Night Train to Phoenix (2011)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Abraham Anene Ntonya and Carly Simone Fischer

Is it a new month already? Then it's time for another Travis Mills movie and November's is a noir-infused piece of poetry called Night Train to Phoenix that has an interesting history. First inspired by the title of an old Polish film called simply Night Train, then the movie itself, Mills discovered a whole world of night trains out there in culture, often tied to places because it's never the train that's important, it's the travellers, their destinations and their reasons. All trains go somewhere, just like all stories. To a creative mind, a train is possibility and a night train is dark possibility. Mills felt drawn to write about his own night train, to stake out his own little corner of this world, the only catch being that here in Phoenix we don't have one, we just have the light rail. But hey, that's what poetic license is for, right? So for a brief five minutes, Phoenix has its own night train and a brief glimpse into its own stories.

It's an interesting piece of two halves. The first has an unnamed black man, played by Abraham Anene Ntonya, ride the light rail, I mean the night train to Phoenix, and tell us why he's there. It's poetic, partly because of his soft and hypnotic voice, partly through Mills's blank verse and partly because it talks about a mysterious woman, one that spoke to him without words and led him to places he really didn't need to go. Perhaps it's always about a mysterious woman. Certainly the poem I wrote on a train, Seat 35 on the 18.02, was about one, given that she slept while I wrote and never knew I was there and I knew nothing about her other than what I saw. Perhaps that's also why this short took on noir tones, as mysterious women easily turn into femmes fatale. This femme fatale is free of both name and voice, as she never speaks, but she's played well by Carly Simone Fischer, who returned for a small role in Mills's first feature, The Big Something.

Halfway through, almost exactly, Ntonya's voice stops as the woman he rides the night train to find once more gets on. As if released from a spell, we follow him follow her as Brandon Reader's music kicks in and we wonder if it's all going to progress the way we think. It did for me, which suggests that Ntonya did exactly what he needed to with his voice, not merely telling a story but infusing it with the emotional cues to tell us what he may not even know he wants. I'm surprised that this is his only credit, as he does solid work here at a very free level, with only narration and body language, no dialogue. I have nothing against Fischer, who is suitably enticing, but this is Ntonya's film. Technically, it's amazingly loose, serving only to support him and his journey, Very few shots seem planned, though the footage feels capably edited. It's dreamlike, soothing and inexorable, deceptively simple but with cryptic meaning, like a vampire story without teeth.

Night Train to Phoenix is available to view for free on both Vimeo and YouTube.

The Holding (2011)

Director: Susan Jacobson
Stars: Kierston Wareing, Vincent Regan, David Bradley, Terry Stone and Skye Lourie

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

While some have dismissed The Holding as being merely an English version of The Stepfather, I see that reading as rather unfair and strongly suggest that it shouldn't be ignored that easily. It does follow a similar sweep, with a stranger coming into a young woman's life because he wants to be part of a perfect family, and it acknowledges the similarity with a couple of overt homages, but it's much more of a feminist response than a mere rerun through the material. In particular, the lead character of Cassie Naylor is a long way from being a victim. She's a strong woman, so much so that I'm unsurprised to see that the film's director is a woman, although the writer isn't. What's more, there are deliberate pains taken to blur the traditional killer/victim roles, which are interchangeable here, as we're shown that the killer is also a victim and the victim also a killer. I appreciated this depth to familiar material, and surely I can't be alone.

Kierston Wareing is dominant as Cassie Naylor, a small but strong leading lady. There's softness in her, but it's buried deep as she's had to be strong for a long time. She hunts, she farms and she runs the business of the title, a holding in the English Peak District. She's a single mum, with two daughters to bring up on her own, as her abusive husband Dean has 'left'. Obviously she's used to taking the lead and doing what needs to be done, whatever it takes. In fact, that's how we know that Dean hasn't just left, because the opening scene clearly shows Cassie killing him. Why she does this isn't made clear until later in the story and she's shown in a sympathetic light throughout, but we know from moment one that she's a killer and her guilt flavours everything that follows. So does her doubt, as eight months on we find that even with their biggest problem supposedly taken care of, life didn't magically fix for the Naylors.

Cassie is finding it tough to keep the holding going financially and tough to stop her family from falling apart. Her eldest daughter, Hannah, ably puts it into words. 'We're not exactly a family,' she tells her mum, 'just three people who live together.' What's more, Karsten Rabe, her nearest neighbour, really wants to buy her place, going as far as to propose marriage if that would only do the trick. He's polite enough to begin with, but he escalates nastily, killing one of her calves and blocking her way off her own property. Into this mess comes Aden, a stranger who claims he knew Dean a long time ago and happened to be in the vicinity so thought he'd look him up. He proves useful immediately, saving a pregnant cow and her calf, and promptly offers to help out wherever he can. He talks Cassie into letting him work there for a month, in return for room and board, but of course soon becomes much more than that. You know how that goes in movies.

In most films, Aden would be the lead. He's big, strong and able, and he's the element of change in the story. Vincent Regan, yet another actor who exchanged substantial experience on British television for supporting roles in Hollywood, shows that he's a force to be reckoned with, not just as a tough guy, but as a flawed individual. Aden is an interesting character, as he deteriorates as we learn more about him. Initially he's the saviour of the day, equally at home delivering calves, cleaning gutters and responding to threats. He makes a quick connection with Cassie's youngest daughter, Amy, who sees him as an angel sent from God. We know he has an agenda, but with each hint as to what it is, he decreases in worth even as he increases in menace. By the end of the film, he's a ludicrous creature, unable to forge his own destiny and shed a definition that was forced on him by his upbringing. He's as much a victim as he makes others. He's just a cycle.

Here, Cassie is always the lead. She's always stronger than Aden, except physically. It's telling that the moment he steps over the line, she ushers him out at the end of a shotgun. I wonder if director Susan Jacobson has had any feedback from battered women who have watched her film, because I have a feeling they'd identify very strongly with it. They'll take a lot, especially when their oppressor is physically stronger than they are, but eventually they won't take any more and they'll prove that strength is far from only physical. There are points here that are overtly fuelled by testosterone but, if you pay attention, you'll see that it's the women calling the shots, even in the roles of victims. Once we learned a few key facts, it was clear where the film had to go and how it had to end, and that's exactly what happened. Yet, that isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing as most films play to convention with concepts like damsels in distress and lucky accidents.

The other reason this plays to me as such a feminist piece stems from what might appear to be a throwaway line given to a supporting character named Coop. Overtly, he's just an employee, the only one, but he's really Cassie's rock and he's been instrumental in keeping the holding open, all the way down to freeing it of her husband by helping her kill him. Late in the film he talks about the idea of moving on and how it always comes down to people and the secrets they keep unspoken. Of course, we know what secrets he's talking about, but his words are prophetic and firmly mark the moment at which real healing begins in this film. David Bradley, who plays Coop, is a highly experienced television actor, albeit one probably best known for playing Argus Filch in seven of the eight Harry Potter movies. He's a quiet presence throughout this film, with little to do but all of it important, and he's very much its key.

I can understand how those who read this as a straight thriller might be disappointed. From that perspective, it would be an unimaginative piece with a weak villain, a victim who refuses to play ball and overly quick, albeit brutal, scenes of violence. What I can't understand is how they can fail to see the depths here. None of these characters are throwaway. Cassie and Aden obviously carry baggage, but Hannah and Amy carry no less. Coop has depth, Karsten has depth, even Jed the local cop has depth. I appreciated Jarrod Cooke as a very British cop, who knows his beat and the people in it, who commands respect because he cares. This film isn't flawless, as Maisie Lloyd shows some inexperience as Amy, Hannah is too stereotypically written and a few lesser characters are poorly built but these are minor compared to the subversive take on the familiar. This deserves better than it's got and it could be valuable viewing for a lot of abused women.

All Men are Called Robert (2010)

Director: Marc-Henri Boulier
Stars: Gwenaël Przydatek, Jean-Françoise Picotïn, Thomas Baelde and Alexis Samailovitch

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

A man runs through the forest. He's buck naked, as is made patently obvious from the frequent full frontal shots. He's covered in dirt, which looks worn into his skin. And a woman is calling him by name, calling for his help. He runs towards her at speed, but he also runs away from the men with shotguns too, as we're apparently in some sort of Most Dangerous Game territory. It's very realistic, the actor playing Robert doing a heck of a lot more naked than I'd ever want to do. He's Gwenaël Przydatek, which I wouldn't want to attempt to pronounce, and he throws himself into this film as if his life depended on it, which to Robert it certainly does. He hightails it through the forest as if he wasn't barefoot, he ducks from shots coming his way and he even drags himself through the grass, face down. I hope he didn't hurt himself making this film, but his efforts are much appreciated because they add a great deal to its success.

I can't say much more about the plot, because there's only four minutes of footage and the twist comes three minutes into that. It deserves to not be spoiled, but it's very nicely done indeed. It's a concept that I've seen before, one that's easy to describe and draft out on paper but difficult to do right, and it has to be done right if it's going to be done at all. It would have been so easy for writer/director Marc-Henri Boulier to get this horribly wrong, as for instance, Y Sci Fi did, just to name one short that aimed at the same concept and missed by miles. That film struggled under the weight of its own propaganda, like an albatross around the filmmaker's shoulders. This one has no need to struggle. The approach Boulier took, with its lack of dialogue, successfully avoids any charge of propaganda, even though it has the exact same message. It's a brave French film that deservedly added the audience award at FearCon V to its already hefty tally of laurels.

Zombeer (2011)

Director: Drew Griffin
Stars: George Mulholland, Daniel Schurgin, Ulysses Mauricio and Jesse Denton

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

I'm hardly going to mount a complaint when a horror short kicks off with Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, but while its ominous overtones suit the feel of the opening scene, it doesn't play well with the rest of the film. As you might imagine from the title, which works well as a one word synopsis of the plot, it isn't a particularly subtle piece. In fact, it wouldn't go too far to suggest that this is pretty close to what I'd have made if I'd have found a movie camera and a few likeminded friends when I was sixteen. It's nine minutes of gore effects, heavy metal and beer. The humour is lowbrow, the philosophical hints even lower and technical quality obviously wasn't a high priority. There are movie posters galore on walls and a couple of homages to Bad Taste, or at least I read them that way. They were overt enough for instinctive quoting on my part. It's fun, but it's overdone and it gets old quickly.

I'm not sure which character is which, though there are only four and their imaginative names warrant mention here. The one with cheap sunglasses is Spud Krousensky, but I don't know if his guest in the neat Dark Tranquillity shirt is Dink Hefeweizenheimer, Chimmychummy Stoutington or Bjorn Reinheitsgebot. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they apparently like beer and Spud's crazed roommate has been brewing up a vat of it that glows radioactive blue and is served in bottles with cool labels. He, like any sane beer lover, is offended that they're drinking Bud Light, so brings out a case of Zombeer and we get to watch them drink. A lot. These scenes run on far too long, perhaps just to allow for more crunchy metal while they foam at the mouth and go red eyed. The inevitable gory twist is neatly foreshadowed by the Anthropophagus poster on the wall. When I was sixteen, this would have been the greatest thing ever, but I grew up.

Cargols! (2011)

Director: Geoffrey Cowper
Stars: Marc Ayala and Mireia Figueras

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

An accomplished and thoroughly enjoyable short film from Spain, Cargols! is an odd movie in that its biggest success is also its biggest failure. On the positive side, it's a stereotypical feature length monster movie with all the crap taken out. For the record, that makes it fourteen minutes long. On the negative side, that means that everything we see is something we recognise from a whole host of other movies. We get every setup, every shock moment, every red herring. We get every screw up, every heroic gesture, every shot at redemption. We get every emotional peak, every slomo shot, every topical choice of song. If you don't recognise every single cliché then you haven't watched enough monster movies. Yes, it starts in lover's lane with some guy trying to get some. No, he doesn't manage it. Yes, it moves to a party crashed by monsters. Yes, the hero saves both the day and the heroine. No, their happy ending doesn't reflect the big picture.

All this guarantees that there isn't a single surprising moment to be found anywhere in the film, which therefore has to succeed on completely different merits. It succeeds on the writing front as Geoffrey Cowper, who also directed, understands not only the mechanics of monster movies but that they're fundamentally supposed to be fun too. He manages to sneak a few nice touches in there as well; the immediate reaction of all the partygoers when a giant snail breaks their party up is to film it on their phones because it'll look great on YouTube and the Jurassic Park section is priceless. It succeeds with the acting too, as Marc Ayala and Mireia Figueras are both capable and pleasing to the eyes and they're well supported by a string of others with much less to do. They play Joel and his first girlfriend, Eva, who he unwisely dumped when he thought it meant he was getting popular. He's regretted it ever since and now he gets the chance to try again.

It's mostly successful on the technical side too. The song choices are appropriate throughout, though I can't believe they got clearance for all of them. They're matched well to the action on screen, down to the Angus Young trainers the hero's wearing. The tone of the piece feels right as well, though it loses a little when it gets too stylised, like with the running against the tide shot. The biggest flaw is probably the effects. The giant snails are good but far from great. They do exactly what they should but they're far too obviously animated graphics. Maybe we're spoiled by the achievements of modern day effects wizards, but the animators from the Barcelona 3D School here created monsters that don't quite live up to the live action world that they're placed in. It isn't a major flaw and it certainly doesn't stop the fun, which is what this short thrives on. Just don't expect anything you haven't seen before.

Refugio 115 (2011)

Director: Ivan Villamel
Stars: Georgina Latre, Dani Ledesma and Alba Arenals

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

Set entirely underground, to the hiss and boom soundtrack of bombs hitting the surface above, this Spanish period piece is a neat little exercise in tension and suspense. There's little story, as it runs only eight minutes and obviously aims to use the supernatural as a political metaphor not a literal plot device. We find ourselves amongst an inoffensive group of people in the tunnels of Refuge 115 hiding from the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War. All they want is to survive, but they discover that even down here, their worst fears may be hiding in the darkness. There's no effort made to provide any explanation of what mysterious force might be picking them off, beyond a little girl's song about the bogeyman, so it's obviously a metaphor for all fear, which in a civil war is rampant because it's so tough to figure out who is friend or foe. As the darkness extinguishes light after light, we wonder if anyone will make it out and how much meaning we should seek.

Some of it is clear enough. Jordi appears to be the ostensible leader, doing what he can to keep these folk together under pressure by keeping calm and helping who and where he can. None of the others have similar strength, only Aina proving stronger than her obvious fears, so they find their own moments to cave and disappear. I wonder whether these points mean more than just further steps in a progression, but I don't know enough about the Spanish Civil War to guess. So I'm left appreciating the acting, which is solid but overshadowed, pun not intended, by the style of the piece; and the various devices used to build the tension. The effects don't aim far, relying on basics like lights going out, but they do what they need to. I'd have thought there would have been more telling moments, like the one where one woman screams, 'The darkness has taken my daughter,' but it's left vague and creepy. That means it's effective but not too abiding.

Velvet Road (2011)

Director: L Gustavo Cooper
Stars: Thomas R Martin, Heather Ricks, Walter Colson and Stephen Ezell

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

Velvet Road oozes class even as the opening credits unfold. With the same muted colour palette as The Walking Dead, not to mention the same subject matter, it's difficult to avoid comparison. As the film runs on and we both enjoy the Jacksonville countryside and realise how grounded the story is in the human element, we can't help but see it as cut from the same cloth. Of course, at only 14 minutes, it's a brief slice rather than a grand sweep, but it resonates nonetheless, subtly providing a time and place without ever hammering the point home. As Brian Jerin's theme adds sinister piano undertones to soaring strings, the radio tells us that a disease is spreading across the deep south, inevitably suggesting a source in the negro population. I've seen a lot of zombie movies over the last few years, many metaphorically substituting zombies for this demographic or that, but this may be the most telling example I've seen yet. It proves the well still isn't dry.

The story is solid and very carefully crafted, but it jumps back and forth between an evening and the following morning enough that it took me a couple of viewings to fully put the various jigsaw pieces together to get the whole picture, even though there are only four characters. There's a mechanic called Bobby, fleeing the zombie apocalypse with his pregnant wife Carolyne, who has obviously been bitten. There's a black man walking the other way, who Bobby sees on the road and again the next day, handcuffed to the door in the back of a police car. At that point, he's in search of his wife, who bit him while driving and caused him to crash, literally and figuratively, until the morning, when he crawls out of the wreckage and follows the blood trail. Finally, there's the cop, bloody himself and slumped in the front seat, waiting to turn. It won't be too surprising to find out how everyone interacts, but it's done stylishly, carefully and with strong impact.

This is one of those films that really need a couple of viewings to be fully appreciated. Initially it was a little confusing and I wondered why it leapt back and forth so much, until I realised that we were understanding these events from the perspective of someone who was bitten early in the story and was turning into a zombie himself. Of course he's confused, but he figures it out, just as we do, enough to realise how carefully the gun is pointed in the best shot of the film. We also realise how lean this piece is. Some filmmakers would spin this story out to feature length, but L Gustavo Cooper, who directed and co-wrote, trimmed the fat away, so he and editor Bill Gaggins could keep it under a quarter of an hour, including both opening and closing credits. They'd have found it tough to go any further without causing damage, but it does everything it needs to, with a wide story and a number of smaller ones, all within a social framework and told with panache.

I Want to Be Tom Savini (2011)

Director: Bianca Luedeker
Star: Bianca Luedeker

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

It really isn't surprising that I Want to Be Tom Savini won for Best Short at Phoenix FearCon V, as it's almost a textbook on how to engage the audience at a horror film festival. It's a lively piece from the outset, with an enticing lead character and a just as enticing sense of humour. In fact it was the humour that leapt out at me first, not only because Bianca Luedeker, who is not only the writer, producer and director but also the subject of the piece, is a real character. From moment one we only see her hidden behind a black wig and a thick moustache, meaning that in one fell swoop we get a visual explanation of the title, a simple gimmick that isn't annoying, the means by which the shy Bianca can keep a distance from everyone she meets in the film (and at a festival) and, perhaps most important of all, a surefire way to keep the audience wanting more. It may just be the merest hint of a disguise but it's a sheer stroke of genius.

Luedeker is refreshingly grounded, honest and aware of her limitations. She describes herself as a 27 year old child who's afraid to be around other people and she squees quite magnificently at the slightest provocation. She's a small town Arizona girl, who apparently hasn't been anywhere or done anything. She's never been further from Sedona than Flagstaff and she hasn't been on a bus, a plane, a subway, you name it. However she very much wants to change that. She wants to do all those things and more, you know, like casting full size heads, filling them with blood packs and shooting them with a shotgun so they explode, that sort of thing. After she absorbed Grande Illusions, a 1983 manual on special effects, she knew exactly who she wanted to be: the author, legendary make up/effects artist Tom Savini. By the point she proclaims, 'I'm really into blood and gore,' festivalgoers will want to be her, or be with her, or both. She's horror nerd heaven.

While half of what follows isn't surprising in the slightest, it's done with style and it's flavoured by the other half, which is pure character. Luedeker heads off to Hollywood, where she meets a host of genial effects guys who make her feel welcome and answer her questions about how to get into the industry, but it isn't as remotely dry as that sounds. These guys are impishly cool, even when not playing eviscerated corpses in horror movies and she's less like a CNN reporter and more like a teenage writer for a punk zine. She intermingles real substance with giggly girly stuff, the sort of thing that many filmmakers would cut out, but it's this mix that makes the film. Here's Oscar winner Tom Woodruff of Amalgamated Dynamics Inc, but there's Luedeker running down an up escalator. Here's Tom Devlin's body parts closet but there's Luedeker attacking her fear of people by holding up a Free Hugs sign in Hollywood. In her Tom Savini disguise.

And so, while she forgets most of the questions she wants to ask these industry experts, it really doesn't matter because at heart, this isn't about special effects, let alone Tom Savini. It's about discovering who you are and having the balls to do what you want to do. Luedeker meets people getting full head casts who are claustrophobic. The funny and outgoing adrenaline junkies who run Hollywood effects shops explain how they started out as shy kids. So the engaging humour on the surface turns into a meaningful journey, both for Luedeker and for us. Repeat viewings do wonders, peeling away the layers of this deceptively simple 21 minute short. The first made me laugh, the second think and the third highlighted Luedeker's skill in editing, as I appreciated her decisions about what to leave in, what to take out and how long to pause. Oh, and yes, she does meet Tom Savini, of course, and that's no spoiler as it doesn't play out remotely how you expect.

A Cruel Tale: Return to the Dream (2012)

Director: Andrés Vidal Alarcón
Star: Sofia Medel

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

Here's a strange one: a four minute animated horror story set in the land of dream. It features a child but is narrated by his mother, who we're not sure is really looking out for him or not. Maybe that's the point: from a child's view, it's often hard to tell the difference. Neither character has a name, making them archetypal. It's a Spanish film, though one that's presented in English, from the warning screen to the heavy but appealing accent of narrator Sofia Medel. IMDb hasn't quite figured out what it is yet, as it lists two films by two different writer/directors: an 8 minute 2005 short, Vuelta al sueño, by Andrés Vidal Alarcón, and a 4 minute 2012 short, Vuelta al sueno: Un cuento cruel, by Andres Vidal. The truth is in hidden at the end of the credits: the 2005 film was a student short, while the 2012 film is a remastered version with a fresh cut, updated story and new music. The filmmaker is the same, Andrés Vidal Alarcón.

It tries to do a lot in a mere four minutes, not least to fix what Alarcón saw as errors caused back in 2005 by being more ambitious than his skills would allow him to live up to. I haven't seen that version, but this one is a fascinating piece. We watch a child go to sleep and enter the world of dream through a portal. Alarcón paints fractal landscapes with liquid walls and playful light. He uses effects to enhance the story, like artistic blur and double exposure. Everything is scary but warm, especially with the lush voice of Sofia Medel telling us how much she cares for her baby, who runs away from her in his dreams. But then we meet her, in dream form as a scary sort of steampunk dinosaur Jack Skellington. She's not a cruel mother, she tells us, while committing what we might interpret as a cruel act. But this is about innocence and sacrifice, right? She does care for him deeply, right? Or maybe she doesn't. That's open to a great deal of interpretation.

Whom God Helps (2012)

Director: Louis Mansfield
Stars: Jason Vail, Kate Boyer and Brandon Ruckdashel

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon V in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my festival reviews.

Visually striking from the outset, it's not immediately clear where this sixteen minute American short is going to take us. Combining enticing abstracts with shots of privileged young things at a Philadelphia party, it feels like a music video for a percussion heavy jazz improvisation, or even footage to sit under the opening credits of a television legal drama. A couple of minutes in, we switch to an underground parking lot where one tipsy couple is heading back to their car. They aren't named, so are obviously archetypal, but their happy evening gradually descends in tone and action. The only other character is a mysterious stranger who doesn't appear to be entirely human but watches them from the shadows nonetheless, even driving their conversation with commands in an ancient tongue that only the man can hear. They're one word commands that we see translated in subtitles and while the man follows them, it isn't clear if he knows it.

There are no easy answers here, which I'm sure is absolutely deliberate, but the key may be in that 'Whom God Helps' is the translation into English of the Hebrew name Azrael, the name of the angel of death. What doesn't help is that different traditions see Azrael very differently. In Judaism he's the embodiment of evil, while in Islam he's the returner of human souls to God. It isn't often that watching a horror movie can spark a theological debate, but this almost invites that, to help understand what writer/director Louis Mansfield was aiming at. His background is in thoughtful and ambitious experimental film, which adjectives describe this one well. It's entirely clear what's happening, as Azrael manipulates the couple's interaction from fresh desire to the profane and the violent. Jason Vail is strong as Azrael, under four hours a day of make up. Kate Boyer and Brandon Ruckdashel are just as strong as the couple. What it all means is up to you.