's Jefferson Starship's, Art Carney's, American history. And George Lucas himself testified as much to Congress. Perhaps Philippe should have made a real trilogy.

George Lucas's testimony to the United States Congress in 1988 is preserved online with some context, at Saving Star Wars, an important site in the fight to preserve culture.

Recreation (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Charles Bennett, Helen Carruthers, Edwin Frazee and Edward Nolan

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

If Chaplin was experimenting with new approaches to cinema in The Face on the Barroom Floor, he surely wasn't experimenting with anything new at all with Recreation. While Chaplin newbies may get a kick out of it, being a six minute distillation of everything they might imagine a silent slapstick short to be, those who have seen any of his earlier Keystone films will disregard it because, hey, it's a six minute distillation of everything he'd already been doing over and over up to this point. Fans could describe it simply as yet another of his 'park comedies' and other fans would know exactly what unfolds. When Chaplin famously suggested that, 'All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl,' Recreation is the epitome of that comedy, merely with a sailor and a second policeman added for good measure. There's no doubt that it's the most predictable and familiar of Chaplin's Keystone films thus far with maybe only one single shot early in the film providing anything new, as Charlie considers suicide by drowning.

Advertising copy calls his character here a 'down-and-out young man who finds a new zest in life in park flirtations conducted with inimitable vigour and humour, in which the police materially assist.' That's an exaggeration, of course, as is the ensuing summary, 'A short but uncommonly good one', but it's not far off the truth if you visualise that description. It's the 'down-and-out' bit that stands out, because Chaplin is initially not merely the Little Tramp here, he's the suicidal Little Tramp. Resting one leg on top of the guardrail of a bridge, he uses both hands to attempt to lift the other to match it, so he can topple over and plunge to his doom. In a neat bit of physical humour, he inevitably ends up sprawled on the wrong side. He's about to take another shot when the inevitable pretty girl walks past and that's it for the real darkness in this film. For the rest, we're firmly back in routine slapstick territory, however much throwing bricks at people would be surely interpreted as a dark act rather than 'routine' today.

I should add that there's another form of darkness here, literal darkness, because the surviving copies of Recreation are, in the accurate words of Flicker Alley, 'fragmentary, very damaged or of terrible quality picture.' Restoration was performed from 'the most complete element available, a 16mm dupe negative held in the Blackhawk Film Collection, Los Angeles, completed by the only surviving fragment of a nitrate positive print held by the BFI National Archive in London.' They really aren't kidding about the quality, as I'm not even convinced that we're seeing the whole frame. That scene on the bridge, and those ensuing with Charlie and the pretty girl he plans to hit on, unfold with the tops of their heads chopped off by the top of the picture. This continues to be the case for a little while whenever anyone stands up, so we feel that we only see things properly when they're sitting down. Somehow that seems much more annoying than the washed out picture quality in which faces are reduced to vague blurs of white.

Of all the films Chaplin made at Keystone to suffer this particular fate, this one is perhaps the safest, as even audiences of the time clearly knew how generic it was. A few months after the picture's release, in January 1915, the British trade paper, Bioscope, suggested that, 'This quaint actor is here seen in one of his most typical parts.' More tellingly, the same review described the location of Westlake Park, renamed in 1942 to MacArthur Park, the one later commemorated famously in song by Jimmy Webb, as 'that very beautiful park, which seems to be most frequented by Keystone comedians'. With the suicide flouted, not one surprising moment can be found. The pretty girl is with a sailor, who's passed out on a park bench, so she moves to another where Charlie hits on her. When the sailor wakes, the two men have at it, from the initial standard slap, slap, duck, girl gets slapped by mistake routine to brick throwing time. When both are hit by enough bricks, a couple of Keystone Kops appear out of nowhere to get hit by bricks too.

The only surprising aspect, if you can call it that, is how quickly this all happens. Usually Chaplin had one whole reel to let this sort of thing take its course, but here he only had half that. Recreation ran 462 feet, which made it a 'split reel', six minutes of slapstick comedy distributed to theatres on the same film reel as a documentary short of similar length entitled The Yosemite, naturally about the national park, which sounds as generic in its own way. Given that the similarly generic title of this film would appear to have precisely nothing to do with the plot, clearly improvised during a one day shoot, I wonder what it aims to describe. Is it subversively suggesting that every Keystone character dreams only of chatting up a pretty girl, stealing her away from her boyfriend, throwing bricks at him, escaping from policemen and booting them into a lake? Or is it suggesting that Chaplin and his cast of lesser Keystone names were themselves indulging in a little recreation shooting something so basic so quickly?

When the picture quality kicks in, five minutes into the six, presumably from the BFI print, we're reminded just how much better Chaplin's Keystone shorts have played when not presented with washed out picture quality such as we remember from so many cheap public domain DVDs. It's a strange feeling to witness this change happen while we're actually watching one of these films, but the sudden shift in quality does bring back to mind that this may well seem far better if seen as it was intended. I believe that Recreation is a capable film that ably demonstrates Chaplin's mastery of the simple gags that constitute the building blocks of Keystone comedy, both as an actor and a director. While it's certainly an inconsequential and a redundant one to us today, given that we're able to watch all these gags time and time again in the films that came before this one, it may have been important to Chaplin at this point in his directorial career to knock out one of these just to prove to himself how easily he could do so.

If it was just an experiment to show how confident he was with the basics, it would seem appropriate that it was a one day location shoot with no other major Keystone names. The girl is Helen Carruthers, whose brief career from 1914 to 1915 was dominated by Chaplin pictures at Keystone. She appeared in thirteen of them, only eight short of her total. Her sailor boyfriend is Charles Bennett, who beat Chaplin to the big screen by two years and went on to major features like The Adventures of Robin Hood, Citizen Kane and Mrs Miniver, before his death in 1943, but only in bit parts. He was a lot more memorable playing George Ham, the cheap actor who looked like a romantic poet in The Property Man than in the overeager shot he gives his role here. That leaves only Edwin Frazee and Edward Nolan as the two Keystone Kops, the short one and the tall one respectively. Both were actors with short careers: Frazee shot 22 films in two years, Nolan only twelve, plus a single feature in 1920. Nine of Frazee's and eight of Nolan's were with Chaplin.

And that's about it. Being so relentlessly generic, there's very little of interest to add about Recreation, a film that could almost be entirely restored by copying and pasting scenes from other Chaplin Keystones together. With this picture quality, nobody would likely notice the difference. Is it worth mentioning that Chaplin's initial pratfall may well have influenced Buster Keaton, who performed the same move often in his career, which wouldn't begin for another three years? Is it noteworthy that there are two policemen in this film, rather than just one, and that they have a brief tussle of their own before teaming up to hone in on the real brickthrowers. Could it be important that when the short ends, as perhaps every one of these 'park comedies' ended, with people getting pushed, pulled and kicked into a lake, the end intertitle rolls with every single character in the film in the water? Only the first instance has any validity. This really is no great historical piece, it's just a solid example of the Keystone archetype conjured up in a single day.

Important Sources:
Anonymous review in Bioscope, 21st January, 1915
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Recreation can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive. Be aware that most instances of Recreation online are actually Charlie's Recreation, a reissue of an earlier film, Tangle Tangles.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version is now available in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

The Constant Epiphanies of Billy the Blood Donor (2007)

Director: Nathan Blackwell
Stars: Daniel Brodie and Lauren Henschen

One of the main reasons behind my reviewing an Arizona feature a week is that many of these films are worthy of being seen but nobody has a clue that they exist and I'm sure The Constant Epiphanies of Billy the Blood Donor is a great example. Most people within the Arizona film scene know of Nathan Blackwell; many know him from more than just his hilarious webseries, Voyage Trekkers. Yet those who want to go back to see how his earlier work led him to that point have only been able to see his short films thus far. Sure, they include gems like Masters of Daring, Zombie Team Building and Logan Must Make Star Wars, but there were features before them that have been insanely difficult to see. There's Forever Midnight, shot in 1999 on 16mm, and this film from 2007, which have both been teasing us from subsidiary pages at the Squishy Studios website. I finally got to see this at last year's LepreCon, at which Blackwell was a special guest, as he kindly allowed me to screen it after my set of sci-fi shorts.

Like most earlier films, it doesn't approach the quality of Blackwell's later work, but hey, some of the first few episodes of Voyage Trekkers don't approach the genius it later became either and they're still worth watching. Billy the Blood Donor is a much slower paced comedy than Blackwell fans will be used to, with lead actors who don't feel like lead actors, but it's full of clever dialogue and it goes somewhere I haven't seen before. You want a tagline to sum it up? How about this? It's an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? written by Franz Kafka. Perhaps the Czech master merely adopted a pseudonym of Logan Blackwell to write the play this was apparently based on. Certainly it feels like a play, with few and sparse sets for the actors to play in and a stronger focus on dialogue to drive things forward than on acting. Many of the Squishy Studios regulars appear here, though some are scarily young. Half the cast of Logan Must Make Star Wars are here, including leading lady Lauren Henschen, as utterly different as could be imagined.

As the title suggests, we're here to follow Billy Walbert, who is, let's face it, an utter dweeb. He's studying biology in college but doesn't appear to comprehend how to talk to girls, or anyone else for that matter. He's picked on ruthlessly by his brother. He can't wear a tie. He can't even sit on a couch with a cushion on it. He certainly can't hug, but hey, I get that one. He also only seems to own one shirt which at least cuts down on production budget. And yet, he's the hero of our story, because even if we can't find a way to identify with Billy personally, we can all identify with the situations he finds himself caught up in. One of the strongest aspects of the film is the frequency with which it hurls us into surreal scenarios that are as utterly recognisable from our lives as they are obviously exaggerated for comedic effect. Personally I haven't ever been hired by someone who asked no questions in my interview, then suggested I start in five minutes. However I certainly know people like the interviewer. 'Inarticulateness, that's interesting.'

Billy is one of those people who goes along with anything to make life easier. He goes to American Blood to give blood but ends up getting hired instead. And promoted. He's promoted before he even does any work by a man he's never met who talks to him over a speaker. Rochester, the man behind the company, tells him he loves him, tells him he's a fool, tells him to take the day off. Billy can only sit and gape, but that's what he does best in the world, that and allow people to run roughshod over him. In the morning after being hired, he shows up to a meeting where his boss points out that they'll need to close down as they've been haemorrhaging money. All it takes for that to turn completely around is for Billy to chime in with a hesitant, 'What about advertising?' They take that and run with it and, hey presto, Billy's now the Senior Assistant Manager. Well, for about five minutes. Then Rochester shows up and promotes him to Night-Time Manager. 'You'll need a suit,' he points out. 'Here, take mine.'

If this sounds surreal, you only know the half of it. Every scene is a fresh dose of weirdness for Billy, who can't even sit on his girlfriend's couch without her grabbing a phone call from the grocery store, lying to him about what was said and rushing out, to promptly disappear from the film for a while. He can't show up to work without being mobbed by potential blood donors who are there only because of him. And he certainly can't even go to his manager's office without being confronted by a strange man wearing dark glasses and drinking from an ornate, if plastic, goblet in a dim red-lighted basement. 'I've finally figured out where God's been hiding all these years,' he explains to Billy. 'Now I'm drinking his heart and I plan to become him by Memorial Day weekend.' We've only just passed the halfway mark and it's already gone from mild surreality to batshit craziness. The bad jokes this bizarre gentleman recounts in monotone are the most normal part of the whole affair and they still make us want to punch him.

The downside of the film is pretty obvious. The leads don't act so much as they float through the picture in a sort of dreamlike state of accepting bemusement. The more capable actors recognisable from a slew of short films from Squishy Studios, like Logan Blackwell, Craig Curtis and Gabrielle van Buren, are firmly stuck in supporting roles. The leads, Daniel Brodie and Lauren Henschen, were new faces to me until this year's Logan Must Make Star Wars, when Henschen returned to play Princess Leia as a southern gal. 'Y'all are my only hope!' she cries in that film, though she doesn't get remotely as emotional here, even when given a surreal scene of emotion to work with. The talky story is notably slow, weighed down by dialogue and built by stacking one surreal encounter on top of another until we can't help but wonder when it will all collapse in on itself like a giant game of Jenga. The sets are sparsely populated, which just returns us to the dialogue. With Logan Blackwell's source play so dominant, this could have played as well on radio.

However, bizarrely, the upside of the film isn't far different from the downside. Brodie and Henschen may float through the picture, but then so did Jeff Goldblum in Into the Night, as that was the whole point. Any other lead would have grounded Billy so well that he would have been completely out of place in the role. Any other leading lady would have grounded Sherry so well that she wouldn't have been believable with Billy. Putting these two in front of the camera, especially Brodie, and letting the movie happen to them is perfect. The slow pace may turn away many, but it aids the comic timing and emphasises the weirdness going down that piles on top of Billy layer by layer. As to the dialogue, that may well be overwhelming to some but it's what makes the film for me and, as natural as Brodie and Henschen are, they deliver their lines well, even ones like this one from Billy: 'I don't really know what sociology majors do except become sociology teachers who teach sociology students how to become sociology teachers.'

The Blackwells also gift their supporting cast plenty of little opportunities, most of them through making Billy thoroughly uncomfortable. There's a wonderful scene early on, as Billy signs up to give blood. He's already been inflicted with both an annoyingly cheerful nurse and an annoyingly dismissive one, but as they look over his test answers in silence, they play out the scene like he has Ebola or some other death disease, even bringing in a doctor to look at him with worried eyes too. Yet it's only them discovering he doesn't have a job and so deciding to offer him one. This sort of thing happens throughout the film, with Billy stuck in situations that and in front of characters who make him nervous, belittle him, pressure him into doing things that he otherwise wouldn't, just to make the awkward moment go away. I'm sure I'm far from alone in saying that I certainly recognise many of these little moments that Blackwell's supporting cast play out wonderfully. The bastards.

If you've seen the trailer for Dumb and Dumber To and you're eagerly looking forward to it, then there's no way that this is a movie for you. The closest this gets to toilet humour is Billy's brother, heavily under the influence, calling him 'Farty the Space Age Dinosaur'. It's clever humour that explores a transparent mystery by floating a lead character who wouldn't say boo to a goose through surreal scene after surreal scene until he surely wonders if he's real or not. It would be accessible to anyone who's happy to forgive a microbudget for a clever script, but it's especially interesting to fans of Squishy Studios, who will see a whole host of regulars much earlier in their careers. While director Nathan Blackwell looks like he hasn't aged a day since his brief cameo in the Trunk Space scene, others look younger, Gabrielle van Buren so much so that she bizarrely only reminds of herself. It's definitely not up to what would come later and it would have benefitted from a budget and more pace, but it's still well worth a look for Squishy fans.

The Constant Epiphanies of Billy the Blood Donor is available to watch for free on YouTube.

An Encounter (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Max Mendoza, Trevor Robins, Ryan Horacek and Bill Wetherill

While Travis Mills selected short stories from a variety of authors and times to adapt for his 52 Films in 52 Weeks project, his choices were clearly centred on James Joyce. He started with a Joyce story, The Sisters, and he ended with a Joyce story, The Dead; in between, he adapted every other story in Joyce's Dubliners collection, first published in 1914. I'm not a huge fan of Joyce, if only because of personal bias: in telling quintessentially Irish stories at a time of nationalistic fervour, everything becomes inherently drenched in religion and all delineations are defined through prejudice. However, I can appreciate how good he was at capturing moments with his short stories, something that surely appeals to Mills, who does the same with his short films. Joyce often appears to ramble around a lot, only for us to realise that he merely paints his backgrounds first then gradually focuses in on an abstract moment that often proves universal. This one is no exception, as he sets up a single incident to emphasise the coming of age of his lead character.

In fact, An Encounter is so universal that it must have been one of the easiest of the 52 source stories to bring into the modern day. In the web series episode, Mills mentions how it reminded him of Stand by Me, one of his favourite movies. While both are quintessential coming of age stories, they're very different in their accessibility. Stand by Me is grounded in the little rituals that American kids go through, which often appear inexplicable to foreign eyes, a sort of junior version of John Ford's films, merely replacing square dances and social obligations with wedgies and mailbox destruction. An Encounter, on the other hand, is far more universal, its rituals as accessible as peer pressure and ditching school. Mills adds another here, that of stealing money from family members, but keeps his film as easy to approach as the story. All that he had to update were some minor details: a tanner becomes five bucks; the river Liffey, the lifeblood of Dublin, becomes a Salt River Project irrigation canal, the lifeblood of Phoenix.

Joyce's story follows three boys, young ones who are just reaching the age where rebellion is a draw, who decide to ditch school and travel to the Pigeon House, a famous Dublin landmark that was at this point in time a tuberculosis sanatorium built on reclaimed land in Dublin bay. Of course, nothing goes remotely as they expect. One of the three doesn't even show up and the other two don't make it to the Pigeon House, instead wandering around the docks and failing to find a dairy to buy milk. Eventually they settle down in a field by the banks of the Dodder, one of the Liffey's tributaries, where the encounter of the title occurs. A shabbily dressed man with a stick and an ashen-grey moustache walks past them, then returns to sit and chat with the boys about books and girls, how many of the former they've read and how many of the latter they have as sweethearts. He wanders off to relieve himself but comes back again, changed in his demeanour and ranting about whipping rough boys who talk to girls, a shocking end to their adventure.

Mills's film mirrors this relatively well. He sets three similar boys on a similar journey, though he adds one agreeable little detail in that the boy who doesn't show is the one who had pushed their adventure most emphatically. By comparison, Joyce's no-show is the one who he describes as 'fat' and an 'idler'. This little change heaps pressure on the two who go because they're the ones who are least confident, most out of their element. With no obvious equivalent in Arizona to the Dublin docks, Mills has these boys wander up a canal just to see where it goes, which is where they meet the unnamed bum played by Bill Wetherill. A regular face in Arizona film, Wetherill is a gimme for this role, looking drab but characterful in his beanie and eyepatch, shambling along with a limp. Like the man in Joyce's tale, he's initially friendly, sitting with the boys on the canal bank and telling them tall tales. After he drains his bladder onto a bush, though, he changes, mumbling and beating the ground with a long stick. It's a neatly scary moment.

Of course, the whole point is that these kids believe themselves grown up, ready to be part of the world, but this encounter strongly disavows them of that notion. It's not a deep story, which is probably why this adaptation runs a short four and a half minutes, but it carries a resonance that remains long after it ends; the inherently memorable nature of the encounter makes An Encounter one of the most memorable of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks. The kids are believable, Max Mendoza in particular able to conjure up a strong reaction at the end, but it's Wetherill's show. He's reliable at not looking entirely there and he believably vanishes inside himself to rage at unknown targets, perhaps his own character, while the boys react as if they're in danger. His presence is aided by the fact that the film mostly plays with music and a narration by Mills himself rather than dialogue, so this last sound scene is emphasised. A shift to handheld close ups, rather than the longer shots thus far, also builds this finalé. It's a memorable encounter indeed!

The Face on the Barroom Floor (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Cecile Arnold and Jess Dandy

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

It has to be said that The Face on the Barroom Floor is one of Chaplin's weaker films, but it does carry some interest because of what he tried to achieve. It pays homage to the Keystone formula, but without really following it. Sure, Chaplin plays a drunk for the umpteenth time, but this time he's one with a real story to tell for a change. Things escalate towards the end of the film with some slapstick fighting, but it could hardly be called a standard Keystone ending, with no chase, no cops and no bricks thrown. It's all familiar material but it's presented in a completely different way with a completely different framework. It's a short comedy based on a poem, which is both seriously interpreted and parodied on screen, with the very last line transformed into a gag. It seems tailor made for Chaplin's Little Tramp, but it predates him by decades. Perhaps the fact that Chaplin adapted it to the screen soon into the period at Keystone when he had relative creative freedom suggests that it may have been an inspiration for his character.

The poem is by Hugh Antoine d'Arcy, French by birth, who came to the United States via England, where he studied at Ipswich University and became an actor at Bristol's Theatre Royal and later in London. He gave up acting in the States, becoming instead a business manager, taking care of other stage actors of renown. It was in 1887 that he wrote The Face Upon the Floor, a poem in ballad form which saw its first publication that year in the New York Dispatch. While it's far from great literature, it immediately caught on, becoming the title piece in The Face Upon the Floor and Other Ballads, a 1890 collection of d'Arcy's work, a year after being anthologised in Standard Recitations. Maurice Barrymore, the patriarch of the Barrymore acting dynasty that was stage royalty at the time and is still notable today, regarded it as a favourite recitation of his. It was also promptly adapted into song under its current title, possibly in a cunning attempt to evade d'Arcy's copyright.

The origin of the story is utterly unproved, but d'Arcy claimed that it originated in truth. As he told it, he was at a bar in Manhattan called Joe Smith's when a bum entered and was promptly evicted. Feeling for the man, d'Arcy followed him to give him a drink and some money and, when he asked what the man did for a living, was told that he was an artist. Thus arrived the inspiration for the poem about an artist who turned to drink because he lost Madeline, the love of his life, to a friend who had also modelled for him. Quite why it touched a nerve I have no idea, but it prompted a few films, with or without a hyphen in the title. Certainly at least three were based directly on the poem: the first was by Edwin S Porter at Edison's company in 1908, Chaplin's parody followed in 1914 with a lost hour long feature from John Ford arriving in 1923 at Fox. Later pictures also carried the name, but are less likely to be direct adaptations from the poem than melodramas inspired by it and its ironic adoption by prohibitionists.

Chaplin's take on the poem looks relatively standard to us today, but it was a real departure for him back in 1914. He plays the lead, of course, the drunk staggering into a bar and asking for someone to foot him a drink because he used to do that for others. In return he tells them a story, the story of how he came to be in such a state, the story that's recounted in the poem. What's new is that we see this in flashback, an approach that Chaplin had never used before and, according to Jeffrey Vance, would only use twice more in the future, in 1918's Shoulder Arms and in Limelight, released an entire era later in 1952. Even within the flashback, things look notably different from anything seen in his Keystone films thus far. We're on a static set, of course, but it's designed with far more elegance than was the norm. It's shot from an angle, for a start, and its shape doesn't follow the usual right angles. There's a staircase at the back of the room, at least some of whose stairs are real, and the set decoration is done with a careful eye.

He's a neat painter, retaining the toothbrush moustache but in a much nicer suit with a bow tie, and he's painting his lady love, Madeline, though her pose isn't what's showing up on his canvas. Then again, the addition we watch him make isn't her at all, but an imaginary urn on a stand in front of her that evolves from her curvacious rump. There are a few minor gags here but it's mostly played straight. When we return to the flashback to watch him paint 'a fair haired boy, a friend of mine', the humour comes less from gags and more from the fact that he's played by the rotund and far older Jess Dandy, with precious little hair at all, so that the idea that Madeline might fall for his 'dreamy eyes' is at once ludicrous and far more painful for the artist who can't help but compare himself to his former friend and wonder at how he came off second best. Cecile Arnold, who had debuted as one of the dancers in The Property Man earlier in the month, makes Madeline look like a Hollywood starlet; Jess Dandy looks like a fatter Hercule Poirot.

I have to admit I got a mild kick out of Chaplin's first attempt at parody. The humour is more subtle and sophisticated than anything else Keystone was turning out, pointing the way firmly towards the future. Even though the tramp isn't a tramp for even half the picture, his character is built to ensure at least as much sympathy as laughs from the audience, if not more. While there's always another laugh about to arrive, there's a lot more drama here than we're used to in these Keystone pictures; Chaplin was clearly experimenting to see what other emotions he could draw out of his audience. And while this never aims to be another laugh a minute slapstick riot of the sort that Mack Sennett expected, it is funny in its way. Both the last points are ably highlighted by the scene we see after Madeline leaves with the 'fair haired boy' and the neatly dressed artist turns into the tramp we know in the park we know. Sitting on a bench, he's passed by his friend with Madeline and five children in tow. He clearly thinks Charlie has it better.

And so we reach the title, at which point the parody reaches its peak. Already Chaplin has manipulated the poem for comedic effect and added extra scenes to enforce that take, but here he has a blast. In the poem, the artist takes a piece of chalk 'to sketch a face that well might buy the soul of any man' there on the bar-room floor, but adding 'another lock upon that shapely head, with a fearful shriek, he leaped and fell across the picture - dead!' Needless to say that's not how it goes down in Chaplin's version. Finding it difficult to even reach the floor, the staggering drunk draws a face so stunningly generic that his fellow drinkers kick him out of the bar, generating at least an approximation of the riotous finalés that Sennett tended to expect at his studio. Of course, he gets back in to finish up his picture and collapse dead upon it, but Chaplin adds a further word to the last line. He's not dead, he's just dead drunk. He was always a particularly acrobatic drunk and he collapses impressively here over his childlike work.

That's about it for Chaplin's film, certainly a more interesting entry in his Keystone filmography than an entertaining one, if one that deserves a better reputation than it's garnered. There is a further episode in the poem's history though that has outlasted Chaplin's parody, even if the story behind it is told in many different ways. An illustrator for the Denver Post by the name of Herndon Davis really did paint a face on the bar-room floor of the Teller House in Central City, CO, in 1936, which became a tourist attraction that in turn inspired a chamber opera by Henry Mollicone. Some versions suggest that he did so to provide a punchline to an itinerant actor's frequent recitation of the poem there, an added joke being that it was the face of his own wife, Juanita, who was a prohibitionist. Others suggest that it was an attempt to leave something of him behind after a heated argument there with a local lady with much influence, before he left Colorado. Whatever the truth, it's sad that more see Davis's painting each year than Chaplin's film.

Important Sources:
Bart Anderson - Whose Face is It?
Martin Gardner (ed) - Famous Poems from Bygone Days (1995)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Face on the Barroom Floor can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in August.

The Death Factory Bloodletting (2008)

Director: Sean Tretta
Stars: Claudia Vargas, Noah Todd, Shane Dean, Kareem McRoy, David C Hayes, Jeanna Coker, Josh Bingenheimer, Timothy Pontecelli, Joth Andrews, Nadine, Shareese Hegna, and Michelle Mousel

The Prometheus Project may well be Sean Tretta's most ambitious feature and Death of a Ghost Hunter may be his most consistent work thus far, but both titles are likely to be lost to future pictures. As M is for Matchmaker, his top 12 entry to the ABCs of Death 2 competition last year highlights, his work is notably getting better. Somehow though, I don't believe The Death Factory Bloodletting will ever lose its throne as his guilty pleasure picture. It's not a great film by any measure, though it is in a whole different league to Death Factory, its vaguely related predecessor, but it throws enough edgy material at the wall for a whole dubious bunch of it to stick. Certainly when I think of a number of the film's actors, the twisted characters they play here are the ones that spring quickest to mind, however much I see those actors in other, often better films. Shane Dean has made movies as impressive as Deadfall Trail and David C Hayes has been in every other Arizona feature of the last decade, but these are their archetypal screen characters.

For half its running time, The Death Factory Bloodletting is a massive amount of fun, precisely the sort of film that generates a cult following, its fatal flaw being that it runs out of steam, feeding that first half so well that there's relatively little left for the second half, which drags quite a bit and so loses our attention. It takes very little to figure out what went wrong: just basic quantifying of how much awesome populates the first half and then trying to figure out what's left in the second. The problem isn't that the second half is filler, it's just inherently less interesting because most of the cool aspects have been dealt with already and what's left is unable to drive the film forward. Trying to reedit this down to an hour by chopping away half an hour of less interesting material wouldn't do the trick; Tretta would need to replace it with footage that bulks up all the characters who don't make it that far, footage that was probably never shot. His error was simply to make his disposable characters so interesting that we missed them when they were gone.

We quickly meet the ostensible good guy and bad guy. Ana Romero is the good guy who's documenting a journey for posterity, one that she knows she may not survive. She'll be attending an event known as the Bloodletting, the ritualistic murder of a young woman known only as the Object. Denny is the bad guy, as he's running it, even though he seems to be a highly unstable religious freak who wants to help homeless people but kills them instead when he thinks they're doing drugs. The Bloodletting is as secret as it could be. You can't even get invited unless you're a major trader in illegal material who lives on the darknet. If you're invited, you'll have to pay a couple of grand to get in and you'll have no guarantee of getting out again. Bloodletting minions will duct tape your mouth, tie your hands and throw you in the back of a van, so you can wait in an undisclosed location until everyone is present to hear the rules read. If you leave, you die. Make the guy in the balaclava nervous, you die. Clearly this event isn't for the fainthearted.

Of course, none of the characters who have signed up for this treat are remotely fainthearted, not least Ana Romero, who's on a revenge kick. Someone murdered her daughter and, years of wallowing through online filth at a site called the Gorehouse later, she believes she's figured out who it is, so she's coming to the Bloodletting to take him down with extreme vengeance. She's played well by Claudia Vargas, who has racked up surprisingly few credits, given that she gets a lot more screen time and opportunity than the other actors with few films behind them. Given that the framework calls more for individualism and character from Bloodletting attendees than any particular acting talent, I'm surprised that most of them weren't tasked with doing more than a token scene or two. We're given ideas about who these folk really are through simple interaction after the opening credits, but they're introduced properly twenty minutes in, online text giving us names, Gorehouse handles and tastes, while they back it all up verbally.

They're a varied set of freaks, as you might expect. Henry Becker aka White Manson is a Neo-Nazi white supremacist who's also into 'rape, underground fights, snuff, no big deal.' Not happy to be in the same room with him is Jerome Larson, or Black Johnson, an African American white slave trader with a female export business down in Atlanta. Patricia Snyder is Slutty Baby, a high priced call girl who sees this as a little balance after what her clients do to her for money. Bobby Shupe is the notably nerdy Cock-Master, an anarchist who's planning to commit a major killing spree someday. Hansel and Gretel are a dom/sub pair, though it's the latter who's clearly in charge, very much into F on M sodomy; they get off on places where people have died. Charles Donnely is Rubber Love, a very meticulous paedophile who's aiming to broaden his horizons. And Ana Romero is Massive 9, the biggest trader on Gorehouse, who did all of it to track down Rubber Love for a little motherly vengeance.

While there are a lot of introductions here, they run smoothly because everyone's so easy to delineate and because Tretta and his crew refuse to let anything slow down long enough to be boring. The editing is fast, without approaching the rapid fire craziness of today, the camera is usually moving and there's a staticky industrial soundtrack peppering emphasis behind the dialogue. The soundtrack is hallucinatory, especially as the film moves on, combining TV evangelism, pulsing ambient weirdness and Denny's odd, rambling commentary into something that's equally sacred and profane and wouldn't have been out of place on a crazy public access show. While the actors were cast as much for their unique looks as their acting talent and the visuals are particularly strong in these early stages, I wonder how this movie might play as an entirely audio experience. I especially wonder how people who haven't seen the film might imagine the character of Alexa, the flesh eating creature who returns from the original Death Factory.

In fact, Alexa may well be the only element to return from the original film. There, Alexa was a chemical plant worker, who, after exposure to a radioactive leak, turned into a demonic Goth chick with sharp teeth and unwieldy metal contraptions on her arms that make her fingernails deadly weapons. Most of this was changed for the sequel: the eighties goth look was replaced by longer hair and a fetishistic leather outfit of straps; instead of being a wild urban legend on the loose, she's a monster manipulated animalistically by noise from Denny's control room; and she's much quicker and less awkward. She's even portrayed by a new face, Michelle Mousel, especially surprising as the original actress, Tiffany Shepis, had, since the first film, become Mrs Sean Tretta, the wife of the director of its sequel. The only aspect to work less well here is Alexa's contact lenses, which look cheaper this time out. Otherwise, even the blood shed is more effective with plenty of arterial spray, though gore is oddly minimised by the camera looking away.

While the set up is notably innovative, light years ahead of the by the numbers approach of the original film, it's not too surprising to see how it all unfolds. It's not even surprising to see how the various guests wait for the action to begin, though we're hardly looking for surprises at this point. Rubber Love quietly contemplates the image of the Object, David C Hayes as fundamentally creepy here as he's ever been, which is saying something. Gretel takes Slutty Baby for a coked up lesbian sex session in the bathroom, while Hansel, easily the most disposable of the characters, is shredded by Alexa while he investigates a strange noise. After that, Black Johnson and the Cock-Master look for a way out, only to find an electrified fence. Massive 9 naturally focuses on her real quest, which doesn't quite go the way she expects. Tretta, who wrote the screenplay with Mike Marsh, inserts a few twists which work for the most part, especially early on and especially around her. Of course, people die, frequently and not always at Alexa's hand.

And here lies much of the problem. Every time a character dies, their potential story arcs evaporate and they're missed, even if they were only providing decoration. Claudia Vargas does well in an odd lead role with a surprising amount of substance, but she's far from the most memorable of the characters and Ana outstays her welcome, her story extending only to embrace further twists for us to care progressively less about. By comparison, Jeanna Coker and Nadine are massively less substantial as Slutty Baby and Gretel, presumably cast from outside the film world, but they look freakily awesome and they could have spiced up more scenes than they were allowed. Timmy Ponticelli is no actor either, but he's perfectly cast as Sid, Denny's mindless paeon of a cousin who's clearly in thrall to him. No offence to Ponticelli intended, but if he's given a story arc then why couldn't one be given to Coker or Nadine? I'd much rather watch the hot blonde chick and the freaky dominatrix, however much they need acting classes.

With most of the characters gone by the halfway point, much of our interest in the film wanes. Many of them never got story arcs, just the opportunity to decorate the screen for a little while, and only one was ever in our sympathies, so we do wonder who we're supposed to care about. While we had sympathy for Ana, her story arc appears to end and we find ourselves unsure as to why she's still in the movie. Alexa is the monster of the piece, but she only has presence, never character, and she's a monster who's more of a victim than anyone else in the film. Sid is a question mark but he can barely function. Denny is the loon in charge of the show, so we know he has activity coming but we don't really care. The most watchable of the characters turns out to be White Manson, who gives Shane Dean's famous arrogant grin a chance to manifest itself as a character all of its own. Once Hayes is gone from the film, it's Dean's to dominate and he has no problem doing precisely that, however freakily cool Mousel looks as Alexa.

At the end of the day, half of this film is an underground cult gem but the other half is a slow wait to see if there's anything still worth watching. Even with that massive flaw, it's a league above the film it claims to be a sequel to. With a new location and a complete set of new characters, this is hardly a sequel, more of a completely new story that could be said to be set in the same universe as Death Factory, given that one character reappears. However, with Alexa so wildly different, utterly silent and never a driving force, that becomes a real stretch. This is therefore a sequel in name only, existing entirely to capitalise on the success of Death Factory, which was popular for reasons I still can't quite fathom. I've been wracking my brain to see if I can think of another such blatant cash-in that even reached its predecessor in quality and I'm coming up dry. This, however, exceeds it so effortlessly that it's hardly worth the comparison. It's just a shame that it fired all its rounds so quickly and couldn't find a way to effectively rearm itself.

The Return (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Star: Michael Hanelin, Stacie Stocker, Bailey Stocker and Tony Sarnicki

The fifth of Running Wild's contemporary adaptations of public domain short stories is one of the oddest of them all, because of what it attempts, what it ignores, what it does and what it has no interest at all in doing. The source is an 1897 story by Joseph Conrad, which at over 20,000 words is notably longer than the first four stories Travis Mills adapted put together, but very little happens in it, at least that could be easily translated to the screen. Physically it unfolds within a single room in a single house, mostly in the form of a conversation between a couple who had been married for five years; she left a note explaining that she's leaving him, but then promptly returned while he was still absorbing the news, apparently not willing or able to go through with her plans for reasons that are never explained. However, the real story unfolds in Alvan Hervey's head, as he tries to wrap his head around it. 'He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil,' wrote Conrad, and the story is his response to that.

Given that what drives the story isn't the fact that Hervey's wife left him but that she returned, it's a trip to realise that Mills removed the return entirely from this adaptation of The Return. Sure, Alvan Hervey is updated to become Martin Klinger, whose wife e-mails him at work to tell him that she's leaving, but the script departs from the source story at that point, except for its concentration on Klinger's wild struggles to come to terms with what's just happened. While we soon see a lot of Chelsea Klinger, not to mention their daughter, a character who doesn't exist in the story, we never once see either of them for real, as each scene is conjured up inside Martin's mind as he searches for some sort of understanding of what their relationship really was. In ignoring almost the entire story and removing the event of its title, Mills ambitiously concentrates on what Conrad was aiming for, namely an exploration of emotion within the descriptive language for which he was known and which is incredibly difficult to adapt to film.

Running less than seven rushed minutes, it makes a pretty decent attempt to adapt the claustrophobic and hallucinatory tone of much of Conrad's fiction into visuals. One of my favourite lines from Conrad is one from The Secret Agent where he described a street as 'a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.' It's a magnificently concise setting that reeks of oppression, but it would take a budget far more substantial than anything Running Wild can bring to bear to show that as well on screen. This sort of thing is very apparent in The Return, which means that, for instance, Mills is tasked with visualising a sentence like, 'He walked at her, raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides he lost touch of the material world and was whirled interminably through a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till he came suddenly upon her face—very close to his.' Such a task would stretch the likes of a master, but Mills does give it an interesting go.

He does it through a combination of close-up shots, fast paced editing and hand held camerawork, which combine into a strong sense of urgency. The first thing we see is Michael Hanelin's face, as he wills a mail to show up in his inbox, albeit not the one he gets. If that's a close-up, the next shots are closer, because they only depict halves of faces, more like chads than the zooms we see in Carl Theodor Dreyer. When we see the Dear John mail from Chelsea, we only see fractions of it, enough to catch phrases like 'I'm going', 'I'm leaving' or 'I'm sorry' without the need to highlight them. Then Martin rushes home, in rapid fire cuts that do far more than crop his journey, they suggest that his mindset precludes him from experiencing it himself. The handheld camera takes over, staying as close as it can as he rages around, emphasising his bewilderment. To highlight how quickly these emotions are running wild (pun clearly intended) inside his head, a whole host of shots begin out of focus and rush quickly into it, only to cut to another.

It's ironic that I most want to praise Rolo Tomassi here, the Running Wild editor, given that it's a clearly a pseudonym borrowed from LA Confidential, where it was used to subvert a screen adaptation by cropping out hundreds of pages of source material and allowing it all to move in a completely unfaithful direction. I have no idea who handles the role of Tomassi at Running Wild, or whether it's even the same person from one film to another, but whoever it was here did a great job. If it's Mills himself, he deserves extra praise for his work with the camera. The various experiments of this sort that pepper the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project which, after all, was an experiment to begin with, aren't always successful but they were a strong point in this entry. That's a good thing, because there's little here except the experimentation. Certainly, anyone wanting to see the source story on screen is going to be disappointed, even if they factor in the contemporary setting. You can't really have The Return without the return, after all, and it needs an end.

The key actors tasked with bringing this one to life are used to Mills's experimentations. Michael Hanelin, the Running Wild casting director, is the actor given the opportunity to bring life to Martin Klinger. In this adaptation, he's less an updated version of Alvan Harvey, given that he has neither his name nor any of his dialogue, and more of a similarly fraught bundle of emotions with a new name. Hanelin is powerful in what must have felt somewhat like a test scene performed for an acting class. Playing Chelsea is Stacie Stocker, who never disappoints, even with only a week to prepare, as she substituted here for an actress who baulked at the last minute from performing a (completely safe for work) scene with a vibrator; even bringing her real daughter, Bailey, to play her screen daughter. Surely less of a disaster than the rain that saw the last film become silent, Mills masochistically enjoyed the challenge. 'It's almost becoming fun,' he said in the accompanying webisode, 'to solve these problems.' And that's why 52 Films in 52 Weeks.

The Property Man (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin

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

Working through all Chaplin's 1914 films on the days they were originally released has ably highlighted just how many of them there were. Each time I reviewed one, my eye was already on the next as it was never far away. It was easy to think back to 1914, as the original audiences saw these films for the first time, watching this funny new face show up time and time again to establish a hold. His first three films arrived on cinema screens in the span of only eight days and, by 20th June, no less than twenty Chaplin films had been released. Even with an uncharacteristic 25 day gap between A Busy Day and The Fatal Mallet, that averages out to one every 6.9 days, an output faster than a weekly television show today. Yet his nascent career as a director started out much more slowly; Laughing Gas was released 19 days after Mabel's Married Life and The Property Man didn't show up for another 23. For the first time in this project, his previous film wasn't fresh in my mind as I watched the new one. At this speed, life got in the way.

Part of the reason for this delay is that, while most of Chaplin's earlier films were one reelers that took a week to put together, this was a two reeler that ran 24 minutes and took 16 days to shoot. It's not tough to figure out why, though, as this must have felt like an important movie to him. Certainly, to our century of hindsight, it points firmly towards the future far better than any of the pictures he'd made thus far, but it's also fundamentally rooted in his music hall past, most obviously the famous Mumming Birds sketch that he had performed on stage with Fred Karno's London Comedians, the very one that impressed Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand enough to hire him to replace Ford Sterling at Keystone. The part he played in Mumming Birds strongly influenced the characters he would play at Keystone, which is why he shows up drunk so often in 1914. However, The Property Man is sourced less from his character in Mumming Birds and more from the sketch itself.

Mumming Birds apparently grew out of a comedy written to entertain the Shah of Persia when he visited London in 1903, imaginatively titled Entertaining the Shah. It reached the music hall stage almost a year later, its name progressing within a couple of months from Twice Nightly through A Stage Upon a Stage to The Mumming Birds. It was still being performed on stage in the forties, billed as 'Fred Karno's Greatest Comedy' and with the tagline, 'The show that made Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy', as both Chaplin and Stan Laurel had played parts in it to great acclaim. The concept is one that we'd describe as 'meta' today, as the curtain would rise to show another stage, with some of the cast taking the role of players and others audience members. In the box to the left would be a public schoolboy and his guardian, with 'a drunken swell' on the right, Chaplin's preferred role. A string of incompetent performers attempt to do their thing but are constantly interrupted by the audience on stage in increasingly chaotic ways.

No wonder Sennett was hooked when he saw it under its touring title of A Night in an English Music Hall, as it sounds like a Keystone picture on stage. Of course, before hiring Chaplin away from Karno, Keystone would never have produced a film version quite like this. The Property Man has Chaplin's name all over it, even more as a writer than as an actor or director, because it's never just about a set of gags leading up to chaos, though they do reach that standard goal; it's about how those gags build and feed into others, it's about how better defined characters can render those gags funnier and it's about how a stronger setting can ground the whole thing and keep it funnier. While it's far from Chaplin's best picture, it's arguably his best thus far because it's consistent and interwoven. A Film Johnnie, The Star Boarder and Caught in the Rain hinted at this but were more Keystone than Chaplin. This is the other way around.

While The Property Man is clearly sourced from Mumming Birds, it's no direct adaptation. We do watch an audience watching an inept set of vaudeville acts, but the fun is less in their interactions with it and more in how the property man leads the troupe into chaos. He's played by Chaplin, of course, who is the lowest rung on this ladder except one, and that pecking order is established very quickly. In fact, that's the very basis of this film, differences in status always serving as a clear parallel to class differences in British entertainment. Surely this is how Chaplin expected to find sympathy for his character, though a century has rendered him rather more unsympathetic. Status is everything here. When a couple of new artistes arrive, he mostly ignores them because they're new and his status compared to theirs hasn't yet been established. He highlights the 'No Smoking' sign, though he's smoking a pipe himself. Yet he doesn't dare do the same thing to the strongman, an established opponent, so he flips the sign over instead.

In turn, this lazy, uncaring and sadistic property man takes out his frustrations on the only character who is lower than him. That's his assistant, who Josef Swickard, for comedic emphasis, depicts as an old man with a long beard who has to walk with the assistance of a cane, even when carrying heavy trunks on his back. Many have called this picture out as an especially cruel one in Chaplin's filmography, starting with Motion Picture World, when reviewing the film in 1914. 'There is some brutality in this picture,' said their critic, 'and we can’t help feeling this is reprehensible. What human being can see an old man kicked in the face and count it fun?' I don't buy this take, as the film's tone is notably less cruel than Mabel's Busy Day and everything serves a purpose. Details are either part of a bigger gag or they help to establish the pecking order. Even those kicks, while admittedly cruel, enforce rather than damage. This old man seems as indestructible as a cartoon which, as a character in a slapstick short, he's a forerunner to.

The scene most frequently called out for criticism finds the old assistant stuck under a particularly heavy trunk that he's carried downstairs. With the exception of a couple of those feet to the face, I found this a great example of an effective gag built out of equally effective smaller ones. When it happens, Charlie's first act is to strike a match on the trunk to relight his pipe, then he clambers on top of it in an attempt to lever it free, though naturally he only makes the situation worse. Getting nowhere, he breaks off at the call of the strongman's wife, with whom he happily flirts for a while. Soon most of the cast are involved in trying to free the old man, all of them getting precisely nowhere until the strongman is called. He takes it as yet another opportunity to show off, easily doing alone what half a dozen couldn't do together, thus reaffirming his position at the top of the pecking order. Swickard, on the other hand, merely portrays the character at the bottom of it, so any cruelty is really rooted in the inequality of the class struggle.

Even when we get past pre-show shenanigans and the 'Elite Vaudeville' performance begins, everything can be easily interpreted as depicting the lower class, in the form of Charlie the property man, getting one over on the upper class, in the form of the performers who have more status than him. The audience loved it, perhaps because they were predominantly made up of the lower class, as is ably depicted in the scenes involving the audience watching the performance. It may never have been a deliberate act on Chaplin's part, but it's telling today that the audience we see in the film is comprised of the old guard at Keystone. That's Mack Sennett himself in the front row, with his goofy grin, and a drunken Harry McCoy frequently asleep on his shoulder, while Slim Summerville and Chester Conklin are there as well. As with Mumming Birds, there's a lot of fun in seeing the audience's reaction to bad vaudeville performances or to Charlie inadvertently becoming part of the show, causing chaos or ogling the dancing girls.

While class was clearly the dominant theme of The Property Man, there's also a sense of time that comes from hindsight. It's a timely film for reasons beyond it being his first two reeler as a director and the proof that his work was benefitting from the creative freedom he began to find with his previous film, Laughing Gas. Music hall, or vaudeville in the States, had been the dominant form of entertainment for the masses since the 1830s and, while it would fall into the shadow of cinema and eventually television, it was about to reach its peak of popularity. The First World War broke out on 28th July, 1914, only four days before the release of The Property Man, and the music halls would serve as a rallying point for public support and a massively effective tool for the war effort, recruiting many through patriotic songs like 1914's Keep the Home Fires Burning. Chaplin wasn't as vocal about the conflict as he would be as the Second World War loomed. 'Everyone thought it would be over in six months,' he wrote in his biography.

Ironically, given that Chaplin came from music hall and was hired out of vaudeville by Sennett to become his new movie star at Keystone, his rise in cinema was mirrored by the decline of the music halls and the two ended relatively close together. It has been said that music hall ended with the death of Max Miller in 1963; at that time, Chaplin only had one more film in him, The Countess of Hong Kong, released in 1967. As this film brings to mind an end, it also brings to mind a beginning. While the film's finalé, in which the property man turns a firehose on both the stage and its audience, was set up for comedic effect, it has a lot of meaning. The hose is the great leveller, wiping out every difference in status and leaving Charlie in charge; audiences would remember A Film Johnnie ending earlier in 1914 with Charlie being drenched by a firehose, so this highlights his elevation. It can also be read as an homage to the first cinematic gag, in which a gardener is drenched by a hose in the Lumière brothers' film, L'Arroseur Arrosé, in 1895.

The Property Man was one of the few of Chaplin's 1914 films that I hadn't seen before, so the Flicker Alley box set introduced me to the film rather than just a better quality copy of it. Ironically, it's one of the least consistently restored titles in that box, as the majority looks great but a few scenes are of horrible quality. Presumably this is because it was pieced together from seven different prints in three different countries, but it's annoying to see the inconsistency. That we can complain about this highlights how absolutely this box set has spoiled us. Most of it looks great though, so we can see the bad spelling on a number of signs ('Garlico in Feets of Strength') and a host of little details that a cheap print would probably obscure, such as Harry McCoy's drunk seeing the firehose as an opportunity to sober up and shower. While many seem to dismiss this as an exercise in cruelty, I'd suggest that they read it with the appropriate subtext; if they do that, they may see The Property Man, as I do, as the best of Chaplin's pictures thus far.

Important Sources:
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Property Man can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.