Babble (2012)

Director: Alexander S Pawlak
Star: Kainion Bachtel

I've long wondered why nobody has done something like this before for an IFP film challenge, at least not while I've been paying attention. After all, if you're working to limitations to begin with, why not add more of your own? It seems like the logical time and place to experiment with your art, to shoot something a little different, to shock the audience into paying attention rather than coaxing them gently through subtleties. Most people just make little dramas that fit the shorter required running time, often with a twist ending to be memorable. Alexander Pawlak of Flight in the Eye chose not to do that here. Whatever else Babble might be, it's a very different entry into this IFP Masterpiece set. While its competitors aimed to outdo each other on grounds of cinematic quality, Babble simply aimed to be different, to stand out from the crowd by not resembling any of them in any fashion whatsoever. For that at least, I'll happily give it props.

What Pawlak did, working from a story by Sarah Woodward and adapted into a script by Heather Woodward, was to hit us with a six minute rant in free verse, delivered as a monologue and shot in black, white and fleshtone. 'Don't judge me,' says the focus of our attention, before proceeding to press us into doing just that. He's clearly unhinged, his facial and body tics mimicked by odd camera movements, which mostly comprise a long, slow pull back to highlight that he's confined by a black straitjacket, but seem to also include odd zooms in and out and little shuffles sideways. I really haven't a clue what this is all about, but maybe he killed his mother and hates the media or some such. I don't think it's important, but if you can figure it out, please let me know. Kainion Bachtel is solid though, appearing to act far less than become a living art installation. Beyond his performance, there wasn't anything here for me though beyond the wake up call.

Letters Home (2012)

Director: Annie Winn
Stars: Jacqui Allen, Lexi Burke, McKenzie Burke and Steve Briscoe

Films from the University of Advancing Technology's Digital Video program are usually a highlight in any local film selection. Frankly, they've long passed the point where 'local' should be dropped as a pointless limitation. The best part about having a school push so hard for local challenges is that new names keep on coming and most of them feel that they have to outdo the achievements of their predecessors. While Professors Paul DeNigris and Steve Briscoe remain omnipresent, they are no longer the only recognisable names. Caleb Evans is the most obvious new one, given the stunning success of Red Sand and Screaming in Silence, but others are following in his wake. The key name here is Annie Winn, who directed from a story by Vanessa Schell, which was perhaps the most insightful take on the source material of any of the 2012 Masterpiece Challenge films. Unfortunately it couldn't escape the predictability of where it felt it had to go.

Steve Briscoe plays an absentee father, but he sends many letters from Peru back home to Alice, his daughter. He's an explorer on an expedition, and in the mid-1800's that sort of thing doesn't take ten minutes, so we watch Alice grow over many years in the form of three young ladies who took home a deserved ensemble performance win for running through very similar scenes. They build with precisely the emotional cues that you might expect, while dad is shown through artful filters to highlight distance and the fact that after so many years Alice really has no clue what he even looks like. The downside is that it all unfolds as simply and as predictably as you imagine; there isn't a single surprise here. However, it's well put together, with accomplished effects work very different than the UAT norm to fit the period and tone, and the emotional swell is so solid that we almost forget how clearly we see it coming. Almost, but not quite.

Spark (2012)

Director: Diane M Dresback
Stars: Nathalie Cadieux and Kane Black

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

In theory, films produced for IFP Phoenix's Masterpiece Challenge ought to be more accomplished and more plentiful than, say, those produced for the Beat the Clock Challenge. The latter requires films to be written, shot and completed within 48 hours, with further restrictions: the filmmakers must work in one of a couple of genres and include a particular line and prop. That's pretty tough, you might think, and you'd be right. Yet for the Masterpiece Challenge, the only restriction other than a seven minute length limit is that they must be inspired by one of a variety of pieces of art at the Phoenix Art Museum. Bizarrely, taking their time seems to be harder for filmmakers. Many of those who work well under fire for Beat the Clock find that they can't stay focused on projects that take longer to complete, and the dozen registered teams for Masterpiece 2012 only turned in five completed films, mostly from long established names in Arizona like UAT and Mindclover.

What I found with this set of five is that time doesn't always seem to have helped. Three seemed less accomplished to me than much quicker shot equivalents, including this one from Mindclover, which felt more rushed and unpolished than usual, at least during the first half. Spark has a great and subtle story woven around an artist called Norman, who calls the cops after realising that one of his sculptures has been stolen, and Maggie, who apparently shows up undercover to look into it. Given the nature of Diane Dresback's story and where it takes us, I can't say any more without spoilers, but I loved the idea and certainly wouldn't mind seeing it extrapolated further. I'd even like to see it with these actors, Kane Black and Nathalie Cadieux, as they ought to fit the parts well. Both are recognisable from other challenges, Black an omnipresent face for both Mindclover and UAT, and Cadieux being so exquisite in Come Follow Me, shot by Dresback's son, Devon.

The catch is that for the first half of the film, it feels like they're rehearsing. They do pretty well in the more sarcastic moments but when they reach for emotion, it doesn't connect. It's as if they've only just been given scripts and they're experimenting to find the right tone to use but not finding it quite yet. I'd expect that a lot more from a 48 hour shoot than one crafted on a more leisurely schedule. They're both better than this and they show it later in the film, but of course we have to get through the first half to get to the second and it didn't help that Spark opened up proceedings when these films were shown in competition. Its failings may not have seemed as apparent a little later in the programme. Acting aside, everything felt capable but not really worthy of comment, either positive or negative. The story is what shines, brightly enough to build something of a swell late in the film, but ultimately and ironically missing what it needed most, a spark.

Zero Killed (2012)

Director: Michał Kosakowski

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

It's not your usual horror movie that evolves out of an art installation, but Zero Killed began life in 2007 at the Lothringer13 gallery in Munich and, sure enough, it's something rather different. It's a cross between documentary and fake snuff film, but with an opposing emphasis to movies such as Man Bites Dog or Long Pigs. For a decade, beginning in 1996, filmmaker Michał Kosakowski asked a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds about their murder fantasies, then provided the gruesome means by which they could act them out in front of the camera. Kosakowski delivered everything needed to turn their fantasies into reality, if only in a fictional way, except one thing: he set the condition that they had to act in their little pictures themselves. Then, a decade on, he returned to his subjects, spread across five central European countries, to interview them about their experiences and how they might have been changed by them.

It's certainly an interesting concept, but I'm not sure how well it's explored in this film, which runs a long 75 minutes, accompanied by a neatly contrasting soundtrack of polite electronica and light opera. What we're given is a selection of extracts from these murder fantasies, some tantalisingly brief and some disturbingly protracted, broken up by the thoughts and musings of the people who conjured them up to begin with. While these are obviously edited carefully to provide progression, any direction is kept off camera. Kosakowski remains unseen and we don't see or hear any of the questions that he asked, merely the answers he received, combined together in such a way that themes appear to emerge on their own as we find our own meanings from this material. The furthest he goes is to edit it and stack it in a particular order, but it's still very open to debate as to whether there's any consensus to be found. What I saw may not be what you'll see.

Initially there doesn't seem to be much of anything in common with the various fantasies beyond the fact that someone dies in every one of them. Certainly it was the differences that leapt out at me first. Some are brutal exercises in aggression through power, while others are passive, polite ways to kill. Some are dreams of long standing, outlined in minute detail, with others more vague in concept, maybe built reactively from the idea posed. Some are personal, the targets being ex-girlfriends, family members or those who caused an abiding response of some sort, but some are random attacks on complete strangers. Some spring from morbid intellectual curiosity, while others are emotional to the core. While this ought to be about the act of murder itself, some folk are apparently unable to see past a particular victim. Most surprisingly, while most interviewees take the expected role of killer, some place themselves into the role of the victim instead.

For a while this is enough, as the sheer diversity of fantasies sweeps over us and I found the first half an hour fascinating. One man loses control so far that he doesn't just take out his aggression on his bound victim but shoots his tomatoes too. A quiet lady serves salad laced with poison to a man who ignores her, all the while trying to embark in conversation. One inventive victim places himself into a full body cast while an apparent madman cuts off body parts. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of momentum and this diversity of approach gradually turns into the consistent result. What are we supposed to focus on: the death or the philosophy? Are we supposed to glean some sort of meaning out of the thoughts of these fantasists or is this supposed to cause a response in us? Should our questions be about the ideas brought forth or about the people who raise them? I couldn't figure out any of these answers and there's no guidance given.

Perhaps that's the point. Art is a subjective creature, which at its best ceases to be about the art and the artist and becomes about the viewer. Perhaps the point is to confront us with death in a hundred different ways and hope that it sparks something in us. Well, no light bulbs lit up above my head watching this film and much of it was predictable. Personalities matched methodologies according to clear patterns. Extroverted and emotional people get up close and personal, visible killers who want their victims to see them before they die. Introverted but driven murderers stay at a distance or hide what they're doing. I didn't find a lot of surprises in any of that. A farmer who is an experienced killer of animals has intellectual curiosity about how it might feel to extend that to human beings, but he found what he expected and so did I. Those with childhood traumas get to explore how it affected them, such as the eight year old who saw his grandfather hanged.

If I found anything new, it was in the more topical choices of approach. One woman takes on the role of a terrorist, putting on a burqa and strapping explosives to herself before walking out into a busy public area. These moments stretched for me. I watched bystanders and passers by carrying on with their lives without any knowledge of what was about to happen. I also watched the woman compose herself and find an inner peace before pressing her button. This particular scenario stood out for me, perhaps because in most of them there's a clear ending where the victims know what is going to happen and why, but here there's nothing. One moment, there are many people living their lives, but the next those lives are stopped entirely. I found it very tough to place myself into the roles of the victims in this scenario because they're blissfully unaware that they're even going to be victims. Most of these scenarios are simple, this one is deceptively complex.

The most topical choice of murder fantasy is the young man who goes on a school rampage. This was hard to watch not, because of the reasons above but because it all became meta for me at this point. I wasn't thinking about the man himself or his actions, but of how others would react to him talking about it so freely in a movie like this. After Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook, there are heated discussions across America about gun rights and the second amendment. What fascinates me most about this highly contentious issue isn't the issue itself but the reactions and overreactions to it. When a second grader gets suspended from school for throwing an imaginary grenade into an imaginary box of evil in order to save the world, how are we supposed to react to a young man talking candidly on film about his fantasies of shooting up a school and then seeing clips of him doing so, albeit in fake form, with a realistic machine gun?

Zero Killed is so named for a few reasons, not only as the meaning of the abbreviation OK, as used in military dispatches after combat to highlight no casualties, but to make it clear to us that what we see is fake, imaginary, hypothetical. While we watch a large number of gruesome deaths, not one person was killed in the making of the film or since, to the best of my knowledge, at least not at the hands of these fantasists, but the school shooter hammered home questions about whether that might ever happen. It's constantly notable how cheerful, down to earth and normal these folk are, but a few do seem to warrant a more careful look. How thin is that boundary between fantasy and reality, after all? It's in this aspect that the film really turns around on the viewer and prompts us to evaluate what we're watching and what our reactions are. In a world where thinking about a crime is frequently conflated with committing it, suddenly this feels dangerous.

Unfortunately, such thought really stems from the very existence of this picture more than from anything that unfolds within it. While it started well and posed interesting questions in surprising ways, my interest lapsed about half an hour in. Almost by definition, it became highly repetitive and the reuse of music, as enjoyable as that was, added to that feeling. Clearly I wasn't alone, as the people leaving the theatre where I first saw it wasn't en masse as a reaction to one moment, but a gradual trickle as they decided individually that they just didn't want to watch it any more. Watching again, at home, outside the boundaries of a film festival, I found it easier to remain on board, but my interest still lapsed. Paradoxically, the longer reenactments run, the more boring they become but the less easy it is to ignore their content; yet the more this happens, the easier it is for our eyes to drift away and find something, anything else to focus on. That's not good.

Gut (2012)

Director: Elias
Stars: Jason Vail, Nicholas Wilder, Sarah Schoofs and Angie Bullaro

For a film with a short, punchy title and which begins with a bloody man doing something violent to someone offscreen, Gut is a surprisingly psychological picture. Perhaps the pointer is that it's written and directed by someone with only one name, so there's presumably going to be an arty tone. It's not your traditional art film, that's for sure, but it's far from the visceral experience you might expect from the subject matter and title. It looks deceptively normal, capably shot but with little of the visual flair that you might associate with art films. What it has is a leisurely pace that stubbornly refuses to speed up as the freaky stuff enters the plot, accompanied by a minimalist and echoingly repetitive soundtrack. Both fail to impress initially but stake out a place in our brain nonetheless to hauntingly command our attention. The tension certainly builds consistently and considerably from subtleties and the pace and score both have a lot to do with that.

The biggest problem the film has in its early stages isn't in what it does or in what it doesn't do, but in the fact that it has to do it. It's all about boredom, you see, and it's a really difficult trick to make boredom interesting on film without it not being about boredom any more. The story unfolds in the office, in a diner, at home, with none of these places shown in a remotely interesting light. Life is clearly boring for Tom Nelson, the only thing in it that carries any spice being Dan Jones, his best friend and co-worker. He does mildly wild things like staging a mock suicide and reanimation as a zombie from his desk, when sticking post-it notes on his nipples loses its charm. You'd think that Tom would be happy to have a wildcard like Dan to share an office with but perhaps he's just known him too long. They've been best friends since they were kids and it's entirely obvious that they've been drifting apart for a long time.

While Dan lives in the past, watching home video shot years ago, Tom has grown up and moved on. Either it's a Pixar movie with his wife and daughter or it's yet another run through Return of the Living Dead III with Dan. Both have lost their appeal. He sees the choices that he has but he doesn't like any of them. The passion has evaporated. Even sex with his cute wife, Lily, is boring. He can't eat. He can't sleep. He can't get it up. He's stuck in routines, going through the motions to the degree that it's ritualistic. We see the same places over and over again: the office for work, the diner for lunch, home for dinner. Back home we see the dining table, the shower and the bed, transitional places in between where fun things are supposed to happen. Only Katie, his daughter, hints at life, playing with dogs in the park, but Tom doesn't join in. He has no impetus. Well, not until Lily lets slip to Dan that they're planning to move and Dan decides to woo his friend back.

How he does so is through something new, something edgy, something better than horror movies. It's a DVD of footage he ordered from 'some underground vid site' that is basically effects porn in the Flowers of Flesh and Blood vein: snuff without the death, or so they think. It has a man's hand, a stylish knife and an incision, little more. It's passionate rather than entirely clinical though, the hand slipping inside the body through the wound as if it's a loving act. Tom pretends not to care, even to be turned off by it, but he goes home to discover that his apparent impotence problem has gone. He just thinks about the video, and the clearly symbolic aspect to that gory penetration, and that's pretty much all that it takes. And so on it goes, becoming an addiction. Tom wants Dan to get rid of it, but he comes round to watch the next DVD anyway. We don't even see that one, just the two of them watching it together over and over. And then it begins to infect his dreams.

I found Gut a sort of infectious film too, though it didn't take over my dreams and my life the way it does these characters. I found the buildup fascinating, all the more so for watching it again and realising just how well constructed it is. The whole film is slow and deliberate, admirably refusing to play the gimmicky modern editing game. There are few cuts and the long scenes tend to unfold by being embedded onto our eyeballs so that there's a lingering image of them even after they're gone. In this it reminds of, say, a Bergman movie, another reason we can't help but look for depth and substance. Of course, it doesn't say as much. There's no Sven Nykvist phrasing the poetry of the piece. The main actors, Jason Vail, Nicholas Wilder and Sarah Schoofs, are capable and clearly committed to the picture but they're hardly in the Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand and Bibi Andersson class. It's very hard for an actor to tell us something meaningful while doing nothing.

I've only seen Vail before, though in a part so thoroughly different I didn't recognise him. Here we see a lot of him, in both meanings of that phrase. I presume the frequent shower scenes and butt shots go beyond highlighting routine to lay himself bare as the protagonist of the film and to show contrast between the physical and the mental, the outside and the inside. Yet in Whom God Helps, a striking short film, he played the angel of death, heavily made up and barking short commands in Latin. To highlight his diversity, his big rôle was in Asylum's Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, given that he'd appeared in the trailer for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, the book. Wilder has the character to Vail's moodiness. He's like a nerdy version of Christian Slater, with thick eyebrows and a strong half grin and he provides the surface to most scenes. Schoofs is very passive, forced for the most part to allow both the story and her screen husband to overshadow her.

Where the picture disappointed me was in its failure to capitalise on how strongly it had built up the story. While we're quickly given a clear and straightforward direction, it's overlaid with a few neat levels of ambiguity. Tom is so fed up with his life that he plans to move, prompting his best friend to try to win him back to the good old days. At this point, the snuff footage is meaningless in itself. It's just a MacGuffin for Tom and Dan to evolve around and their changes are fascinating to watch, both positive and negative. Yet as the plot takes a more personal turn and the footage with it, that evolution is lessened. For a while we remain absorbed with questions. Is Dan insane? Is Tom schizophrenic? How is this footage really affecting them? Do either of them have any real involvement with it beyond the voyeuristic level? The film does a solid job of prompting us to ask these questions but then it decides to quickly and simply finish out without fuss. The end.

Gut is working the festival circuit right now, which is perhaps the best place for it. Surely it's more likely that slow, thoughtful material like this will find an audience at film festivals than at RedBox or Netflix. So far it's been selected to 24 festivals, from Atlanta to Zagreb, and won seven awards, including Best Feature at the New York City Horror Film Festival, where it also won for its special effects, which are both effectively visceral but somehow erotically charged. Interestingly, though, it isn't making the cut everywhere. I first saw it as a festival submission, but it wasn't selected for that festival or for a second that I'm involved with. It is playing locally this weekend at a third, the Bloody Hero Film Festival at the Phoenix Center for the Arts, but I do wonder why those who ought to like it most, like myself, don't always. I think it's because as a festival selection, it's not a film to walk out of or a film to slate afterwards. It's a film to enjoy but then move onto the next theatre.

The French Spy (2012)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Xavier Christian, Stacie Stocker, Michael Hanelin and Maryam Cné

A fresh month means a fresh review of a Travis Mills movie and this one's a challenging one. I watched it last year but didn't get it, so I let it sit for a while and came back later. Unfortunately I still don't get it and writer/director Mills is keeping tight lipped. The Running Wild site calls it 'a storytelling experiment in structure', which is clear enough, the ten minute running time split up into three sections, The Fall of Man, Crucifixion and Resurrection, suggesting a Biblical theme. However the story, if we can call something so abstract and disconnected a story, has no obvious Biblical connotations, instead providing a modern day spy plot. The title could refer to one of two different characters, though the IMDb synopsis hints at one. There are three acts, set up as slices of story rather than progressions, perhaps with the important bits skipped over. The score plays on for a while after the credits, inviting the fourth act to unfold in our ideas of what happens next.

Given that I still don't know what happens, even though I've seen The French Spy a few times, it's pretty clear that spoilers don't apply. The film feels like a riddle to be unravelled, though its very elusiveness may tie to there not being an answer. So I'll try to unravel it and Travis can laugh at how wide of the mark I'll surely end up. What we see is a man, played by Xavier Christian. He's in the park, reading Alan Furst, an American spy novelist, when a lady sits down next to him with a Georges Simonen. Neither speak French, or so they say, even though he sounds continental and her Maigret is in French. So she makes her offer in English. Later, he's chained up and bloody in someone's house, with a litany of his supposed exploits as a French spy being recounted back to him. The lady interrogates him in French. In the last act, he's in another lady's back garden, still bloody, when he's offered a drink. The end.

And so what does it mean? Clearly the Biblical framework has a purpose, but is it just a reference to the rise/fall/rise flow of the story or something deeper? Is it suggesting that our accused French spy isn't any such thing, by equating him with Jesus, who was persecuted for everyone else's sins? We know nothing about him, except that he sounds French and reads spy novels. The lady calls him Jean-Pierre but that doesn't have to be his name. Could this all be a mistake, perhaps a social commentary on the Khalid el-Masri case, where a Lebanese born German citizen was mistakenly assumed to be a terrorist, spirited away to a clandestine black site in Afghanistan and tortured by the CIA before being released without warning at night in Albania? Perhaps the information we're given is deliberately lacking to put us into his shoes. It must be disconcerting to say the least for an innocent man to be given an accounting of someone else's sins.

Perhaps the French spy is really the lady in the park, who certainly doesn't tell him the truth. The outcome of that first act is for him to become a bloody mess, presumably on her orders, if not at her hands. As she's clearly equated with Eve, whose inquisitiveness got our entire race kicked out of the garden, is her apparently violent sidekick the snake? Are they going all Old Testament on their victim's ass while he passively endures as the New Testament man of peace? It's hard to tell without seeing any of the material that ought to sit between the first and second acts. Still more frustrating is what's absent from between the second and third. Does the final act mean that they let him go or that he fought his way free, against the sort of odds that only a real spy might have a chance at. He does speak one line in French, after all. Is his ending smile the acknowledgement of a cycle beginning again, sly satisfaction at success over enemies or just happiness at freedom?

These may (or may not) be good questions, but I don't have good answers. This clearly isn't about sparkling dialogue, but everything we see and hear appears to be very deliberate. Christian plays a capable mystery man and Stacie Stocker does well in two languages as the lady who really does speak French. Her sidekick is Michael Hanelin, from The Memory Ride, who is believably someone you don't want to look up at from a chair you've been tied to. Maryam Cné completes the cast as the young lady at the end. Maybe it's all a con and she's really the French spy because, hey, she has an accent on her awesome last name. With the story cut down to the quick and its supporting material gone, it's hard to know if they've done their jobs right or not but I presume they did fine. Maybe the key to it all is in the fourth act, the one that plays out after the movie is over but the music continues on, improvised in our imaginations from a theme by Travis Mills.

The French Spy can be viewed for free at YouTube.

Bombs Over Monte Carlo (1931)

Director: Hanns Schwarz
Stars: Hans Albers, Anna Sten and Heinz Rühmann

It's clear to see that after Peter Lorre's stunning performance in M, the cinematic world was his for the taking. He was just as noticed on stage, his individual work in Bertold Brecht's Mann ist Mann, in which he'd acted during the production of M, impossible to ignore, whether critics appreciated it or not. Yet by the time he took a small role in this film, a comedy musical, M hadn't been released, so he was still an unknown face to widespread audiences. He doesn't get much to do here but he makes the most of it, with such a wide grin every time we see him that it's hard to imagine it's the same actor who played a paedophile murderer only a few months earlier, not only because of tone but because he looks so much younger. It is surprising, however, that in the rôle of Pawlitschek, the chief engineer of a battleship owned by the fictional Balkan nation of Pontenero, he only rates eighth on the credits list, as he's far more memorable than a couple of those listed higher.

Without benefit of hindsight, audiences of the day were here to watch Hans Albers and Anna Sten, who are clearly Teutonic equivalents of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. As Queen Yola I of Pontenero, Sten is a delight, reminiscent of Claudette Colbert in both moonface and comedic style, but vamping it up like Marlene Dietrich, a big star in German cinema after The Blue Angel a year earlier. Albers is harder to take as Capt Craddock, Pawlitschek's commander, though this is due to what Craddock does rather than how Albers plays the part. The script by Hans Müller and Franz Schulz was based on a novel by Fritz Reck-Malleczewen, released only the year before, and the unbridled sense of entitlement within hints at what the Germans would do next historically. I was surprised to discover that the novelist was a staunch opponent of the Nazis, who banned his works. After he denounced Aryan purity in 1944, they sent him to Dachau and shot him dead.

You see, the morals in this film are all kinds of screwed up, not just on the surface but deep down within the guts of the story too. As the film opens, we discover that Craddock's crew are lounging around doing a whole lot of nothing, because apparently the queen hasn't seen fit to pay them for a while. We might imagine that Pontenero is going through a financial crisis or some such, but no, when the orders come in to clear for departure, it's to pick up the Queen at Livorno and chauffeur her on a pleasure cruise through the Mediterranean. She's en route on the Adriatic Express, ready to live it up on her country's dime. At this point, we can almost sympathise with Craddock when he decides to utterly ignore his queen's command, hijack his own battleship and set sail for Monte Carlo instead. The telegram he composes in response is a joy. 'Will no longer act the fool for Your Majesty. Stop. Been bored long enough. Stop.' I'd love to send that verbatim to my manager.

It's no surprise when the queen decides to follow him to Monte Carlo and see what sort of man he is, listening surreptitiously in the Pontenero embassy as Craddock demands 100,000 francs from the consul to pay his crew and fuel his ship, which isn't unsympathetic. She even redeems herself a little in our eyes too by giving up her necklace to cover that demand. So we overlook the mutiny and prepare for the songs and romantic comedy that the format conditions us to expect. This one adds the subterfuge angle by having the captain fail to recognise Queen Yola, even though he has a portrait of her in his cabin, thus allowing her to get up to all sorts of shenanigans at his expense, and I can buy that in a romantic comedy. It's not too far distant from Roman Holiday, after all, and the battleship is notably crewed by volunteers from a variety of nations, so perhaps Craddock has little knowledge about his adopted country of Pontenero.

Where it all gets a bit much is in the tone that these two characters persist in adopting, while the film presumably expects us to treat them sympathetically as endearing leads. We've already seen that Queen Yola happily flounces around having a blast while her armed forces and her embassies go without pay. Of course, she treats Capt Craddock as her personal plaything, manipulating him without shame, because we expect that she's going to get her comeuppance at the end, probably by him turning her over his knee. What we find is that Craddock is no better. Clearly some sort of playboy, given that the orchestra at the Monte Carlo Casino knows him well enough that they play the Craddock March when he walks towards the dancefloor, he might talk the talk about paying his crew but he doesn't walk the walk, however much they adore him. Effectively, he's the same character, as deserving of getting his comeuppance, perhaps by her turning him over her knee.

But no, we get neither of those things. Rather than have our leads learn the error of their ways, face up to their selfishness and turn over a new leaf, accompanied of course by a song or two to keep it all jolly and a romantic entanglement that gifts them both perspective, instead we get a rather surprising set of escalations that only proves that neither of them has any conception of morality whatsoever, not to mention remorse. So Queen Yola sets her sights on Craddock and he unwittingly falls for her machinations. It takes him precisely one night to spend his ship's entire payroll to inadvertently buy back the queen's necklace as an ironic gift for his brand new pickup, who I'm not sure has even given him a name yet. He covers the 30,000 franc percentage for the jeweller by giving him his ring and collecting ten grand back to gamble on the tables, playing not with skill but with romantic whimsy, risking all for the luck in her glance.

It's no surprise to find him win big and sit pretty with that ten grand turned into half a million, but his new ladyfriend blows it all on an insanely risky gamble at the end of the night. Presumably she plans to teach him a lesson, especially as he's told her outright that he aims to sail for Honolulu in the morning with the queen's battleship, crew and that half a million, but his response is still more insanely risky. He literally stands on a chair in the middle of the casino, commanding everyone's attention and suggesting that they all keep away for the next twenty four hours. Then he asks for 100,000 francs of his losses back from the casino manager; like any casino is ever going to do that, however politely he suggests that they can keep the rest of his losses. Well, Capt Craddock thinks he has a rather unique bargaining chip to back him up: a Pontenero battleship sitting in the bay. He gives the casino until nine in the morning or the picture's title will gain bloody meaning.

The sense of entitlement here is truly astounding and, while I won't reveal how this all plays out, it never goes away and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I can enjoy the cast, because Albers, the biggest star in Germany during this era, is a force of nature and Sten is a bundle of charms. Both have able sidekicks: Ida Wüst hams it up as Isabell, Yola's maid, in a coquettish Ruth Chatterton sort of way, and Albers's regular co-star, Heinz Rühmann, anticipates Donald O'Connor well as Lt Peter Schmidt. The only catch is the relentless chummy relationship between the commander and his senior officer, which may be innocent but surely doesn't seem so. Even when talking about young girls in Monte Carlo, they smile enticingly at each other and cuddle up closer than might be appropriate, every opportunity for physical contact being leapt at. The pet name Craddock has for Schmidt of 'Little Peter' is surely unfortunate, given hindsight, but distracting nonetheless.

I can even enjoy the style exhibited throughout, this being a lesser UFA production but still an UFA production nonetheless. There are many capable shots like one where casino patrons descend in elevators as missiles ascend through battleship mechanisms. Even the songs aren't distracting, a pleasant surprise for me, and there are fewer of them than I remember from the Chevalier and MacDonald vehicles that I've seen thus far. UFA certainly put their weight behind it, also shooting the picture in English and French versions simultaneously for foreign release. The French version, Le capitaine Craddock, had a completely different cast led by Jean Murat and Käthe von Nagy, but Albers reprised his role in English for Monte Carlo Madness, opposite Sari Maritza. Critics were not enthralled by the latter, but I don't know about the others. I wonder whether audiences outside of Germany saw this differently. Did they leave it with a laugh and ignore how callous it really is?

Perhaps because the only other lead role I've seen Albers play is Baron Munchausen, in the 1943 German version titled simply Münchhausen, I couldn't help but see this less as a viable framework for a story and more as a tall tale. It worked a little better for me that way, as it becomes wild and far fetched almost immediately and doesn't let up as the story runs on, each escalation still more outrageous than the last. Yet this reading still ends with that bad taste, because the Munchausen stories I've read in print and seen on film had him as a lovable rogue, arrogant perhaps, but not to the degree that everyone else would be left so ruthlessly high and dry. This is almost like an Ayn Rand musical, where the moral is that you can do anything you like as long as you can get away with it. Perhaps that might not seem so obnoxious if the nation behind this film didn't promptly do exactly that starting only a couple of years later. Perhaps not, but obnoxious it would remain.

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, Miles Mander and John Stewart

In 1925, Alfred Hitchcock was far from the legend that he would become, but he was also far from the novice you might expect, given that this was his first feature as a director. He'd actually been working in the industry since 1919, after he'd persuaded Famous Players-Lasky, the company that became Paramount, to hire him when they expanded into Britain, where a strong national cinema was struggling after the First World War. He impressed them with title designs for properties that they owned rights to but hadn't made yet and was quickly hired to run their titles department. By 1922, he had designed the titles for all eleven of their features, as well as an indie picture made by Donald Crisp, one of their directors, before stumbling into the director's chair. The company wound down as he shot a two reel comedy that studio records call Mrs Peabody but Hitch called simply Number Thirteen, but it wasn't finished and no longer exists. 'Thank heavens,' said Hitch.

His second spell as a director came the next year. Other companies were shooting pictures at Islington Studios, where Famous Players-Lasky British had been based; one took advantage of his availability when their own director, Hugh Croise, either fell ill or into disagreement with the film's writer/star, Seymour Hicks. So, as Hitch was around, Hicks hired him to finish the remake of his 1914 film, Always Tell Your Wife, a one reel comedy. As luck would have it, while he was doing this, a company called Balcon-Saville-Freedman looked round the studio and were impressed with the confident young director; when they moved into Islington, he became their assistant director under Graham Cutts. Over the next three years, he'd rack up other roles too, such as scriptwriter and art director, continuing as such as the company became Gainsborough Pictures. This would end in 1925, as the increasingly jealous Cutts refused to work with 'wonder boy' any more.

Fortunately for Hitch, the company's founder, Michael Balcon, who would later lead Ealing Studios throughout its heyday in the forties, was more than happy to keep him on. While Cutts was kept busy in England making The Rat with Ivor Novello, Balcon had Hitch shoot The Pleasure Garden in Munich. He'd already become passable in German, as The Blackguard, the second Gainsborough picture, had been shot at Neubabelsberg Studios in Berlin as a co-production with UFA. This may have been one of the most influential experiences in Hitch's career, as F W Murnau was shooting The Last Laugh on neighbouring sets, with the aim of telling its entire story visually without titles. Hitch, whose career in pictures began from his ability to write good titles, was fascinated. What he learned may not be obvious in The Pleasure Garden but is notable in The Lodger in 1927, his third film as a director, the one he regarded as 'the first true Hitchcock film', and increasingly ongoing.

Unfortunately for us, most of this material is lost today. Always Tell Your Wife no longer appears to exist, and Mrs Peabody perhaps never did in anything but nascent form. The twelve pictures Hitch wrote at Famous-Players Lasky have all been lost for years, as have the Gainsborough films. Most annoying to Hitchcock fans, The Mountain Eagle, his second feature, also shot in Germany but set in Kentucky, is also lost. There's always a hope that one day it might resurface, as one early Hitch film did recently, when three of the six reels of The White Shadow were discovered mislabeled in the New Zealand Film Archive. This was the second Balcon-Saville-Freedman picture, quickly shot as a follow up to Woman to Woman, after Betty Compson, their imported American star, talked Balcon into a two picture deal. The catch is that Woman to Woman was a huge hit, but The White Shadow wasn't, to the degree that it bankrupted the company.

Bizarrely, the footage that we have today of The White Shadow ends as a character walks down a staircase in a nightclub, while The Pleasure Garden, the next material available with Hitch's name on it, begins with a whole chorus line running down a spiral staircase to perform. Staircases would soon become a regular sight in Hitchcock films, as a psychological cue to depict changing fortunes or moral directions, up for positive and down for negative. That idea may not have been ready at this point but it's a great shot nonetheless, perhaps the best in the picture. This spiral staircase is at a theatre called the Pleasure Garden, where Patsy Brand works as a dancer and Jill Cheyne soon will, once she's robbed of her money and letters of introduction but kind hearted Patsy puts in a good word with the boss, Mr Hamilton, just to help out. These are our two leading ladies, played by two American imports, Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty, as was the trend at the time.

It takes a little while to get properly moving. There are strong visuals, like the opening staircase shot or one soon after that has an elderly man focus in with his glasses and pan over a chorus line of legs to find his favourite girl. There are eyecatching scenes like the one where the girls undress back at Patsy's place to share the same bed. There's even drily subversive humour, such as when Jill kneels down at the bedside to pray and Patsy's dog distracts her by licking her feet. Generally though, it doesn't feel smooth, hardly surprising given the chaos that accompanied shooting on the financial front. Hitch ran out of money shooting in Italy, as his leads racked up more bills than planned and he had to buy new film after Italian customs confiscated everything he had, despite having an Italian baron, Gaetano Ventimiglia, as his cinematographer. They got it back later, but that didn't help at the time. At least, it all proved to be a learning experience.

He was also hindered by having to work with a completely predictable melodrama, written by Eliot Stannard from a novel by Oliver Sandys, hardly the sort of material that he would quickly become known for. Sandys was a male pseudonym for a woman who usually wrote as Countess Barcynska, just the sort of name you might expect to have written something this melodramatic. At least ten of her novels and stories were adapted for the screen, nine in the twenties with a late one in 1933, but the basic story here doesn't promise much for the others, especially given that Stannard, who had been writing scripts since 1914 and was prolific in the twenties, is clearly better than this. He went on to write many of Hitch's formative films as a director, including everything from 1925-29 except Blackmail. Even the title here is frustrating, as the Pleasure Garden has less and less to do with the story as time runs on. What it really has to do with is two ladies and their two men.

At the outset, Patsy is established at the Pleasure Garden, while Jill wants into the business. Patsy is clearly a good person, putting up the other girl and helping her kickstart her career, and initially it seems that Jill is too. Yet even during her audition, she begins to upset the girls that she'll go on to work with, and her abhorrent behaviour increases along with her professional stature. When her fiancé comes to see her at Patsy's, she isn't there. She's at Hamilton's apartment, the suggestive intertitle only temporarily misleading. 'Let's not have any suggestions like that,' she tells Hamilton when he gets fresh, 'until I have my own house to invite you to.' That doesn't take long. When she moves out, she leaves a note for Patsy saying that she can't stay in cheap lodgings now that she's almost a star. When Patsy raises her reputation as Hamilton's kept woman, she dismisses her and carries on with Prince Ivan.

Why would her fiancé ignore this sort of behaviour, you might ask. Well, that's Hugh Fielding, her childhood sweetheart, and he's conveniently working overseas on a plantation, saving up enough to allow them to get married. To cement the contrasting fortunes of the two leading ladies, Patsy falls for a friend and colleague of Hugh's called Levet. They become close, but when he asks for more she interprets it as a proposal, which he agrees to when she seems accepting of not going back to the plantation with him. A quick marriage and an Italian honeymoon at Lake Como later and we're back to where we were: the girls working at the Pleasure Garden and the guys on their plantation. The comparisons are hammered home. Hugh cares for Jill, but she's sleeping her way to the top. Patsy cares for Levet, but he was just making a conquest. When he throws away the rose she gave him, his words cover her and their relationship too: 'Had to. It had wilted.'

If you can't see where this is going, you either don't have any imagination or you have more than is needed to navigate something this predictable. If there are surprises here, it's in how far things are taken. While the first half is melodramatic in the extreme, the second half is more reminiscent of an edgy precode, merely without sound, or perhaps a less morally grounded take on the sort of melodramas that Lon Chaney specialised in. We're taken on an increasingly eye opening journey into adultery and alcoholism, madness and murder, which is a heady mix indeed. While it never once takes a step that isn't telegraphed far in advance, often as far as the outset of the movie, it does often step a little further than I ever expected it to, keeping eyes wide as each successive taboo is broached. There's a sinister tone to some of the plantation scenes that is notable, but the manipulation is by the characters not by the director, so it doesn't feel particularly Hitchcock.

He did well with his cast. I was impressed by Virginia Valli, a major Hollywood star at the time, who makes Patsy feel much more believable than most silent movie actresses even aimed for, though she still has her histrionics. Her friend, Carmelita Geraghty, is more traditionally overdone as Jill, though her role is more overdone too. They're both easy on the eyes and they back that up well, however limited by the material they are. John Stewart is capable as Hugh, but he's overshadowed by Miles Mander, who steals the show late on as Levet, reaching into the depths to stagger and twitch and try to build danger and unpredictability into a part that still has a clear direction. The four of them get by far the most screen time but others do get opportunities. Patsy's landlords, the Sideys, are treated well, while the costumer taking care of Jill's trousseau is either a flagrant queen, an escapee from an expressionist horror movie or both. It's a Dwight Frye sort of role.

I wonder if the early technology was a Hitch touch. He was frequently ahead of the curve when it came to technology and Mr Sidey has a small wireless set with a posh looking pair of headphones. Certainly Hitch's predilection for icy blondes hadn't manifested itself yet, both leading ladies being brunettes. Of course he hardly had power over casting at this point, the cast being given to him in a package with the rest of the assignment. He was also busy getting married at the time, to Alma Reville, his long time editor and continuity girl, his current assistant director and surely the person who would prove most influential throughout his entire career. One other thing he had no power over was the film's release, which was promptly held up. In fact, while his first film was shown to the press in March 1926, it wasn't released until after his third, The Lodger, had proved a massive hit in 1927. Even at that point, it was just an interesting footnote. The Lodger was the future.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

Director: J Farrell MacDonald
Stars: Violet MacMillan and The Marvelous Coulerc

There are no less than six films based on L Frank Baum's Oz books in the works, including two due this year with massive budgets. Oz the Great and Powerful is a $200m Disney blockbuster helmed by Sam Raimi and Dorothy of Oz is a $60m CGI animated feature with an even more outstanding cast. So it seemed like an appropriate time to take a look at a much older Oz film, one released 99 years ago by Baum himself. The Patchwork Girl of Oz wasn't the first adaptation of his work, that honour going to 1908's The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, an expensive cross between performance and film that must have been something like Richard Attenborough interacting with himself within Jurassic Park. The earliest surviving adaptation is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1910, adapted via the 1902 stage musical. The three sequels shot the same year are all now lost. After that came this film, the first production of Baum's own Oz Film Manufacturing Company.

This production company was an ambitious undertaking to say the least. Not only did it attempt to draw children back to quality family entertainment from the violent westerns that were the norm, it aimed to do so at a frantic pace. It shot four feature films in 1914 alone, The Patchwork Girl of Oz for an early September release, with The Magic Cloak of Oz following later the same month, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz in October and The Last Egyptian in December. All were made by the same core crew: J. Farrell MacDonald directing, Baum handling the scripts and Louis F. Gottschalk composing complete scores to be sent out with the prints, a rarity at a time when theatres worked from cues. This pace was unforgiving and the first film's lack of success was a death blow. 1915 only saw the release of four shorts, with a fifth lagging behind in 1917; and the company quickly folded. Three features are available today, a fourth only exists at MoMA and the rest are lost.

Frankly, it's not surprising. Children's films are always tough ones for adults to properly evaluate as they succeed or fail through how well they connect to the minds of children, who don't always care about things that adults do, like consistency, plot continuity or believability. The longer since a film's release, the more difficult it becomes because changing culture plays a factor too. Think about how hard it is to get your kids to watch films that you grew up loving, then think about how hard it would be if they were in black and white or shot without sound. You might be surprised, as kids have a habit of confounding our expectations, but this is a primitive picture indeed, one that relies less on story, which is episodic and highly unrealistic, and more on slapstick, silliness and acrobatics. While there are some excellent effects, especially given the film's age, the non-human characters are created through costume and pantomime. Pixar it sure ain't.

The story is sourced from Baum's own novel, released a year earlier in 1913 as the seventh in the Oz series begun by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. He'd actually wrapped the whole thing up with book six, The Emerald City of Oz, but financial difficulties caused it to be promptly unwrapped again and it continued until his death, the fourteenth book, Glinda of Oz, arriving posthumously in 1920. The sweep of the story is the same, as a munchkin called Ojo quests through the land of Oz to find the ingredients needed to restore his uncle, Unc Nunkie, to life after being accidentally turned into a marble statue by Dr. Pipt's Liquid of Petrifaction. There are differences, naturally, not least that Ojo is a boy in the book but a girl in the movie. The book and film also differ as regards to the number of marble statues and the ingredients needed to restore them and there's a strong difference in the assortment of characters encountered during the quest.

It starts off slowly, with Ojo and Unc Nunkie bemoaning their lot in life. There are no loaves on the bread tree in the yard, but they don't look malnourished. Ojo wonders why they're so poor, but I'm not seeing any signs. They live in a stone house with a big fireplace, though it's clearly a set built out of cardboard. Anyway they hit the road, as everybody knows that nobody goes without in the Emerald City. Their first stop is at Dr. Pipt's place, which doesn't turn out too well, even if his status as "crooked magician" refers to his limbs rather than his intentions. He lives there with Margolotte, his wife, whose desire for a servant girl made out of scraps prompts both the title of the film and crippling toil for her dedicated husband, who has spent six years stirring four huge iron cauldrons with both hands and both feet in order to create his magic powder of life. No wonder he's crooked, reminiscent of Kamaji in Spirited Away. Later he moves like Torgo in Manos: The Hands of Fate.

The mishap that sets up the rest of the film unfortunately takes place during a missing sequence, but it's clear enough how things progress to that point. Margolotte uses stop motion animation, i.e. magic, to conjure the patchwork girl together out of scraps. While her husband finishes up his six year potion, Ojo is shocked at the whole concept, or at least the lack of brains in play. Margolotte does suggest that, "The fewer brains, the better servant," but Ojo decides to raid the magic brains cabinet (it's labelled "Magic Brains"), mix up contents from bottles like Obedience, Ingenuity and Judgement to sew into the patchwork girl's skull. On the positive side, this may be why Scraps, as she's named, turns out to be so useful later on. Unfortunately, perhaps it's also why she turns out to be a hyperactive acrobat, whose flouncing around in Pipt's cramped quarters causes three folk to be accidentally covered with liquid of petrifaction and so turned into marble statues.

Unc Nunkie and Margolotte are two, while the third is Danx, the munchkin boyfriend of Jesseva, Dr. Pipt's daughter. Danx and Jesseva are new to the film and I still haven't managed to figure out the reason why. Sure, they're a happy young couple, which always looks good on screen, however big these munchkins happen to be, but there's not much happiness involved, given that Danx quickly becomes a statue. It's good reason for Jesseva to accompany Ojo on her quest to find ingredients for Pipt to brew up some antidote, but she decides to take Danx along too, in miniature form. I do realise that this is a children's movie and I also realise that I clearly don't understand, but it soon becomes apparent that the marble Danx, shrunken for portability, is an instant object of lust for every woman in the land of Oz who even catches a glimpse of him, catfights galore breaking out over this unfortunately dildo sized marble boy. This surely has to be a Japanese porn movie.

The cultural boundaries of time don't want to quit here. Intriguing characters like the Shaggy Man, the Glass Cat and the Yoop were dropped as the book became a script, but new characters arose in their place. Unfortunately, Mewel, a stray waif of a mule, is some guy in a pantomime costume who spends most of his time rubbing his ass, pun not intended, on everything he can find: trees, bridges, people. Maybe he has worms. Just as unfortunately, the Lonesome Zoop appears to be some sort of Chinese monkey demon who's so lonesome that he that apparently wants to ravish Mewel. Again, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that my strikingly modern interpretations of the character motivations in play are as wrong as wrong can be but I'm fascinated to find out what the point of these characters was. Unfortunately, their absence from the source novel means that I'm likely to be stuck conjuring up ever more outlandish reasons that are equally wrong.

Most of what we see is easily explainable, if not always easy to explain to a modern audience. For instance, Ojo, Jesseva and Scraps need three hairs from the end of a woozy's tail. Now, a woozy is a sort of large cat who seems friendly enough, though our heroes discover one in a corral behind a sign reading 'Beware of the Woozy', but in one of the least inspiring effects in the film, it's also apparently an AT-AT made out of cardboard boxes. What's more, the hairs on its tail aren't easily removed so, as only Scraps, the acrobatic patchwork girl, can climb over the corral, the woozy has her make it so mad that its eyes will squirt acid and burn a hole through the fence to freedom. Uh, what sort of message is this? Abuse animals to make them free? Next up is a six leaf clover, which only grow in Oz, where they cannot be picked, prompting Ojo to voluntarily break the law to land ingredient number two. This clearly isn't a particularly moral children's story, folks.

At least they get caught and marched into the Emerald City by a chorus line of guardswomen, in royal prison garb, which means that they have sheets thrown over them with holes in so that they can still see. This does make them look more like Casper the Friendly Ghost than Ku Klux Klan members, but it still seems a little strange a hundred years on. Surely, with many of the costumes and races in Oz, Baum was just going for childish silliness, but it would be great to know some of the cultural background behind those creations. There's a town populated by Hoppers, who have only one leg each so force everyone else to hop within city limits and chop off offending limbs as they find them. There's a village of primitive Tottenhots, all in blackface. There's even the cave of the Horners, who are jolly pregnant men who like to rub ther own bellies and have hair like that guy in Doctor and the Medics. I know about black stereotypes but what are the others?

I realise I'm poking fun here, but this has aged terribly, not in quality but in cultural grounding. It just seems so wrong in so many ways that presumably didn't in 1914. I should redress the balance and point out what works. The story is so ridiculous that anyone over the age of six will point out continuity errors and unexplainable leaps, but it zips along at a breakneck pace fuelled by sheer imagination. Blink and you'll miss a wild idea or two. While the costumes are awful, Sunday School play animals and big hats, the visual effects are pretty capable. The stop motion animation while Margolotte conjures Scraps together and as her husband stays at the House of Magic is fine. The Wall of Optical Illusion is just what you might expect and it's as well shot as the Horner ability to break the laws of gravity. The acrobatics are enjoyable, the Marvelous Pierre Couderc particularly impressive as Scraps, even though he's male as it would have been unseemly for a lady to tumble.

There's also another note of historical importance to remember, beyond the author of a popular children's series starting a production company to produce screen adaptations of his books, that he adapted himself. You don't see J. K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer doing that today. This note has to do with a couple of minor supporting actors who just happened to meet on the set and begin a friendship that would become a major one in film. The Tottenhot on the Royal Jury convened when Ojo plucks a six leaf clover is Harold Lloyd, unrecognisable in blackface, while inside the costume of the Cowardly Lion, lounging on the dais next to the Hungry Tiger, is Hal Roach. Both were early in their careers here, but an inheritance allowed Roach to become a producer and in 1915 he set Lloyd on the road to stardom as Lonesome Luke in a series of over sixty comedy shorts. It's funny to think about the sheer talent on the set of this movie, where nobody expected to find it.

Star Quest: The Odyssey (2009)

Director: Jon Bonnell
Stars: Adam Rini, Shane Stevens, Katherine Stewart, Aaron Ginn-Forsberg, Davina Joy, Niko and Kevin Tye

For a local feature released as recently as 2009, it surely says something that I hadn't heard of it before. I recognise almost everyone in the admittedly small cast and I know a few personally. I'm less up to speed with the crew but some of them are still on my friends list. I've reviewed many of them in other movies and this would seem to be a starting point for one project I enjoyed enough over the last couple of years to contribute to. Yet somehow I didn't know it was out there. Could it be that they're keeping schtum because the reviews are correct and this is one of the worst films ever made? There are precisely 3 positive IMDb reviews out of 45, the earliest ones, one of which is from one of the actors. I enjoyed the imagination of the detractors though: 'Like a porno, minus the porn', 'Should be erased from human consciousness forever', 'This movie could be a new form of punishment', 'I nearly wet my pants at the end'. My favourite is, 'MST 3000 where are you?'

What I found was that it really isn't that awful, but it seems to have found a wider audience than might have been expected through easy rental availability. 'I want my $1.07 back from Redbox' isn't an uncommon theme in those reviews, but clearly these folk haven't seen the crud that I've seen. I don't mean to pull rank, but when the previous worst movie you've ever seen is Rocky V with its $42m budget, or The Butterfly Effect, which made do with a mere $13m, you really don't have much of a clue. I've sought out the worst movies of all time and I screen films submitted to festivals, where there are technical gradings as to how easily we can see or hear what's going on. In microbudget cinema, at least around the time this film was made, it wasn't uncommon to rate some of those at the lowest level because the sound guy apparently didn't show up and nobody had a clue what lighting was. As for equipment, I was even in a movie shot on a phone.

That rant out of the way, I really can't say that this was a good film though, even though I could see and hear everything well enough. Never mind the budget, which clearly wasn't much higher than whatever's in my wallet right now, it's the script that's the biggest problem. Carlos Perez is the name on the screenplay and if this is anything to go by, I don't want to see any of the other six films that he's written, especially with obvious cash in titles like The Black Knight - Returns or Vamps in the City. While the whole concept is obviously a low budget take on Star Trek, it would have made more sense to have shot it in the same format rather than patch a couple of stories together to feature length, especially with the cliffhanger ending that has precisely no meaning without another episode to lead into. This would have worked much better as a web series, as a couple of those involved apparently realised, going on to the far superior Voyage Trekkers.

The plot is utterly generic and highly derivative, with an overlong historical introduction. Simply put, the invention of a cheap and reliable faster than light drive in the late 21st century allowed humankind to spread throughout the galaxy. After a couple of hundred years of expansion, the colonies formed the Galactic Alliance, based on Earth, to handle governance. The few who chose to keep their independence formed the Krone Axis instead, enhancing their race with cybernetics and bioengineering. Inevitably this led to war, though the introduction ends with peace declared and the film proper begins on the planet Scyth, where the war is replayed in miniature in a good old fashioned fistfight between an Alliance commander and a Krone warrior. Six months later, it's no surprise to find that these two are forced to work together on a mission to transport members of the Earth Council to finalise the terms of the peace agreement or some such.

This concept isn't bad in itself, but it had been done to death long before 2009 and the writing is so ADD that it forgets about the mission almost immediately, instead becoming an episodic yarn shifting from one distraction to another. It doesn't help that neither party can live up to the hype. The poster is gloriously dynamic and action packed, while the introduction does a reasonable job building up the story. It's when we arrive on Scyth to watch Jim Carrey fight Forrest Whitaker from Battlefield Earth that it all falls apart. Adam Rini shines in roles that need him to be full of himself, such as Capt Sunstrike in Voyage Trekkers, making it all the more surprising to find him so pissy and annoying in effectively the same role here, as Capt Jack Tanner, commander of the Starship Odyssey. Shane Stevens does better as Hargoth, Minister of Defence for the Krone Axis, but the Klingon/Borg mashup he's stuck playing isn't inspiring and the costume hinders him throughout.

Perhaps their combined talent could have saved a less consistently bad film. Rini does get better, but it takes a long while to see even a hint at something worthwhile. Stevens never stops trying, but even at his best, his attempts are still buried by a production so schizophrenic that it's never possible to ignore the lack of budget. While the script is the movie's worst failure, the reluctance of director Jon Bonnell to even attempt to hide his lack of resources is its most frustrating aspect. For instance, the inside of the Odyssey is cramped, apparently built from supplies bought when a Dillard's closed down, and sparsely populated with a crew of four. Bonnell obviously didn't care to make it look bigger and busier, ignoring simple cinematic methods such as having extras walk in and out. He should have added sound effects and flashing lights to busy it up. Instead, he added numerous CGI external shots of a ship that's the size of a city.

The CGI itself is fair to middling in quality, but it's utterly wrong for the film. Simply making those external shots of a much smaller vessel would have improved everything. Instead it makes it all worse purely by the powers of contrast. Like the CGI, the costumes, sets and props aren't awful, but they're made to look awful by the unrealistic expectations that we're given. Here's a way to improve this film: remove most, if not all, of the CGI. That's it. Trim the introduction and create a new DVD cover that's a little less evocative of a Hollywood blockbuster while you're at it and the film would be worth four stars rather than one. And all that's without reshooting a single scene. Then again, that's me suggesting how to make the film better, as if quality means anything to a potential viewer. The quality of the DVD cover is surely why IMDb has reviews for this film. You can't ask for your $1.07 back from RedBox if you didn't spend it to begin with. The cover worked.

But I'm reviewing the film not the cover and it isn't remotely up to the same standard. I'm here to poke holes in the science in science fiction films, like how a faster than light ship takes three hours to travel 20 AUs when it only takes light an hour and a half. I'm here to highlight how ineptly the cameraman caught Katherine Stewart's patented hair flip and to rail at the waste of talent shown by casting this elegant Shakespearean stage actress in a role that requires her to pine for a pissy space captain who gave her a sparkly bracelet. I'm totally sold on the cavegirl outfit though. No complaints there. I'm here to wonder why the Odyssey shakes when one washer comes loose but it doesn't when fired upon by an enemy vessel. I'm here to giggle at the surface of an alien world that looks like Arizona, merely green. I'm here to wonder why the entire ship's arsenal is stored in a cubbyhole without a door. And I'm here to laugh at the tween level relationships on show.

I'm also here to embarrass the cast by reminding them of their work. Adam Rini is too young and dorky here, but he was note perfect in the same role in Voyage Trekkers about ten minutes later. Shane Stevens does better than anyone else, even with a Christmas tree stand stuck to his chest. Bones rarely got to do much medically in Star Trek except point a tricorder at people, but as Dr Jessica Vox, Katherine Stewart doesn't get that much. She actually has to say, 'I'm a doctor not a soldier, dammit,' but we don't see it; the most she's tasked with is to strap down Hargoth. Davina Joy and Niko were only cast to follow Star Trek's racial precedents, as was Kevin Tye as the very English Chief Engineer. Their talents are wasted too, as are James Ray's as Tanner's boss. At least Aaron Ginn-Forsberg hams it up royally as Dertax, Hargoth's lieutenant. He's like a berserker on acid played by John Pyper-Ferguson, over-emoting as much as is humanly possible. Grrr!

If everyone had chewed up the scenery like Ginn-Forsberg, it would have been a more 'so bad it's good' sort of ride. As it is, the actors try to do their parts justice, only to find that there's precious little in their parts to which justice can be done, leaving them all cast adrift by the script and the budget. While it's patently obvious that Carlos Perez is a screenwriter to avoid like the plague, I think I'll give director Jon Bonnell another shot before writing him off too, by watching Match.Dead aka The Abducted, with what appears to be a more original screenplay (albeit one partly credited to Alan Smithee), a lead role for James Ray and The Big Something's Michael Harrelson brought in for good measure. So this is a 'so bad it's bad' movie, though one not quite as thoroughly awful as has been made out. The overriding conclusion is clear though: if you want a modern take on Star Trek, don't watch this, watch Voyage Trekkers. It's more professionally done and it's funny too.