Cabine of the Dead (2010)

Director: Vincent Templement
Stars: Richard Keep, Slony Sow, Yvette Petit, Pascal Montel and Bernard Cormerais

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

While six of the ten shorts that screened at Fear Fest IV were European, four of those were Spanish, so it fell to writer/director Vincent Templement to represent France with the very last slot. Cabine of the Dead looked very stylish from moment one, with its pulsing electronic score, nice camera angles and enticing lighting. We're gradually focusing in on Patrick, who's running scared and takes refuge in the location of the title, which isn't a cabin in the woods, it's what the French call a cabine téléphonique and we would call a phone box or a public phone booth. He's apparently a complete moron, because he doesn't seem to have a clue what's attacking him. Is it really viable that anyone in the western world in 2011 wouldn't recognise zombies when they're outside his phone box clamouring for his brains? That pointless idiocy was by far my biggest problem with the film, because it doesn't help us connect to his character at all. Otherwise, it's relatively well put together, especially on the technical side.

Not everything is solid. I didn't appreciate the brief shakiness the cameraman suffered from while Patrick is trying to close the door on the nearest zombie; I'm sure he was aiming at grittiness but it came across more like Parkinson's. He does a lot better emphasising the claustrophobia Patrick must surely feel inside the phone box by shooting from within it. I don't know if the camera was mounted inside or they built the booth with a removable panel so they could have a little more room; either way it works really well. There are a few longer shots too, which highlight how isolated Patrick is and how there are more zombies on the way to join the throng literally rattling his cage. More extras would have helped here, but it's staged well and I liked the composition of it all. The back and forth editing as Patrick phones the various people who might help him might be inevitable, but this screams out as being a perfect opportunity to play the whole thing out in splitscreen, building contrast rather than merely distance.

What Templement nails more consistently is a subtle humour. Even as he builds the tension, he's aware of the opportunity for laughs or, at least, for smiles. He doesn't try to tickle our ribs too overtly, but I had a smile on my face throughout, mostly because of how he built the supporting characters. Patrick himself is built primarily through the order that he rings people and the reactions he gets. After he discovers the wait time to talk to the cops, he tries Didier, a friend who falls asleep with his hand in his shorts and tries to write directions on the inside of a pizza box. Eventually he gets to mum and the reason why she's last is clear from her reaction. The funniest to me was when he rings his sister, Sophie, but gets her husband Marc. Their son is eating her and Marc thinks he can take him down calmly with a spatula. Pascal Montel nails the tone magnificently, even with much less screen time than Richard Reep gets as Patrick. Reep is good but hamstrung by being a dork who doesn't know what zombies are. He deserves to get eaten.

Panic, Fear (2011)

Director: John Francis Conway
Stars: Saad Nassim, Honor L Nezzo and Bryce Thurston

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

This short carries the on screen title of Panic, Fear, but IMDb lists it as Panic, Fear: Part One, which makes a little more sense because, like Stay, this feels less like a film and more like the beginning of one that we don't get to see because the end credits roll first. In fact, the two films worked well as a pair on screen, as they really aim to do the same thing: set a scene and let it unfold with the suspense paramount, the style worthy of note and the story so far down the list of priorities that it might as well not have been included at all. They both achieve this through use of the standard horror trope of a young lady in danger. Only the location is notably different: in Stay, she's in the middle of nowhere, but in Panic, Fear she's at home, as neatly emphasised by a tattoo on her foot. Initially she's in bed with her husband, but she gets up, visits the bathroom, pours herself some water from the fridge. Of course, the difference is that she's supposed to feel safe here, unlike the lady in Stay who wasn't in the back of that secluded car to feel safe.

The story here is so irrelevant that I've just told you half of it and the other half is that we then discover a stranger in the house with her. He's a faceless killer, as tends to be the case, hidden behind some sort of black bondage mask. He does have a presence to him, though he was far more ominous when he showed up in character for the film's screening at Phoenix FearCon IV and stood guard in the entryway as we filed in for each screening. Of course, we have no idea who he is, where he came from or why he's doing what he's doing; all we know is that he's doing it, which isn't a heck of a lot of background for us to connect to. Then again, we don't know much more about his victims. The young lady has a few tattoos, but otherwise is unworthy of note if her surroundings are anything to go by. If there's anything interesting in her fridge, on her bookshelf or anywhere else in her house, we don't get to see it. She doesn't have a big screen TV but she has sweet stuff under glass on her kitchen counter. That doesn't give us much to go on.

And so, we really don't care about either killer or victim, beyond the fact that the latter clearly has much nicer legs. What we therefore focus on is the way the film was put together, something that I appreciated more consistently here than I did with the last film that I reviewed from director John Francis Conway, one which played the previous FearCon, called the Phoenix Fear Film Festival in 2010. That was Blockhead, in many ways a similar but less successful picture, even though it won the award for best short. This does a lot of the good stuff that that one did, with its appropriate setting, memorable lighting and efficient gore effects. Perhaps it addresses most of its problems, not least by excising the moronic characters, needless dialogue and overly cool setups. Simplifying everything means that it runs shorter and smoother and the camera dollies neatly through the rooms to ensure that it stays that way. It does everything it needs to do except to actually tell a story; maybe that will eventually show up in the currently nonexistent Part Two.

DemiUrge Emesis (2010)

Director: Aurelio Voltaire
Star: Danny Elfman

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

When I last reviewed a stop motion animation by Voltaire, I called him a 'professional Cuban weirdo and cultural superhero' and I stand by that. He's one of those rare creators who are so idiosyncratic that their work is instantly recognisable, regardless what field he's working in. Hear one of his songs and you won't have any doubt that it's him singing it and the same goes for his films, which generally tend to fall into a series he calls Chimerascope, animations full of stop motion skeletons and assorted oddities, narrated in a philosophical fashion by a member of the musical profession. That last review was of 2011's Odokuro, gifted with a voice by electronic pioneer Gary Numan; this one was his previous film, DemiUrge Emesis, with suitably bouncy narration by Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo. This narration is focused more closely on a theme than the musings in Odokuro on life, the universe and everything. It speaks very specifically to the process of creation, as visualised for us through the self effacing metaphor of cat vomit.

Given how wild that metaphor is, it's surprisingly on focus and very recognisable, with the artist pouring out his soul into his creation, looking it over and finding it good, just like a cat with its vomit. The trigger for change arrives with the critics, who pop up out of nowhere like venus fly traps made of bones to carp and bleat until the sensitive soul of the artist crumbles under the pressure and he dies the violent death of a poet, to be born again, like a cat with nine lives, the next time an idea rooks him between the eyes. Given that I'm a critic taking on the task of reviewing a film that sees critics in the most negative light, I ought to be wary of my words, but critics don't all bleat and carp. I firmly believe that there's something positive to say about the worst short film shot in someone's back yard by a sixteen year old boy raiding his mother's closet for a costume and his little brother's toybox for props, but something negative to say about the most grandiloquent Hollywood epic. Few pictures are without both spark and flaw.

The most obvious flaw here is how quickly it all ends, but every second to a stop motion animator is far more important than to someone working in live action. I've seen many single takes in films longer than this entire short but those don't involve the painstaking work of stop motion. This is also more traditional in its design than Odokuro, the visuals merely impressing rather than amazing, even though they're more organic and at home in their surroundings. I liked the patron saint we creatives endow with headaches, a free gargoyle with rolling eyes. The creator cat doesn't merely have nine lives; it also has nine eyes, as if it ate a peacock and hiccoughed. The skeleton critics, however, are familiar creatures, eerily reminiscent of other Voltaire skeletons in other Voltaire shorts, but their bite (ironic if they're the bones from the cat's previous meals) is verbal as they hurl out their 'gloomy news and blues and bad reviews'; many critics know how to tear apart but not to build up (or, to be fair, vice versa).

While the brightest spark in Odokuro was its visual aesthetic, a surreal vision that took the metaphors of the narration and rendered them literally, the spark here is what backs that up. The script is a freeform slice of poetry, expounding the vomit philosophy of the title with rhymes spat out like bullets; Elfman is trigger happy, letting the words flow out like a torrent. It's Voltaire's script behind his animation and it all unfolds to the accompaniment of his characteristally quirky music, which he performed in collaboration with the ever-delightful Rasputina. I could imagine this delivered as a spoken word piece, but the music adds a layer and the visualisation another. Unlike Odokuro, the characters here don't feel like they're on their own, living their own lives with Voltaire's camera merely recording part of them. His words have the control here and its them which bring the characters to life. The Chimerascope films go back to a 1994 piece called Rakthavira narrated by Debbie Harry; it's about time I slid backwards through them.

DemiUrge Emesis can be watched for free at YouTube.

Stay (2010)

Directors: Álvaro López León and H R Paternain
Stars: Javier Bermejo and Sara Marrón

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

As the title suggested, Stay has stayed with me but hardly for the reasons that the filmmakers intended. I first saw it while screening submissions for the Phoenix Fear Fest and it didn't play well to me at that time on a relatively small screen, with its host of clichés leading to an inevitable conclusion and precious little scares showing up along the way. It apparently had enough for Chris and Jim to select it for programming though and watching it afresh on the big screen at MADCAP Theatres was a revelation. What felt like the same ol' same ol' on a small screen blistered off the big one and got a huge response from the audience. Not only did it work at scale, it worked magnificently, the scariest short at the festival by far. Every setup paid off, every sound built the tone and every visual added to the creepiness. Sure, the clichés were still clichés, there being less of a plot and more of a situation, the sort of film you expect to end with the title and be followed by ninety minutes of feature, but it taught me that small screens suck for screening.

We're in a car in a clearing in a forest in Spain. The young lady in the back seat doesn't know where they are either, but she has a boy in there with her and a cigarette to pass around, so she's happy. His parents are leaving for a flight, so they're just chilling until they can head home and party the night away. Maybe they'll start the party early in the back seat, but they don't quite get that far. He gets out to pee and she stubs out the cigarette, discovering in the process that there's another one in the ashtray with lipstick on it. We might think we have a story about to kick off, but we're quickly whisked away from that possibility when his head rolls off his shoulders. Something is moving around outside, enough to make the girl shut up the car, the camera to rock a little in anticipation and for us to get ready for the jump scares that we know have to be right round the corner. The only question is which corner, especially if this film plays on a system with decent sound.

Everything here hinges on the tension that builds as she tries to figure out what's out there and what it's got in store for her. Nothing here is surprising: the slowed down movements, the uncertainty, the shimmy of the camera. The shots are cut together faster and faster until, well, you need to watch the film yourself to find out where it takes us but the final shots are the best in the whole movie and the bigger and better the system you're playing it on the more you'll appreciate how it gets there. Watching afresh a few years after I last saw it, it feels almost like a musical performance, one played on the nerves of its lead actress, Sara Marrón, as much in the actual score, which is built out of sound effects. Technically Javier Bermejo is top billed, but it's Marrón's show throughout, even as her character must feel as out of control as she has ever felt. My guess is that this was created as either an experiment or the beginning of something bigger. It has too little substance otherwise to stand alone for long, just a freaky exercise in building tension.

Stay can be watched for free on YouTube.

Fearful John (2010)

Director: Daniel Romero
Stars: Iván Martín, Sonia Lázaro, Fernando Ustárroz and Óscar Villalobos

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

While Ma'am's Copy Shop was long for a short film and took its time to develop (pun unintended but I'll take it), this Spanish short, Juan con miedo or Fearful John, whips by us at a rate of knots. It runs eleven minutes but it feels like half that, as we immerse ourselves in the dark whimsy of fairy tales. The title is a take on Fearless John (or Juan sin miedo in Spanish), a simple Brothers Grimm fable that suggests that if only you can be completely without fear, you'll be able to land yourself a princess. In the story, the king promises the hand of his daughter, Princess Lily of the Valley, to whoever dares to spend a night in the haunted woods which contain the wonderfully named Castle of Terror. Because he's apparently unable to count, Fearless John doesn't just last one night, he stays in the castle for three, running off ghosts, tying up a bear and conquering a fire-breathing dragon and dumping it into a well. When he eventually comes back home, the king is so impressed that he allows him to marry the princess and the kingdom rejoices.

As the title of this film suggests, this particular John isn't going to be quite so brave. The inevitable John and Mary of the tales become Juan and Maria, who meet while the former is playing tag. He thinks she's playing too, but she's just trying to escape some creepy old guy. Fortunately she knows a hiding place of ill repute, a gloriously dilapidated house with a gloriously dilapidated gated courtyard, and she and Juan quickly take refuge there. Maria is clearly in charge here, not only because the character is dominant but because Sonia Lázaro is obviously a better actor than Iván Martín, who remains passive (fearful, I guess) throughout. 'In the tale you're always fearless,' she tells him, so off they go inside to hide out during the imminent storm. She dominates here too, counting its progress and passing the time by reciting a story her grandmother had written, a sort of legend called The Man of the Birds, which she keeps close to her even though she apparently knows the whole thing by heart.

It's a freaky story, built of the usual elements: sleeping peasants, crying children and spirits reincarnated as living scarecrows, you know the sort. It's made even more freaky by the location, which is surely one of the biggest successes of the film, even before the storm starts to bathe it in stroboscopic light. If this is a set, I'm stunned at how authentic it is, but I bet it's just a really good choice of location at which to shoot. It feels precisely like what it claims to be, an old house that the villagers won't buy because they say it's haunted. The film can be read in a number of ways, but my take is that we're watching the ghosts doing their haunting. Perhaps Juan is real, a city boy from Madrid in town every holiday to spend time with his grandfather, but Maria and that creepy old guy, whose identity is eventually revealed, are more likely to be ghosts than villagers. Either way, they drive the story, especially Maria with her rapid fire speech and her many stories; Juan merely experiences the haunted house like, well, a haunted house.

I enjoyed Fearful John a lot, though less for the acting or the story and more for the tone that it manages to successfully set. The house is a beautiful wreck and what it holds is gloriously designed too. The speed at which the film unfolds helps to make it a hallucinatory experience, as does the storm which would turn it into a dancefloor with a different score. The music here isn't modern at all, but it's strong and dynamic and drives the piece on, at least until Maria takes over with her fairy tales. The way they're recounted as story but woven into the fabric of the film we're watching is capably done, right down to the design of the espantapájaros who provides the nightmarish image with which we leave the picture. By the way, I chose to use the Spanish word there partly because it's such a glorious thing and partly because you deserve to experience it yourself without knowing what it means. Just don't forget to breathe, as the eleven minutes pass in fairy tale time.

Fearful John can be watched for free at Vimeo or YouTube.

Ma'am's Copy Shop (2009)

Director: ZiZak
Stars: Kim Ho-yeon, Owhoo and Zea Yu-bin

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Ma'am's Copy Shop, a 25 minute Korean horror drama from 2009, is surprisingly obscure, but its director, ZiZak, best known as a scriptwriter, doesn't appear to be very well represented online, at least on English language websites. He co-wrote the feature films Soo: Revenge for a Twisted Fate and Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait a few years before this short, in 2006 and 2007 respectively, and may have directed another a couple of years afterwards, 2011's Executioner's Daughter, but it's hard to find information on him. It's unfortunate because this is an intriguing piece, too long and consistently overacted but with a neat sting to it that resonates as it moves forward through its five chapters and renders it far more memorable than other, better short films. The good news is that the film itself is watchable for free at IMDb but, bizarrely, it doesn't even have a page there to tell you who made it. I had to search elsewhere to find that Ma'am is played by Kim Ho-yeon, while Owhoo plays Chang-soo, the unnamed leading man.

It starts relatively simply, with Chang-soo taping up missing posters wherever he can because he wants to find his wife. He does seem a little strange, not merely because he's overly careful with the green duct tape he uses instead of the usual glue. Then again, the lady who's printed 10,000 copies of the poster for him for free, is a little strange too. Her excuse is that she's clearly head over heels for this man, but both of them are painfully nervous. Owhoo is so nervous that I wondered if he isn't even an actor at all, given that searching for his name only brings up Scrabble sites and, from what I can gather from Korean pages, this is his only credit. Perhaps he was an amateur cast for his demeanour, as we'll soon come to realise a lot of why he's the way he is and it's rather appropriate. For a while we wonder how this odd lady, surely the Ma'am of the title, is going to connect with Chang-soo, given that he's married and driven to find his wife, but then we see a photo of her inside that's been torn in half so only she's visible. We have a story.

We never know for sure what happened to Chang-soo's wife and Ma'am's husband, but we're given hints that do ring true, given what we'll see as the film runs on. The only English language site I could find that talks about the film suggests that ZiZak tried to 'express indescribable sadness through repeated despair and emptiness', which is an odd goal for a film that frames itself in longing. Chang-soo longs for his wife, which seems pretty straightforward until we get far enough into the story to realise what delicious irony underpins his search. Similarly, Ma'am longs for someone to share her life with, even though her missing husband apparently treated her like a queen and cooked the very best noodles. Her story arc is a weirder one than Chang-soo's but there's irony there too. ZiZak may have achieved some of the sadness, despair and emptiness he aimed for, but he nails irony much better than any of those. If anything, the ending is the most ironic part of all, because it's not just another example, it's another layer.

I wish I knew more about the background to Ma'am's Copy Shop, because it feels like there's something of note behind it, both as far as the development of the story and the film itself. ZiZak's involvement in a few features suggests that he ought to have had access to highly professional actors, but he clearly went for an awkward amateur feel instead, perhaps to capture the nervousness of his characters before letting us in on their background. Certainly the crew seems to be more than capable, especially the editing from Um Yun-joo and the deceptively natural cinematography of Kim Joo-young. Yet the cast don't match that, from the almost but not quite endearing nature of Chang-soo to the overdone selfishness of a couple of Ma'am's prominent customers. It's possible that this plays better through subtitles to an English audience than it would to Koreans, but it was the oddity of the piece as much as the gradually growing irony of its script that has stayed with me.

Ma'am's Copy Shop can be watched for free at IMDb.

Eveline (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Stacie Stocker, Maria Patti, Susan Rienzo, Dillard Taylor and Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia

By week twelve, Travis Mills was getting into his stride and feeling confident. 'Every week I feel us getting better at telling these stories,' he noted in the webseries episode shot alongside this. It's understandable, as he'd cleared some notable obstacles in previous weeks and found this one easy running. 'We got done in one day what I had scheduled for two,' he explained. Then again, this was a relatively simple film, with a tiny crew and a cast that wasn't much bigger; only three locations, none of which were outdoors; and a source story that tries to do a lot with very little, much like many Running Wild short films. It's the next in James Joyce's Dubliners and it has to do with a young lady who wants out of the life she has and into one that's different in every way: exotic, romantic and alive. Her ticket to this new life, literally, is a sailor who has 'fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres'. He wants her to be his wife and he has a house ready for her to move into. Of course, this is a Joyce story, so pessimism ensues.

It's easy to see Eveline as yet another of Joyce's short stories that has a huge build but no payoff and it's easy to leave it empty and unfulfilled. However, there's a real truth here that I've witnessed myself often and I've personally gone through what Eveline finds that she can't. Everything in the story exists to lead up to her decision and it's the sum of it that makes the difference rather than any one piece. Eveline has a miserable life, one she dearly wants to leave behind, but that miserable life is all she knows. In the end, it'll always be better the devil you know even if the grass isn't as green, or some other mangled pair of proverbs. There are a lot of them that speak to this situation, because it's such a common one. I grew up in England, where I thankfully wasn't miserable like Eveline, but I left my family, country and life to move to another continent and get married. Ten years on, I haven't once regretted my decision, however much I miss the food, but I know many others who dream of doing the same thing but absolutely never will.

Mills's adaptation to the screen is an anorexic one indeed. I was surprised to find that it ran six minutes, as it feels like half that. Much of Joyce's story is built of memories and to adapt it faithfully would require a much more substantial shoot than was viable. I like what Mills brought in to replace them, a miserable pair of women from Eveline's work moaning about how she's leaving and talking down her chances. I'm familiar with bleating women like this (of both sexes) because I've had to listen to conversations just like this one while I was fixing their computers and they couldn't work in the meantime. They're the sort who are happy being unhappy and the best way to do that is to be jealous about someone else who might do what they know they never will. Maria Patti and Susan Rienzo are frustrating to watch because I've seen this so often, but they do it well. Unfortunately, the flipside of ditching all those memories is that Stacie Stocker has to find a way for Eveline to explain everything she's leaving with facial expressions.

And that's frankly impossible, so she's up against it from moment one. She's a really odd choice for this role and I wonder why Michael Hanelin cast her as Eveline. For a start, she's a long way from nineteen, however good she looks, so the whole dynamic of a young woman wondering if she can really leave the only home she's known is completely lost. This Eveline has a whole lot more experience behind her than Joyce's Eveline, so her decision is completely different. Perhaps that's why Mills ended his story a little sooner than Joyce ended his. Stocker's also a very strong woman, which makes this part a tough one for her to sell. The scene where she summons up the strength to leave her father behind in their RV without making his breakfast first is exactly what she does best, but most of her part calls for weakness instead, whether it's through fear of her father or fear of the unknown. With a lot more screen time, I'm sure she could nail the part, but she doesn't have that luxury and it really shows.

While Dillard Taylor is a much more natural casting choice and he does very well with his few moments on screen, Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia has an even tougher task than Stocker. While Joyce had his Eveline fall for a sailor who's back in his home country for a holiday and wants her to sail away with him, Mills's contemporary version has an internet romance that leads to her driving out to Sky Harbor. It's the right update, but we only hear the object of Eveline's affections through a computer screen as we watch her face and that's a really tough set up to generate shared charisma. In the end, Valencia merely has to settle for matching Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's record in my mind as the actor with the most syllables in their name. I'm unsure as to what Mills could have done with this story, as a faithful adaptation would have been ten minutes of narrated montage leading up to a brief and unsatisfying ending. He tries for a better film than that but only manages to give us the bones, not the flesh.

They Live (1988)

Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George 'Buck' Flower, Peter Jason and Raymond St Jacques

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.

Back in the eighties, when I found the money to go out and discover a wider variety of movies than were broadcast on the four TV channels we had in England at the time, John Carpenter was surely the biggest name in genre cinema. He seemed to be most highly regarded for two hits, Halloween and Escape from New York, both of which did very well at the box office and strongly resonated down the years. Yet today, it's his less heralded features that stand up best, especially Big Trouble in Little China, which lost money at the box office, and They Live, which made a profit but hardly a spectacular one. If I had to pick a third place, it would be Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter's update to Rio Bravo, as Halloween feels simplistic now and Escape from New York wears some of its more convenient scenes on its sleeve. By comparison, They Live feels more and more relevant with each year that passes. It's horrifying to realise that it often feels like we're living in this world that Carpenter created in 1988. How do we shut down the source?

At the time, They Live was quintessentially about the eighties, perhaps why many critics didn't see much value in its message; they needed to skip forward a few decades to see how it would all evolve. In truth, Carpenter was railing against a number of things, one reason why They Live doesn't feel like a one note message, but at its heart, it's anti-consumerism. He told Starlog that he'd started to watch TV again and that he realised that everything was designed to sell us something, but he also noticed the reflection of this in the thriving yuppie movement, which tied success specifically to money, and the Reaganomics of the time. Carpenter naturally polarised this in his script to become a 'them and us' scenario, but as he phrased 'them' as alien free enterprisers and 'us' as the human race, he tapped into a set of wider truths about modern America that have become more obvious with each year that passes, a recognition that the class system of the British is present in the United States too, merely manifested in a different form.

Today, yuppies and Reaganomics have gone by the wayside, but They Live feels more contemporary than ever because it's phrased vaguely enough to be universally applicable. When I rewatched it in 2012 and again in 2013 at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, it felt like Carpenter was writing specifically about the Occupy movement, the 99% and venture capital firms like Bain Capital. Watching again for this review, it's suddenly reminiscent of Ferguson, MO, police brutality and the erosion of the middle class. I'm sure Carpenter looked backwards for references to McCarthy's communist witchhunts and the civil rights movement, but he also presaged climate change, subliminal advertising and modern corporate America. He certainly adapted one of the most telling lines in the film, 'We all sell out every day' from an executive at Universal. Since then, Universal has not incidentally sold out to a whole string of global multinationals and is currently owned by Comcast.

I first saw They Live on British TV as a presentation of Moviedrome, in which Alex Cox introduced me to a stunning range of films and, in many ways, placed me on the road to Apocalypse Later. I remember that Cox highlighted that the primary character is homeless, hardly a common scenario for a lead in an action movie. He's also never named, his credited name of Nada meaning 'nothing' in Spanish', and the product of a broken home, from which he ran away at the age of thirteen. The movie's title is sourced from graffiti within it, initially underneath a bridge, and it opens with Nada walking past it, literally travelling from the other side of the tracks in search of work; he ends up in a shanty town for the homeless quite a distance away. However, he's not phrased as a victim. While the government's job centres have nothing for him, he's an able bodied man with his own tools and he finds work on a construction site himself. 'I believe in America,' he tells a bitter co-worker. 'Everybody's got their own hard times these days.'

His optimism isn't reflected in anything else we see or hear, as hammered home in the early scenes. The lady he meets at the job centre doesn't care and doesn't want to listen; the loudspeakers explain that the food stamp programme has been suspended; a man in a wheelchair rolls past him, shaking his head. Out in the streets, a preacher asks, 'Why do we worship greed?' before a cop shows up to shut off his words. Frank, that bitter co-worker, hasn't seen his wife and kids in six months; they're back home in Detroit, but he had to leave because the steel mills closed down. Nada came from Denver where 'things just seemed to dry up.' In other words, it's not just here, it's everywhere. The only way out is through television, where you can watch and dream, even if it's in a shop window. It doesn't address the problems of society, but it serves as a temporary escape from them. On television, you'll never, never grow old and you'll never die. No wonder people stop trying, even in the shanty town; it's much easier to escape than to try.

But breaking into that signal comes an old bearded hacker, ironically because he's using 'their' medium, to rail at the complacence of the people. He isn't received well, partially because his message is nowhere near commercial (how about zingers like, 'We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep' or 'their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness') and partially because the interference literally gives them headaches. The truth hurts, right? His more effective words are very familiar, but here's where the setup ends and our story really begins. Clearly something is going on at the African Methodist Episcopal Free Church over the road from the homeless town and our hero is an inquisitive soul. He wanders in to find that it's a front for a group of scientists who discovered the truth behind all the proselytising and want to wake up the populace. Talking at them doesn't help, but what has a chance are the sunglasses they're manufacturing that show things as they really are.

Given that They Live is now over a quarter of a century old, that the point at which Nada puts on a pair of these sunglasses is only half an hour into the movie and that what he sees has passed into pop culture to the degree that street artist Shepard Fairey's Obey campaign was deliberately inspired by it and arguably his iconic Obama Hope poster was too, it seems fair to talk about it. When wearing these sunglasses, the world of colour that we know is transformed into black and white, partly because it works metaphorically and partly because Ted Turner was prominently colorising classic movies at the time and it seemed like a good way to make him out to be 'a monster from outer space'. Images and words vanish too, replaced by simple subliminal slogans on every advertising hoarding, every page of every magazine, every sign in a window. Many contain only a single word: 'Obey', 'Consume' or 'Conform', while others are more complex, such as 'Do Not Question Authority' or 'No Independent Thought'. Paper money reads 'This is Your God'.

What's more, while some people look identical, others are utterly different, like a mass of bruises without skin. That's because they're the aliens who own us and the message becomes crystal clear. The first alien we see is an affluent white businessman but the first human is a black newspaper seller; in this world, we call them 'sir'. Masters are alien, but their servants are human. Aliens get promoted, while humans don't. Some cops are human but most aren't, something that echoes today in the maxim that good cops protect bad cops. Stumbling around town in a daze as he can see the truth, Nada decides that he'll do something about it and the rest of the story falls easily into place, the social comment stronger early on but not lost as the film turns into an action piece. The most telling moments arrive late, such as the transformation of Buck Flower's character, a lazy nobody from the shanty town now gussied up in a suit and bow tie as the epitome of the nouveau riche. 'We all sell out every day,' he says. 'Might as well be on the winning team.'

For a movie that carries a whopper of a message, much better constructed than the hacker's diatribe that is primarily received as 'just that idiot licking his nuts again,' it's a highly enjoyable piece. The source was a story called Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson, published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1963 and it's surprisingly close to Carpenter's adaptation to the big screen. George Nada wakes up to a similar revelation after being hypnotised on stage, finding that our world is ruled by Fascinators who breed us for food but control us through subliminals. It ends with an extra twist that isn't in the film, surprisingly given that it's even shorter than this review, under two thousand words, but Carpenter does a magnificent job of turning them into 94 minutes of visualisation and social analogy, not least through how he phrased the characters. Nada is far from the only unusual primary character and, even a quarter of a century on, this stands surprisingly alone in its varied heroes, right down to the heavily tattooed biker with a long beard.

Playing the homeless, nameless hero is Roddy Piper, who is a better actor today than he was in 1988 but is perfectly cast nonetheless as the everyman; as Carpenter told Starlog: 'Unlike most Hollywood actors, Roddy has life written all over him.' At the time he was best known for his career as a WWF wrestler, but he was starting to dabble in movies, first being noticed in this and the much lower budget Hell Comes to Frogtown in 1988. Playing opposite the white guy is a black guy, Keith David, clearly a much better actor, who had impressed Carpenter during the making of The Thing. He wrote the part of Frank for him, as he 'wouldn't be a traditional sidekick, but could hold his own.' Just as prominent in a smaller role as a blind, black street preacher is Raymond St Jacques, who had broken down a boundary on his own, becoming in 1965 the first black actor to become a regular on a western series on television, as cattle drover Simon Blake on Rawhide. It's appropriate that he was a noted civil rights activist in real life. He sells his role.

Buck Flower is perfectly cast as the drifter who finds his way up the food chain by selling out. It's notable that unlike most of the homeless folk in the shanty town, he never seems to do anything except sit back and watch television. His creaky voice is perfect for the role, as are his unkempt looks. As Gilbert, whose part in running the shanty town is mostly a front for his more subversive operations in the underground, Peter Jason is strong too, even if he's one of those actors who we remember visually without ever letting his name sink into our skulls. He was also in Carpenter's previous picture, Prince of Darkness, another of his underrated gems. And that leaves Meg Foster, whose unique blue eyes have never been more overt. She has an odd role, in that she doesn't show up until almost halfway through the film and does so as a hostage. She plays Holly Thompson as cool, composed and conciliatory. 'You have two guns,' she tells Nada. 'You're not sorry. You're in charge.' Yet the moment she can act, she does, quickly and powerfully.

There's so much to discuss in They Live that a review can easily run away and become a book of its own, something impossible to even conceive with most eighties action movies, which are often looked back at as guilty pleasures, the nostalgia overriding the cheese. That cheese isn't entirely absent though, as we can't forget the film's most famous line and most famous scene, both of which are remembered far more than the substance and depth that pervades They Live. The line, of course, is Nada's oft quoted, 'I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.' Piper apparently ad libbed the line, but he certainly didn't ad lib the long alley fight he worked with Keith David, all to get him to put on sunglasses. Carpenter had them watch The Quiet Man, with John Wayne battling Victor McLaglen, then they built up the choreography over weeks. It's arguable that fight credibility is lost whenever a suplex is added into it, but if it's bringing new people to They Live after 26 years, it's well worth it.

Saw (2004)

Stars: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson, Tobin Bell, Ken Leung, Makenzie Vega, Shawnee Smith, Dina Meyer, Benito Martinez and Leigh Whannell

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.

It had been quite a while since I last saw Saw. It was released in 2004, while I saw it in 2005, probably as the word of mouth that quickly built around it had become substantial. While it cost a little over a million dollars to make, it grossed a hundred times that and its six sequels gradually built the franchise into the most successful at the box office of any such horror series. I was impressed, though the sequels gradually fed on each other incestuously and I haven't yet made it all the way through to the latest, Saw 3D, the seventh and currently final film in the series which was released in 2010. I hadn't revisited it since, until doing so around the time of its screening at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2013, which had executive producer and CEO of FearNet Peter Block in attendance. Eight years was long enough that plot details had either faded from memory or become blurred with the sequels. I remembered the final, particularly vicious twist, but I didn't remember the many others that preceded it.

What I discovered was that it remains an impressive film, notably better than the sequels I've seen thus far, though it hasn't entirely stood the test of time. The fundamental concept still stands up well, a neatly twisted one that has a couple of men wake up in a bathroom, chained to separate walls with hacksaws provided to free themselves, not ones strong enough to sever their chains but ones that will cut through their legs. This is only the first sadistic torment with which they're faced as they gradually discover why they're there, how they're connected and what else might be going on that they can't yet see from their perspective. This concept stands up today, even if it served to introduce the world to the modern torture porn genre. This first film isn't as gory as its sequels and the complexity isn't overwhelming, remaining close enough to the simple vision of its twisted mastermind to ring true. I agree with creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell that it wasn't torture porn yet, even if I don't agree that it didn't get there later.

This one tells two stories that gradually become one. The first revolves around the bathroom, with its two questioning captives and its bloody corpse in the middle of the floor between them that they can't reach. It's a intriguing puzzle, not merely for Dr Lawrence Gordon and Adam Stanheight, the two men inside it, but for us as well. Of course, Lawrence and Adam have more motivation than cinematic inquisitiveness pushing them to figure out why they're there but their actions are cleverly tailored not only to drive their story forward but to draw us into the picture. There are two quick notes that do this very well indeed. Dr Gordon realises that there's a purpose behind their kidnapping and captivity. After all, they could easily have been killed too, but they weren't. 'They must want something from us,' he points out, prompting us to wonder about where the story will take us. Then he notices that the clock on the wall of this wrecked room is brand new, meaning not only that time is important but also that we need to look as much as think.

The other half ties to a police investigation, in which a couple of detectives try to find the Jigsaw Killer, an odd serial killer because he doesn't actually kill anyone, merely places them into darkly ironic situations where they die more often than not. Paul, a man who had attempted suicide by cutting his wrists, was put into a cage of razorwire and given two hours to tunnel a way through it to escape. Mark pretends to be ill to get other people's money, so wakes up with a poison running through his veins that he can counter by taking the antidote that's merely feet away in a safe. There are catches, of course: the combination is on the wall, but there are a heck of a lot of numbers to work through, the floor is covered in broken glass and he's doused in a flammable substance but has to use a candle to read what's on the walls. There has only been one survivor: Amanda, a drug addict, who could only escape the reverse bear trap attached to her head by carving the key out of the stomach of the paralysed man in her makeshift cell.

We soon find that there's already a tie between the two stories, beyond the obvious fact that this pair of captives are clearly going through the latest of the Jigsaw Killer's ironic setups. By this point, we've been let in on how it will work: Lawrence has been given until six o'clock to kill Adam or his wife and daughter will be murdered in his stead. The tie is that Dr Gordon was a former suspect in the police investigation. Sure, he was quickly cleared of being the Jigsaw Killer without any doubt, but the real mastermind behind these cruel acts of irony still chose to set him up. Certainly putting his family on the line is ironic because the alibi that cleared his name also exposed his infidelity; the wife he now has to commit murder to save is the wife he's been cheating on. And so we watch Lawrence and Adam try to figure out a way to escape while hoping that former Det David Tapp, now clearly obsessed with the case, will find them first. And we try to figure out the connections before Wan and Whannell show us their finished puzzle.

However much they reject the suggestion that this film is torture porn, it's impossible to talk about Saw without talking about the sadistically intricate but ingenious traps that the Jigsaw Killer constructs. They dominate the film far more than its stars, the acting or any other cinematic angle. For a start, it's an odd hybrid of horror and thriller that's never entirely comfortable in either genre. It's more gory and sadistic than thrillers tend to be, which has led to frequent and fair comparisons to David Fincher's Seven, and it doesn't play up the tension as a thriller would; we rarely see the clock, for instance. However, it's not a conventional horror movie either. It's not scary, for a start, even if the jump scares are clearly supposed to catch us unawares. It's better as a thriller than a horror movie, especially as it plays it straight, even if a couple of elements threaten to send it into camp horror territory: mostly Adam's occasional attempts at poor humour and a freaky puppet unnamed in this film but known outside it as Billy.

There are major actors in the cast, but nobody really shines on the acting front. I appreciated the choice to tell this predominantly from the victims' point of view, an unusual but highly successful angle, but that means that as Dr Gordon, Cary Elwes is the closest thing we have to a lead and he's done far better work elsewhere. Critics have lambasted him for overdoing it here, but it isn't really that. Dr Gordon is a notably flawed character, a cheat and a liar who isn't particularly good at lying, which makes him seem deceptive all the time. No wonder Det Tapp never buys into him not being the Jigsaw Killer, even though he isn't, as his cop's instinct would be to distrust him. Sure, Elwes doesn't appear to be endowing this role with what we know he can do, but then he's playing a duplicitous character whose every action is a performance. If Dr Gordon was a better actor, then I might buy into Elwes not doing his job. As it stands, I'm unsure as to whether he doesn't do his job or whether he does it too well.

Leigh Whannell's acting isn't up to his writing, as his script is much more successful than his performance as Adam. He was the first actor cast, having played the lead of David in the 2003 short, also titled Saw, in the role that became Amanda in this feature. Much of the reason that the film stayed independent is that director James Wan wasn't willing to lose Whannell as Adam; while another actor might have been better in the role, that choice indirectly led to many of the successes of the film. With Wan unable to do much of what he wanted because of the restrictions of budget, cast and time, he found himself gradually forced to use his imagination to make everything work. Unusable shots became still photographs or footage from a surveillance camera. The end result ws something that's 'more gritty and rough around the edges', which helped it feel real. No wonder the underlying theme is one of control; Wan and Whannell were constantly fighting to keep control of their project and then the film that they wanted to make.

If Cary Elwes got the opportunity to depict a man who believes he has control over his life, even though it isn't deserved, and who rails the most against the Jigsaw Killer taking that control away from him, the rest of the cast didn't get those chances. Danny Glover shot all his scenes as Det Tapp in two days; while he's far from bad in the role, it deserved to be more substantial. I like that Tapp isn't the lead character, as he would have been in most takes on this story, but he deserved better than he got. Dina Meyer is hardly in the movie as another detective and neither is Tobin Bell, who would soon dominate the franchise. Michael Emerson is far too overt as Zep Hindle, one of Gordon's orderlies who gets hauled into the mix too. It's Shawnee Smith and Ken Leung who impress most in smaller roles as Amanda and Det Sing respectively. Each of these characters returned in future films, though sometimes only tangentially. Bell is in all seven pictures; Smith, Meyer and Emerson four each, Glover and Leung three and Elwes in two.

One sure reason why the film did so well is its ending, which is one of the great twists of the modern era. It's been torn apart by many critics and with possible good reason, but I believe that it's easy to explain it without venturing into the dubious logic of conspiracy theorists. Then again, if I'm right, it would counter the general tone of control that pervades the picture. There are other things I'd complain about first. One is how it's impossible to figure everything out ourselves from what we're given early on; we're reliant on a steady stream of information throughout to fill in gaps. Another is the complexity of the film's structure which unfolds in an overly complex set of flashbacks, mostly to keep the stream of information flowing. It leads to the next, which is that the script is effectively playing with us just as much as the Jigsaw Killer is playing with his victims. Most annoying to me was how Wan and Whannell task us with figuring out their puzzle but deem us incapable of reading the periodic notes. In fact, that's not just annoying, it's insulting.

I stand by my rating of Saw as a capable and original thriller, especially considering its budget, even if its varied issues become more and more apparent with repeat viewings. I'm hardly going to complain much about a movie that spurs us to think earning close to a hundred times what it cost to produce. It certainly deserves to be judged on its own merits and not merely as part of a franchise which soon came to value the cruel ingenuity of its traps over clear stories and its characters, which are less believable as the films ran on. It also can't be judged on its legacy, which directly led to more overt examples of the torture porn genre. I firmly believe that it's been mostly forgotten in favour of its even more successful sequels and I wonder how it'll be received when it's re-released in theatres this Hallowe'en for its tenth anniversary. It may bring some respect back to the franchise, which is far more successful commercially than critically, but it may disappoint people used to the more extreme material in the sequels.

Gamera vs Guiron (1969)

Director: Noriaki Yuasa
Stars: Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama and Christopher Murphy

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.

Tonight we went to the drive in for free movie night, but we left after Guardians of the Galaxy as the other half of the double bill was the reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once through that mess of a movie is enough for me, so I avoided a second viewing by heading home instead to watch a memorable turtle picture, Gamera vs Guiron, the fifth movie in Daiei's original Gamera series which was released Stateside by American International Pictures as Attack of the Monsters. Even in their television print, in a full screen ratio with an English dub and notably faded colour, it's still a great deal more fun than that latest Michael Bay debacle. Seen as it should be seen, in the widescreen version issued by Shout! Factory on DVD in the original Japanese and with crisp colour, it's a real treat. It's also a wilder ride because it restores the fight scene between Guiron and Space Gyaos to its full glory, one of those gloriously inappropriate moments in Japanese children's entertainment that make us wonder if we're watching a movie or dreaming one.

Now, let's be clear before we begin. This is an awful movie by most standards and it's not surprising that Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on no less than five of the eight Showa era Gamera movies. In fact, it did so twice, firstly with a five episode marathon during its initial run on KTMA in Minneapolis, currently the earliest surviving episodes of the show, then again in episodes scattered throughout season three of the regular syndicated show, its debut season on Comedy Central. They riffed on another version of this film, dubbed into English by Sandy Frank Entertainment so poorly that its voice acting became a running joke in itself. However awful the film is, we shouldn't forget that this was a movie for children, with a pair of boys in the lead roles, and, kaiju fans aside, it's easy to see how it would play much better to a young audience. Akio and Tom go on a great adventure, flying a spaceship to an alien planet, where they watch monsters fight, meet strange ladies, get saved by Gamera and return home safely. What glorious fun!

Bizarrely, it starts out in a completely boring fashion, especially for kids, with no less than three sections before we can finally be introduced to Akio and Tom and get down to business. First up is an introduction that effectively lets us on in the scientific secret that space is big, before pointing out to us that a star is in trouble. Then we get the opening credits, which unfold over some sort of lava flow, which I hope isn't supposed to be the star in trouble. Finally, we meet Dr Shiga, in the form of Eiji Funakoshi, who returns to the series after playing the lead, Dr Hidaka, in the first Gamera movie. He's supposedly here to explain to the assembled press that the strange waves from space they're receiving aren't the same ones the Brits are getting. We hear delightfully squeaky space age sound effects, courtesy of some delightfully squeaky analogue technology. Really he's in the movie to explain to the kids watching why none of the planets in our solar system are viable candidates for the source, which is nonetheless somewhere nearby!

Fortunately, we have Akio and Tom on the case. They've been trying to figure out where the waves have been coming from too, using the portable telescope they keep on Akio's balcony. Akio is a believable boy scientist, as Nobuhiro Kajima ably captures a magic combination of knowledge, optimism and discovery. Surprisingly, this was his only film. Tom, on the other hand, who is as Japanese as the name suggests, is very much stuck in the role of Akio's sidekick, Christopher Murphy proving endearing but apparently not capable of actually displaying emotion on screen. He does appear to be fluent in the Japanese language; if he was dubbed, it wasn't by Sandy Frank Entertainment! The kawaii factor is reserved for little Tomoko, Akio's younger sister, left behind when the boys embark on their adventure for no reason other than to be disbelieved when she explains to mum that they tracked a spaceship on their telescope to the vacant lot where they play, cycled over in the morning and promptly flew away in it. That's every day in Japan!

The spaceship is an obvious model, of course, but it's a cool one with huge fins and a revolving top. It's designed in a minimalist style with a few abstract wall designs and a preponderence of triangles, but few actual controls. Then again, it is flown by apparent remote control, even if we're supposed to believe for a moment or two that the kids successfully launched it themselves. We are asked to buy into a great deal here. Given that they're hurtling into space at ludicrous speed, the sparkly meteor that quickly threatens to fly into them must really have been flying backwards at just less than ludicrous speed. Either that or the laws of physics don't apply and we don't want to go there yet, given the early emphasis on science. Fortunately for them, Gamera is apparently cruising in their immediate vicinity and he promptly steps in to save them, before flying in convoy for a while so that we can sing along with the Gamera theme song. Sure, this is a kids' movie, but these plot conveniences aren't just ridiculous, they're blatant too.

Then again, we can't argue too much about little details like this when we're watching a movie featuring a giant, jet-propelled, spacefaring turtle, hardly the most grounded character in Japanese cinema; even Godzilla seems completely believable by comparison. However Gamera was one of the major box office successes of Daiei, one of a half dozen great studios of postwar Japan. They produced Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the first Japanese film to win an international award, both the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival and an honorary Academy Award (the Best Foreign Language Film award hadn't been introduced yet). They produced Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, the first Japanese film to screen internationally in colour; it also won an honorary Oscar and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. They also produced such legendary Japanese films as Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds and the long running Shintaro Katsu series, Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. Gamera was in good company.

Akio and Tom soon find themselves in bad company. Landing on an alien planet, the first thing they see is Space Gyaos, an alien version of Gamera's most popular enemy painted silver. Gyaos is a giant airborne monster with a triangular head who had been introduced in the third movie, Gamera vs Gyaos, and would return later in the first Heisei era movie, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the Millennium era film, Gamera the Brave. These eras don't denote period Japanese settings, by the way, just the different series that Gamera has appeared in so far: seven Showa films from 1965 to 1971 and an eighth in 1980 as the studio was facing bankruptcy, three Heisei titles in the late nineties and one Millennium picture in 2006. Gamera is portrayed differently in each of these eras, with a different design and different powers. The Showa era saw him released by a nuclear explosion from natural cryogenic storage in the Arctic circle to apparently fly around and save children. He retracts his legs to ignite his jets and is able to breathe fire.

Here's where we get that amazing fight scene that was censored for Attack of the Monsters. It's not a long battle, as the very first blow is a self inflicted injury, with a laser from the eyes of Space Gyaos bouncing off Guiron and severing its own leg. Guiron is an odd monster, not only in how it looks but also in how it fights. Space Gyaos looks like the standard Japanese actor in a big rubber suit, but Guiron mostly restricts itself to crouching on all fours, its huge knife shaped head apparently weighing it down. Then it leaps into the air when the time is right to slice something off its enemy, like the wing it neatly removes from Space Gyaos's body in mid-air, sending it into a spin and a crash landing. Then it jumps again to sever the other wing on the ground, leaving the monster with only one of its four limbs left. Our eyes are already wide as we're not used to seeing severed kaiju limbs wriggling on the ground or spurting purple kaiju blood, but it continues. Guiron decapitates his rival, then proceeds to chop off more slices. Remember, kids' movie!

Of course, we're going to end up with Gamera battling Guiron as the title has to mean something, but it'll take a while before we get there. First, we need to watch Akio and Tom explore the nearby alien city until they run into the only two inhabitants left on the planet. Naturally, they're cute Japanese ladies, but that's amazingly explained, as is their ability to speak fluent Japanese. It isn't explained well, but it is explained! They're Barbella and Florbella, names which ironically translate to Sweet as a Bird and Pretty as a Flower, given that they're planning to eat our heroes' brains and invade the planet Earth with the advanced tech from their dying civilisation. They have teleportation wigwams, a remote control spaceship and a device that allows them to change their speech into any language, really useful when you're the only two people left on the entire planet. Guiron is their watchdog, who protects them from other giant monsters; beyond a giant knife shaped head, he can also hurl shuriken through telekinesis. Remember, kids' movie!

I don't know about you, but when I was six, I'd have fallen in love with a movie where kids accompany a jet propelled turtle to an alien planet in their hijacked spaceship, teleport around an alien city, narrowly avoid having their brains eaten by cute alien women and yet still get home in time for supper. Having a set of monsters like Gamera, Guiron and Space Gyaos is just icing on the cake, especially as it's notably gory icing. You just don't see bizarre monsters counting down to the moment where they decapitate an enemy on Teletubbies or Bob the Builder and they don't feature a single drop of spurting alien monster blood. I could argue that the western world might be a much more interesting place if they did. Don't get me started on Japanese TV shows where child actors get to shoot guns in the holy name of saving their country, their world and their universe. Sure, Japanese children get to spend way more hours at school cramming for exams, but they get wildly imaginative wish fulfilment television, so that's a fair trade off.'

Now that I'm much older than six, it's impossible not to see the wild flaws, leaps and conveniences that pervade this movie, and frankly I'm sure that my grandchildren would see them too. Perhaps I need to introduce them to Gamera movies like this one to see if they find the magic or the stupidity. It would be worth it to hear them singing the Gamera theme song instead of Carly Jepsen or Justin Bieber. I have no idea why Gamera vs Guiron was screened at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, as it didn't tie to anyone attending or any apparent theme. It merely followed another out of the blue classic selection at the 2012 festival, The Brain That Wouldn't Die. That slot didn't exist in the much smaller 2011 event and it wasn't continued into 2014, when the showcase features had plenty of interesting new movies to screen instead. The only classic shown in 2014 was Cujo, with Dee Wallace-Stone there to give a Q&A. Now, I'd have gone to Gamera vs Guiron if Christopher Murphy had been there to talk about it!