Sader Ridge (2013)

Director: Jeremy Berg
Stars: Trin Miller, Brandon Anthony, Andi Norris, Josh Truax and D'Angelo Midili

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

For some reason I can't fathom, Sader Ridge is a polarising movie. It quickly garnered a great deal of love and promptly won awards on the festival circuit, from audiences and judges, and topped at least one end of year list at a genre site. Yet the film was quickly retitled The Invoking for home release, which usually means that it wasn't capturing the audience it aimed for and so needed a marketing makeover. Its IMDb rating dropped massively to the point that the many naysayers debated how low it could go. Well, I'm in the middle. This isn't close to the worst movie ever made but I wanted a lot more from it than it was able to give me. Most denigrators may have wanted it to get going quicker, because it has a notably slow and subtle build and, especially to viewers used to jump scares every ten minutes, nothing meaningful seems to happen for quite a while. I didn't have a problem with the pace and enjoyed the character building, but wanted more background. At 82 minutes, it could have done with another 8 to nail it down tight.

We're here to watch Sam, who's driving into the countryside to take ownership of a house that she's just inherited from an aunt she never knew in the family she didn't grow up with. She's been raised by foster parents, the Harrises, who have refused to tell her anything about her former life that she left at a young enough age to not remember at all. As you can imagine, that rediscovery of who she was will constitute a good deal of the horror story that she's going to find herself in, but director and co-writer, Jeremy Berg, is eager to avoid clichés. This is really a drama that wends its way through traditional horror territory, where each scene seems to show us something we recognise from other horror movies but is approached from a different angle. Yes, this could be read as a cabin in the woods story, but it's far more subtle than that subgenre tends to be. We even open with four young adults in a car, but this thankfully doesn't turn into found footage. The biggest departure from the norm may be that these characters aren't stupid.

For a young lady who was raised by foster parents, Sam seems well grounded, pondering about her past without being overtly inquisitive about it. She realises that they'll lose cellphone signal on their journey, so sneaks in maps and directions to make sure they avoid the usual wrong turn. The car's in good shape, so we don't get the expected breakdown. Mark, in the passenger seat, is her ex-boyfriend not her current one and we don't feel that they'll be drawn back together even if Jessica dumps him over the phone soon into the film. He's a believable ass, up tight and bitchy but able to apologise. He's bright but socially off a little. The cute couple in the back seat, Roman and Caitlin, aren't a couple, even if he'd dearly like them to be; she really does see them as best friends. Roman is nerdy but not stereotypically so, capturing odd sounds for his library on an old tape recorder. Caitlin wears the nerdy glasses we might have expected of him, but she's a little tomboyish, a little hyper, a little free spirit. It's easy to see their connection.

I found the four of them refreshing. They're not doing drugs in the car, mooning other drivers or bitching at each other. They're believable people with realistically cool dialogue and it's great fun to watch them, even though they're apparently doing next to nothing. Ten minutes in, the wildcard arrives in the form of Eric, the caretaker of the property who clearly remembers Sam even if she doesn't remember him in the slightest. He's the one who found Sam's aunt, peacefully dead in her rocking chair, and he's the one who meets them at the gate to show them the property. And, of course, he's the one who's about to introduce us to some of the background that Sam doesn't remember. Her aunt lived here for fifteen years, but took the place over from Sam's birth parents, James and Ellen Sader, who owned most of the land around the house, including the ridge of the title. Sam even lived here too until she was five years old; she played in the woods with Eric, the kid from a property over, five miles down the road.

Thus far, it's a generally believable piece, very old school in its slow character-driven build, the downside being a few darker scenes and the lack of anything except hints at what we might imagine will be coming later. Clearly there's something in Sam's past that she's blocked out, but it takes no less than 41 minutes, literally the halfway mark, for her to get round to asking Eric what happened back when she was five and for him to not answer. There's a darkness in Mark's background too, based on one offhand comment, and Roman begins to react a little strongly to him getting lost in the woods. It's Roman who gets the first real horror scene too, crouching on the steps to the house too scared to go back inside, pitching some sort of fit about what Sam interprets to be Caitlin's plan to travel for six months before finishing college. Yet, as she calls everyone over, he's not there any more. We're 36 minutes in and suddenly we're in the realm of horror, wondering if Roman is possessed or Sam's having hallucinations. Now's when we need to find out the history of the place, because even if the characters don't think in horror movie terms, we do.

It's certainly the growing shift from banal drama to clear horror territory, a very gradual shift but a strong one, that shines brightest in Sader Ridge. Berg doesn't give us anything flash here to distract us from the build and the characters that experience it. He wore a lot of hats on this project, one of which was as the cinematographer, but as capable as his eyes seem to be from the well framed rural stills that pepper the minimalist credits, he keeps his visual work very subtle. There are no ambitious camera movements, not a lot of cinematic angles and relatively pedestrian editing, certainly no jump cuts. That's fine, as he's not going for either art film or mainstream horror movie. He's going for that old school disconcerting tone as we gradually question what's real and what isn't and he's relying on the actors to ground their characters so deeply that we can tell when they're being themselves and when they're not. That's crucial here for us to figure out what's really going on and that's the strongest part of the film.

Trin Miller manages to remain the focus throughout even though Sam is a rather passive lead surrounded by more outgoing, more dynamic characters. Brandon Anthony is particularly impressive as Mark, as he's given two tones to find and he manages to nail both of them, channelling a less comedic Jim Parsons for one and some Alexander Skarsgård for the other. Josh Truax has a similar task as Roman, a more obscure one in which the two tones are a little less distinct, thus a little more unnerving. Andi Norris also has two tones to find but gets less opportunity to do so. As Caitlin, she's the most obvious character in the movie but her other part is more obscure and it took the end credits to tell me that I'd misinterpreted it. As Eric, D'Angelo Midili only gets one character to play and so he seems a little less dominant, even though he's very capable in what he does. I can't say that every actor reached every note, but the way these five act around each other, three of them juggling two personalities, is to my mind a major success.

I was less sold on the story, which Berg conjured up with Matt Medisch and adapted with John Portanova. To be more precise, I was less sold on where it went. I appreciated the basic concept, the way that it built and the ideas that it threw out, but even after a few viewings, I haven't figured out exactly why any of it is happening. I can't talk in depth about this without introducing spoilers, so I'll try to keep it generic. It felt to me like there were two stories here, one in the present and one in the past, one psychological and one literal, one featuring the characters we're watching and one featuring others. My problem is in how these two stories tie together, because they have to in order to work, but they don't seem to fit. The end result to me was a huge image made up of pieces from two different jigsaws. Now, those pieces may fit together if they happen to be the same shapes, but they're still not from the same picture and thus we can't expect that completed image to make sense. Maybe I'm still missing something but I don't think so.

In the end, I think that Berg had all the constituent parts he needed to make a memorable feature, but he didn't put them together right. He had a capable eye, a strong cast and a good location. He didn't have a large budget, but this didn't need one. What it needed was some more imagination to the camerawork; a bit more attention to the sound and lighting, especially in outdoor scenes where night is falling; and a lot more work on the script. The location could have been used better, but the script deserved to be polished a lot more than it was. It felt to me like the first half should have been condensed to be the first third, the second half sped up to be the second third and a whole new emphatic third added at the end that makes some sort of sense within the larger framework. It certainly deserves to be more than it is and I wonder if what was shot matched what was written. Could Berg have run out of cash in his clearly small budget and so shot a quick ending rather than a third act? Inquiring minds want to know.

Found (2012)

Director: Scott Schirmer
Stars: Gavin Brown, Ethan Philbeck, Phyllis Munro, Louie Lawless, Alex Kogin, Angela Denton and Shane Beasley

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Scott Schirmer deserves a lot of respect and not all of it is due to the fact that he made this feature for as low a budget as $8,000. More is because he adapted it to the screen from a self-published horror novella in collaboration with its author, but most is because, two years earlier, he took the effort to write a review of that novella at Amazon. It's Found by Kentucky writer Todd Rigney, who published it himself back in 2004 to 'the deafening sound of crickets'. Well, one of those crickets was Schirmer, who explains in his review that he found it 'quite by accident' and 'could not put it down'. He appreciated 'the bleakest, most disturbing scenarios you're like to read', but also the 'provocative themes and beautiful ambiguities'. It's a meaningful review, one that ably highlights just how deeply he was drawn into the piece. 'I've read the book three times now,' he says, 'and new layers keep unfolding before me.' Schirmer had made a couple of long short films already, but it's not difficult to see that he felt compelled to adapt this to the screen.

I haven't read Rigney's novella (though I really should remedy that fact soon), but Schirmer's adaptation is magnetic from the very first line. 'My brother keeps a human head in his closet,' narrates a twelve year old boy called Marty and that's about as engaging as any movie can start out. Marty is our protagonist, a kid who's being dragged into the adult world whether he likes it or not. He doesn't want to grow up, given that he's been told it'll mean that he won't enjoy horror movies and comic books any more, but he'd sure like to get past the bullying at school. The catch is that he's a curious youngster who wonders about the world and explores it by learning other people's secrets. Mum's are old love letters from some guy called Danny, while Dad's are porn mags in the garage. And, most shocking to us but initially just another adult weirdness to Marty, his older brother Steve keeps severed heads in the bowling ball bag in his closet, a new one every few days. Marty found that out by accident too but can't leave it alone.

Whatever you're imagining the film to be based on that paragraph, you're probably wrong. This isn't a horror comedy, for a start, a juvenile take on 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. It's not a sick and twisted flick that crosses boundaries just to make us grin. It's not even a fast paced gorefest where Steve works his grisly way through the neighbourhood like an insane Batman and Marty signs up to be his Robin. Really, it's a coming of age flick, one that eschews every bit of John Hughes cuteness because it's telling the opposite story. You know all those movies where the kid hero makes it through one adult thing and suddenly is set for life because he gets it? This isn't that, not remotely. Here, growing up is a slow, traumatising process, where everyone is against you in one way or another and nobody gets what you're going through. Gavin Brown, debuting here as Marty, isn't a great actor in the traditional sense but he nails the tone of his role completely and we're with him all the way, as coming of age moves steadily into disturbing horror.

Marty's a relatively normal kid on the surface, one major reason why he's such a powerful lead character, but there are warning signs throughout. He's a quiet kid who only has one real friend, David, with whom he draws violent comic books. One of his pictures upset his teacher a year earlier, so he's clearly on that invisible watchlist. His teachers wouldn't like that he watches horror movies too, often borrowed from his big brother, but then all the best kids do. He wants to be accepted, but finds that following the rules don't seem to help. 'I get good grades and I do what people ask me to,' he pronounces early in the film. 'They should just leave me alone.' Of course, they don't. He's picked on at school by Marcus Sanders, a bigger kid, and his stooge. Marcus punches him in the stomach one day in the bathroom and only gets a couple of Saturday detentions for it. Marty doesn't have the courage to fight back and his mum pulls him out of school for a couple of days to get over it. You can imagine how well that works.

Marty is rarely off screen and his character is built meticulously, enough that everyone watching is going to recognise something of him in themselves. Even though he's polite, talented and far from stupid, he's not getting anywhere in a social setting because he's quiet, awkward and a little nerdy. His parents aren't much help. Dad seems to care, but he's a bigot with a temper. When he hears about Marcus Sanders, he focuses on the kid's black skin rather than what he did. Mum seems to care, but she's overprotective and babies him. So it's big brother Steve who he looks up to. Steve is quite a few years older and notably cool to someone like Marty. Just look at the posters on his bedroom wall: of bands like Iron Maiden and Venom and movies like The Astro-Zombies, The Deadly Spawn and Wild Zero. There's even a 27x40 of The Taint, one of the more telling ones in this story. The catch of course is that Steve, the cool big brother, the only one who understands him, is also a serial killer. How's that for a tough realisation?

Steve is played by Ethan Philbeck in his only film role and he does a powerful job, especially as he was a last minute replacement for another actor who had to drop out after his family objected to the picture. It's surprising thinking back on the film afterwards at how little he's really in it and how far it revolves around Marty. Even scenes about Steve are often shown from Marty's perspective, even if he's in another room at the time. One of the most telling early scenes has Steve argue with his dad upstairs, while Marty and his mum silently mirror that argument over the dining room table. To Marty, what's being argued about isn't important, just the fact that they're arguing again. Another scene later on does precisely the same thing and turns out to be even more brutally disturbing because we can't see what's happening. We're focused instead on Marty's face, his horror at what's going down and his frustration at being unable to stop it. The best scene in the film may be the tense one that has us stuck under a bed with Marty.

There are a number of themes here that delve much deeper than most horror movies attempt. Bullying is the first obvious one, but that isn't just restricted to Marcus Sanders and the responses that are raised to deal with him. Scenes late in the movie suggest that Marty's dad is a bully too, which perhaps highlights why Marty's the way he is and even why Steve's the way he is. Certainly another theme explores the way that horror movies influence people, a subject close to the heart of anyone who grew up in the UK during the video nasty era. Steve's most overt influence is a fictional (at the time) horror movie called Headless, which he appears to be reenacting, but did it and other movies turn him into who he is? I noticed that he has a copy of Snuff in his VHS collection, which did what Headless did back in the seventies, with a major furore around its supposedly real act of murder, which of course was no such thing. David Alton and other campaigners against video nasties always screamed about copycats, which Steve could well be.

There's a hint at homophobia, but it's only a hint. While Marty has nothing to do with girls throughout, his bullies spread rumours that he's gay and he certainly has hero worship for his big brother, there's no real evidence that he really is gay and Marcus Sanders is committing a hate crime. He's just a bully, throwing out whatever crap is likely to cause impact. There's more of a hint at racism though, as Steve's collection of human heads are predominantly of black women. Whether or not Headless (or Snuff) influenced Steve to do what he does, we're clearly led to wonder if his father's bigotry influenced him too, because surely that's where his racism comes from, even if he doesn't realise it. Perhaps the Daily Mail could campaign against parents as well as horror movies. At this point, we even wonder if Steve's sexualised violence is sourced from Headless, from Dad or some strange conflation of them. As we see this household entirely from Marty's perspective, we know that we're not being told everything and that there's history there.

And, of course, as we wonder about Steve and what really turned him into what he's become, we wonder if we're going to watch Marty going through the same transition. He's bullied already, as Steve may have been earlier in his life. He watches the same movies, perhaps at an even younger age. He's already seen Headless, for example, and he overlays his brother's face onto the perpetrator in his mind. He's gradually being alienated from all authority figures (parents, teachers, pastors) except for Steve, his serial killer of a big brother. He starts the film with one friend and ends it without any. If he isn't sexually frustrated yet, he'll surely get there soon, whether he's gay or not. Even without the final scenes which he appropriately interprets as his life becoming a horror movie, he's being screwed up every which way and we can't help but wonder what he'll become. Will he become Steve in the sequel? Will he take the Lovecraftian way out and go completely insane? Or will he just grow up, if this is all traumatising metaphor for coming of age?

I first saw Found as a festival screener and I was impressed but not bowled over. It was clearly a capable film, even before I realised how minimal its budget, and it obviously had a lot to say, but it wasn't difficult to bring my own expectations to the table and realise how different this was. It's much slower than horror films tend to be, even down to the music, which varies in style from ambient to noise but rarely ramps up from tracks that include the word 'soothing' in their titles. While it was banned in Australia for 'prolonged and detailed depictions of sexualised violence', that's mostly restricted to Headless, the film within a film, and it's far from the most disturbing material, much of which isn't seen but conjured up in our own minds from what Marty has to go through. Watching Found again to review, I realised that it had stayed strongly with me from a couple of years ago, so opened up this time round for me to explore more of its admirable depth and realise just how powerful this story is.

And, unlike those Australian censors who couldn't see past the surface, it's the depth that endows it with its power, not the faux snuff antics of the guy in the mask in Headless, which incidentally is being made into a feature of its own by Arthur Cullipher, the head of the Found effects team. What's disturbing is the realisation that Marty is so thoroughly everyday but enduring so much as he travels through the rites of passage that lead us to adulthood that we start to wonder why everyone doesn't go completely insane when they hit puberty. Suddenly we wonder what's going on next door and next door from them. We ask ourselves how we would react to the apparently minor events that lead up to more major ones, all those little details that we denigrate as minor because we've forgotten how worldchanging they are to a twelve year old. We even put on Steve's shoes as Marty muses about his caring, protective big brother and says, 'Why do there have to be two Steves?' If that isn't real coming of age, I'm not sure what is.

The Bum (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Eric Almassy, Travis Mills, Tenley Dene, David Wellnitz, Rohan Shetty and Steve Wilson

I saw most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks at the three day festival that debuted them to the public, and not one of them stood out as more immediately and obviously meaningful than The Bum, a 1929 story by W Somerset Maugham originally titled The Derelict. Even before it finished, I was intrigued as to how much of what's on screen is what Maugham wrote and how much what Mills brought to his adaptation of it, as it's impossible not to read it as the Running Wild Films manifesto. That interpretation is aided by real life observations. This was the first of these 52 films to feature Mills himself as a prominent character, not as the lead but as the most important character in the film. The first day of shooting, which took care of the present day scenes, is why he cultivated a memorably bushy beard over a number of months, one which got ever bushier with each succeeding episode of the webseries they shot during 2013. Once done, that beard was promptly shaved so he could shoot scenes the next day set years earlier.

Mills plays the bum of the title, in which form he never speaks. He just wanders around, looking unkempt and notably intense. In another story, we might believe he was dealt tough cards or abused a substance or three, but not this one. Here, he's the architect of his own destiny, through sheer stubbornness. To find out how and why, we have to meet him through the eyes of the real lead character, Barry Connor, played by Eric Almassy, who's really good at being the visualisation of a narrator, the person who experiences a story on screen along with those of us watching at home, without necessarily playing a part in it. Here he wants to be a writer, but he doesn't seem to have the drive to make it happen. Perhaps he's more in love with the idea of having written than actually going through the process of writing. As we meet him, in the present day, he's taking a couple of weeks off to write, which may just mean reminiscing through the box of old stories he keeps out of sight because his wife wants to throw them away.

The connection between the two almost happens when Barry is sitting at an outdoor table thinking while his wife shops. Enter the bum to look for scraps on tables, bundled up in a hoodie but with those piercing eyes and bushy beard. He looks potentially dangerous. He moves on, but Barry has recognised him. He's the centre of attention in the flashback scenes that we watch in colour, as if everything was more vibrant back when Barry and Tom were in college. Tom, sans beard but with just as intense an air, holds court in an auditorium, three other students hanging on his words. Somehow he's relaxed but angry, denigrating the validity of the professor who's been giving them advice because he's never been published, at least not really. Barry and the others are unnerved, as if they know they should agree with Tom but don't have the courage to dive down that rabbit hole. Further conversation backs that up and it all feels exactly like Mills's views on film schools and professors who only teach, never do.

Barry says he wants to be a writer, but his writing revolves around classwork. He's inquisitive enough to ask Tom for feedback on The Desert Stranger, the story he pulls out first in the present day which sends him back to these flashbacks, but Tom doesn't give him the critique he expects. He asks why he wrote it, whether he'd have written it outside of class. Barry doesn't have answers to questions like, 'Where did it come from?' Tom believes that writers write because it's who they are, not because it's who they want to be. 'It should be coming out of you,' he enforces. 'It should be coming from your gut.' This dialogue is all the more magnetic because while we're hearing from Tom, we're clearly also hearing from Travis. There are scenes in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks webseries where Mills sounds just like Tom, driving and analysing because the best education is doing. That's what this project is all about, releasing the films that burn to come out of him and, in the process, making him a better filmmaker. It's learning by doing.

Barry Connor doesn't understand and Eric Almassy captures that well. He's a little too loose in the earlier scenes but in the flashbacks he reacts just right. Half of him wants to reject Tom's arrogance, but half of him wants to adopt him as his guru. None of him realises that his dreams aren't going to lead him where he wants to go because he doesn't have the passion. Instead he turns on Tom when he says that, 'I don't have any answers' and tells him that he's going to end up a bum, which of course he does. This is the old paradox of integrity: if you compromise, you might just succeed and be able to create professionally as a living; if you don't, you might never get anywhere but you'll still be true to your artistic vision. Many may see the last scene as a suggestion that you have to compromise that vision or you'll burn yourself out. I see it differently, that Barry's compromise inevitably led him nowhere while Tom's still true to himself, as a bum writing in puddles in the park. Each sees the other as worse off than them. Who's right?

Maugham's story leaves that question as open as Mills does, but cloaks the idea subtly in religious garb as if the bum his narrator meets in Vera Cruz, Mexico and who he eventually recognises as the confident and arrogant writer he knew decades earlier in Rome, has Christ-like attributes. The narrator realises that 'he had sacrificed everything to be a writer,' but for whom? Is he merely suffering for his art or for that of others, like the man who tries to help him but is rebuffed. Perhaps this act of charity, after the symbolic three days, is what will save the narrator instead, who began by lamenting 'that I had not half the time I needed to do half the things I wanted.' Perhaps he'll now make the time, if only out of shock. Barry might do the same, because Tom has at least lived and experienced. Maybe Barry might have achieved without the distractions of an easy life with a job and a wife who thinks old stories should be thrown away. Maybe he should reevaluate his dedication. Maybe he can write the sequel to The Bum.

I have no idea how much Mills has sacrificed for his art, but I know that making 52 films in 52 weeks isn't an easy task and it surely involved a great deal of sacrifice. This challenge was about creating new films, however easy or hard the task at the time. Sure, some films might just flow easily, especially to someone who had already made fifty or so, some of them features, but others wouldn't. We've already seen that in Catastrophe, The Return and Araby, but there were challenges here as well; this time the crew were able to use the rain to their advantage. Mills chose to shoot the present day scenes in black and white but the flashback scenes in colour. Clearly one reason is just to delineate between them, but I doubt that's it. Are we merely enforcing that Barry's ambition has faded over time or are we highlighting how his options are more polarised and obvious? Perhaps if he makes the right choice, to let his passion loose and write what he perhaps aches to write, everything will shift back into colour. Maybe Tom saw it that way all along.

Running on Empty Dreams (2009)

Director: Nitara Lee Osbourne
Stars: Kathleen Benner, Rachel Owens, Jose Rosete, Sevan McBride and Wil Rillero

To switch things up a bit from the predominantly action and horror movies I've been covering thus far for my Arizona feature project, here's a lesbian drama from writer/director Nitara Lee Osbourne. Well, that's what most people seem to take it for, even though there's a lot more going on, and they either love it or hate it accordingly. Some hate the film because there's only one brief sex scene even though IMDb lists keywords for it like 'female nudity' and 'lesbian love', while some love it because there's only one brief sex scene but the two leading ladies, Kathleen Benner and Rachel Owens, are believably close anyway. The contrast between sex and love is only one of the themes that Osbourne riffs on throughout; there's much that's worthy of discussion here and she deserves a good deal of credit for attempting so much in one feature. Sadly, her drive to send a very particular message (this was based on true events) prompts much of the negative side as she refuses to let her characters collaborate with her.

While this is generally seen as a lesbian film, that isn't the first theme that's explored; initially, this aims to take a look at fresh starts. Sydney Harris moves to Phoenix in the summer of 2000 with her husband, Corey, a former marine now working as a private investigator, and their young son, Matt, who's too old to be starting kindergarten partway through the movie. Their new home isn't the only fresh start. They are clearly not connecting well as a couple and Sydney is fighting thyroid cancer, something that they can't afford and thus is putting even more strain on their relationship. The second theme looks at what makes a hero. Corey saved the life of a colleague under fire, someone who was overtly thankful even though he lost a leg in the process. Having been a hero once, he feels frustrated that he can't be one again, to save his own wife, because he simply doesn't earn enough. He does everything he can for her, but he does it out of a sense of duty rather than because she wants him to. He thinks it's what heroes do.

The third theme is the most awkward one because of where it leads; it's the difference between religion and spirituality, as personified in the leading ladies. Sydney takes Matt to the playground in the park and he gets squirted by another kid with a water gun. He's Tony Smith and Sydney immediately hits it off with his mum, Jane. Jane epitomises spirituality as she's a free spirit, much more bubbly than Sydney and with a powerful smile that's even more notable during the few scenes when it's absent. Sydney, however, has a Roman Catholic background, so everything in her life is wrapped up in guilt, something that particularly plagues her when she realises that she's fallen in love with Jane. Even now, the film isn't about lesbians, as Jane, her kids and her house, are merely ways that Sydney can escape what's behind her. Presumably she ties her cancer and her husband together in her mind, even though he's decent, loyal and caring, so she tries to run away from both. She runs away a lot, often literally to underline the point.

By this point we're starting to see the strong aspects and the weak ones. The actors are strong, all three of the major cast selling their characters and aiming to endow them with substantial depth. The themes are flowering and the picture has a lot of potential. There's also a really nice transition into flashback, as Corey slams his fist down on the table at home and we explode into a battle scene where he's being a hero. It's the technical side that also leans most into the negative though. The sound is the worst, with certain indoor scenes underpinned by background noise that sounds like someone's vacuuming in the next room or a jet engine is about to take off next door. Bizarrely, sound isn't a consistent problem, as it's mostly OK, just obviously poor in some scenes. The camerawork is generally capable, if never particularly ambitious, but the colours are too warm throughout. The music is consistently predictable too, especially in the more overtly religious scenes; it's also often overblown and intrusive.

It's as the film progresses that it starts to show its seams. The big themes are good ones but when any of the characters question, the script refuses to bend to give them the opportunity to grow. This often leads to odd scenes where they act out of character because that's where the themes require them to go. Some of this even leads to contradictions that shouldn't be there, because you can't force a square peg through a round hole. Little details are less problematic but more predictable. We can usually see where the script is going to go by keeping an eye on them because they're always telegraphing something. As characters say things, we can see the scene after next because that's obviously the only reason why they had those lines to begin with. These issues made me wonder about something else that could be seen as a positive or a negative; the way in which lines of dialogue obviously apply to more characters than those to whom they're delivered. I saw these as positive for about half the film but then started to switch to negative.

Another major flaw is the character of Geri Woods, not because Amber Ryan does a bad job because she does precisely what's required of her, but because a conscience should never have been this prominent. Corey's conscience is personified by John Duncan, the soldier whose life he saved, though one late scene hints that perhaps he didn't save him after all. If he's imaginary at this point, why should we assume he wasn't earlier? Similarly, if he's imaginary to Corey, perhaps Geri, Sydney's conscience, is imaginary too. She seems real though, an intrusive, obnoxious character who raises a lot of awkward questions. She's a lesbian who turned celibate for Jesus and adopts a mission to convince Sydney to do the same. Sydney's Roman Catholic and the priest to whom she gives her confession is worse than useless, so she's happy to both follow her heart and then feel notably guilty about it. Geri should have been a one scene character to make an important point, but she moves into the film like an unwelcome guest and refuses to leave.

I liked the setup of the first half hour and appreciated the promise that was offered by a thoughtful script. I was less impressed by the second, which creaked its way into the lesbian drama that Osbourne perhaps always wanted it to be. The third half hour was like the second but more so, because the characters were consistently screaming to develop while she held them back to tell the story she wanted. I was impressed most by the actors at this point, because they kept my interest even as they became progressively more forced. As Sydney, Kathleen Benner is an engaging lead, the pivot of the drama, but she's unable to find ways to sell many of the changes that she's going through as they don't all make sense. Jane should be a lot more than just Sydney's love interest and Rachel Owens seems up for it, but the script holds her back in that one role and can't stay consistent. Jose Rosete is especially hamstrung because he's given depth but no story arc, struggling at the end with the same things he was struggling with at the beginning.

And that's a real shame. While I appreciated the way in which none of the major characters come out of this as either the good guy or the bad guy, I didn't appreciate how they didn't come out as themselves, pun accidental but appropriate. I also didn't like how the film never seemed to end, or rather that it kept ending, with the last half hour full of places where the credits could have run, only for yet another scene to carry on regardless. This is a ninety minute story that takes two hours to unfold and shredding Geri's role down to match John Duncan's is only the beginning of what the editor should have excised from the picture. I was surprised to see that Webb Pickersgill edited, as this felt very much like what happens when a writer edits their own work. His cinematography is generally a lot better here than his editing, if he was left to his own devices. I have a feeling that he may not have been and, at the end of the day, he was stuck with the material that was shot and that focused on the script which refused to bend.

Osbourne's refusal to let her characters tell their stories as they saw fit shapes the whole picture and that sadly overwhelms many of the more ambitious things she attempted. Even as annoyed as I became with the inconsistencies, obstinance and out of character moments, I liked how she continued to weave those bigger themes through her script, most of them still worthy of praise at the end. The love vs sex angle is particularly well handled, one reason why the growing relationship between Sydney and Jane is so strong. Jane, with her two kids and many prior relationships, explains to Sydney that she's never made love, only had sex, something that helps their friendship grow into something more. The hero angle is deepened by a discovery late in the film that isn't surprising but is welcome anyway. Unfortunately it's weakened later still by scenes that shouldn't be there, especially a few of Corey's. The theme of religious guilt is the one that's resolved best (the conflict is abandoned) but it was bludgeoned into submission first.

It might be ironic that Sydney is a screenwriter with a BA from Yale and a subplot that has her submitting her work to studios to fulfil a dream or it might merely be projection on Osbourne's part. While the film is apparently based on a true story, I have no idea whether it's hers or not. It could be that she's telling her own story through abstraction into a character or she could just be adding little details to Sydney to build her character. Certainly she has a sense of humour, as at one point Sydney and Jane watch a short on TV called Romey and Jules. Sydney says she can write better than that and Jane agrees, but Osbourne was a script supervisor on that short earlier in her career. Given what she achieves with this script, I'm sure that she can write better than this too, but she needed fresh eyes on it and she needed another draught; this isn't what it should have ended up as. Most of all, she needed to collaborate with her characters, loosing them from the rigid framework she constructed and letting them go where they needed to.

The Rounders (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Phyllis Allen and Minta Durfee

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.

Charles Parrott's pre-Charley Chase appearance in His New Profession reminded me yet again how early Charlie Chaplin's work was when compared to the other great silent comedians. The Rounders highlights what else could have been: a great comedy double act, not only because the characters of Mr Full and Mr Fuller display some notable chemistry between Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle that could easily have been built upon in future films, but because there's little else here except that double act, the story threadbare but the laughter acute. Arbuckle was established before Chaplin, of course, starting out five years earlier at the Selig Polyscope Company and later switching to Keystone in 1913, where he established Fatty, his regular character. His double act with Mabel Normand, which ran from late 1914 into 1916, maybe began with his title role in Mabel's New Hero in 1913. Had Chaplin not left Keystone, it all could have been very different, as this film ably highlights. Instead Arbuckle teamed up with Buster Keaton in 1917.

There were many double acts in the slapstick age but none come quicker to mind today than Laurel and Hardy, one that outlasted the silent era by decades, their final film together arriving as late as the 1951 feature, Atoll K. It's perhaps worth highlighting that they were young men in their early twenties in 1914, Stan Jefferson still with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, the very one which Chaplin had left for Keystone, and Babe Hardy starting out on screen in split reelers for the Lubin Company in Florida. Their double act wouldn't officially debut for thirteen years in 1927's Putting Pants on Philip, though they did appear in a couple of earlier films together. The first of them, The Lucky Dog, wouldn't arrive until 1921 and Laurel's debut on screen wasn't until 1917's Nuts in May. As Arbuckle and Chaplin pioneered the little and large double act in The Rounders, the latter's former understudy, Stanley Jefferson, seven years before taking his stage name of Stan Laurel, was doing impersonations of him on stage for Fred Karno.

Chaplin, of course, was too independent to be locked down to a mere partnership. He was the epitome of a solo artiste, even if he proved as early as his fifth film, Between Showers, that he could work well with a partner, albeit the actor he was replacing at Keystone, Ford Sterling. Within a couple of weeks these two would do more work together worthy of a double act in Tango Tangles, most obviously the superb scene towards the end where they try to put on the same coat at the same time. Arbuckle and Chaplin were big names at this point for Keystone and they had already shared the screen in six previous pictures, though none are real partnerships. The most time they shared together before this was either in Tango Tangles, in which they literally battle on the dancefloor for a pretty hat check girl, or The Knockout, a film starring Arbuckle as a man who ends up in a boxing match officiated over by Chaplin in one of his guest slots in other Keystone stars' pictures. However, after this success, they'd never share the screen again.

Beyond the obvious potential for an ongoing double act that never happened, what leaps out here is the pacing. Chaplin's script may have had very little to say but it had a lot to say about how it should unfold. We're introduced to each of the four major characters individually, so that they have the opportunity to develop before they start colliding with the others, collisions which grow naturally too. Chaplin is Mr Full, yet another opportunity for him to haul out his drunk routine, as he's three sheets to the wind as he first staggers onto screen; the odd word in the title comes from an old slang term for drunkards, presumably those who make the rounds of bars. Jeffrey Vance describes this as 'the best of Chaplin's drunk roles for Keystone' and I'm not going to argue with that, especially as he's notably better at it than Arbuckle, who would have sold his drunk routine more effectively if he wasn't tasked with trying to match an actor who was hired by Mack Sennett on the basis of his stage role as a drunk in Karno's Mumming Birds.

Chaplin's introduction is very reminiscent of Mabel's Strange Predicament, his third film, in which he stole all the early scenes by stumbling around a hotel and getting in the way of everyone else in the film. Here he's stumbling around a new hotel but its geography is exactly the same. In both films, he stumbles into the lobby, where he interacts with a lady in a chair to his right and another in one on his left. Eventually he makes his way up the stairs at the back which lead to a hallway with a pair of rooms on each side. We find our leads in the two rooms nearest to the camera. Here, Mr and Mrs Full have the room to our right, while Mr Fuller and his wife occupy the one opposite. These characters are bounced between them, often quite literally, as the story progresses. In the earlier film, Mabel and her significant other had the room to our right, while the couple they get caught up with are on the other side of the hallway. Some things are apparently clearly defined in the cinematic comedy rulebook; even the carpet is identical.

As Mr Full, Chaplin is apparently doing much better for himself than he has for a number of shorts, even if he forgot to change his shoes along with the rest of his costume. We have no idea why he's so drunk, but we get one when we meet his wife, who's a formidable battleaxe in the form of Phyllis Allen, overbearing and violent. No wonder he has eyes for the fluff in the lobby! It's telling that she uses his cane to pull him towards her in a similar way to how Charlie pulled his employer's girlfriend to him only a week earlier in His New Profession, albeit with completely different intent. Charlie was getting fresh in that film; Mrs Full is merely trying to keep him upright so she can upbraid him some more. Once we have their relationship down, Mr Fuller and his wife can make their entrances, introduced in a similar way that highlights both similarities and differences. Fuller enters like Full, only instead of ogling the girl he sits on her. His wife is initially as weepy as Mrs Full is violent, but only initially. When she gets going, she really gets going.

If this setup is completely reminiscent of Mabel's Strange Predicament, fortunately the ensuing chaos is not. The earlier film had a more substantial plot, but it was a stupid one, better suited to the pantomime stage with its hide and seek shenanigans. This doesn't go far beyond two drunks dealing with their upset wives, in a way that brings them together, when they realise that they're masonic buddies or some such and escape their collective wrath of their wives arm in arm for a nearby café. The gags are improved too, Chaplin's in particular. One has him unable to get up from the floor as he's standing on his coat; another sees him thrown bodily onto the bed, where he finds himself upside down because his feet have caught on the headboard. Arbuckle does well in the scene with his wife too, though perhaps partly because she really was his wife. Minta Durfee and Roscoe Arbuckle made a strange couple, but they wed in 1908 and remained married until 1925, though they were estranged before his legal turmoil in 1921.

The best and worst moments of the film unfold at Smith's Café. The latter is clearly the decision to have Billy Gilbert play the doorman in blackface, something that admittedly wasn't offensive at the time but is still completely unnecessary to the picture as a whole, which makes it all the more offensive in hindsight. The former arrives when we find ourselves trying to figure out which of the two leads we're supposed to be watching. After Mr Fuller attempts to lift an almost paralytic Mr Full off the floor using not one but two canes, their action splits in two. Arbuckle is trying to disentangle his jacket from his hat, drinking tabasco sauce or something similar and using the the champagne bucket as a footstool. Meanwhile, Chaplin is at the next table causing problems for Jess Dandy's unnamed diner. Only when both of them end up using their respective tablecloths as blankets and collapsing onto the floor into drunken sleep does the action bring them back together again, quite literally and with a thump.

This would have been a good ending, especially as the slower, more methodical pace makes it seem like we've already reached the end of a reel, but there's the traditional Keystone chase to come, another one that takes us into Echo Park where characters end up as always in the Echo Park Lake, but with a notable change: this time we see a growing crowd of onlookers on the other side of the lake as the action moves on. They're too far away for us to see details, but California locals had been apparent in a number of the films Chaplin made at Keystone which were shot in public spaces and how those everyday folk interacted with them changed over time. Initially they were disinterested, even annoyed, by the distraction Chaplin was at the beginning of Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal, but they moved to enjoyment by the end, then on to casual acceptance in Tango Tangles, grinning awareness in Mabel's Busy Day and now on to standard tourist activity here in The Rounders. Such was Chaplin's rise through 1914.

As always, there are problems with the film, which is another strong step forward in terms of pacing and structure, as well as the manipulation of more emotions than were usually found in comedies of this era. Rounders are dissolute drunks, debauchers, but Mr Full and Mr Fuller aren't as obnoxious as many of the drunks Chaplin had played at Keystone. These rounders certainly become sympathetic by the point they swap their secret handshakes and we're with them all the way to the end, but we didn't need Arbuckle's attempt to strangle his wife to stop her beating him up. Phyllis Allen is overly violent to her husband as well, throwing Chaplin across the room with a vengeance. At least her performance is far more consistent than that of Minta Durfee, who pantomimes a great deal too much, the old school overdone silent acting she throws out in her solo scenes reminding at once of how much of that we got early in Chaplin's 1914 films and how much it gradually decreased. Allen and Durfee rage well at each other though.

Chaplin is the star here, of course, as writer, director and lead actor, but he plays very well with Arbuckle, who brought a new level to his co-star's regular routine as a drunk, one of my favourite moments in this film being when Mr Full trips on the welcome mat outside the hotel and Mr Fuller keeps on going, literally dragging his colleague along behind him because they're arm in arm. Arbuckle was a big man, hence the nickname he never appreciated that became the name of his regular character, but he was often able to use that attribute to his advantage. He's not loose enough to be as believably drunk as Chaplin and he's too obviously aware of his surroundings when he's bouncing people off his belly. Yet the pair of them are great on screen together. Arbuckle later praised Chaplin, saying that, 'I have always regretted not having been his partner in a longer film than these one-reelers we made so rapidly.' He's not alone. Lack of story aside, I got a real kick out of this one and wish they'd have been a double act for longer.

Important Sources:
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Rounders 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 debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Heavy Metal Horror (2014)

Director: Richard Boylan
Stars: Keltie Squires, Damian Dunwoody, Daphnee Hanrahan and Anthony Rotondi

While we frequently can and do complain about the dearth of cool genre film events in Arizona, a couple of established festivals notably excluded, sometimes we get slapped with a few of them all at once. I was elated to see a feature called Heavy Metal Horror announced at the Valley Art in Tempe, especially with a few of the cast members there in person for a Q&A. I'm a metalhead, a horror nut and a film critic, so this is about as tailor made for me as any movie could be. Unfortunately I was hosting my own film event the same night at LepreCon, so couldn't make it. However executive producer Mel Hoy kindly sent a screener my way so I can catch up, however far after the event. Bizarrely, the film is at once exactly what the title suggests and nowhere near what I'd expected from it. Most obviously, metal is usually fast and this is far from that, even though Armifera, the band who feature here as a fictional version of themselves are very much an old school thrash band. It's a slow, grounded movie that has no concerns about taking its time.

Initially it appears to be two completely different films. The first half of the title naturally follows Armifera, whose original guitar player, Richard Boylan, wrote and directed. Originally named Death Metal Horror, it also inspired their song DMH. Armifera are a real band from Edmonton, Alberta, which is surely why they sound so tight on stage in a tiny club. They're not a groundbreaking act, but they're clearly very capable musicians. I'd happily go to see them live, especially in a club that small. Off stage, they don't appear to be particularly bright, though I don't know if they're putting it on for the sake of the story. Their side thus far is the sort of thing you'd expect: they get together, buy drugs and rehearse. It's no hard task to watch them noodling around and chatting, because it feels very real and thus very believable. We do wonder if it's going to take us anywhere, but it does ground the film effectively while we take in what we're seeing from the second half of the title, which eventually becomes 'horror' but starts out as 'whore'.

In this thread, Boylan adds the hat of documentarian and interviews a hooker about a story she's wanted to get off her chest for a couple of years. Her name isn't Julia but she chooses it for the interview because she liked the movie Romeo and Julia with Claire Danes. Yeah, there are clearly some damaged brain cells in play here, though the actresses (Keltie Squires in older scenes, Daphnee Hanrahan in newer ones) feel as appropriate for the part as Armifera are playing themselves. Julia is lucid but disillusioned, clearly not all there but never too far away. She's a faded beauty, but with solid potential to look good again with an effort. She's a little stupid and a little slow but she's still able to call others on stupid questions. She's not too comfortable about being in the profession she is, apparently, possibly because she was trying to quit two years ago and didn't manage it. 'I'm a hooker' she says with her eyes notably elsewhere. 'I do what I gotta do.' Yet she talks in euphemisms, referring to her sex work as 'arranged meetings' and the like.

The biggest flaw of the movie is in how long it feels like it takes to get moving while we're watching. With hindsight, the pace isn't a problem, but we have to get to the end to realise that, rendering it an odd but eventually satisfying picture. We know the two halves of the story have to connect at some point, partly because there wouldn't be much point otherwise, partly because Julia's interview footage interrupts the renactment of what she's building up to and partly because she's all white and dressed in black but with very red lips, like she's all ready for a role in a stylistic movie with a deliberately restricted colour palette. For a while, the biggest suspense is wondering if the inevitable is really inevitable or whether the halves will remain unconnected. She offers background that's interesting but doesn't seem to take us anywhere; they just do what bands do without ever suggesting why we're watching them do it. It doesn't even seem like we're watching a horror movie, until Chris the guitarist lets us know he's planning to raise a demon.

Now, I've seen movies where bands raise demons and they're not remotely like this. I remember watching The Gate on its original release then walking down to my local record store to order the Sacrifyx album. It was great being a kid watching The Gate, Trick or Treat and their ilk, but this isn't remotely like that. We're not enjoying another cheesy horror flick, we're watching an adult drama, phrased as a fake documentary and with a real band playing themselves to make it seem all the more believable. After so many routine scenes, which frankly include the vocalist putting up freaky fliers with a Satanic vibe, we're conditioned to take the whole demon raising concept as completely normal. Similarly, we hear enough about Julia to quit asking questions when odd things come up. She lived in a haunted house when she was a kid, or at least she thought so. It seems to us like she still does. When she was a kid, her imaginary friend was a hole in the back yard which told her to throw things into it. Like rocks. And cats.

And finally, things start to connect. Vincent, her pimp, texts her to meet a john and she won't do it. She's going to quit the streets. He rings her driver. She runs. And hey, all of a sudden, there's the bar at which Armifera are playing. The stars are finally aligning and we have ourselves a movie, both subplots still in play but unfolding together until the conclusion. As a drama, it's surprisingly engaging for such an odd framework, but as a horror flick we wonder what we actually saw because the finalé is far from explained, probably because the whole tone of the piece is documentarian in nature and open to our interpretation. I had a whole bunch of questions. Is Julia speaking out of guilt or horror? Was something summoned or was something brought? If the latter, who brought it? The film's synopsis suggests that Julia is 'hounded by an evil spirit' but is that before or after? What's with the hole? Does that have a deeper purpose? Is Julia crazy, schizophrenic or demonic? Maybe a second viewing might tell me but the first didn't.

I enjoyed Heavy Metal Horror, though it's far from what I expected it to be. It's not a horror movie; there's nothing camp here, even the parts that would be under different circumstances like the cheesy demonic book. It's more of a drama that reaches into horror territory towards the end, a slow paced one that's all the slower because of the approach taken to mix documentary footage with a reenactment and because it spends far more time than is usual grounding the story in reality. Musicians will surely subconsciously nod their heads while watching this movie because the little details are so true, like the band taking time after their performance to deconstruct their show and all their little mistakes. I wonder if any ladies of the evening watching might do the same, Julia so often talking but not talking or detailing the things she'll do and the things she won't. In the end, it's a sort of art film, something you might expect to watch on IFC or the Sundance Channel rather than on FearNet.

As you might imagine, none of these actors are particularly experienced, but they're all very believable. There's good reason for the band to feel real, of course, given that they are a band; Armifera are a going concern playing gigs in northwestern Canada and festivals like the Calgary Metal Fest and Farmageddon, in the countryside east of Edmonton. Their debut album, Eradication, is also now available and based on what they sound like in this film, it ought to be a good buy. Making an intriguing feature film is surely an original way to build publicity and I wish them well. I have friends in Edmonton, one of whom often stays with us in January, so I'll make it up there one of these years, probably for one of the genre film festivals that sells out up there like DedFest or Deadmonton. Seeing Armifera live on the same trip would be cool. The individual members are characters but not so much that they would thrive outside the band. They're charismatic enough to appear as themselves, but clearly it's music that drives them, not acting.

Of course, the film's approach really doesn't call for acting, mostly calling instead for its cast members to act as naturally as possible. While Anthony Rotondi does get to shout a lot, the only one who really gets the opportunity to act here is Daphnee Hanrahan as the modern day Julia. IMDb only details one previous picture for her, Bridges Over Montreal, a Canadian romcom in which she presumably goes on one of the five memorable first dates that it covers, which all take place, as you might expect, on Montreal bridges. That would seem like a notably different role to this one and I'd be interested to see how she does. This is hardly the sort of movie that allows us to really gauge her talent. She's believable in the role of a hooker wanting to not be a hooker and she gets enough little quirks of character in there to become memorable. In many ways the film itself does the same thing. It doesn't seem to do much, but it does it uniquely and it's all the more memorable for that. It's definitely not your usual horror flick but it's still worth a look.

Araby (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Kevin Ashton, Andrew Laguna, Henry Ibarra, Antonio Elzy, Dana Bohanske, Marissa del Prado and Michael Hanelin

Given that many of my comments on the last few 52 Films in 52 Weeks have tied to what Travis Mills did to the source stories he adapted to the screen, it seems odd that Araby is at once one of the truest to the original material and one of the strangest adaptations of them all. Part of this is because of the trouble he found putting this film together. The Araby of the title is a bazaar in Dublin, thus providing through name and purpose an exotic enticement to both the reader and the lead character, epitomising his new crush. Yet for all that Joyce conjured up such a place through his words, his story remains firmly about everyday Irish folk, with all the Catholic guilt that drives them, especially about sex. Mills aimed to cast the short with Middle Eastern actors, perhaps to play with the notion that what we see as exotic, others know as routine and vice versa. However, he was unable to find his cast (maybe Mina Mirkhah was in New York), so switched the whole thing around to be Hispanic instead, all with a mere week to go before the shoot.

Being forced to deal with this sort of roadblock is precisely the sort of challenge that the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project was supposed to hurl at Mills. Gus Edwards talks in the webisode shot alongside the film about how the project was always aimed at being a 'baptism of fire', enforcing that, 'The best thing is: it doesn't stop you.' It didn't stop Mills and he found his cast and made his film. His choice of words in the webisode is rather telling: 'The idea of having to recast and reimagine a short film in less than a week,' he suggests, 'was a little daunting.' Now, he can play it up as a greater challenge than the rain that fell during Catastrophe or the loss of a lead actress in The Return, but his own words betray him. Only nine weeks in, this challenge was merely 'a little daunting'. Obviously the project is already starting to work. An added challenge was that while he found his cast, their availability meant that he only had six hours to shoot the entire film. 'It was fast and fun,' he later said, 'like a Running Wild film should be.'

However, while it's an especially interesting film, it's no 'motion picture' because there's no motion. The whole thing is comprised of a set of still photographs, an approach surely taken because of the pressing time constraints rather than any influence from Chris Marker, though with Mills you never know. Marker was an overtly English pseudonym for a French filmmaker, after all. Whatever the reasons, this approach is an appropriate one because Joyce's Araby was all about capturing a moment, not merely of a boy at a bazaar but of a point in his life where he stopped thinking about playing in the street with his friends and started thinking of a girl, Mangan's sister. 'Her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood,' explains Joyce's anonymous narrator. 'Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance.' In this film, all we have is an image, because we never see Antonio's sister move. The biggest success here is the capturing of the moments Joyce aimed at, literally through still images.

Mills captures much more though, underlining how Araby is one of his most successful translations. The exotic undertones, which of course aren't merely suggesting unknown delights on foreign shores (neatly highlighted through changing The Memoirs of Vidocq into The Arabian Nights and having some dialogue delivered in subtitled Spanish) but also unknown delights under Antonio's sister's dress, are well caught here in these fleeting glimpses, even if the natural translation of a bazaar to modern Arizona is as banal as a mall. The self-loathing and bigotry of Joyce's characters, instilled through the religion which echoes through his work as much as the rain outside his windows, is written into good narration, softly delivered by Cisco Saavedra and Ixchel del Castillo. That book belongs to our young hero's father, a scholar who his uncle describes as 'a man with soft hands'. Those aren't Joyce's words, but they easily could have been, as that's precisely the sort of politely barbed putdown that can be discovered everywhere in his work.

Perhaps the best line that Mills adds in is one that appears overly simple but absolutely nails the point of the story. 'I never wanted to play again,' emphasises our young lovestruck hero, now that he's enchanted into what Joyce described as 'confused adoration'. Even the casting of this boy is spot on, because he's a number of years too young to do what he thinks he wants but, of course, he wouldn't believe that. Every boy has a crush at a time when they imagine they're old enough but really aren't any more than a boner on legs beginning to figure out what it's for. This short film ably shows both how unattainable Antonio's sister is and how the much too young boy beginning to think about the future has no comprehension of that truth. All he hears is his uncle's voice telling him, 'You are a real man now,' in another deceptively simple line that packs a lot more punch than it might initially seem. It also ably shows the magic of this moment in every boy's life, before he really understands what that is.

This is far from an ordinary film and I'm sure it's far from what Mills aimed it to be, but it still admirably, if unconventionally, succeeds in telling a story that's at once contemporary to us in Arizona and true to the original material written a hundred years ago on the other side of the pond. Because Mills managed to turn an apparent disaster into perhaps the best adaptation in this project so far, if perhaps not the best picture, he proved that Gus Edwards was more than onto something with his comments before shooting began. This would have been so easy to give up on, but perseverance took care of business. Perhaps the only easy decision Mills made here was the music he picked for the soundtrack, Kevin MacLeod surely the most recurring name in 52 Films in 52 Weeks credits after Mills, Alire and Hanelin (after the festival at which all these films were screened, I keep seeing Kevin MacLeod's name everywhere). In a film about magic, we're reminded that it's the magic of art that our hardest creations are also sometimes our best.

.357: Six Bullets for Revenge (2013)

Director: Brian Skiba
Stars: Laurie Love, Brian Ames, Fred Williamson, William Katt, Tony Mandarich, Miss Krystle and Shane Dean

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

One Devil's Night in Detroit, something horrible happens. Eric Draven is murdered the night before he's to marry Shelly Webster, who is raped and left for dead. A year later, the dead man is resurrected from the grave by the mysterious power of a crow to wreak his bloody revenge on the thugs who killed him: T-Bird, Tin-Tin, Funboy and Skank, who all work for a gang boss named Top Dollar. Oh, sorry, wrong movie. We're in 2013, almost two decades on from The Crow. This is .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, written and directed by Brian Skiba, who is not David Schow reincarnated, even if they have the same number of letters. This is about a young couple who did make it to the altar, but only just. Eric is murdered, while Jade is raped and left for dead. There's no crow, but a mysterious power brings her back from the dead and she returns a year later to wreak her bloody revenge on the thugs who killed Eric: Colorado, Zander, Pretty Boy and Ravyn. Oh, and Big Money, but he's not the boss here, just one of the thugs. The boss is Lyle Barnes.

If that isn't enough, and frankly it is, this goes a lot deeper, so deep that Skiba really ought to have had Schow and Shirley credited as co-writers. The big bad boss runs a bar with live bands booked. He and his girl have a succession of playthings which they break, and for break read kill during kinky sex. The dead girl's ring is pawned quickly, prompting a violent return to the pawnshop, though it was the owner in The Crow who had the .357. Of course, the black guy gets killed first, but then that's hardly restricted to these movies. The memorable costume that leading lady Laurie Love dresses up in is black and feathered. It's even worth bringing up the frenzied opening credits, which are laid out like a comic book and hint at the source of The Crow in the comic books of James O'Barr, and the finalé, which involves a swordfight on a roof in a storm. The biggest difference is that there's no crow here, unless Fred Williamson's character is seen as an amalgam of the crow and Ernie Hudson's cop. Even the dialogue often has parallels.

Beyond this being a thinly veiled remake of The Crow, a year early for a twentieth anniversary tribute, it's the cast that leaps out here. That film had an amazing cast, not merely Hudson and Brandon Lee, but Bai Ling, Michael Wincott and Tony Todd. Williamson is one of a pair of big names here, William Katt the other in the pawnshop owner role that Jon Polito nailed so magnificently in the original. Both are good additions to the cast, though Katt has little to do and Williamson clearly didn't travel far from his usual routine. He's playing himself playing the Hammer (literally) who plays the standard sensei we see all the time in films with any connection to martial arts. Of course, he's been merging the first two levels of that triumvirate for decades and the third is hardly a stretch. As such he can play this sort of character in his sleep, but Hammer roles tend to fall into two categories: those he cares about and those he doesn't. Fortunately he seems to care about this one because he does a pretty decent job.

In this telling, Jade is the half of the newlyweds who wakes up after being killed. There's good reason for the hit: she was a cherished plaything of Lyle and Ravyn, but she chose to abscond with their bartender and $50,000 in cash. No wonder Lyle's enforcers chase them down to do something about it. You could say they had a point, but rape and murder is notable overkill, so perhaps revenge for Jade is justified too and that's why we have a movie. Jade is Laurie Love, returning from her lead role in Blood Moon Rising and, well, pretty much any other movie Skiba's name is attached to. Williamson and Katt aside, the cast was sourced from local talent prominent enough that I've reviewed other films featuring the vast majority of them, so I instantly assumed Michael Alvarez was trying to be Seth Gandrud as her husband Eric but, once I realised the connections to The Crow, I realised that he's clearly aiming for Brandon Lee. Skiba's odd twist here is to have the girl survive and seek revenge, which, hey, I'm all for.

His other major change is what's highlighted by the title, that Jade swaps her ring for a .357 magnum and only gets six bullets in the deal, conveniently one for each of the people she wants revenge on. In a neat grindhouse touch, she even paints them up nicely with the names of their intended victims on the side. I liked that touch a lot more than some of the other faux grindhouse nods. Like we really need help from on screen graphics to figure out who's going to get theirs next? Let the story roll! One Skiba switch up that I appreciated was the whole training angle. While Eric Draven was invincible from moment one, Jade isn't; she completely screws up her first hit, aiming for Big Money while he's getting head in a parking lot of a strip club but getting taken down herself instead. Here's where the Hammer shows up, because she's an amateur who needs professional assistance, he's already on site, he read about her in the papers and he sees her deadly revenge as important enough to step in and help out with.

In fact he dedicates a year of his life to making sure she'll succeed in her deadly mission, training her up in martial arts, gunplay and all the other little things she'll need to get the job done. He's a Vietnam vet with apparently nothing better to do and he either owns the boxing gym that becomes her home base or he's merely important enough to whoever does for it to make no difference. The wonderfully named Jack Neptune calls him Master Hammer and bows his head when talking to his sensei. Richard Anderson does a decent job in an oddly subservient role, one of the most consistent actors in the film. It's here in these training scenes that Laurie Love does her best work, useless to begin with but gradually building up her skills until she can take down her trainers. She's pretty when she smiles, but doesn't get much chance to do that here, of course. She's at her most natural and thus her most believable when she's training. This movie would have played better for her as a regular action flick.

Unfortunately, it goes for the gothic tones of The Crow, wrapped up in a neo-grindhouse style and Love is less successful when she shifts into her revenge character. The depth she had begun to bring to the role vanishes into a one note cipher, who's either silent or shouting in a monotone, dressed in a costume that overwhelms the actress. Continually scowling adds years to her and the combination of silhouetted shots and feathered outfit makes her look huge, like the later Tura Satana playing a mysterious Angel of Death. She's not the only one stuck in an unflattering getup. Shane Dean is great at moody, pissy and sarcastic, but as Colorado, the next on her list, he's like a cartoon character. Whenever he's in thug company, like a crazy torture scene, he and his fellow henchmen turn into the hyenas from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the inappropriate laughter echoing in my brain. When he's solo, running his gambling joint, he's every cliché a thug can be: a drug addled shouty mess sponsored by the word 'bitch'. He's better than he's given.

And so the film runs on. If you've seen The Crow, you're going to have a really strong idea of how it goes, merely phrased more as a grindhouse flick than a moody gothic tale. If you haven't, then it still won't be too surprising but you'll notice the continuity issues more, because when Skiba shuffled his Crow cards, he lost a few that connected things together. For my part, I enjoyed the wide cast of strong local actors a lot. Even if Laurie Love was better as the trainee than the vengeful killer, she looks great splattered with blood and she gets a few decent fight scenes. As Pretty Boy, Aaron Neal Trout is a believable Irish thug, his backward baseball cap looking like a beanie. Kevin Tye is less believable as a South African and I still haven't figured out why he's even in the movie. The best thug is the one who isn't local, Tony Mandarich, who's frickin' huge and looks even bigger. He's a former offensive lineman in the NFL, no great actor but a very watchable character. All he needs to do is walk on screen, but he does more than that.

Of course, local actors really dominate the smaller parts. Backstage at the stripjoint, we see Windy West topless, which provides two powerful reasons for locals to seek out the movie. Melissa Ann Marie Farley is topless too, when she's not snorting coke. As Colorado's bouncer, James Ray impresses with his nervous routine which is surprisingly good, given how confident he is and usually plays. Rick Dyer is a wild tattoo artist. Blink and you'll miss Kimber Leigh in William Katt's pawn shop. The most fun local scene is the one where a string of mercenaries stride down a corridor and only one isn't familiar. They're Steve Dorssom, Bill Connor, Bill Wetherill, Chris Sheffield and Jax Menez, the one I didn't recognise. That's a lot of talent to relegate to such minor roles, where few get opportunities like Shane Dean with tiger venom coursing through his veins, Laurie Love splattered in blood or Brian Ames really acting when he confronts William Katt. One strong performance is enough for this movie though, which has completely different goals.

This is all about updating The Crow to a neo-grindhouse aesthetic, and Skiba could have done a lot worse at that. I don't buy the argument that plotholes are required for modern grindhouse movies just because the films they pay homage to had them and The Crow was a lot tighter than this. Fred Williamson gets to play himself yet again, which makes him happy, and have his name prominently featured on the poster, which makes local filmmakers happy. William Katt is a bonus on that front, proof that Arizona can make features with major names in that have capable sound and visuals. And really, with Windy West's boobs, Shane Dean's bitching and Tony Mandarich's bulk all on show, what more do we need that isn't covered by Laurie Love's pretty painted bullets and a lashing or six of blood? This covers all the bases it needs to cover, even if it would have played better with some originality. I don't buy the argument that grindhouse stories can't say something new either and this one is just a fair retelling of a twenty year old story.

The Devil and Tom Walker (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Ron Foltz, Kevin Phipps, Shelly Boucher, Raymond Scott and Patrick Giglio

On the face of it, Washington Irving's The Devil and Tom Walker, published pseudonymously in 1824 and set for the most part in a 'thickly wooded swamp' outside of Boston, might seem a difficult story to adapt to contemporary Arizona. This thought leapt quickly to mind as I revisit Travis Mills's adaptation for his 52 Films in 52 Weeks project because of the difficulty he found in adapting longer stories like The Return and The Liar in the weeks before this one. He does a much stronger job here, even though, as he did with the two earlier films, he excised a little more material than he should and altered the source story a little too much. Where that approach was problematic before, it's intriguing here, aided by an excellent location, a talented cast and a good eye for composition. If anything, the most troublesome aspect is the sound, not a common complaint on Running Wild pictures, as some dialogue out in the open is a little quiet. Perhaps that's due to James Alire only handling the sound in post-production.

The visuals are Arizona from moment one. The swamps and inlets of Massachusetts are replaced by the deserts and mountains of Arizona and they're captured well. There's a great static shot as the credits roll and Tom Walker wanders through the cacti towards the camera, underpinned by music by Ohioan that's as wide open as the landscape. We're introduced to Tom through Mills's opening narration, which sounds old but isn't from Irving's story, and to one of the changes Mills made to the material, namely that Walker isn't 'a meagre, miserly fellow', as Irving had it; he's merely ordinary, Ron Foltz as generic here as he was stirring in The Sisters. He's in the mountains being ordinary enough to hold his friends back, so he stops to let them enjoy their hike. They leave him water but he looks for more, finding it in the form of a water cooler attached to the fireplace that's all that remains of an old collapsed building in the middle of the desert. It's at once surreal, believable and metaphorically appropriate, a magnificent choice of location.

It's here that he encounters a rather grizzled and sunstricken Kevin Phipps, playing the Devil, Arizona as close to Hell as it gets. Phipps is known within the Arizona film community more as an acting coach and a director than an actor, but he does move in front of the camera on occasion and he's the obvious choice to play this part. I've always seen something of the trickster god in him and it's deceit and omnipotence that he's tasked with bringing out in this character. He gives a gloriously memorable performance, which to me screamed Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate, given all the twitching, the wild voice and wilder cactus infused walking stick. I asked him after the screening in February what his influences for the role were and he told me that he was channelling Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, who heeded Jimmy Cagney's old advice that actors should never stop moving. Beetlejuice is more obvious in his little interjections and in his dialogue. 'Your wife's a bitch when you get up in the morning,' he growls to begin his pitch.

And of course the pitch is what this story is all about. In Irving's tale, Tom Walker is a miser, he's married to a miser and his miserly habits are enhanced through a deal with the Devil to become his moneylender in return for Captain Kidd's treasure. Mills switches this up a little, not only by replacing that gold with the gold from the Lost Dutchman mine, another neat little Arizona touch, but by making Walker driven not by his own characteristics but by those of his wife, to whom he is utterly subservient. Old Scratch wants Mrs Walker, while Tom wants her to be gone from his life; it isn't a difficult deal to make. When we meet Marcy Walker, we realise why. Shelly Boucher is as superbly cast as Foltz and Phipps, though she has much less screen time than them. If Eric Almassy was my big discovery from the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project, then Shelly Boucher came close and she only appeared in a couple of these shorts. By the time I saw this film, she'd already stunned me in A Mother; her brief but pristine portrayal here further underlined her talent.

Keeping Marcy Walker close to the character in Irving's story but changing Tom's dynamic means that the ending of the film has to change too and I wonder if that's what drove Mills to take this approach. There's an arrogance in it but also a peace, which makes it a highly attractive way to end the story, if not the far more traditional one that Irving used, which of course was old even when it was published in 1824; deals with the devil had been good fodder for storytellers for millennia with the Faust myth first seeing print in the sixteenth century. Perhaps Mills was more inspired by more recent American adaptations of the story, such as The Devil and Daniel Webster or even The Devil Went Down to Georgia. It's also ironic given that the real winners in the film are the two most outrageous characters. Boucher's Marcy is believably a 'tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm', while Phipps is far from the 'great black man', 'swarthy and dingy, and begrimed with soot'. Both, however, are delightfully memorable.