The Blind Man (2011)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Coleman and Jess Weaver

Congratulations to Travis Mills and Running Wild Films for reaching the ten grand they've been aiming at on Kickstarter! Now 52 Shorts, 52 Weeks, their 2013 project to adapt no less than 52 stories from the public domain into contemporary short films in a single year, will go ahead, for release in 2014. They've made a few such adaptations in the past, so it seemed appropriate to commemorate by checking out the first one they made last year: The Blind Man, based on the story by D H Lawrence first published in 1920. It's a fascinating movie, not least because Mills isn't only its director, he also plays the title role and in a dedicated piece of method filmmaking he does so while blindfolded. I can buy that as an actor but as a director too? That's perhaps the very definition of ambitious. Mills restricted himself from reviewing any of the shots until they were all done, an interesting concept but frankly one that shows.

The picture begins with the blindfolded Mills lifting a railroad tie in his back yard. He really isn't auditioning for The Karate Kid: The Next Generation, he's building a game of horseshoes even though he can't see to play. Obviously life hasn't treated Martin well, but that doesn't show in him, it shows in his wife, Isabel. He's carrying on regardless, though notably disassociated, but she's lost in a world she can't understand, clearly finding it tough to cope, so Benny coming to visit might be a good way to regain a grounding. He's an old friend, from before she married Martin, apparently a good one, given how long they hug. 'I hope it won't be too uncomfortable for you,' she tells him; and while she's talking about his room, Martin is obviously an unspoken double meaning. That's only partly because of his eyes, apparently lost in an accident, and partly because the two men really don't like each other.

There are a number of angles to the source story, which uses disability as a means to highlight communication and common ground. By blindfolding himself as both an actor and a director, Mills explores those angles in interesting ways. Beyond forcing himself to share in Martin's lack of sight, he also forces himself to communicate with his small crew more effectively than would normally be needed. Perhaps to push this experiment another step further, this entire short, all seventeen minutes of it, was shot in a single day. That's not much opportunity to do retakes or alternate shots, let alone much time to adjust lighting levels, which means that while the idea is fascinating, it's far from successful. Jason Cowan's camerawork is occasionally annoyingly jerky. Some scenes run longer than we expect them too. Most obviously, the whole thing seems to have been shot in natural light, which is fine in the back yard but not so effective indoors.

The catch is that by exploring character themes as a director as well as an actor, Mills pulled a fast one on his audience. To one way of thinking, the lack of light is an annoying flaw. As Isabel and Benny talk for the first time, they're in silhouette. Inside the house, lighting is inconsistent and frequently not enough. Yet, on the flipside, this ably highlights the focal point of the movie. While we struggle to see what's going on with Isabel and Benny, we realise that we still have it better than Martin, who can't see at all. Of course, that parallel may never have been intended and this may simply be Mills discovering how tough it is to direct while blind. It's what Occam's razor would tell us. Certainly, that doesn't explain why the film misses the finalé's key bonding moment. In the end, thinking about this film becomes more fun than watching it, but a day and $100 proved an interesting, if flawed, experiment. Bring on the next 52 of them!

The Blind Man can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

The Dead Inside (2011)

Director: Travis Betz
Stars: Sarah Lassez and Dustin Fasching

After Dust Up and Lo, I knew I needed to track down The Dead Inside, the film that Travis Betz made in between those two and which will finally see a home release tomorrow on DVD. It has more in common with the latter than the former, being less of a single coherent story and more of an experimental piece of art. Like Lo, it plays around with genres and tones within a wider framework. This goes even further, if anything, throwing still more genres into the mix, but like Lo, it can't quite nail the consistency it needs. Like Lo, it creatively addresses the lack of budget by embracing restrictions rather than fighting them. Almost the entire picture unfolds within a single house and is performed by only two actors, Sarah Lassez and Dustin Fasching, although they each get multiple roles and they're not always recognisable under heavy makeup. Like Lo, it's great fun, but eventually falls short of the masterpiece Betz will surely one day create.

It opens with a couple of zombies trying to figure out how to get into a locked room so that they can eat the woman inside. They're not your usual zombies; these ones are lucid, romantic, droll, able and willing to self examine their lot in life. And, as we quickly discover, they're not actually the leads in our story, Fi and Wes, or at least they're not quite. They're the gruesomely made up experimental projections of one of them, Fiona Cella, author of a series of zombie novellas called The Dead Survive, who uses the concept to figure out plot progression. Or not, given that she's suffering from acute writer's block, hence the inability of these zombies to get at their food, and she's very easily distracted indeed, which means that they're hardly the focus that they ought to be. Her boyfriend Wes tends to get home nowadays to find her lying on the floor, searching for patterns in the ceiling, or hiding inside a fort she's built out of the furniture. Anything but writing.

I could say that she's letting the fourth novel in her series, The Dead Inside, get to her far more than she should, but it would be a glaring understatement as she's rapidly and effectively losing her marbles. Wes is the rock that her creative soul depends on, but he's not coping particularly well with life himself, being a talented photographer who's having to rely on wedding pictures to pay the bills. It doesn't help when Fi cuts off her own finger with a pair of scissors and then tries to stab Wes in the heart with them. Off to the psychiatric facility she goes to recuperate, but on her return we find that she's not quite the same. Apparently in her weakened mental state, she's been possessed by a dead girl called Emily, and we start to wonder who's actually insane in this picture. Is it Fi or Wes or both of them? Is this him fuelling his creative instincts or her reacting to the changes in her writing? There are certainly parallels.

Thus far, it's been a interesting ride, because it's a lot of different things all wrapped up into one approachable bundle. It's an offbeat zombie comedy. It's a drama about a young couple under a different sort of stress to what is usually depicted in film. It's also an insight into creative juices at work. It's a horror movie, what with the zombies and possession and such. It's an effects film, not only through the excellent makeup work on Fi's zombie couple but through scenes in which she and Wes come to life in photographs on the wall. And, I should point out, it's also a musical, because we get songs about how great the zombie apocalypse would be because they could just stay at home together or how Fi reaffirms control over her body to persuade herself that she's not possessed by a ghost. Unfortunately these songs are fun more for the lyrics than the tunes. Let's just say that while I appreciated the clever lyrics, I wouldn't bother to pick up a soundtrack.

While many comparisons could be made to Lo, and I made a whole bunch in the first paragraph, the biggest difference may be in that this feels like a more personal film for writer/director Travis Betz. It can certainly be enjoyed on the surface as just a freaky weird story, but there's a lot here of substance about creation, innovation and experimentation, words which arrive quickly on the tongue whenever Betz's name comes up. Much of his experimentation is due to his budgets, or rather the lack of them, but I'm sure they're not the only reason. He obviously likes manipulating film in surprising ways, morphing one thing into another when it's least expected, somewhat like a cinematic version of Mr Bungle. Of course, the more outrageous a change is, the more likely it is to fail, but when it succeeds it can succeed magnificently. It also means that to fully grasp the bigger picture, you can't just watch films like this once. They need to be returned to.

From one viewing, I caught a lot of depth. The title has many meanings, for a start: The Dead Inside not just being the latest book in Fi's zombie series, but also a biting metaphor for the lead characters, given the ruts that they're stuck in. More literally, it also speaks to Max and Harper, the undead surrogates inside Fi's imagination, and the ghost that possesses her. Obviously, the theme is the parallel between life and creation, an easy concept for any writer to grasp, as their job is to bring life to their work. The use of zombies though suggests that the opposite of life isn't necessarily death but undeath, a state in which walking and talking continues on but the ability to do anything of substance vanishes. A zombie isn't only unable to do anything meaningful, it's also unable to acknowledge that inability. In their creative ruts, Fi and Wes are no less zombies than Max and Harper, making it appropriate that they're played by the same actors.

I wasn't particularly impressed with Sarah Lassez in Lo, where she may have been the leading lady but a relatively inconsequential MacGuffin of a leading lady who had few opportunities to shine. Here, she gets a great deal of opportunity, not only as she has a lot to do as the leading lady but because she also has plenty to do as the leading lady possessed by a ghost. On top of that she gets to ham it up under makeup as Harper, the metaphysical zombie who may well be the key to the entire story, given that the directions she takes are mirrored in the real world by the character who imagines her. She does very well, much better than she did in Lo and better than her male counterpart here, Dustin Fasching, who is still decent as Wes and Max, though he has less to do as either. He's the one who's let down by the writing this time, as he doesn't get the time and depth that Fi or Harper do.

I expected him to come to life halfway through, thinking that the film would pivot and shift from Fi to Wes, but it didn't. It shifted from Fi to Emily instead, with Fi always floating metaphorically in the background waiting to return. The picture slows down at this point, when it really ought to have kicked it up a notch, lagging for much of the second half before getting back on track by the end. Perhaps the source of the problem is the budget, not directly but because it meant that a few people got to share a lot of roles and, in turn, that Betz got to edit his own work. I'm sure that had he stayed on as writer and director but stayed out of the editing room, the issues with the second half could have been countered. Such are the pitfalls of low budget filmmaking. The benefits are the freedom to make films like this, which could never happen in Hollywood. Betz is a joyously creative indie filmmaker and one day he's going to really nail it. Just not quite yet.

Pig (2011)

Director: Henry Barrial
Stars: Rudolf Martin, Heather Ankeny, Keith Diamond and Ines Dali

This film was an official selection at the 8th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Scottsdale in 2012. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012 films.

In one of the more accurate plot synopses at IMDb, 'a man wakes up alone in the middle of the desert with a black hood on his head and his hands tied behind his back.' He has amnesia with mere glimpses of memory. A slip of paper in his pocket reads 'Manny Elder', which may or may not be his name: he doesn't even remember that much, let alone what might have led him to have been dumped out there in an apparent execution. Isabel, a young mother who finds him in the desert and nurses him back to health at her home in Page, AZ, knows from experience that drug smugglers do that sort of thing, as her dead husband was one. Our mystery man doesn't know what he does. Obviously something is going on, but we're not in on the secret either and we don't know who is. We're forced to rediscover this man's past along with him and, because we have no idea where discovery might come from, we have to pay a great deal of attention.

What's important here? Should we focus on the little details that he can remember or those that he can't. Snippets do come back to him, like the tune to London Bridge or a figure of a knight in stained glass at Isabel's house, but nothing substantial or apparently useful. On the flipside, he's forgotten that 'Cheers!' is a toast or that bees sting. Is it notable that wine and pain elicit similar reactions in him? They carry shock and bring a memory that he can't quite define. Is it important that he doesn't dream? Certainly he's completely functional: he speaks English, he can read and write, even draw. He knows what things are, for the most part, and he's at home with his bodily functions. If this was deliberately done to him, who might have done it? All we see is Isabel and her young son, Jason, along with some quick visits from a local doctor to tend to his immediate wounds. The only real clue is the name in his pocket, Manny Elder.

Isabel searches online and finds that he runs a hotel called the Continental in LA, so off he goes to see what might come of talking with him. However, before Elder's door even opens, suddenly he's back in the desert in those plastic cuffs and that black hood. We're thirty minutes into the picture, yet it's apparently starting again. And again. We're only given the benefit of one detail that the man living through this bizarre process doesn't see: the numbers at the corner of the screen that appear each time everything reboots. It was 1.2 when the film began, then it became 1.3 and 1.4, always counting up. We don't have to run through everything again though, we find ourselves right back at the Continental to discover that Manny Elder is a friend, that our guy is called Justin Reeves and that he's subscribed to a substitute teacher agency. Surely it isn't an accidental irony that he likes puzzles, given that he himself is now his own biggest puzzle.

What makes this film special is that, as answers arrive in a flood they only bring more questions flowing along with them. With each fresh discovery Reeves makes about who he is and why this might be happening to him, we make that discovery with him and we can't help but realise that they don't all seem to be compatible with each other. Initially they're just subtle inconsistencies but they escalate in grandeur, to the point that, while he's enjoying some fresh air in LA, a lady in a car calls out to him in German, in which language he promptly answers her. She tells him that he speaks German because, like her, he was born in East Berlin and his name is Lukas Ernst. By now, we're forced into a constant reevaluation of each piece of evidence we're given, juggling it with every other piece to try to build a coherent bigger picture. Increasingly, it feels like we're looking at pieces from two different puzzles, but we try to reconcile everything to being one.

The name behind Pig is Henry Barrial, who wrote and directed, and it's surprising to find that he doesn't have a large body of work behind him. While this features no major stars and obviously doesn't enjoy a major budget, it's a complex film that doesn't feel like it could have sprung out of nowhere. The actors are experienced and some are recognisable. Rudolf Martin, who plays the mystery man at the heart of the film, has many credits going back to 1993, including Hollywood features like Bedazzled and Swordfish. I recognised him from television, where he played Ziva's half-brother Ari on NCIS. All three of the major supporting cast, Heather Ankeny, Keith Diamond and Ines Dali, have similar experience in varying quantities. The production values are high, budget notwithstanding, and there are few issues with the technical side. My biggest complaint was an annoying spelling mistake that reoccurred a few times towards the end of the film.

While Barrial's credits are varied, this would seem to be a natural extension of his core focus as a writer/director. Pig is his fourth feature as a director, three of which he also wrote, and while I haven't seen any of his other films, it's clear just from their synopses that they're are all about relationships. Some Body is a search for something beyond sex in the singles scene, Heartland has to do with a girl looking after a brother with Downs syndrome, and True Love examines three couples at different stages of their respective relationships. While Pig may seem to be something of a departure, it really isn't, as at heart it's about a man's relationship with himself at its most strained. It's a science fiction movie without a single spaceship, ray gun or monster, but it's still science fiction, which at it's best and purest is about tweaking the world in a single scientific way to see how everything else changes because of it. That's exactly what Barrial does.

To my mind, it's Barrial's script that most obviously succeeds here but not completely. He frames the science fiction as a mystery, not to be obtuse but to keep us engaged in the puzzle, and like all the best puzzles it continues to make us think even once we've solved it. Some will figure out what's going on sooner than others, but nobody will leave wondering what happened. Instead, they'll be wondering about that single tweak itself, initially about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but then when they realise that, like most changes, it's intrinsically neither good nor bad, they'll wonder about the morality of the concept instead, whether it's ethical or not and how it could or would be abused. If it isn't black or white, how grey does it get? The ending itself is a good one, though it isn't nearly as iconically phrased as other provocative movie endings like those of Brazil or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which still spark debate today.

Rudolf Martin is deceptively great here. As the story is entirely about him, he has to carry it and he proves up to the task, even though he's in a state of confusion for most of it and is frequently missing lines because he has no memory to provide answers to people's questions. He becomes more grounded as the film runs on, with each discovery about who he is, who he was and why he's in this story to begin with, but he plays it more subtly and with less flash than Guy Pearce did in Memento, another puzzle picture. The three main supporting actors back him up well, though their respective stories are fleshed out to different degrees. As Anouk, the German lady who finds an old friend by chance, Dali's is most naturally contained. Diamond's as Manny Elder has a wider scope but it's fairly covered too. It was Ankeny's role that satisfied me least, not for her acting, which is excellent, but for where Barrial takes, or doesn't take, her character.

I had a lot more questions about Isabel than are ever spoken to, as she's a complex and pivotal character worthy of much more exploration than is attempted here. Perhaps it would be tough to include that without detracting from the central character, but I think the fault may be with just how far Barrial was willing to let the science fiction aspect of this story take him. The big reveal, if it could be called that, comes too early to be seen as a twist ending, but too late to shape how the rest of the film goes with any real depth. I felt that Barrial's background with straight drama made him see this as an insular story about one man, but the science fiction approach is bigger than that and once that door is opened it really can't be closed again. Barrial is good at setting up questions but the answers he provides don't complete the puzzle. He isn't willing to take a crack at the new world he's created, remaining content instead to focus on one man within it.

It's not surprising that Pig won for Best Science Fiction Feature at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2011, and it's not surprising that it's won a whole slew of other awards at other film festivals across the map. Sadly there are few enough serious science fiction features made at this level that when a good one shows up, it's almost guaranteed to accumulate laurels like there's no tomorrow. This is certainly a good one, but it's not a great one and it shouldn't have been the shoe in that it was. I'll certainly be checking out Barrial's previous films, as well as his next one, The House That Jack Built, due in 2013, as they all appear to be straight dramas and it's the dramatic side of this film that he shined brightest at. If he comes back to the science fiction genre, I hope he'll be willing to look beyond the dramatic to the wider questions of change, not just to an individual person or a couple but to society at large.

The Puzzle (2008)

Director: Davide Melini
Stars: Cachito Noguera and Alessandro Fornari

After adoring The Sweet Hand of the White Rose, whatever problems I found with it, I was eager to see what writer/director Davide Melini might have done before that. His previous short film, his third, was The Puzzle, shot two years earlier in 2008. It's much shorter and more to the point, running under five minutes, even including the credits, but it doesn't sacrifice any of the style that was so notable about the later film. It's another agreeably hallucinatory piece that follows a mother unwilling to give any more money to her son. 'It's over, you hear,' she enforces as she slams the phone down on him. So she goes back to her desk to work on a jigsaw puzzle, while the camera becomes her tension, rising and falling and circling around. As time moves on, the curtains swirl and the tension changes, using double exposures along with standard suspense tricks to keep the whole thing stylishly feverish.

There are two apparent flaws. One is that it isn't apparent until the end credits that this woman is dealing with her son. From her language and the photo by the phone I'd assumed it was her lover or even an estranged husband. I don't know if I'm criticising the photo and the choice of line or praising Cachito Noguera, but the other flaw is her acting, which is overdone. She seems to have a perpetual half grin that doesn't fit with the tension she obviously feels. Unfortunately for the most part she's it, unless you can count the house itself as a second character. Certainly it gets as much attention and opportunity to build character as she does, with the Ikea furniture occasionally just as mobile. Really though, Noguera's acting isn't a big deal, given that she gets very little dialogue and is mostly tasked with feeling unnerved, often in fast forward. Like The Sweet Hand of the White Rose, this is about feel and on that front this is another success.

The Puzzle can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

The Sweet Hand of the White Rose (2010)

Director: Davide Melini
Stars: Carlos Bahos, Natasha Machuca and Leocricia Sabán

It's easy to like The Sweet Hand of the White Rose as it starts simply, builds magnificently and ends exactly when it should. It finishes up so well that it's easy to heap praise onto it, but it's not quite that perfect. The good news is that its flaws aren't too important. The most obvious is that it takes far too long to get started, the first three minutes at Bar Zeppelin being wildly enjoyable but precisely nothing to do with the story. It's only when Mary shows up and her boyfriend Mark leaves because he doesn't want to talk to her that we can really begin. Even then, the opening credits haven't quite finished, but we can settle down to hearing about Mark and Rose. Mark is heading out in his car for nowhere in particular, to clear his head of relationship issues, but he crashes because he can't stop looking at his phone. Rose is a young girl heading home on her bike after a fun day in the park. It's clear that their stories will meet right there on the curve.

Thus far, it's been inconsistent. Their monologues are simply written and poorly inflected, as if the speakers don't count English as their first language, even though I'm watching the dubbed version where those speakers aren't the actors on screen and their names in the credits sound British. I'd very much like to watch this in the original Spanish as the actors, Carlos Bahos and Natasha Machuca do everything asked of them, even if young Natasha looks at the camera too often. The settings are spot on, the choreography is well thought out and the camera moves just as it should. Everything proceeds nicely, if perhaps a little too leisurely. And then, seven minutes into the sixteen that this short film runs, everything suddenly kicks into high gear and from that moment it doesn't let up in the slightest. I wonder if starting seven minutes in would provide enough background to the story. If it does, excising that footage would make this astounding.

So let's pretend. As our seven minutes in movie begins, everything is stylish in a very European way. It's dark but we see well by a full moon. A mysterious hooded man arrives at a church and breaks in to pay his respects to a dead girl. The electronic score is overlaid with choral chant which adds to the gothic flavour, while the wind whips up outside so a storm can move in. As he stumbles out into the mortuary to follow a mysterious trail of white petals, giggles and blood, neatly accompanied by an driving prog soundtrack, the camera swirls, the lightning flashes and the stone memorials hem him in and force him on his way. Eventually he finds the girl and with her a bigger truth than he might have expected. We flash back in black and white, then move forward in colour to a superb ending, shot from the right angles, with the right amount of light and with just the right swell of emotion. You'll certainly feel this one as well as see it.

It works without the first seven minutes, but I'm still in two minds about how effectively. Perhaps we should hear the stories of Mark and Rose, but less leisurely and split from the body of the film by a shorter version of the opening credits. But that's just me playing armchair editor, offering unwanted amateur advice to filmmakers who are obviously capable of magnificence. That's the word that springs to mind when describing the style we enjoy from the church onwards. It's very claustrophobic, very giallo, very Italian. It infuses the gothic setting with unashamed emotion, in a way that's very reminiscent of Dario Argento. While I'm not going to say it's perfect, because there are little moments that could have been improved, I will say that I wallowed in its texture. The earlier scenes are no less capably shot and if the biggest complaint I can offer about them is that they're there and perhaps shouldn't be, I'm not complaining too loudly.

The Sweet Hand of the White Rose can be viewed for free at YouTube.

Kiddy Kiddy Bang Bang (2012)

Director: Dick Jane
Stars: Devin Werder, Riley Werder and Reed Daniels

I adore the opening credit sequence of Kiddy Kiddy Bang Bang. Against a striking abstract but patriotic background and a striking theme, two twin girls in matching outfits point their guns at the camera and fire. Devin Werder kisses her pump action shotgun in slow motion, Riley Werder duckfaces at the smoke rising from her pistol and Reed Daniels loses his bloody brain matter to a string of bullets. This is as far away from subtle as it gets but it's modern day grindhouse at its finest, too slick to be old school but fitting very well with the Tarantino-inspired revivals. The oft quoted Edmund Burke line that 'the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,' closes them out with a rumble from the speakers. It's wrong on so many levels but I'm sure most grindhouse fans would pay to see what follows. What they need to know is that the best and worst things about this short film are that it's just as blatant.

I watched this a few times to try to figure out which side of a pretty obvious and dangerous line writer/director Dick Jane sits on. In my mind, this puts it aside from exploitation films generally, which ought to be transparent. The exploitation angle was always in getting people onto theatre seats, usually by promising more than would ever be delivered but with enough thrown up onto the screen for those punters to want to come back again. For all its faults, you can't accuse this of false advertising. Kiddy Kiddy Bang Bang delivers exactly what it says it will, no more and no less. It's about twin girls hunting down paedophiles, pure and simple, from accusation to blam blam blam. How you feel about that concept is going to phrase your appreciation, or lack of it, for this short film and, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, for the expanded feature version when that becomes available. If you think you shouldn't watch, then don't.

For those who do, it's an annoyingly inconsistent film. It's capably shot, with good lighting and sound, and the characters all look precisely as they should, if your expectations are shaped by exploitation stereotypes. Yet the acting is terrible, both from the kids and the adults, and it's all out of sync, the sound on the copy I saw at Vimeo being an annoying half a second behind the visuals. At first, I thought the kids were being dubbed, perhaps to add in the more unpalatable lines without them having to say them, but it extended to the adults too. The detail is often hilarious, though it requires pausing to catch the full effect. As Sam searches findaperv.com to find the paedophile who apparently abused Penny, pause on Ezekiel Josiah Miloševic's details. You'll see that his ethnicity is 'cracker', his hair 'piss yellow', his eyes 'bloodshot with a hint of green', his sex 'massive' and his threat level 'deep shit'. This suggests a dark humour at play.

Yet the way the story unfolds, without any hint of depth, suggests something else. Sam and her sister Polly assume guilt through a single accusation and promptly wander over to the house of the accused to blow him away. Bill Hannigan only lives three blocks away, where we watch him underline his guilt by asking for God's permission to play. 'Go for it, Billy,' the voice in his head tells him. There's no ambiguity here at all, just a certain knowledge that these girls are dishing out the justice that society has failed to do. Polly shouts back that Johnny shouldn't call the cops if they fail to return. 'They're not on our side,' she says. When she blasts down the pervert and blood coats her face, there's a long, long pause backed by music that evokes a holy moment. What's more, the dedication to the victims of sexual abuse is followed by a sinister count. '1 down, billions to go,' it says, a number reiterated during the film. This isn't dark humour.

So I'm impressed by the balls Dick Jane shows in making this, I love the opening credits and it's possible that this could become a politically incorrect grindhouse joy in feature form. However, I don't think I can buy that on the basis of this short version. It all feels too acutely uncomfortable, too close to propaganda, too far over the line. On his website, Jane explains his cinematic goals and they're laudable. He's a 'radical creative' with an 'inexorable avant-garde stance'. He both condemns and venerates his audience through 'original perspective'. He addresses themes of 'sex, violence and the inhumanity of the human specie.' He's 'anti-sellout and anti-trend since year zero'. This is exactly the sort of filmmaker I want to watch. I'd like to see Kiddy Kiddy Bang Bang as a feature, with the Werder girls as the leads, but only if it drops the propaganda and gains instead either a sense of humour or depth through social comment, preferably both.

Simone (2010)

Director: Joops Fragale
Stars: Jennifer Ward and Erin Nicole Cline

After Date Night, a simple but highly effective short, I had high hopes for its predecessor, shot a year earlier with many of the same cast and crew. Simone turns out to be another capable and enjoyable film with much to praise, but there's also more to dislike and it doesn't succeed to my eyes quite as strongly as its successor. It's more complex and more overtly stylish than Date Night, opening wildly as a handheld camera rushes through the sweeping neon of cityscapes at night but struggles to orient itself in the glaring daylight over the bed where Simone sleeps. The uncontrolled approach ably mirrors the fragments of her dreams as she wakes up with smeared make up and an obvious hangover, perhaps unsure even of where she is. She certainly finds the empty bottle of vodka by the bed a lot easier than she finds her clothes and her phone. Editing and sound work in tandem as enforcement, snapping her back from haze to reality.

One she finds her phone, her voicemail joins the fight as a voice drunkenly tells her that she was a real slut last night. She forces herself to remember, though it hardly looks good as she coughs up blood and hair and follows a trail of blood to the kitchen. Memories are quick to surface but only as blips in explosive club light that highlight mere snippets of a bigger picture. Gradually the memories coalesce enough for us to put that picture together and figure out exactly what's going on. She remembers a bar, drinks, a girl. She remembers passion at the bar, hot girl on girl action in the bedroom. She remembers waking up in the night apparently shocked that she's in bed with a chick, but that's not where this is going. There may be hints at a gay subtext to the story, especially given that the film's theme is about fighting with inherent nature ('fear your instincts' is the tagline), but they remain hints. The story remains a lot more straightforward.

I liked Simone, both as a film and a character, but neither aim as deeply as they should. Jennifer Ward is good but not as versatile here as Erin Cline was in Date Night. Cline is here too, as the girl Simone picks up, but she gets much less to do as it's very much Ward's show. It's the script that lets them down most, I think. While Joops Fragale's story in Date Night works consistently well across three acts, Frazer Lee's here is awkwardly balanced so that the first act gets a lot of attention while the second inherently has little substance and the third is almost skimped over. There are eleven minutes to build but only four to close out. Technically it's not as accomplished as Date Night, with the same inconsistent lighting flaw. The camerawork and editing smooth out with the progression of the story, but they should have gone further. There's more reliance on effects, but they work better through sound than visuals. The last shot is effective but cheap.

And all that sounds far more negative than it should. My biggest complaint isn't that it's a bad film, as it's actually a pretty effective one given obvious budget restraints; it's that it seems to set itself up as something more than it ends up being. It's very possible that I'm reading it the wrong way, of course. Instead of starting with the style of the opening, that strong tie between the sound and the visuals that carries us into the mind of the lead character and draws us into the story, maybe I should be starting with a simple but persistent story that's enhanced by the stylings of the camera, the editing and the sound. The thing is that it doesn't work as well that way, because it stays too simple. I wanted Simone's conflict to be focused on more and earlier, the fact that both lead characters are female to mean something, the last shot to be lingering and haunting. But hey, this is still good stuff and I'm up for more Cline and more Fragale.

Simone can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

Date Night (2011)

Director: Joops Fragale
Stars: Erin Nicole Cline and David Fuit

She's not going out, she emphasises to her friend on the phone. She doesn't want to be a third wheel. She's going to stay home in her dressing gown, catch up on her reading, watch a movie. Any excuse. But our story really begins when she samples the perfume from an ad in a women's magazine by rubbing it on her wrists. When she heads back to the couch with her popcorn, he's right there waiting for her, escaped from the ad with every line in the book on his lips. 'You are so beautiful,' he says, beckoning her to him. 'You ought to be kissed, and often,' he quotes as if he'd just conjured the words out of his head, 'by someone who knows how.' And, as if by some insane impulse given that there's suddenly a stranger in her apartment for no apparent reason, she goes for it. 'Don't leave,' she tells him, and goes to get ready for her dream date, returning to find him there with champagne and strawberries. He even brings the light with him.

David Fuit is wooden for the most part, but then he's supposed to be. He's a walking cliché who sprang to life from a perfume ad. He does everything she could ever want: make salad, rub her feet, play the ukelele. He's confident, he smiles well and he makes her laugh. It doesn't matter how. This isn't his story though, it's hers and the camera rarely strays far from Erin Nicole Cline, who impresses. The material requires her to run through a vast array of different emotions and reactions and she has the acting chops to do just that. It also tasks her with looking completely different at different stages of the film, which is under fifteen minutes with credits. Starting out dowdy but comfortable, she has to jazz herself up enough that the happy date scenes, and the bed scenes that follow, could easily have been lifted from a commercial. Of course, there's a lot more here than just a dream date sequence and the morning brings the other side of the story.

While obviously not shot for the budget of the commercial the middle section looks like, this is very capably done. Cline is excellent throughout and Fuit gets to show a little more range than we get initially. Michael Long's camerawork is fluid, with great composition and movement that makes the progression feel like a dance. The set design is solid, the editing is tight, the music by Christopher Fragale is spot on. Only the lighting shows its flaws a little too often. Even the end credits are good, highlighting simply how so much work is done by so few people on shorts like this, as names scroll down past long lists of roles. Joops Fragale gets most, from writer, director and editor to stab dummy. Long, his partner at 386 Films, gets almost as many. The few people involved here took a good idea and let it flow smoothly to its natural conclusion without ever overstaying its welcome. The ending is textbook, as right as it is expected. It's promising stuff.

Date Night can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

The House with 100 Eyes (2011)

Director: Jay Lee & Jim Roof
Stars: Shannon Malone, Jim Roof, Larissa Lynch, Liz Burghdorf and Andrew Hopper

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

The House with 100 Eyes works primarily because of contrast. On one hand, it's a notably nasty affair, which follows the people behind Studio Red as they work through the process of acquiring, torturing and killing a trio of victims in an attempt to make the world's first 'snuff triple feature'. They're 'taking snuff to a whole new level', documenting everything in order to provide a host of bonus features on their DVD. It succeeds in living up to the language touted during the intro. It's 'shocking'. It's 'depraved'. It's 'condemned'. As co-director Jay Lee points out, there are walkouts at every screening. As I saw for myself, most of them don't even get to see the nastiest bits. Yet, on the other hand, those inherently sick and twisted filmmakers are, from moment one, a rather endearing and outwardly inoffensive couple, Ed and Susan, who have carefully fitted their home for their work, in part by installing a plethora of hidden cameras, the hundred eyes of the title.

Ed and Susan are a joy to watch, which is fortunate as this isn't the sort of material many would choose to sit through otherwise. The charisma they share is because they're married in real life too. He's Jim Roof, who wrote and co-directed this film, in addition to being its most obvious star. She's Shannon Malone, who backs up him perfectly and manages to steal the show on a number of occasions. He's a charmer, who begins the film testing his microphones by singing Hello! Ma Baby, that 1889 song we know today because of Michigan J Frog. He has a contagious smile and says cutesy things like 'Happy hunting!' and 'Home again, home again, jiggety jig!' without ever seeming out of place. She's like a doll, utterly inoffensive and with magnificent giggles. Yet they make snuff films. We can't forget that pointer to depth, which creeps out throughout. He rages against cinematic mediocrity. She merely has 'a little impulse control problem'.

Because Ed and Susan are so joyously grounded, The House with 100 Eyes plays out in a notably different manner to many of its obvious comparisons. Even though it's intrinsically about torture and porn, it doesn't sit well with what has become known as the genre of torture porn. Even in its darkest moments, it doesn't carry an oppressive tone; even at its most sadistic, it's hilarious in gloriously inappropriate ways. It sits far better alongside Man Bites Dog and Long Pigs than Saw and Hostel, most obviously because it's written as black comedy, relying inherently on comedic timing to get us through the grue. It doesn't go so far as to aim for a restrained old school Kind Hearts and Coronets vibe, as it happily puts its money where its mouth is to show us agreeably brutal effects work (though it does blur out naughty bits like Japanese porn). Yet we're never far from a smile, if not a grin, and it feels right because we're laughing at the deserving.

For the most part, that's Ed and Susan, as their sick little house of cards begins to crumble and, with it, the facade that makes them such a quintessentially American postcard couple. We watch them pack their kits, bait their hooks and troll for victims, yet nothing ever quite goes to plan. It's dark situational humour, of course, but it's funny all the same. Even once they find their willing trio, nothing goes right. They're not quite as willing as they could be, or they're too willing. And then there are Ed and Susan's own flaws to add to the mix, which lead to the most telling part of the film for me. That's when Susan protests to Ed about minor indiscretions in a framework built out of major ones. We laugh not at her, but at her hypocrisy, which builds her character superbly and adds a huge amount of depth to the story as a whole. There's not much plot on hand here: a couple entice three youngsters to kill on film, that's it, but there's a lot more in the why of it.

At points we laugh at their victims, a young couple and their friend, but always because of who they are, never merely because they're victims, and that's a surprising but major reason why the film is so palatable. Clutch is a slacker musician who underachieves with aplomb and digs holes that Jamie, his girlfriend, can't always climb out of. They're here because she sees the $500 each for two hours work that Ed promises them as a beginning of a way out, the start of a better life. There's obvious irony at play here, given what we know that she doesn't, but there's also depth in her constant willingness to jump down two steps to allow her to climb up one. Their younger friend, Crystal, is harder to laugh at because she's a less willing victim. Obviously a runaway with regrets who may be younger than the seventeen she claims, the humour in her character is only situational and surreal outside elements have to be brought in to avoid the tone getting nasty.

All these characters are surprisingly well defined, with both comedy and drama stemming from their character flaws. Andrew Hopper gets least to do as Clutch as he doesn't really do anything, merely allows the world to do things to him. As Jamie, Larissa Lynch is his dynamic half, though she's too accepting to counter his passive self-destruction much. She's impressive, though to my mind it's Liz Burghdorf who shines brightest of the victims. Crystal may be the victim with the least humour to her but she has the most drama, none of which is ever actually explained, and she's incredibly good at being almost but not quite strong enough. Clutch and Jamie are clearly the architects of their own destruction, meaning that Ed and Susan may only be hastening the inevitable, but Crystal's doom feels like the hellish product of a single poor decision that she'd undo if only she could. She's the one we want to help, but of course we can't either.

What unfolds isn't going to be too surprising, but it's mostly phrased well as an interesting take on the found footage concept. At the outset, we're told that documentary filmmaker Jay Lee was sent an anonymous package containing a bunch of tapes and DVDs, which he believes are real and which he edited into this film. It's a solid way to take the found footage concept, which is a cheap approach for low budget filmmakers, but provide background, keep a narrative track and escalate to a finalé, with just enough ambiguity at the end for us to reevaluate the introduction. It gets bonus points for internal consistency (I only spotted a couple of minor slips), a believable use for a bunch of youngsters and a thoroughly different approach to drugs, not to mention the voyeuristic nod to reality television that the house with its hundred lensed eyes provides. Even better, the use of handheld footage is kept to a bare minimum, all of it early on.

It's not always successful. The most annoying thing for me (and apparently not just me) was the screaming electronic noise that apparently substitutes for static. Jay Lee feels that it adds some edge to the material, and as the editor of this supposedly real footage I can buy that he'd leave it in for effect, but I found it distracting. For such a well equipped house, with expensive hidden cameras everywhere, I was disappointed at the minimalism of its actual studio: not much more than a mattress and a potted plant. I'd have thought that after soundproofing it as well as they did, Ed and Susan could afford a bed to put the mattress on, maybe something to set the scene. Studio Red claim be taking snuff to a whole new level after all, which isn't apparent here. Judging from the screeching on Ed's home made porn mementos, he skimped on the sound equipment too, which doesn't sit well given how far he took the visual side.

These aren't major complaints though, and this isn't the sort of film that aims to be expansive in its outreach. It's hardly a Pixar movie, after all. Jay Lee obviously feels proud of the niche carved out here and has no expectations that The House of 100 Eyes will ever outgrow it. He talks about walkouts with pride, as an achievement to savour almost as much as the die hard fans who stay through Ed whacking off to a home video of him torturing some woman. He'll happily leave the moneymaking to other projects, like his most famous film, 2008's Zombie Strippers, with Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson, which is just as inviting to a wide horror audience as this isn't. This is a journey that many fans automatically won't want to embark on, just because of the subject matter; or stick with through the icky scenes which do get rather icky indeed down in the romper room. What they'll miss out on is the delightfully dark joy that is Ed and Susan.

Everything comes back to them here, because it isn't about the snuff or the victims at all, even enjoyably quirky ones like Maddie, a quadruple amputee with Stockholm syndrome who's kept in an animal carrier. Ultimately the picture wins out because its focus on Ed and Susan reflects its strongest assets, Jim Roof and Shannon Malone. Ed is the most obvious, not only because he's the driving force in the relationship but because he's so volatile, veering from caring to acidic, understanding to vindictive, pleasant to tyrannical. I enjoyed Susan more as she's endearingly mad. Though clearly one of the bad guys, it's impossible not to empathise with her often. She's like a perfect fifties housewife, merely mad. 'Susan, please don't let him kill me,' Crystal pleads with her at one point. 'You're already dead, sweetie,' she replies, politely tapping her knee. This sort of simultaneously upbeat and downbeat moment makes the movie. Contrast, you see.

One Down, Two to Go (1982)

Director: Fred Williamson
Stars: Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly and Richard Roundtree

When I asked him at FearCon V to personally pick a couple of movies out of his filmography for me to review, Fred Williamson declined in character as the Hammer, suggesting that any picture he's ever been in is automatically worthy of being reviewed. I'd beg to differ, having seen some of the turkeys he's been in, and even he had to laugh when I brought up the unreedemable Fist of Fear, Touch of Death. So I picked a couple of Hammer movies which appear to have meaning but which I haven't previously seen. First up is the rather appropriately titled One Down, Two to Go, because Williamson isn't just the star, he's also the writer, producer and director. He'd gone beyond acting early on, first writing and producing in 1975 with the western Boss Nigger, then directing the following year's Mean Johnny Barrows, but this one features a blaxploitation dream team, not just the Hammer but Shaft, Slaughter and Black Samurai to boot.

That sort of team up was exactly what blaxploitation needed in 1982. Exploding onto the movie scene in 1971 with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Shaft, it was huge for half a decade but tailed off quickly at the end of the seventies. However most of the stars of those films were still around and just as good as, if not better than, in the genre's heyday. Three of the stars seen here, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Jim Kelly, had teamed up together in Three the Hard Way back in 1974, so it wasn't a stretch to reunite the team, especially with Richard Roundtree added into the mix. Unfortunately it doesn't live up to that potential and one of its biggest flaws is that it never treats these legends as a team, separating them up as much as possible for most of the film. Otherwise it's enjoyable but predictable and pedestrian, Williamson much better on screen where he can exploit his charisma than behind the scenes calling the shots.

It opens up strongly enough at the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey, where a host of martial artists break boards with their fists and feet even while the opening credits roll. This is the warm up to a winner take all karate tournament, which looks a lot more like kickboxing to me but I'm not going to quibble because the fighters really go for it. Williamson wanted authenticity, so he told them to fight for real with the winner of each fight getting five hundred bucks but the loser only a hundred. That's a far cry from the fictional $400,000 on the line in the California vs New York match we're here to see, but it was a lot of money back in 1982. The California team coach, Chuck Wells, is at ringside. That's Jim Kelly with a much smaller afro than I'm used to seeing him in. Richard Roundtree is there too, playing his friend Ralph in a pristine white suit, but they're worried. Something's wrong and Wells wanders off to the dressing rooms to find out what it is.

The good news is that he finds out: Mr Rossi has taken a hundred grand to fix the fights. He's a local businessman who runs a tow company but presumably a lot more. I don't think it ever tells us that he's in the mob but it's pretty obvious with character names like Mr Rossi and Mr Mario. The bad news is that even in the eighties, Jim Kelly had to be stylin' so his bright red and yellow outfit fails utterly to blend into the dim green walls and the nameless local hoods get to slow him down. Jim Kelly vs The Nameless Local Hoods wouldn't be much of a movie and it isn't much of a fight, over before it begins, but one of them decides to slow him down with a bullet and that's a bit more successful. Exit Kelly stage left for most of the rest of the film. Enter Richard Roundtree instead, to pester fight promoter Joe Spangler for their winnings and to team up with sexy bargirl Teri, played by Paula Sills, to spirit their buddy off to a cabin to recover from being shot.

Roundtree is solid here and it's a good thing. Kelly never was a great actor, being watchable not for his stagecraft but for his style and his moves, neither of which get much exposure here. With Fred Williamson and Jim Brown both still conspicuously absent from the picture, that leaves 'the man who would risk his neck for his brother man' to take care of business and he does. The best acting in the picture is when he asks Spangler for the money. For 'asks', read 'politely but firmly pressures', naturally, and he's believably tough but everyday. He's not putting on a star routine; for that we just have to wait for the Hammer to show up. When he and Brown ease into the film in Lincoln limos that get more screen time than Kelly, reality takes a notable raincheck. For now, we're doing the blaxploitation thing, with shifty white jerks bringing the pain to the honest black folk. Roundtree gets beaten down, Sills gets raped and kidnapped, while Kelly gets shot again.

So much for the low key approach. Rossi's hoods would have solved their problem if Teri hadn't rung a couple of numbers that Chuck gave her to call in the cavalry. Here's where Williamson ups the ante and the grittiness of the earlier scenes turns into flamboyance. Into town roll Cal and J in style to track down their friends, Chuck and Ralph, and stir up the pot until the money falls out. What's most astounding about this isn't how much Fred Williamson's stogie looks like a slim jim or how the black guys' handguns are twice as big as the white guys' (compensating for something, gentlemen?). It's that Sheriff Lucas, played well otherwise by Warrington Winters, is the most bizarre lawman I think I've ever seen in film. He pops up continually out of nowhere like he's a time traveller and he lets our heroes get away with everything. He may berate them, but he lets it be. Carry on shooting people and blowing things up! The law apparently doesn't mind.

And the rest is relatively predictable. There's a lot of filler here, with far too many shots of those limos or the Hammer's dog or Cal and J skulking around in the dark, but it delivers on the fronts that it aims at, albeit unimaginatively. The bad guys die quickly, the good guys slowly. There are periodic bouts of toughness, violence, brotherhood, redemption, breaks so the Hammer can get the ladies. And of course, Sheriff Lucas keeps showing up and doing precisely nothing else. This is all predictable but it's also dependable, capable and solid on the one hand but unimaginative and routine on the other. If you've only seen one blaxploitation movie before this, you won't get a single surprise from this one. Of course, it all unfolds to a funky score, which is actually pretty good this time round, in the hands of jazzman Rodney Franklin. For those more into rock than funk, it crosses that line on a few occasions but always stays appropriate for the material.

Williamson plays this one in standard persona. He's always sassy and knowing, less acting out a role and more just walking in front of the camera as he usually is with that Hammer grin on his face almost constantly. It's so personal that I could even believe that this performance wasn't aimed at the film's audience but any ladies hanging around on set behind the camera. Mostly because of this, he doesn't add much to the movie at all, except for one glorious scene at the enemy dojo. Refusing to be threatened by a big martial artist, he slips his even larger gun into the man's belly. 'You may be good at kung fu,' he quips, 'but I'm an expert in gun fu.' It's all the more joyous for being delivered straight. Brown is good with gun fu too, racking up most of the body count, but he's best being cool and threatening, like when he pressures the mob's money man at the bank. He doesn't move much but he demonstrates his dominance absolutely.

The film's problem is that these moments are there but rarely and almost always when there's only one of the stars in the scene. It's not often that they get to interact and, when they do, it's fleeting. Williamson's character needed more substance anyway, but with Kelly and Roundtree nowhere in sight, it needed it all the more. Brown does well, but not so much that he can carry the picture. It needed Kelly back on the screen, actually doing something other than being shot. It needed Roundtree back on the screen, working his subtle charms while Williamson hammed it up and Brown took care of business. More than anything, it needed all four of them to team up and be a joint force. It needed that to make the picture, but it really needed that to have any potential of sparking a blaxploitation revival. As it was, it came and it went and it didn't change anything. Instead, it sadly let the opportunity slide for other films to take a shot at.