Incident on Highway 73 (2012)

Director: Brian Thompson
Stars: Elizabeth Schmidt and Ian Alda

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.

Purely by coincidence, I commented on a forum today about the quality of short films at festivals generally being frequently inconsistent. That was timely because I first saw Incident on Highway 73 after it was submitted to a festival but, while it thoroughly impressed me, it surprisingly didn't make the cut. Now I'm reviewing it ahead of its selection by a different festival, the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival, at which it screens next Saturday night as part of their Holy Moly Horror Shorts set. I'm really looking forward to seeing this on the big screen, especially as late as it will play. The second half unfolds at night, with deliberately slight lighting, and if the schedule goes according to plan, the tension that riddles this section through should be reaching its height as the hour of midnight strikes. Given that it's screening at Spook Hall in 'the world's largest ghost town', the atmosphere ought to be rather special.

It's one of the few films selected for Jerome that isn't sourced from Arizona, being a California film through and through. That's the stark natural beauty of the California desert that we see as the movie begins; shooting took place in a location called Desert Hot Springs, CA. The impression is clearly that we're in the middle of nowhere, as young couple Jeff and Kelly prepare to turn off the main highway for a side trip. 'That doesn't look like much of a road,' says Jeff, and it doesn't. Its surface is consistently cracked, desert vegetation is blurring the boundary between nature and civilisation and it doesn't even appear to go anywhere. It just aims straight at a set of mountain ranges, nested around unseen passes. Kelly tells him that it's 'a cool, beautiful old highway' and the guidebook backs her up: historic Highway 73 is one of the original Pony Express routes. She wants to use the extra five hours it'll cost them to take photos for her portfolio.

Actors Elizabeth Schmidt and Ian Alda (yes, he's related to who you think) bounce off each other well, aided by director Brian Thompson having them really spend a day together to aid them to feel natural when shooting. They get plenty of opportunity, as this runs 27 minutes, a long time for a short film, but they're the only two actors who we see throughout. They both do good work, especially Schmidt, who neatly highlights her priorities when they watch an electrical storm roll towards them. 'Do you see that?' her fiancé asks. 'Yeah, give me my camera,' she replies. She seems blissfully unconcerned about what to us is clearly a horror movie moment, a harbinger of doom. There are a few such moments early on to remind us that this is a horror movie, mild shock moments and odd nods to convention. Mostly it's a character piece, spending time to establish Kelly and Jeff as people we care about, before doing to them what horror movies tend to do.

If the road and the storm weren't enough to start building a freaky feel, the child's car seat they find in the middle of Highway 73 cements it. Up ahead is an apparently abandoned vehicle with its lights flashing. They pass slowly without seeing anyone, but shortly afterwards stutter to a stop. That's an electrical storm, remember? From here it builds roughly as you might expect, but with superb technique. The tension ratchets up as night falls and then escalates. We know something bad is going to happen, as this is a horror movie, but we're never really quite sure what it will be. Those mild shock moments vanish, lulling us into a false sense of security while never suggesting that it's over and whatever bad things are coming are gone. Perhaps this is cued from the storm, as the gaps between rumbling thunder are exquisitely quiet but we never believe that there isn't another rumble about to burst over the scene. That's a precise mirror of the tone.

Most of director Brian Thompson's credits are music videos, for bands like Killswitch Engage and As I Lay Dying; this is the first short he's credited at IMDb for directing since 2005's Premonition. Yet it's utterly his film, the story conjured up by writer Michael Kirk around a real experience that Thompson and his wife had on a trip to the Grand Canyon. In an interview with Dread Central, he remembers how he felt with words like 'vulnerable', 'spooked' and 'uneasy'; all those are neatly evoked here. I didn't blink much during the last ten minutes; I didn't want to miss anything. Once night falls, the film becomes notably dark but we're never unsure of what's happening. While we don't see much under the shroud of night, Thompson and cinematographer Jason Hafer cleverly ensure that we see what we need to. And when we really need light, flashes of lightning work as well as anything as a highlighter. The best monsters are only hinted at, after all.

Echoing Thompson's surprisingly sparse filmography, Kirk's isn't much busier. I'd have expected a lot more credits for someone who was Sam Raimi's assistant on Spider-Man and went on to three features where he co-produced with Raimi and others. Surely they've been busy on projects that aren't listed at IMDb, as the subtle power wielded on this film has to be sourced from experience. While Alda is excellent and Schmidt is even better, it's what Kirk has them do and what he does to them that nails this. It avoids what most films would have cued up from inception; it demonstrates what can be done in the gaps between those moments. Add to that the subtle but superb effects, suitably creepy sound and, above all, vast open desert crowded in with darkness, location and the use of anamorphic lenses. No wonder it won a Festival Trophy for Best Short Film for its premiere at Screamfest in 2012. That won't be its last win. I'd put money on that.

Forever's End (2013)

Director: J. C. Schroder
Writer: J. C. Schroder
Stars: Charity Farrell, Lili Reinhart, Warren Bryson and David Wetzel

This week, I've often felt like I was at the Dances with Films festival in Hollywood, even though I haven't left Phoenix once. Three features which I thoroughly enjoyed at this year's Phoenix Film Festival (and said so here in reviews) screened there, along with a local short that showed here last year. Coincidentally, I reviewed a fourth film, House of Good and Evil, as a submission, within the week before it closes Dances with Films. Now, uncoincidentally, here's a fifth feature, through the magic of connections. It's a good feeling to know that filmmakers appreciate my writing and let other filmmakers know at festivals that they might submit their work to me too. Thanks, Paul! Of course, now I'll find whether those other filmmakers are as happy with what I have to say. Not all films are made equal, after all. The good news is that Forever's End is a good one too, worthy of checking it out as it premieres tonight at Dances with Films, or whenever you get a chance.

Like House of Good and Evil, it's a thought provoking ride through the psyche of the lead female character, framed as a psychological thriller that's so sparsely cast that we can't help but focus on the little details of the few characters we see. If that film's cast list was condensed down to a bare minimum, this one goes far beyond it. Only four actors grace the screen in just over an hour and a half and one of those has almost nothing to do. As you might imagine, however good the script, its success lies primarily in the hands of its leading lady, Charity Farrell. If she wasn't up to the task, this picture would be in dire straits. Fortunately, she does a capable, sympathetic job that keeps us engaged throughout, even if she doesn't bring that extra something to the mix that Rachel Marie Lewis did in House of Good and Evil. It's a good job because for quite a while, she is the only person we see. The film begins, we watch her establish the grounding for the story and that's it.

It begins with a science fiction sort of feel. A woman staggers, alternately in a dark cityscape and a bright pastoral setting. She appears to have been stabbed in the side and she's losing blood. She also has a gun, though we don't know if those two facts are connected. The camera staggers with her a little, perhaps in sympathy because there's nobody else around. 'Sometimes I wonder where the time went,' she narrates. All she ever wanted was to be left alone, in a world without a structure, without any rules. Now she has her wish, because six years ago the world ended. She hasn't seen anyone since. Beyond missing a lot of things, she looks remarkably good. If I take a couple of days off to write, I'll probably forget to shower, but six years after the apocalypse and Sarah is still taking care of herself and her farm, dusting and cleaning and washing the floor. She keeps busy to stay sane, she tells us. Being alone means nobody to talk to, after all.

Clearly this isn't going to be a busy film. There's a great deal of quiet here, highlighting that the real story is going on as much between the dialogue as in it, if you can call Sarah bitching at her flaky generator dialogue. For the most part, she doesn't make a lot of noise. Unless she's playing the piano, we hear the sounds of nature and her somewhat soothing narration. The only voice we hear other than hers is one in her dreams, a man reciting to her, 'Don't. Look. Away.' I rather liked this approach. It's certainly refreshing in 2013 to see a post-apocalyptic movie that utterly avoids showing us an apocalypse. We get no nuclear explosions, no zombies, no collapse of civilisation, just Sarah White escaping to the countryside with knife wounds in her side. What surprised me more was the rather active editing. For a film with so much room, the editor clearly didn't intend us to sit back and relax, so he kept the cuts coming, even in the most wide open scenes.

Perhaps this is to remind us that this is a thriller rather than a deep relaxation course. Certainly, Sarah jumps when a storm builds and her front door starts banging. You'd think that six years of utter solitude as the last woman on Earth would be enough to get past fearing a home invasion, but when she investigates, she finds a young lady about to collapse outside her door: her sister, Lily. Now, this appears to be the key moment. For Sarah, those six years alone are over and she can begin to share her life again with someone close to her. For us, we wonder the odds of some catastrophic event causing the extinction of our entire race, except for two people, who turn out to be sisters. Quite obviously something is going on, and the real key moment was five minutes earlier, as Sarah kicked her generator back into action, slipped on the floor and cracked her head. That may not be the beginning of the film, but it's the real beginning of its story.

There are a few hints here about what we might be looking at, but writer/director J C Schroder is happy to keep us guessing for a long while. Any film that begins with the end of the world has to involve survival as a key element. Casting not one but two leading ladies to populate this world suggests another angle to survival, especially as these two sisters appear to have matching knife wounds. 'It's not over,' Lily tells Sarah. 'It's never over.' By this time, we're only thirteen minutes into the story, which continues to throw out questions but resists any attempt to answer them as yet, so we can be sure it isn't over. How can only two sisters survive an apocalypse? Why did Lily take six years to come home? What's with the matching scars? Do mentions of Daddy, who was always right and prompts reactions in nightmares, hint at abuse? What importance does Sarah's necklace hold? That's what seems to conjure up the most emotion.

While these questions are initially mostly rational ones, they soon start to slip. Sarah knocks down a set of wind chimes outside because they're annoying her, only for them to promptly reappear in her front room hanging from a chandelier. One night, Lily tells Sarah not to go outside, and doing so prompts her to shoot an intruder dead at her front door. The end of the world is getting really busy all of a sudden. All these moments are far too deliberate to be cinematic goofs on the part of the filmmakers, so they have to carry meaning. This is a psychological thriller, not a supernatural horror story, so it's not too difficult to get onto the right lines. The bad news is that it's slower and less suspenseful than House of Good and Evil; the good news is that it's clear earlier that we should figure out what's really going on so we're more directly caught up in the puzzle of the script, even before a third character knocks on the farmhouse door to explain that the world is still there.

To be brutally honest, if I hadn't watched this very soon after House of Good and Evil, I'd probably have been more impressed. That's not to say that I didn't like it a lot, as I did and I'd recommend it highly, but the two films carry a lot of similarities and this one comes off second best. Even as we're actively engaged in fitting intriguing pieces together into a big picture that's strong the first time through but adds nuances on further viewings, some scenes drag and don't seem to fit. The story is a worthy and subtle one, but during the second act it's often elusive and rather passive. On the other hand, the editing is far too lively, enough to make us very aware of it, which isn't a good thing unless it's trying to tell us something, which it doesn't appear to do. Also, while it's far from a handheld movie that won't cause anyone to get motion sickness, the camera is a floating thing that moves a lot more than it should.

And as I write this, I feel overly critical. I liked House of Good and Evil on a first viewing and really liked it on a second, but while I'll happily come back to it again in the future, it's an open book to me now. A couple of times through Forever's End and I'm still asking questions and not in a bad way. I believe I know how to read the story, which I can't explain here without spoilers, and I know what it leads up to in the end, but I'm still interpreting some of the details that crop up on our way there. There are layers upon layers here and I'm very open to the possibility that some of those elusive plot points in the middle part of the film will suddenly leap out and make their meanings clear at last. Of course, I'm also open to the possibility that they won't and I've got what I'm going to get out of the story because that's all that there is. Even if so, it screams out for discussion. Is it fundamentally impressionistic or do the details really matter?

I have to be careful here with my words, but the nature of the story is such that each of the four actors we see are tasked less with playing traditional characters and more with playing readings of characters. That means it's much harder than usual to rate how they all did. The toughest job absolutely went to Charity Farrell and she grounds the film well, delving very deeply indeed into Sarah's mind but deliberately underplaying as she did so. It's easier for an actor to do something than to hint that they're thinking something, after all. Lili Reinhart is capable as Lily, but is best when bouncing off Sarah. Again, that's less her fault and more the nature of what she's in the film to do. I was less impressed with Warren Bryson as Ryan, the third character with a decent amount of screen time, but he's the least traditional of the three. There are points when he does good work, especially late on, but there are others where he just stands there like a male model.

It's Farrell's acting and Schroder's script that are staying with me thus far, with a shoutout for the score by Douglas Edward and Douglas Romayne, which is as beautifully subtle an underpinning as the editing is overly obvious. Their names are actually the biggest in the film, as their credits are exemplary. There's a song to accompany the end credits that's also haunting; it's by the ethereal and prolific singer/songwriter, Mimi Page, but sung as a duet by the two lead actresses in the film, whose good voices carry agreeable emotion in their imperfections. I found that I appreciated the camerawork and editing of this section, really a music video rather than any extension of the story, more than I did that in the film itself. It adds visual style and soars rather than floats. While Schroder is highly experienced in the industry, this is his feature length debut as a director and it invites viewers to watch it again and again while they wait for his next film. I'll be waiting too.

Space Milkshake (2012)

Director: Armen Evrensel
Stars: Robin Dunne, Billy Boyd, Kristin Kreuk, George Takei and Amanda Tapping

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

More than ever before, this is sci-fi television turned into a comedy feature film. You might think immediately of Galaxy Quest, but that mostly spoofed one show and was cast chiefly with movie actors. As befits its title, Space Milkshake spoofs so many sci-fi shows that you'll count them and it's cast directly from some of them. Of a cast of seven, three of whom only provide voices, we're given two lead actors from Sanctuary and one from each of Smallville, Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural. Amanda Tapping turns out to be most of these on her own, as she was Maj Samantha Carter in both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, Dr Helen Magnus on Sanctuary (both the web series and the TV show), and is now recurring on Supernatural as Naomi. Her Sanctuary co-star is Robin Dunne, who played Dr Will Zimmerman; Smallville is represented by Kristin Kreuk, who played Lana Lang; and George Takei's voice is here from Star Trek.

There's also Billy Boyd from The Lord of the Rings movies, which breaks the whole alliterative S motif, but he's clearly trying to be Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead, just as a Scotsman, so perhaps it all works out in the end. He's Anton Balvenie, the captain of the Regina, not a galaxy exploring spaceship but an Orbital Sanitation Station, number 8518. His crew aren't astronauts, they're garbage collectors because, in the 22nd century, space debris is a serious problem, as is clear from the ring of rubbish we see around the planet Earth. One collision is enough to prompt space travel to be halted for months, so clearly it's important to make sure that doesn't happen. Tasked with keeping the spacelanes clear, busy and moving are crews like the Regina's, who are entry level techs, one of them seeing orbit for the first time. As you can easily imagine, this is a dysfunctional crew in a barely functional station with an unorthodox set of priorities.

What sparks the plot is a cargo shuttle which takes off from the Quantum Transportation Research Station in Antartica, disappears, reappears and collides with a orbiting screw. Balvenie plays it by the book and refuses to clear the way, but leaps at the chance to salvage the vessel afterwards, even against direct orders. They pick up a power source from the rubble, which you won't be too surprised causes the Regina to travel in ways it doesn't expect. Next thing they know, they're out of touch with everything and the orbiting trash that they know so well has vanished. Now the crew of four, along with a computer that they haven't even fixed yet, need to figure out where they are and how they can get home. Given that it's often a stretch for them to even talk to each other, it's hardly going to be an easy ride. The bizarre events that start to unfold under their very noses only serve to render that outcome even more unlikely.

And so, as we wait to see how the story will pan out, we watch the characters. The first obvious comparison is Red Dwarf, a British show built on characters and wild sci-fi shenanigans. This film and that TV show have much in common: both of them follow a tiny crew of menial workers in a huge spacecraft who have been cut off from the rest of humanity and may well be all that's left. Boyd, looking utterly unlike Pippin from The Lord of the Rings, is nominally in charge and he has the same sort of officious, by the book nature as Rimmer in Red Dwarf, but his idea of leadership is sticking to a schedule. Everything happens when it's scheduled: from breakfast to bedtime and from callisthenics to Scrabble. He's also perpetually in the middle of whatever is going on, because he finds it difficult to preserve any form of relationship, whether official or personal, as proved by the broken one he has with his second in command, Valentina, played by Amanda Tapping.

Valentina would appear to have precisely nothing in common with Balvenie except the Regina and she's happily trying to leave both. Fortunately she doesn't, because she's the key to getting back home again, through the plot convenience that she used to work at the Quantum Transportation Research Station under Prof Gary Pinback, who theorised about interdimensional travel to parallel realities. As luck would have it, Gary is on board too, having been thrust into a transdimensional rift and brought on board in the form of a rubber duck that collides with the Regina after it shifts. Here's where the Douglas Adams influences come in. Like the B Ark's captain in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Valentina spends a lot of time in the bath. That show explained that 'you're never alone with a rubber duck'; this film applies that to a form of Alien, right down to the moves of Dr Pinback's face hugger phase, before he becomes Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors.

Here to battle Gary is Tilda, initially the blasé operations officer who doesn't speak much but soon the parallel universe robot version trying to save infinite universes from being destroyed. She still doesn't speak much, at least initially, but she looks like Kristin Kreuk, so it's hardly surprising that the Everyman of the bunch, Jimmy Anderson, falls for her anyway. He's the new guy, a tech who's on board with faked paperwork to fix Wendi, the ship's computer, another Red Dwarf parallel, as it changes sex but not name partway through. 'It's not as exciting as I thought it'd be,' says Jimmy at one point, talking about life on an orbital station, but needless to say he's soon proved wrong. Robin Dunne has a lot of fun as Jimmy, playing him as loosely as Kreuk is precise as Tilda. There's another Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy nod when the two find a way to communicate with each other, through a Scrabble board, an appropriate parallel to their situation in many ways.

Surprisingly, given all the British sci-fi references during the build, Space Milkshake is a Canadian film, shot in Saskatchewan, whose capital city gave its name to the story's setting, the Regina. Its biggest successes are in channelling those diverse British influences into something new, which is a tough balancing act to keep and one that isn't consistently successful. Almost everything here is derivative, but for maybe two thirds of the film it's kept interesting with fresh characters and neat, quirky situations. The brokedown machinery, so reminiscent of Ron Goulart novels but more likely sourced from Douglas Adams, provides nice touches throughout too, like the food outlet that only dishes out sandwiches, a close cousin to the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation's Nutrimatic drinks dispenser. I loved the door to the control room which looks like it ought to retract but never does, thus serving mostly to trip up Jimmy on a regular basis, a recurring gag that grounds him for us.

Unfortunately, while the final act is just as derivative, it's far more clichéd. Instead of enjoying the homages and acknowledging their sources with a smile, the later scenes frequently contain less targeted references and more generic sci-fi moments that are unworthy of inclusion. I didn't find myself cringing for the first hour, however recognisable much of the material was, but that wasn't a rare reaction later on in the film, where Armen Evrensel, who wrote and directed, may well have just run out of influences to nod at. Just like the film as a whole, each of the characters build well but once they reach a certain point, they stagnate into cliché and all of them deserved more. Tilda should have been more than a Galaxina clone. Valentina should have had a better crisis of choice. Anton shouldn't have been sidelined. Jimmy, especially, deserved much more of a focus given that Robin Dunne is technically top billed and he's who we identify with.

In fact, the crew take a backseat once Gary the tentacled rubber duck shows up, not because he's a classic screen villain but because George Takei's voicework utterly steals the show. I remember Takei well from the original series of Star Trek and even more from the movies, but he was merely a good part of a good ensemble cast. Since his reinvention in the internet age, he's become a real star, thus far resisting becoming a caricature of himself like William Shatner. He just has fun here, as he apparently does in everything he puts his name to. Since his last Star Trek feature in 1991, I've enjoyed him having a blast in Bug Buster and two Oblivion movies and I totally want to watch him play the sensei being rescued by the title characters in Ninja Cheerleaders. Unfortunately, he doesn't always pick the best movies to have fun in. This one is certainly better than Bug Buster, but it needed to raise its game to match his contribution and unfortunately it fell apart instead.

House of Good and Evil (2013)

Director: David Mun
Stars: Rachel Marie Lewis, Christian Oliver, Jordan Rhodes and Marietta March

I've never been to Dances with Films, a highly regarded indie film festival in Hollywood now in its 16th year, but this year's line up is enough to add it to my list for 2014. No less than three of my favourite features from this year's Phoenix Film Festival were selected for that festival too (Down and Dangerous, Favor and Waking), along with an excellent and award winning local short film, Parallax. Purely by coincidence, I was also recently sent House of Good and Evil for review, which is screening at Dances with Films next Sunday, meaning that I can personally recommend five selections with no commonality between them beyond all being quality indie pictures. I can't ignore the suggestion that if the five I know about are great films, what about the other hundred or so that I don't know about yet? With a quick note that this festival runs at the historic Chinese Theatres in Hollywood, I'm starting to sound like a advert for something I've not yet attended.

While it's a current film, working the festival circuit before an October 2013 release date, House of Good and Evil is a throwback to the psychological horror thrillers of the seventies. The title is the first hint in that direction, as every other movie back then seemed to centre around an ominous house, with the neo-gothic suggestion that the house is a character in itself. The next hint is the pace, which is a slow but sure burn, concentrating on character development over cheap shocks. There's also the feeling that Chris and Maggie Conley, who buy the house of the title sight unseen after a lot of phone calls, have no idea what they're getting into. They choose to move out to the country, because their marriage is deteriorating after a miscarriage and the big city is becoming claustrophobic, but they have a naive innocence that suggests that they believe a change in setting is all they need. As you can imagine, their problems run deeper than that.

We can see from the opening scenes what they're running away from. These are beautifully shot and very deliberately constructed, not showing us much but ensuring that what we do see speaks volumes. We watch the Conleys in silhouette in their apartment, voyeuristically from outside in the street. Their argument escalates and ends violently. Then we see the worried couple stuck in traffic and realise that Maggie is losing her baby right there in the car. The guilt that hangs above the scene as she screams out her loss is palpable, courtesy of carefully sparse writing from Blu de Golyer and simple, thoughtful composition of frame and camera movement from cinematographer Jared Noe. The constriction felt in the city is very deliberate and it's countered well as the opening credits end and we follow the Conleys almost thirty miles out into the wide open countryside to begin the healing process in their new house. It feels like a breath of fresh air.

Of course, if it was that simple, we wouldn't have a movie, and it's far from that simple. What we see really deserves two viewings. The first allows us to experience the movie as it's presented to us, with the house slowly morphing from a beacon of hope into just another prison, because the problems Maggie and Chris have are rooted in their relationship and a change of scenery doesn't change that. De Golyer's script builds by carefully peeling away layers of civility and appearance to show the fundamental incompatibilities between them and the hidden frustrations that those incompatibilities generate. After ratcheting up the suspense and tension far enough, we arrive at a full understanding of what's really going on, realising in the process that a host of what appear to be minor goofs or plot conveniences are really cues to help us get there. Watching afresh, the cues are far more obvious and we wonder why we didn't understand them to begin with.

Much of the credit here deserves to go to de Golyer, who is not only a scriptwriter but apparently an experienced script doctor in Hollywood, having fixed more scripts by others than he's produced of his own. This would appear to be a project dear to his heart, having financed it with his wife. It was in motion as far back as 2008 when he wrote a short film called The House to use to pitch to potential financers. The cinematography on that short was by David Mun, who was involved with this production so deeply that he took the director's chair after Clint Howard left it. Another major name had also been attached for years, but had to drop out just before production due to illness. That's Tippi Hedren, who presumably would have played the role of Mrs Anderson, the elderly lady who rents the other half of the Conley's new house. Her role was taken instead by Marietta Marich, who has made two Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels and one to Children of the Corn.

The other name that screams out for praise is that of Rachel Marie Lewis, who plays the lead role of Maggie Conley. If the film off screen belongs to de Golyer, on screen it belongs to her. She's a constant presence and the story clearly revolves around her and the way she copes with the loss of her child and her deteriorating relationship with her husband. De Golyer has raised the 'hunger in her eyes' that 'studios dream of finding' in interviews and I can totally see it. Going far deeper than just playing another woman with problems, she really gets over to us that Maggie is broken fundamentally but has become practiced in the art of hiding it. That's a fine distinction but a very important one; it underlines why Lewis gives a truly great performance rather than merely a good one. Late in the film, Maggie tells Chris that the wall that separates the two halves of their house should remain up. 'Some things are better kept apart,' she says and that thought resonates.

Lewis is American and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but has a European feel to her. She reminded me very much of Isabelle Adjani, both in looks and the way she throws herself so substantially into a dark role. The biggest mistake that any potential viewer can make is to expect the sort of horror movie that adds a new shock every fifteen minutes. This is a nuanced piece, reminding of times when stories began with characters and built around settings. It's initially reminiscent of American psychological thrillers of the seventies, from an old school soundtrack through a prominent house to the character of Mrs Anderson, the sort of role that golden age stars often took then, late on in their careers. In turn, those films had their roots in the gothic romances of the thirties and forties, when those stars started out. Lewis's dedicated performance adds a European feel, adding layers to an already layered script and suggesting a depth that Hollywood rarely hinted at.

Lewis is so strong here that I wonder how House of Good and Evil would have fared had she not been cast, but it has quality written all over it. Its superlative script benefits from good direction, gently leading camerawork and a highly appropriate score. The house, really a boarding school built in 1914, looks just right. The supporting cast are solid, especially Marich, who surely would be far better known had she come to the screen earlier in life. She feels like one of those old stars, but surprisingly she didn't make a movie until 1987, even though she was highly experienced in the business that is show: as far back as the fifties, she'd performed on stage, hosted a chat show on television and sung with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra. Rob Neukirch and Jordan Rhodes are able in support too, but they get less to do, the growing connection between Maggie and Mrs Anderson ensuring that the latter gets most of our attention that doesn't go to the former.

That leaves Christian Oliver, who plays Chris. He's solid too, as you might expect from an actor of his experience, having moved on from Saved by the Bell: The New Class into an interesting set of American movies and German TV shows. He's been doing big movies lately, like Valkyrie, Speed Racer and the 2011 version of The Three Musketeers, but I know him from lower budget fare such as the intriguing title role he played in Subject Two. The catch is that this film so quintessentially revolves around his screen wife, he becomes something of a prop for her to work off. That's not to say that Chris isn't well written, as in any other film he'd be a deep character, but he doesn't have anywhere near the opportunities that Lewis has as Maggie. In fact, looking back after a couple of viewings, it's surprising to find that this film was written by a man, as it delves deeply into issues that are by definition oriented around women: control, domestic abuse and the loss of a child.

I always try to highlight both the good and the bad in movies I review and it's always a joy when I find that there's very little bad to say. House of Good and Evil is an excellent film enhanced by an outstanding lead performance by Rachel Marie Lewis and it has very few flaws. The most obvious is the lighting, which gets a little too dark on occasion, but like another indie gem, Absentia, the depth of the material saves it. The tunnel scenes in Absentia became appropriately otherworldly because the filmmakers didn't have the budget for cameras that would see past the entrances. Similarly, scenes here that appear to have been shot in natural light and which get darker as the movie runs on, perhaps due to the budget or just the time of day, may serve to unintentionally mirror the changes in tone, thus turning a flaw into a boon. Depth is never a bad thing and sometimes it can feed itself, adding nuances that were never even intended by the filmmakers.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on what Blu de Golyer does next. With work on over forty scripts behind him, I'm pretty sure he has more than one personal piece in him and I'm eager to see what the next one will be. I'm interested in what David Mun will do next too. He has a huge amount of experience behind the camera, both in film and on television, but this was his first picture both as an editor and a director. His next directorial effort is Berlin Express, currently in preproduction. Of all the names involved in this film though, I'm keen to follow up on the work of Rachel Marie Lewis. She made two features released in 2012, Transatlantic Coffee and Lie with Me, both of which look like great opportunities for her to explore her characters with as much depth as she did here. She clearly has a great future ahead of her and I can only hope that she isn't distracted from this sort of quality picture by being snapped up for big budget fluff. Only time will tell.

Dead Enders (2010)

Director: Paul C Hemmes
Stars: Christie Collins, Seth Gandrud, Juan Marquez, Michelle Pentecost, Joaquin 'Jack' Martelli, Keith R Wilson, David Galaviz, Jimmy Flowers, Damon Foster and Matthew Ellingsen

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.

Dead Enders is hamstrung from moment one. with errors in the opening quote and on the back cover of the DVD, the front of which hawks the soundtrack over the film itself. The resolution isn't particularly strong either, though that may be the R Squared disc rather than the film itself, given that the trailers look as bad and I've seen and loved one of those features. Fortunately what we actually see is a lot better, packed full of enticing imagery that invites speculation as to how it will all connect: a workshop full of torture devices, a shackled man kissing a scorpion, a woman taking off her wig in front of a boarded up door. The man is confined underground, in some sort of hidden dungeon, surrounded by mud, stone and fire, not that he notices any of that; he's clearly there in body only. 'You could have kissed me like that when you had the chance,' the woman suggests; he only reacts when she smothers him to death with a plastic bag. Upstairs, she rocks a cradle.

This footage that precedes the opening credits is a fair pointer to the film as a whole. The budget is clearly somewhere between low and nonexistent, the setups aren't entirely believable and the sound could easily be better. However the visuals are interesting and continually inventive, so we keep paying attention, if only to see what writer/director Paul C Hemmes will conjure up next. This sort of approach is not going to be for everyone and it doesn't surprise me that the two reviews at IMDb are precise opposites: out of ten, these reviewers gave it a one and a ten respectively. I can easily see people giving up during the second scene, as our leading lady, back in her blonde wig, comes on to a couple of guys in a bar. Jack thinks she's hot, while Robert thinks she's creepy and she quickly turns out to be both, as she chloroforms them and whisks Robert back to her lair. The logic here is stretched, to say the least, but it does set up the off kilter oddness well.

And that's where this movie goes with a vengeance. Robert wakes up in a barred wooden cage inside her dungeon, gagged and manacled, his fellow prisoner a baby clown doll. His captor, now in a red wig, kinky latex and huge boots, acts more like his host than his tormentor, apparently less interested in the torture porn we half expect and more interested in introducing him to Max, a mummified corpse in a frilled violet shirt. 'I don't understand,' he tells her, which is something of an understatement, but she obviously works with her own laws of logic. 'You're one of us now,' she explains to him, not asking his name but dubbing him Larry because she apparently thinks he looks like one. Talk about disconcerting! Yet the only actual violence he faces is when she fondles a saw that's hanging from the ceiling and then licks the blood off her hand. It must be difficult to experience. At least pain is something palpable, but Robert has no clue what this is.

Thus far, we have a cute but creepy chick who seems to inhabit a world of her own, a befuddled prisoner who remains surprisingly calm and controlled, a few varied but usually silent co-stars and a jumbo sized basket of freaky weirdness. It's odd to find a microbudget movie which appears to be style over substance, but that's the tone that this quickly establishes and it builds on it as the film runs on. The camera dances in and out of Robert's cage and, because it can't move too much inside it, rotates instead to mirror his ample confusion. The costumes are cool, the sets are cool, the props are cool. The freakiness factor is high and continues to ratchet upwards. The editing varies in quality, but always aids the bizarre feel. The story is clearly wondering if it should show up at any point and the acting talent is waiting for it to arrive. We're not sure exactly what we're watching at this point, to the degree that we're can't even tell if it's dream or nightmare.

Christie Collins is note perfect as Sydney, a chick with more than a few screws loose. While the opening credits list a whole slew of actors, many of whom I know, most of them have little to do. This film belongs to Collins, absolutely, and it's hard to imagine anyone stealing it away from her. She's half Siouxsie Sioux and half Bonnie Tyler, which is something of an enticing combination, especially as her look changes as often as the wind (or her personality). As if she's truly dream rather than flesh, she doesn't even appear to have a consistent age, looking older in some scenes than others. Her character is a great big question mark, as she's quite clearly off her rocker but somehow able to approach rationality consistently enough to apparently hold down a day job, returning home each night to inhabit this realm of her broken mind. At least that's the impression that we're given. Who knows if that's real or just another manifestation of her craziness?

The question here is really about how much substance is going to turn up and we're never quite sure. The freakiness builds well for twenty minutes, but then drags for ten as Sydney makes way for Robert. Perhaps that's entirely appropriate, as we have no idea how long he's been imprisoned or whether his sanity remains in place throughout the experience. It's apparently long enough for him to start hallucinating but short enough for him to not need bathroom breaks. Generally, he's as rational as she's completely batshit insane, though I'm not sure if his trying to reason with this crazy woman really suggests sanity. Robert's grounding provides a strong reflection of Sydney's delusions, but it inevitably makes Seth Gandrud less interesting to us than Christie Collins. After that creepy build, his attempts to escape end up dragging because he's the only character in the scenes. They spark up only when Sydney returns to the screen with a sledgehammer.

For every point Dead Enders loses for its lack of coherent plot progression, infuriatingly slow pace and frequent absence of conventional elements like dialogue and sense of time and place, it gains one back for its dreamlike insanity. Sydney doesn't keep prisoners to torture, torment or ransom; she keeps them out of bizarre romantic notions. Dead Enders are apparently people who believe that they can be together in eternity. 'That's love,' she says. 'Can you imagine it?' Perhaps if you have multiple personalities who come together only to obsess over Romeo and Juliet or you hang out with gothic Japanese schoolgirls with romantic suicide fetishes, you might be able to imagine it, but I think most of us would have problems. The greatest achievement of Collins and Hemmes here is to make us almost get there. They submerge us in their world, prisoners like Robert, so all we know is one room, one woman and her craziness. We almost contract Stockholm Syndrome.

I really can't praise Dead Enders on many traditional fronts: it's a slow, confusing and constrictive experience. It's a gimme that many people will hate it and most of them won't get too far into it. However, those who persevere will end up experiencing something utterly different from anything they're likely to have seen before. It's less of a story based picture and more of a tone poem that achieves on feel rather than plot. The hero isn't remotely like a traditional hero; he spends almost the entire film as a failure, not only as a prisoner but a victim of his own compassion, consistently failing to do what he needs to in order to survive. The villain is even less like a traditional villain, a lunatic who elicits more sympathy from us than should ever have been possible. It's rather telling that we feel more for the villain than the hero; even her necrophilia scene turns out to be romantic and she does at least appear to have a purpose, however twisted.

This is such a visual film that, even while watching the first time, I wondered how it would all play out without sound. It wouldn't seem to be a hardship to lose the plot, as there's so little of it, but all the quirky weirdness should remain intact: the odd camera angles, the frequent costume changes, the freaky interplay between characters. So I tried it out and found that the experience was just as hallucinatory. With very little in the way of sex and violence to raise parental concern, it ought to work as the silent backing to a Hallowe'en party. Christie Collins, who owns the film and is rarely off screen, does well with her dialogue, but she submerges herself so far into her character that she speaks to us through visuals alone. Add in the bare chested Seth Gandrud in a cage and the assorted weirdness that unfolds around them and I'd expect eyeballs to find themselves drawn to her and her creepy tone poem. It may not be what Hemmes aimed for, but it's what he achieved.

Therapist (2012)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Coleman, Jessica Bishop and Amy Serafin

After last month's Travis Mills review, a cute, bouncy and infectious 48 hour film challenge piece called Itty Bitty Bang Bang, here's one that reflects the darker, more experimental side of Running Wild Films. Therapist has garnered quite a bit of attention for its edgy final scene and clearly there are some deep questions being raised, but I'm not sure if they're really asked or answered. Mills is clearly drawn to film noir ambiguity, where he sets the stage for a story and then lets us figure out exactly what he meant by it. The most enjoyable Mills movies for me are the ones where we can't help but continue the story on in our minds after the credits roll, such as The Ruffians, Night Train to Phoenix or the online version of The Memory Ride. Sometimes though, as with The French Spy or this film, he goes a little further and abstracts the story so far that we don't have enough building blocks to go on and we have trouble phrasing our questions, let alone finding answers.

Therapist opens roughly, with a highly voyeuristic scene of a young couple in a small space more like a corridor than a room. They kiss, but don't progress any further, even though he's apparently quit smoking to appease her. She tells him that this will be the last time that she sleeps with him, as her female therapist of six years has suggested. He's stunned, not just because he's no longer going to get any but because he didn't even know she was in therapy. So he leaves, rather than allow her to have that control over him. This scene is interesting, especially when reading up on the odd way Mills set it up. The two actors, Michael Coleman and Jessica Bishop, were given brief ideas of the scene and told to answer their own questions about it. Mills gave them films to watch as prep work. He then treated the shoot as therapy, doing a take, discussing how it went, then repeating until they got what he wanted. 'I want it to look ugly,' he said and it does.

When the title arrives five and a half minutes in, we realise the film doesn't end with its opening scene. Now we're outside, in what appears to be a different picture entirely. Gone is the hiss, the background noise and the handheld camera that's so up close and personal that we see nothing but two heads, a wall and the invisible cloud hanging over them. Smoothness replaces roughness in a beautifully shot scene that has our frustrated male lead track down the therapist who stopped his fun. The sound problems are gone, replaced by Schubert on the soundtrack. Instead of grainy redness, we get impressive camerawork, neat editing and lots of character. He sticks to his choice to stop smoking, though it's clearly tough work, but the draw of following this therapist wins out. She drives to FilmBar, which means I like her, but this was clearly shot some time ago as the sign isn't up. Inside, the camera emphasises him as small and weak but her as strong and dominant.

With a deliberately rough first act and a deliberately smooth second act, I was certainly engaged to discover where Mills was taking his characters and viewers in the final act. Unfortunately I still haven't figured it out and I'm not sure I ever will. Just like The French Spy, this is more of a puzzle for us to attempt to fathom than a traditional plot based picture, so the concept of spoilers doesn't really apply. Certainly the thumbnail image which greets anyone visiting the film's Vimeo page to watch is far more of a spoiler than anything I could provide here, given that it shows the therapist and the large strap on dildo she's wearing looking down at a motel room bed on which our worried looking young man sits. I kept waiting for a twist, but no twist came and there's very little detail to ground us. All I can be sure of is that the linear story that unfolds is clearly not sufficient to tell us what's actually going on. When I tried to figure this out, I realised that I had nothing to go on.

I'm not even sure which characters are therapists and which patients. The two halves of the short share only one character: our male lead. Could he really be sleeping with both a therapist and her patient? Are he and his girlfriend both seeing the same therapist? Or is he really the therapist all along, and we're merely seeing him interact with two of his patients? I really have no clue. I don't really buy the latter as a viable reading but it still seems more likely than the story as presented. Maybe not all this is real. Maybe it's real up to the moment he watches the therapist in the mirror of his car and the rest all unfolds in his mind. Maybe that moment is when she walks up to him in FilmBar. Who knows? It's fair to explore the subconscious in a movie about therapy, but what does that last scene tell us? Perhaps it's a metaphor; when his girlfriend stops having sex with him, he feels that her therapist is violating him. Maybe he's the Dude possessed by Walter. I have no idea.

Therapist is available to view for free on Vimeo and YouTube.

Blood Moon Rising (2009)

Director: Brian Skiba
Stars: Laurie Love, Neal Trout, Kent Wolborn, Jose Rosete and Aaron Ginn-Forsberg

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.

Just in case we didn't figure it out from either the film's title or poster, Blood Moon Rising throws the word 'GRINDHOUSE' onto the screen in such large letters that we can't fail to pay attention. It really is the most important word in the film, because this would be a truly painful experience if you attempted to take any of it seriously. However if you watch it with grindhouse in mind, it's a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, watching it afresh at home, I found that it's a heck of a lot more fun than I remember it being on the big screen, when it premiered at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival back in 2009. That may be partly because I know how outrageous it is now and partly because I know even more people on the screen than I did last time through. I might just have to sit down and watch the director's cut in a couple of weeks time at the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival. Maybe then I'll be able to locate the last few elusive zombie friends in the film.

If the reminder that this is grindhouse inspired helps us deal with the outrageous plot, which may well include more grindhouse genre elements than any other modern homage, it helps to prepare us for the faux 35mm look too. Brian Skiba, who wrote, edited, produced and directed, clearly had the feel of the grindhouses themselves in mind as much as the feel of the films that they showed. If he could have sprayed theatre seats with puke and urine and deposited a bunch of bums at the entrance to sleep off their drunks, you just know he'd have done it. Beyond some well done aging effects that artifact the screen, he goes as far as skipping a few frames here and there, removing some lines entirely so that lips move silently, overdubbing others ever so slightly out of sync, even including a missing reel so that we can only wonder what might have got left out of such a crazily busy picture. In reality, it never got shot, of course.

The opening scenes before the title are the most believable from an aging perspective. If I didn't recognise local actors like Davina Joy, I could have bought it as an early seventies movie I merely hadn't seen until now. It's set outdoors at a lively party, with all the elements you might expect: cars, drugs, tie dyed shirts, live surf music, enthusiastic tongue swapping. And fast zombies. Joy does pick the right moment to find somewhere to pee, but she doesn't make it out. Only a trio of characters make it out and only one of them alive: Sadie, our heroine, played by Laurie Love. One of the others was a vampire to begin with and the other becomes one by the time it's over. This is that sort of film. You know, the sort that starts out with zombies, only for us to realise that most of them are vampires and werewolves. It's the sort where you start to wonder what you've seen in a grindhouse movie that isn't in here somewhere too and can't quite come up with anything.

So here I need to explain how that's all possible. A few generations back, Tristran was married to Lucy, but he cheated on her with Rachel. Unfortunately for him, while Rachel was the daughter of the preacher, Lucy was the daughter of the Devil himself and she really isn't too happy when she finds out what's been going on behind her back. So she ties them up and curses them as she kills them. Tristan will live on as a vampire and Rachel as a werewolf. The locals of the town of Despair take down Lucy and bury her in the forest, but she'll return if the blood of a family member drips on the earth, she'll reopen the gate to Hell through a lost book that's written in blood and bound in human flesh and she can be stopped only by the willing sacrifice of a virgin. Now, Lucy and Sadie are both played by Laurie Love and Sadie teams up with a comic book nerd and soda jerk called Darrell, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that will all work out.

If this story sounds a little cramped, trust me when I emphasise that it is. It's often tough to figure out which faction is which and who's really on whose side. Are the vampire bikers with the Devil's daughter or her great-great-granddaughter double? What about the werewolves? Presumably the zombies don't care. The knights are with Lucy. Yes, we have knights. We have aliens as well. I did mention that there's everything but the supernatural kitchen sink in this picture, right? And I may have missed that during a disbelieving blink. I did catch the army of demonic orcs, the dude in a skeleton mask and metal battle armour, and the swordfighting, Schwinn riding Mexican granddad. I caught Ron Jeremy too and he caught a particularly bloody facial from an exploding head that I don't even dare to riff on; you can make up your own jokes there. There's even a severed hand like Thing that scurries about and steals scenes to down home banjo pickin' accompaniment.

Darrell, the virgin of the story, puts down his comic books when this apocalypse arrives to proudly explain to Sadie that, 'I've been waiting for this all my life!' Now, I want to know what sort of comic books he's been reading to set himself up for this sort of manic monster mash. This one even has a meta level where the various characters in this film locate the town of Despair, only to discover that it's now Despair Studios, authentic western film set, where a crew is shooting a zombie flick only a hop, skip and jump ahead of the real zombie invasion. The script is less a story and more a PCP laced smörgåsbord of influences and it's that constant insanity immersion that makes it such a trip. Certainly there are so many characters to keep an eye on that it's truly impossible to keep up with all of them and we have to give up and let it wash over us like a theme park ride through Grindhouseland. The film works so much better that way when we stop trying to fathom it.

Laurie Love is most obvious by far because she plays both the leading ladies. She knew the movie well, having debuted with the 2007 short from which this was expanded. She only played one role there but, with Brian Skiba, she also wrote, produced and directed the film. In this feature length expansion, she also wrote and produced, alongside others, and even added wardrobe supervision to her list of roles. She must have really liked the idea. She clearly had a lot of fun with her double role, Sadie being a hippie chick next door who progresses from damsel in distress to take charge heroine and Lucy being a dominant demonic succubus. Her filmography looks so similar to Skiba's that it's no surprise to find that they married in 2012. Her latest picture is Crushed Velvet, which is about to receive its world premiere at the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival in mid-June. It isn't just another Skiba movie, it brings back many of the cast members from Blood Moon Rising too.

While Neal Trout clearly did precisely what was asked of him as Darrell, a nerdy Robin to back up Sadie's Batman, I found his acting overdone even for this deliberately overdone homage. I enjoyed Kent Welborn more as Sam, the biker with outstanding mutton chops who made out with Sadie's friend Becky at the party before being turned into a vampire and getting a new lease on undeath in the process. Trout knows how to pose just right for the camera but Welborn does it even better. The rest of the cast are like a who's who of local Arizona actors. Aaron Ginn-Forsberg gets a long flashback scene as Tristan, the cursed vampire. He provides some needed grounding early on but fades away as the film progresses. By comparison, Rick Dyer is acutely painful in his early scenes as Ruddy, the old Mexican, but he becomes rather endearing. Jose Rosete, the most prolific actor in Arizona, is good fun as Sanchez, wandering around with a mini-cleaver stuck in his forehead.

Mostly though, this belongs to the creators of this sprawling mess of grindhouse influences, Skiba and Love. Perhaps the cheesiest line in the film, 'You'll never get away with this!' serves to sum up their approach. The script resembles one of the many exploding heads we're gifted with, because it feels like a bunch of outrageous ideas were splattered onto a page and then blood was poured on in liberal quantities until any connections between those ideas were lost in the grue. And you know what? That's its charm. Try to analyse this and you'll hurt your brain, but sit back and let it wash over you like a deluge and you might just have a blast. There are great gore effects, good make up work, bad greenscreen and terrible CGI, but it's surely all deliberate. Love calls it 'The Evil Dead meets Dazed and Confused' and that sounds fair. If you like grindhouse, this will be a lot of fun even without a beer but it'll be even better at a drive in with a six pack and a pizza.

Dead in France (2012)

Director: Kris McManus
Stars: Celia Muir, Darren Bransford, Lee Cheney, Kate Loustau, Brian Levine and James Privett

I had a great time watching Dead in France, though I'm not sure precisely what Brian Levine and Kris McManus really wanted it to be. Levine produced, took the lead role and co-wrote, under the pseudonym of Jack Hillgate, with director McManus, who also shot and edited the picture. A quote on the poster suggests it's 'Tarantino meets Ritchie', but that's misleading as the similarities are superficial: sure, it's a story about hitmen, which introduces its disparate characters through title cards and spins them gradually together, but the tone is utterly different. Any Tarantino reference is limited to profanity and gore, as without bad language this would feel like an old Ealing comedy, underlined by the choice to shoot in black and white. There's also a lot of quiet here that suggests a Jacques Tati influence, emphasised by the opening credits, slow pace and its setting on the Côte d'Azur. Perhaps I'm impressed because these influences aren't remotely compatible but it works.

Levine plays Charles, a quiet and polite gentleman who wouldn't even kill a wasp. Except that he's a talented and experienced hitman, who's about to retire after his hundredth job. He's methodical, partly through clearly having OCD, and he looks the part, wearing the requisite Jason Statham lack of hair. For all his skills, though, none of them appear to be social. His superb first scene with Lisa, half confident experience and half social nerves, underlines that. We can't initially tell if he's hiring a prostitute or a mail order bride, but she turns out to be a cleaner, an outspoken Essex girl in a bikini to contrast her boss's relentless calm and traditional suit. Both of them contrast madly with her boyfriend, Denny, a wiry party animal with tattoos and a mohawk but no manners who shows up to do her in every conceivable position in every conceivable location in Charles's house and grounds. Some of these scenes are a little long, but they are at least shot imaginatively.

Gradually a number of stories come together. Charles is one, as he aims to follow up his century of hits with retirement, a large yacht and a girl with which to sail off into the sunset. Lisa and Denny are another, as they begin to spin scams of increasing idiocy while they have Charles's place to themselves. Burgess, a retired hitman whose wife is Charles's final job, becomes the third. This introduces a couple of million pounds into the equation to become the MacGuffin of the piece. A further hitman, or hitwoman, whatever the technical term is for a foul mouthed crazy bitch of a professional killer, makes four. She's Clancy, and she's unlike Charles in every way, except for her job, though she's as relentlessly as wild as he's in control. To make it a half dozen subplots we're gifted with Simon and Raymond, a con man and a thief respectively. They're a pair of brothers, small time crooks looking for that one big time score, and they might just have found it.

Naturally, all these characters intersect in inventive ways that keep us guessing as to where it's all going to end up, which turns out to be both believable and appropriate, yet not precisely what we might expect. That might sound like praise for a complex plot, but this film isn't really about plot, as steady and reliable as its storyline is. While Levine and McManus certainly borrowed from early Guy Ritchie movies, they only took the framework, that sort of jigsaw puzzle approach to scripting, but either couldn't or wouldn't cast the quantity of characters needed to obfuscate it substantially enough to keep us truly on our toes. There are a few smaller parts here and there and some of the actors who play them even have key reasons to be in the movie, but for the most part, it's the key folk from those six subplots interacting with each other through plot convenience. Going just from what you see in this film, you might be forgiven for believing that the Côte d'Azur is 95% British.

I get the impression that it started with the characters, and while a vaguely complicated plot was spun around them, it ended with the characters too. It's not that they're particularly deep, though a few have their depths, it's that they're all connected by being Brits abroad, while otherwise not having much in common at all. They're a very diverse and well delineated set of principals and all the actors cast got plenty of opportunity to flesh them out. Levine keeps the deepest character for himself, with the most screen time, but his quiet man routine ensures that most of his scenes are easily stolen out from under him. He gets few great lines and his deliberately subdued portrayal is so underdone that after his introductory scenes, he quickly becomes something of a background, not a background character but a background set, against which everyone else gets to strut their respective stuff. He's the straight man who everyone else bounces off.

If Charles, who we surely care about more than anyone else, for all that he's murdered a hundred people for money, is the most underacted character, his opposite is clearly Denny. Darren Bransford is so completely obnoxious as Denny that most audience members are likely to care about him the least, but he goes hog wild with the character so that we never want to ignore him. Certainly most of the magic little moments in the movie are focused around him: Denny and the door, Denny and the pool, Denny and the cat... It would be hilarious to find that he's really a mild mannered gentleman in real life, because it feels like the advice he was given here was to shove a six pack of Duracell up his jacksie and never stop moving, never stop swearing and never stop pissing off his girlfriend in every way possible. He's like the Energizer Bunny, if the Energizer Bunny grew up in the slums of Liverpool acutely allergic to social graces.

In between is everyone else. Celia Muir, who is technically top billed, is a delight as Lisa. She was one of many actors to return from Kris McManus's previous feature, 2011's Travellers, and it's not surprising to see a director want to keep her. She manages to play Lisa as a slapper of little brain, but somehow enough charm and substance to escape her Essex girl stereotype. Lee Cheney and James Privett are solid as the small time hucksters, utterly out of their depth throughout but blind to the possibility that they won't win out in the end. Only Simon's first scene with Charles is taken to absurd heights, so overdone that it feels like a comedy sketch. Kate Loustau finishes up the major cast as Clancy, an outrageously over the top portrayal almost as obnoxious as Bransford's Denny. However, Clancy has a talent underneath her foul mouthed exterior, one she's more than willing to use. For all her many faults, she's rarely a fool, while Denny is rarely anything else.

With all these colourful characters competiting for our attention, with Charles grounding them all, it can't have been rocket science to throw them memorable moments and lines to work with. Not all of them go to Bransford, including perhaps my favourite, which is gifted to a bit part character, played by Chris Manns, in a flashback. 'You got problems, Big Chris?' he's asked on an intercom, only to answer, 'Yeah, Ian's head just exploded.' While it's not important in the grand scheme of things, this scene ably highlights the very British black comedy which underpins the entire script, as well as the capable and extremely gory effects work, which would have given any horror movie a run for its money if only it hadn't been shot in black and white. Much of it is clearly gratuitous, not that I'm complaining, and the eventual death count would have the antagonist in any slasher movie reeling in envy.

I have no idea how well Dead in France is going to do, but I'm guessing that it won't do as well as it should. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I've watched it twice, but I tried it out with a couple of lads from the next generation and they didn't even finish it. I'm sure the pace is part of it, much slower than they would expect for an action movie. The odd mixture of subtle character building and dark comedy with outrageous profanity, violence and gore may not have sat well with them either. The many easy comparisons like the quote on the poster are valid but none of them give a fair idea of what the feature as a whole really feels like. Sure, there's a lot taken from Guy Ritchie, but it's far from a Guy Ritchie film. It's just as far from a Tarantino movie, an Ealing comedy or a Jacques Tati picture, but there are just as many elements from those here. Maybe: written by Tati from a story by Ritchie, directed by Charles Crichton and produced by Eli Roth. Yeah, it's that unconventional.

Black Gulch (2003)

Director: Michael Strode
Stars: Christopher Bradley, Stephen Taylor and Joshua Miller

Michael Strode has a full decade of credits to his name, but they're not generally in the roles you tend to see referenced in reviews like this. Instead he seems to have collected those colourful job descriptions that people who read long scrolling credits wonder about. You know the ones I mean: he's been the gaffer and the best boy and the key grip, all important technical positions within the electrical and lighting departments. Well, here's where he notched off some that we actually talk about, like writer, producer and director. Given how solid this short film is, it's only surprising that he hasn't reprised them more often, but this is his only film as a writer and director and he's only produced one other picture since, a post-apocalyptic vampire musical from 2005 called Sacrifice. Given that this little film is vastly superior to most of the horrendous movies getting churned out by the ton nowadays, I wonder why he hasn't made another short on his own terms.

Clearly he and his crew knew what they were doing because there's a notable amount of control from the very beginning. In quick succession we're shown where we are and who we're supposed to be watching, while we're introduced to other pertinent details through colourful dialogue. The where is a van speeding through the desert to the town of Black Gulch, while the who is Everett, the leader of a bunch of crooks who are about to take down the Savings & Loan. Strode sets it up superbly. While Randy rattles on nineteen to the dozen because he's nervous and his mouth runs faster than his brain, his uncle Everett stays icy cool until he's called on to throw out a quotable line. 'Relax, friend,' he tells him in a suitably deep voice, 'We got your back.' That's when Chase, the tough guy, and Tom, the thinking man, look at him as if in wonder because he's obviously as green as they aren't, a fourth wheel in a team of three, but it's just as obviously Everett's show.

And so they pile out of their fake plumber's van in Black Gulch and race into the Savings & Loan, to find the last thing they expected: absolutely nothing. The lights are on but nobody's home. It's their lucky day, you'd think, and sure, the tills are full of cash with nobody to stop them waltzing away with all of it, but if it was as simple as that we wouldn't have a movie. There is something in Black Gulch and, as they say, it ain't no man, so we watch Everett and his men hunt it down as it picks them off one by one. There's a lot here that you'll have seen before in other movies, but it's superbly handled by the cast and crew and there's a neat little twist coming that's telegraphed in little cues here and there if you're paying attention. The dialogue is full of eighties cool, especially when it comes to Everett but, frankly, the story rings true and clear even if we watch the entirety of it with the sound on mute. That's how textbook its construction is.

After debuting in a fun but routine slasher movie called The Initiation, Christopher Bradley built a great run in cult movies as the eighties ran into the nineties, films like Iron Eagle, Waxwork and a personal favourite of mine, Sonny Boy, but he was confined to smaller roles. Only in 1992 with an indie remake of Mad Dog Coll and its sequel did he find the lead, but this fifteen minute short film is enough to demonstrate that he could carry it. Sure, this isn't the most original characterisation in the book, Bradley borrowing as much from Tim Thomerson as from Kurt Russell, with moments of Bruce Campbell never hiding too far below the surface, but it's exactly what's called for. Black Gulch has a very eighties feel and so he plays Everett like an eighties lead, all macho loyalty and cool one liners. Word is that Strode made this with the aim of expanding it to feature length. If so, that's where Bradley's work could have really shone.

It's not entirely his film, as you might expect when he's co-starring with a 6'10" stuntman known as Big Dave with a wicked costume and some neat moves, and he's not the only one stealing our attention. I kept waiting for Stephen Taylor to trip over his own tongue as Randy with his mile a minute mouth, but he made it through intact. Joshua Miller, only eleven years old, is superb as a kid called Simon, the lone survivor of whatever took down the town. Of course Everett, the tough bank robber, takes him under his wing for he's not bad, he's just drawn that way. To me, Bradley's biggest competitor for our attention though was the film itself, as it stole mine with the way it was constructed. Other than a few clearly greenscreen scenes, it's technically spot on, with everything done for a demonstrable reason: every angle, every zoom, every pan, every cut, every camera movement. Watch on mute and learn the trade. If only all textbooks were this much fun.

The Story of Luke (2012)

Director: Alonso Mayo
Stars: Lou Taylor Pucci, Seth Green, Cary Elwes and Kristin Bauer

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

As the Special Jury Prize at the Phoenix Film Festival was being awarded to Lou Taylor Pucci, for his leading role in The Story of Luke, he was also starring in the number one movie in America, The Evil Dead. Nailing both indie and mainstream cinema at the same time is a pretty good sign that you've arrived, even if it took a decade of hard work. It has to be said though that this film is rather well titled: not only is it the well defined story of a character named Luke, it's not a heck of a lot else. There are capable actors backing up Pucci, but the stories of their characters are either completely ignored or ruthlessly severed just as we get interested. The Story of Luke is, well, it's the story of Luke and Luke is the sort of special character, a high functioning young autistic man, who either fails horribly or wins awards. Pucci is excellent enough for it to be the latter, though I doubt that the film will last in people's minds like some of its more Oscar-worthy equivalents.

We join Luke at a rather troubled time in his life. To be fair, his entire life has been troubled; his mother left when he was four because she couldn't deal with a special needs child and he has no idea who his dad is. He's been living with his grandparents ever since, but now Grandma Maggie, the most important person in his life, has died and his life is about to change completely. What's notable immediately is that as much as Luke is autistic and isolated from reality, he's also higher functioning than Grandpa Jonas, who's inappropriate and in dire need of care. The pair stay with Luke's Uncle Paul and Jonas wears out his welcome immediately: he grabs Aunt Cindy's ass and offers her a twenty, pees himself in her car and craps himself in a restroom because he forgot to pull down his trousers first. He also insults everyone deliberately; Luke only does it because he's honest and doesn't have the social skills needed to know when to keep quiet.

And so off goes Grandpa Jonas, his story running only a little longer than Grandma Maggie's and she died before the movie began. That's an unfortunate trend in this film; it's so strongly about Luke that we pay attention to anyone else at our own risk. Sure, it's his story and he's set up to be a fascinating character from moment one, walking to Maggie's funeral with a pair of mismatched shoes and a suitcase, only to stand up and scream during the service, but he's promptly shifted into a new world and tasked with finding his own way. Paul and Cindy are a dysfunctional couple with a pair of dysfunctional kids, Brad and Megan, so routinely dysfunctional that we expect the cliché: that all they each need to shake them out of their respective problems is the presence in their lives of someone special like Luke. It's the expected thing because that's what all the other films about special people do and, at least for a while, it's what this one does too.

First up is Aunt Cindy, who's scarily up tight. OK, Grandpa would have got on anyone's nerves but she gets on everyone else's nerves, to the degree that her manicurist fires her as a customer. It has to be said that Kristin Bauer does psycho bitchy better than perhaps anyone, so I don't have a single problem with her performance, but it apparently takes a single one sided conversation with Luke to turn her around. I don't buy that. It takes a similar amount of inaction or at least mild action on Luke's part for him to start to change every other member of the family too. You'd think they'd package him up in a bottle and sell him at the pharmacy. I wonder if all these scenes were writer/director Alonso Mayo's way of getting all the clichés out of the way so that Luke could move forward to experience an original story of his own. If so, it worked but it marginalised most of the stars in the process. Kristin Bauer and Cary Elwes? Forget 'em. This is the story of Luke.

Trying to find a life for himself outside this family while rigidly obeying all of Aunt Cindy's rules is where Luke's story is going and this is a lot more successful. As unintentionally annoying as Luke can be, Pucci succeeds in making him rather endearing. A great deal of it has to be the way he channels a young and nerdy Johnny Depp physically but Jim Parsons vocally. Partly it's his socially awkward honesty, which works like an inner voice that's usually kept silent. Certainly this is one key way that he shakes up the family he comes to live with, exposing that they're all hiding from reality and suggesting that all it takes to set them back on the road to recovery is to confront them with it. Partly it's his delightfully odd balance between constant unsurety and strong will. He simmers with a subdued panic but has the guts to confront his fears, routines and OCD, turning assumptions of how things have to change into absolutes, however absurd they happen to be.

One great example is Maria. She's a receptionist at the job agency he visits to look for work, the only way he'll be able to move into a place of his own. Prompted by his grandpa's inappropriate comments, he asks her out. She turns him down, but he equates that rejection with his lack of work so strongly that getting a job in his mind equates to her saying yes. It clearly isn't going to happen, but his delusion is so believable and so recognisable from reality that we find ourselves rooting for him nonetheless. However, we're soon about to be caught up in something else, the transition of the picture from comedic drama to dramatic comedy, with the arrival of Seth Green who says things like, 'Humanity is evil!' and, 'To the dungeon, halfwit!' He's Zack, the boss from Hell in an inappropriate way that's shocking to Luke, who's stuck interning for him, and hilarious to us. And it's not politically incorrect because Zack's obviously special too.

The Story of Luke is as its best when it's telling the story of Luke. The movie was released during National Autism Awareness month, appropriate because it gifts us with a believably autistic lead who is nonetheless the most endearing character in the film. He's special to us without that term having to hold a double meaning. I found the ways in which Mayo wrote the character and Pucci played him far more human and engaging than anything I saw in Rain Man, which won a brace of Academy Awards. Perhaps it's because Rain Man was never about Raymond Babbitt, the autistic savant, at all; it was always about his shallow brother, Charlie and how Raymond changed him. By comparison, The Story of Luke is all about the autistic Luke, who isn't a savant but whose autism is high functioning enough to allow him to interact with the world, albeit in a different way to the rest of us. It's the various Charlies in his life who we can happily ignore.

The only other character who really gets a fully painted story arc is Zack, who calls normal people NTs or 'neurological typicals' and studies their mating rituals. Seth Green is hilarious as Zack, who is so outrageous that he highlights how easily acceptable Luke's social faux pas are. The catch is that he's such a comedy character that it's hard to take his dramatic side seriously. Pucci is able to walk that fine line, but Green can't manage it. Everyone else is set up, used as a prop for Luke to build off and then callously discarded. While I was happy for this to extend past the expected, I also wanted to know more about the other characters in his life. Kristin Bauer is wasted as Cindy, even with a couple of strong scenes early on; Cary Elwes doesn't even get that much as Paul. The kids are shown to us in scenes that make us want to discover why they're like how they are, but none of that discovery ever shows up.

Really, this entire family is relegated to being a set of walking props, just as the characters who show up later in the story walk into Luke's life, establish something important and then disappear again. A few of them are massively important, but only in how they affect Luke. They're all either unimportant on their own merits or Mayo refuses to allow them to show why they have their own importance too. Of course, their one dimensionality is only highlighted by the superbly nuanced three dimensions that Luke is given. Throughout, the film felt like an animation of a beautiful and colourful painted character walking around in a black and white world. I could go out on a limb and wonder if that's the point, that Mayo is turning the tables and showing us how a withdrawn autistic character could see himself as black and white in a world of colour, or how we erroneously see that through prejudice, but I don't think so. I think this is just emphatically the story of Luke.