Etrange Festival 2010

We’ve had our eye on L’Etrange Festival for a few years now and we are very much looking forward to the 16th edition of the event, which takes place from September 3-12 in Paris. The inventive programming of the festival gives Parisian audiences a chance to see unusual and forgotten, disturbing and enchanting images, drawn from a wide pool of B-movies, exploitation, genre and fantastic cinema. It is the occasion to savour lost gems from the past as well as to discover exciting new films.

Among the premieres, L’Etrange Festival will be presenting George A Romero’s latest addition to his zombie series, Survival of the Dead; Eli Roth’s The Last Exorcism; Pontypool, a smart low-budget take on the zombie movie from Canada; Deliver Us from Evil (Délivrez-nous du mal), the new film by Ole Bornedal, director of The Substitute and Just Another Love Story; and A Serbian Film, the most talked-about horror film of the moment, which has just been pulled from FrightFest in London after being cut by the British censors.

In the section ‘Pepites de l’etrange’ (Strange Gems), we are very much looking forward to 1979 US wheelchair exploitation movie The Amazing Mr No-Legs (L’Infernale poursuite), 1966 giallo Il terzo occhio (Le Froid baiser de la mort) and Swiss sci-fi tale L’Inconnu de Shandigor (another Swiss sci-fi movie, the recent Cargo, is also showing at the festival). There is also a special evening of Tobe Hooper films, including his rarely seen first film, Eggshells, The Funhouse (Massacre dans le train fantôme) and, of course, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

L’Etrange Festival always ask various personalities of the cinema world to put together a selection of films, and this year Alejandro Jodorowsky has programmed a strand of the festival, which includes Todd Browning’s wonderful The Unknown (L’inconnu), and Nacho Cerda’s acclaimed short film Aftermath. Other programmes have been selected by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and gay militant Lionel Soukaz. The festival also includes homages to actors Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Mimsy Farmer, as well as a musical evening and short films. And there is a Vampire all-nighter, with rock’n’roll Canadian vampire comedy Suck, Belgian mockumentary Vampires (inspired by Man Bites Dog/C’est arrivé près de chez vous), and Prowl, the new film by Manhunt director Patrick Syversen.

This year, as in previous years, the programme impresses by its diversity, intelligence and the energy and dedication that are clearly behind it. Look out for our report at the end of September!

The Man in the Blue Gordini

We are looking forward to the London International Animation Festival (LIAF), which returns for the 7th time with an exciting, intriguing, inspiring, sometimes controversial, thoroughly comprehensive collection of animation from 27 August to 5 September. This is the UK’s largest festival of its kind in the UK, screening the best, new animation from every corner of the world to London audiences with 250 films, most of them British premieres, represented in a series of amazing programmes and satellite events.

With films from 30 countries LIAF will proudly showcase the whole spectrum of creative animation, showing that animation is so much more than slick blockbusters and special effects. As well as 9 competitive programmes of the best, recently released animated shorts from every corner of the globe there are many especially curated sessions such as the technique focus (scratch animation), Felix the Cat, the Autour de Minuit (France) showcase, the British panorama, the best of Siggraph Festival, animated documentaries, guests, Q and A’s and seminars.

The whole week wraps up with the Best of the Festival on Sunday night with a collection of films chosen by panels of judges and audience votes.

The full programme is available online at the LIAF website. Tickets available from the Renoir box-office in early August.

Brighton Rock

We heartily recommend the BFI’s short season of nitrate films, which start today with a screening of Brighton Rock.

From 1895 to 1952 films were shot on cellulose nitrate stock, which can be highly flammable and subject to drastic deterioration. Archives the world over have tried, sometimes in vain, to preserve this fragile medium which, Dracula-like, can crumble away into dust.

This short season, which continues in August, gives audiences the first opportunity in ten years to view some of our nitrate prints in the only public cinema in the UK with the licence to screen them.

The higher silver content in nitrate prints is what lends black and white films a wonderful lustre, while an original dye transfer Technicolor nitrate print with its vibrant colours offers an unmissable experience. Don’t deny yourself these pleasures.

Fish Story

Out on July 26 is Fish Story (Third Window Films), a charming Japanese punk sci-fi tale. Here’s an extract of Eithne Farry’s review of the film: ‘It’s a brilliantly crafted piece of storytelling, and each chapter could survive independently, but Nakamura revels in the idea that seemingly random events are intertwined, resonating down the years, until they culminate in a moment freighted with meaning. Funny, melancholy, hopefully, helplessly optimistic, deliciously absurd, Fish Story is a quirky gem of a movie.’

Also out on July 26 is another Japanese film, Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (4Digital Media), which John Berra saw at the Nippon Connection in April: ‘Kaiji is a noncommittal job-hopper who lives month-to-month with little concern for his long-term financial security. When he suddenly finds himself burdened with a debt of two million yen due to the non-payment of a loan that he casually co-signed for a friend, Kaiji is forced to play a high-risk game onboard a cruise ship to try and clear it. It’s an ingenious premise, one that recalls the sinister escapism of David Fincher circa The Game (1997) and comments on current economic conditions in recession-hit countries where people are paying the price for taking out ‘easy’ credit. Unfortunately, Kaiji is undermined by an irritating central performance by Tatsuya Fujiwara while Yuki Amani is merely window-dressing as the initially icy, ultimately sympathetic credit collector. An over-reliance on fast edits and swirling camera movements makes Kaiji an unfortunate case of a neat idea undermined by erratic execution.’

July 26 also sees the release of Ki-duk’s acclaimed prison drama Breath by Palisades Tartan. We haven’t seen this one, but we love Kim Ki-duk and this is what the press release says: ‘Nominated for the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2007, the director’s 14th feature moves on from the extreme violence and provocation of his earlier works, to a more considered yet still poetic look at some of the inexpressible emotions between humans and taboo-breaking relationships. Elements from his previous works Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring and 3-Iron find new expression in this story of a prisoner on death row and the lonely housewife he confides in.’

Continuing with Asian cinema, the BFI have launched the Ozu Collection on July 19. Following its recent theatrical retrospective of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu’s entire surviving films, the BFI will release all 32 films on DVD over the next three years. Some of these films will also be made available on Blu-ray for the first time. The Ozu Collection was launched on July 19 with the Dual Format Edition releases (both a Blu-ray and a DVD disc in one box) of Tokyo Story (1953), Early Summer (1951) and Late Spring (1949). Extra features with each of these three titles, and with subsequent releases, will include an early Ozu film that has never been available in the UK before.

Other DVD releases this month include Todd Solondz’s caustic follow-up to Happiness, Life During Wartime (Artificial Eye, July 12), which John Berra reviewed: ‘It is arguable that Solondz has been somewhat marginalised in recent years, but this ‘sequel’ exhibits a newfound mellowness that those who lost interest following the middle-class mockery of Storytelling may find oddly endearing.’

In the well-crafted, tense Australian thriller The Dinner Party, released by Kaleidoscope on July 12, an unhinged young woman throws a dinner party where she plans to commit suicide with her boyfriend, but things don’t go according to plan.

And finally, the wonderful Iranian music film No One Knows about Persian Cats is released by Network on July 26. Lucy Hurst said: ‘Bahman Ghobadi’s exploration into the world of underground music in Tehran is a welcome antidote to the blasé, pedestrian, apathetic state of the music industry in the West. This bold and inspiring film was obviously a great risk to make but it is ultimately rewarding for its audience.’

Red White & Blue

Film4 FrightFest have announced their programme and it sounds like 2010 is a good year for horror!

The festival will open with Adam Green’s Hatchet 2 and close with Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism. Tobe Hooper is the festival’s special guest and will be interviewed onstage, and there will be a screening of his rarely seen 1969 debut Eggshells alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Again this year there are two programmes, with a Discovery selection running alongside the main event. In the main selection, we can heartily recommend US sexual psycho-drama Red, White and Blue, which Electric Sheep’s Kate Taylor discovered at the Rotterdam Festival earlier this year. Here’s a shorter version of what she said in her festival report:

‘Set in Austin, Texas, Red White and Blue starts as a character study of the ravenously promiscuous Erica, whose existence consists of picking up random men in bars and trying to hold on to the cleaning job at the guest house where she stays. Punk hipster Franki, an earlier Erica conquest, is trying to get his band a European tour, giving his boss grief at his burger-flipping job, and looking after his ailing mother. On her death, Franki and Erica’s paths become entwined again in a twist that would jump out as controversy-baiting, had the preceding scenes not treated the characters in such a non-judgmental way. From then the film shifts gear, unleashing a vicious streak of inventive violence that will satisfy gore-seekers (death by gaffa tape – the ultimate indie way to go?) but still retain the less squeamish brand of cinephile.’

We’ve also checked out the very entertaining Monsters. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it’s a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. The vision of Fortress USA protected by a wall from South American intruders – alien or human – has a certain resonance, although this is not really a film for deep political commentary. While the focus is more on the romance than on the action, it is witty, well written and engaging.

In the other British films on offer, we’ve seen Outcast but we didn’t like that one: we’re just not quite convinced by the mix of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities that seems to be developing into a sub-genre of British fantastic cinema (see Heartless and The Disappeared).

However, we’re looking forward to Mexican cannibal tale We Are What We Are, Kaboom, by American enfant terrible Gregg Araki, whose Mysterious Skin we loved, African-set zombie movie The Dead, and the controversial and much-talked-about A Serbian Film. In the Discovery selection, giallo-inspired Amer and Finale also sound worth checking out. And we’re planning to attend Jake West’s documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, which will be followed by a panel discussion. Aside from the two programmes of feature films, there’s also short films, special guest appearances, Q&As with filmmakers, and Andy Nyman’s Quiz from Hell!

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

The 2010 edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival opened with Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, an animated film based on a script written by offbeat French comic genius Jacques Tati, which had never made it to the screen. This remarkable pairing did not quite produce the exciting result one could expect, and although the animation was beautiful, the story was somewhat insipid and lacked the oddball humour of Chomet’s earlier Belleville Rendezvous.

It was an unchallenging opening but this was corrected to some degree the next day with the screening of Kôji Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar (Kyatapirâ), an angry account of the relationship between a soldier, who comes back terribly maimed after fighting in the Second World War, and his wife. It was great that Edinburgh offered British audiences their first chance to see this subversive exploration of duty, heroism, and the cruel ties that bind a husband and wife. Caterpillar had already screened at the Berlinale in February, together with another of the Edinburgh Festival’s stand-outs, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a remarkably assured hillbilly tale about a young girl forced to face violent relatives to save her family from ruin.

There were few established directors on view and among them Werner Herzog gave us one of the most enigmatic and provocative films of the selection. Similar in style to his bizarrely brilliant Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and with an equally star-studded cast – this time including Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier and Grace Zabrisky – My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is, at heart, a Greek tragedy set in a contemporary San Diego suburb. Inspired by the true story of a son who killed his mother, seemingly at random, the film is told from the perspective of the investigating detective (Dafoe), who is trying to piece together the murderer’s story with the help of his fiancée (Sevigny) and an old mentor and friend (Kier). Although the film was produced by David Lynch and borrows deftly (and unashamedly) from his creepily surreal fare, Herzog insists in deploying his own wonderfully outlandish cinematic tropes – a scene in which Kier visits an ostrich farm is one particular highlight. But what makes My Son, My Son a singularly mesmerising treat is the sense of persistent delirium and delight at play here, and the impression that actors and audience are led through events and flashbacks by some mischievous puppet master.

While it seems that Herzog has found great pleasure in unconventional ‘genre’ movie-making, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering And Everything Is Going Fine is arguably his most modest work to date, one in which his directorial hand is barely evident. So complacent and burbling is this low-budget biopic about the writer-actor Spalding Gray that after watching 90 minutes of snippets of performances, TV interviews and home movies of the man in question, both his personality and the necessity for this documentary were still, unfortunately, unclear.

The fourth major work by Filipino director Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay, Slingshot, Serbis) had bigger ambitions. In Lola, Philippine cinema icons Anita Linda and Rustica Carpio portray two elderly grandmothers who face the consequences of a robbery-homicide involving their beloved grandsons: one the victim, the other the accused. Frail and destitute as they are, both women seek money in the aftermath of the killing – for a burial and a bail bond, respectively. Everything in this touching tragedy of right and wrong, acceptance and forgiveness, is adroitly done, but it feels so stretched and overlong that any sympathy you may have for the characters is in danger of vanishing even before reaching the half point.

Monsters

This year, the Night Moves and Under the Radar sections were disappointing: they were vaguely defined and almost interchangeable, their identity and aims too hazy and muddled to produce coherent, meaty selections. Launched two years ago to showcase ‘raw, risk-taking work’, Under the Radar was no more than a hotchpotch of vacant kitsch. We had high hopes for Zach Clark’s Vacation!, the follow-up to Modern Love Is Automatic, which had impressed us last year. It had a similar mix of retro world and female-focused melodrama, but where Modern Love was surprisingly moving and visually stylish, Vacation! offered only ugly 80s Day-Glo as a background to the underwhelming story of a girly holiday that goes badly wrong. Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl was of no higher standard than a student film, and a badly misjudged one at that. Demonstrating a disastrous lack of skill in all areas of filmmaking, it featured over-stylised, cartoonish characters, wooden acting, awful dialogue and an inexistent plot, and was striving pathetically hard for a coolness that entirely eluded it. The Black Panther (La pantera negra) was an instantly forgettable, nonsensical noir pastiche from Mexico; filming in black and white, having God and Death as characters and dropping references to Kiss Me Deadly does not a good film make.

The Night Moves section for late-night screenings was equally marred by pastiche and déjà vu. Particularly depressing was The Last Rites of Ransom Pride, another ludicrous attempt at making a ‘cool’ film, this time in the Western genre. The rapid-fire MTV-style editing and overbearing soundtrack frantically tried to hide the lack of substance and the preposterousness of both plot and characters, which included a gun-toting hot chick, a witchy woman prone to pompous mystical statements, and villainous outlaw caricatures aplenty. Dutch horror movie Two Eyes Staring (Zwart water) had obvious echoes of The Orphanage and was too hackneyed to offer any real scares. British supernatural story Outcast was a mishmash of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities, a mix previously attempted in Philip Ridley’s Heartless and Johnny Kevorkian’s The Disappeared. It was sad to see such excellent actors as Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt mislaid in this silly mess. The other British offering in the selection, Monsters, was much better, although not entirely original. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it was a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. Although the focus was more on the romance than on the action, it was well written and engaging, albeit in an undemanding, Saturday-night-entertainment kind of way.

Other British films of note included stop-motion animation Jackboots on Whitehall, which presented an alternative version of the Second World War that saw the Germans invading England and Churchill escaping to Scotland. It was a hilarious, witty, satirical romp featuring brilliant caricatures of all the nationalities involved (the weaselly Goebbels, the politically-confused American pilot and the Scots were special highlights) and was one of the most enjoyable films of the festival. In an entirely different style, Amy Hardie’s documentary The Edge of Dreaming also proved a crowd-pleaser. After dreaming she was going to die, Hardie set about to investigate dreams and their relationship to reality and conscious life. Although the scenes of perfect family life are fairly dull and somewhat indulgent, and the film could have gone further in its exploration of the human mind, Hardie, an open-minded woman with a scientific background, was a congenial guide through an uncharted and fascinating territory.

Another interesting British film was Viv Fongenie’s Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World, starring Edward Hogg (White Lightnin’) as a smart, young web designer with an obsessive passion for astrophysics, who experiences a schizophrenic breakdown after the death of his girlfriend. This charming yet at times unsettling portrait of mental illness is unlikely to set the world alight, but it is involving and altogether adult, and Hogg once again lends his character a psychological depth, charisma and soft-eyed madness that is hard to resist. By contrast, Karl Golden’s Pelican Blood was another example of a film that tries too hard in all respects, although it did boast strong performances. Harry Treadaway plays the gloomy antihero Nikko, a birdwatcher who plans to kill himself after ticking off 500 rare birds on his list. He has tried to commit suicide before and failed; now he’d like to do it properly, in a Romeo-and-Juliet way with his unpredictable, animal rights activist, trouble-making girlfriend, whom he met in a suicide chat room. Golden’s film tries hard to position itself as an ‘edgy’ British film, and on the surface it ticks all the boxes, but it never quite pulls it off, partly because the characters are simply too handsome and angelically lit in their misery.

What became obvious as the festival unfolded was that the most accomplished works came from German-speaking filmmaking. Herzog’s outlandish crime comedy was accompanied by a couple of gems from Germany and Austria, both clearly deserving of a UK release. Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber (Der Räuber), which also screened in Berlin, is a smart psychological thriller about a bank robber who is also a talented and passionate amateur marathon runner. Just as impressive was Maximilian Erlenwein’s Gravity (Schwerkraft), starring emerging actor Fabian Hinrichs as Frederik, a seemingly mild-mannered young banker, who, after witnessing a customer shoot himself, plunges into an early mid-life crisis that sees him get dangerously involved with a former schoolmate and ex-convict Vince (Jürgen Vogel). Although the story is heavy-handed in places, and at times a little clichéd, overall it is a witty, dark and thoroughly entertaining film, and it was one of the unquestionable highlights of the festival.

Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy

Secret Cinema: Blade Runner

Emerging from the escalators at Canary Wharf into an unseasonably cold and damp June evening, the first sight that greeted us was of two futuristic policemen standing guard, while air stewardesses in retro outfits guided ‘passengers’ to a Utopian Airways shuttle. After a few minutes on board, a man in a trench coat abruptly stopped the bus, alerting the passengers and crew that we were to be redirected to a holding station in the wake of a replicant rebellion. In case anyone hadn’t figured it out by now, we were on our way to a screening of Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film Blade Runner.

The bus reached its destination a few moments later, a desolate yard in the shadows of Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers. Walking between rows of shipping containers, boys in uniform yelled at us to hurry inside the warehouse; we were harassed by refugees and disturbed by the site of three vertically challenged men taking baseball bats to a car. Inside was a stunning recreation of the film’s futuristic vision of LA, with its crowded stalls selling anything from noodles to replicant pets. Pole dancers, masks covering their faces, shimmied on top of scaffolding, overlooking the bar where Chrome Hoof, clad in gold, played a set of jarring, angular rock. Women with snakes draped across their shoulders roamed through the crowd. A woman in a see-through plastic coat sat at a vanity table applying make-up. An actress, dressed in torn stockings and a fur coat, wearing a blonde wig, wandered, oblivious, through the guests. Outside in the back yard, a fire-eater performed on top of an armoured vehicle.

While it was impossible to completely shake the feeling that it was all an elaborate set-up, the level of detail that went into organising the event was near genius. The army of actors, who portrayed nuns, strippers, police officers, Decker, Roy, Rachael, and almost everyone from the cast, were impressive in their ability to stay in character while surrounded by throngs of film-goers knocking back sushi and beer. A few drinks later, when we were finally ushered into the screening room, the recreation of J.F Sebastien’s apartment that greeted us was breathtaking; more actors and actresses dressed as his robotic playthings littered the remarkable set. By that time, the film itself was almost a side-show, the crowd even cheering at the scene when Decker and Rachael kiss. But there was still a surprise left in store for the audience: Decker and Roy, playing out their final scene, hanging off the brick wall of the warehouse, illuminated by a projection of the building’s façade.

It was a remarkable night; and it’s almost impossible to imagine how Secret Cinema will ever top it. I’ll certainly be there next time to see if they pull it off.

Sarah Cronin

Accident

The Electric Sheep team reviews the highlights of the 2010 Terracotta Far East Film Festival.

Accident (Soi Cheang, 2009)
The term ‘high-concept’ was coined to describe Hollywood blockbusters that can be summarised in a single sentence; however, it could also be applied to Accident, a Hong Kong thriller about a team of assassins led by the intensely disciplined Brain (Louis Koo), who disguise their hits as ‘accidents’ so that nobody realises that a crime has actually been committed. Produced by the prolific Johnnie To, Accident exhibits an icy aesthetic that keeps the audience at an emotional distance but serves to maintain suspense during the sustained set-pieces. The unexpectedly romantic score by French composer Xavier Jamaux, who previously collaborated with To on Mad Detective (2007) and Sparrow (2008), aims for a tragic resonance that is undermined by the comparatively one-note characterisations of Brain’s crew, but Cheang’s psychological approach towards pulp material ensures that Accident has a meditative quality that is rarely found in upscale action cinema. JOHN BERRA

Vengeance (Fuk sau, 2009)
Vengeance marks a return to what Johnnie To does best – stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. The plot is simple – a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Johnny Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord. As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. It’s their simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, with a touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd. RICHARD BADLEY

Antique (Min kyu-dong, 2008)
When arrogant yuppie Kim decides to open a cake shop, assuming that such establishments will offer plenty of opportunities to meet available women, his search for a pastry chef leads him to former high school classmate Min, who has become known as ‘The Gay of Demonic Charm’ after being sacked from numerous bakeries following flings with co-workers who find him irresistible. Somehow, this simple set-up serves as the springboard for multiple narrative strands to the point that there are three films competing for audience attention; Antique is ostensibly a comedy about the unusual professional relationship between Kim and Min, but it also takes a darker detour into thriller territory and flirts with the form of the musical through dizzying montages. There are some hilarious moments scattered throughout this adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s popular manga, and the themes of friendship and forgiveness are effectively conveyed amid the colourful chaos. JOHN BERRA

Cow

Cow (Dou niu, 2009)
In Chinese director Guan Hu’s Cow, set in 1940, a village simpleton emerges from hiding to discover that his fortress home has been destroyed by Japanese soldiers. The narrow lanes are eerily quiet; the dirt in the square stained with blood. Confused and terrified, he discovers that the only other survivor is a ‘foreign’ cow that he’s promised to care for. Cow unfolds in a series of flashbacks, mixing humorous scenes of village life with the simpleton’s harrowing struggles to keep himself and the cow alive as his home is overrun by returning Japanese soldiers, the Kuomintang, and fellow refugees. The result is a tragic black comedy about the futility of war, told from a unique point of view in an already crowded genre. Initially curious and captivating, it’s a shame that the film starts to drift in the second half once the novelty of the plot and set-up start to wear thin. SARAH CRONIN

Summer Wars (Samâ wôzu, 2009)
This new animé from director Mamoru Hosada is more satisfying than his previous offering, The Girl Who Leapt through Time, although its promising beginning and beautiful animation are equally marred by a fairly simplistic message. The story revolves around a young boy, Kenji, who, while staying with the family of a classmate he has a crush on for the summer, accidentally helps a hacker crack the code to the ‘OZ’ network, a Second Life type of virtual world used by everyone, from private users to government and military institutions. As the mysterious attacker wreaks havoc in OZ with potentially disastrous consequences in the real world, Kenji has to find a way to stop him. The animation is excellent, with two contrasting styles used to represent real and virtual worlds, and the tone is charming and humorous. But while the story is initially captivating, it quickly descends into a basic good versus evil battle underpinned by an unsophisticated, conservative belief in traditional values. VIRGINIE SĖLAVY

Phobia (See prang, 2008)
As with most horror anthologies, Phobia is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they seem like extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts. Last Fright is the most technically accomplished of the bunch, a slow-burning chiller that doesn’t rely on ropey effects, just old-fashioned storytelling. But the anthology’s stand-out is In the Middle, not because it’s particularly scary but because it keeps a tight, coherent plot, revolving around a group of lads on a camping holiday who are haunted by a friend after he’s drowned. RICHARD BADLEY

Pulse

Pulse is the first of this year’s BBC Three new drama premieres, a short season of three new pilot programmes that the makers hope will get enough viewers and positive critical feedback to justify funding for a whole series. Pilots aren’t a new idea, but while in America many examples get made but never shown, in the UK the BBC, Channel Four and their respective websites have recently used them as a way to showcase new talent and ideas. As with some excerpts of both TV companies’ comedy output of late, the BBC have innovatively put the whole of each of these pilots online a week before transmission. It’s an interesting experiment, which presumably is designed to create an internet buzz about the shows, but might risk decimating the viewing figures.

Putting it online first is a safe way of gauging interest for what is a slightly unconventional drama: Pulse is a medical drama with a horror and supernatural twist. While there haven’t been many horror series on British television – and those that do exist are generally mini-series based on famous novels like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – one of the BBC Three pilots that did well enough to earn a series a couple of years ago was Being Human, a very likeable supernatural drama with a touch of black comedy, which is about to enter production on its third season. While the premise for Being Human sounds like the set-up for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost share a house in Bristol – Pulse seems like a safer bet. The writer and director are both creators of some of the best of recent Doctor Who episodes and the writer and producer also have experience of successful medical dramas – Casualty and No Angels respectively. In addition, the production has many elements that are familiar to genre fans such as a blood-soaked operation that combines elements of Alien and Re-animator, body horror in the style of early David Cronenberg and mysterious characters and strange goings-on in a hospital that recalls The Kingdom (Riget) and its risible American remake Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital.

However, while the programme will undoubtedly and deservedly attract fans of SF/supernatural entertainment I imagine the BBC would also like fans of more general hospital dramas to tune in. The exploits of the student doctors and the various traumas in their lives depicted in the self-contained pilot are very engaging, and it is well directed, edited, cast and shot. The only criticism is that it feels that too much has been packed into this one episode (clearly in order to sell the ideas that would progress over the series) and casual viewers might feel like the programme makers started shooting the script from page 10 rather than page one.

I’ll admit I’m a long-time fan of the writer, Paul Cornell, but his presence in the writing teams of Robin Hood and Primeval wasn’t enough to make me watch those series. However, the varied elements he and his predecessors, who have apparently been attempting to bring Pulse to screen for a while, combine here make for a very successful mix. Personally, I like hospital shows to have an additional unconventional element such as zombies, surreal comedy or Mandy Patinkin and as TV schedules feel the absence of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Green Wing and Chicago Hope, I certainly hope Pulse will go to series.

Alex Fitch

Poster for Tarantula

‘The 50s were a great time to be a kid, because the whole culture was so juvenile.’
Joe Dante

‘Go get ’em, midnight!’ says the scarred man, sending his trained horse down by itself to attack the two riders in the valley below. ‘Lousy cops, always crowding a guy,’ snarls a teen hoodlum anti-hero swerving his car to avoid a back projection. Later he’ll be beaten up in a clumsy cafe brawl that he starts with the line ‘you’re outta your class, throttle jockey!’ Alfred Hitchcock pops up, presenting something. Then there’s Naked City spliced with a stag reel. The Lone Ranger patronises Tonto, Nabisco cereals are giving away ‘Defenders of America’ cards with their shredded wheat, baseball cards depicting US submarines, planes and missiles to warm the heart of your little cold warriors. The sponsors of Robin Hood, Wildroot Cream Oil, proudly announce that it ‘contains lanolin and cholesterol’, and on it goes: George Reeves’s Superman, Abbot and Costello, Rin Tin Tin, Bufferin and Lifebuoy soap, Alpha Bites cereal and Lustre Creme….

This is Joe Dante’s Movie Orgy, a hand-spliced avalanche of mostly monochrome pop culture, adverts, TV shows, B-movies, and whatever else Dante could find, made in 1968 and then toured round college campuses for the next two years. Screenings were supported by Schlitz beer, and the full thing lasted for seven hours (Dante: ‘after the third hour it got funny’). I’m watching a 90-minute edit courtesy of Cine-Excess, the cult film conference, and then sticking around as the charming Mr Dante is interviewed by Kim Newman afterwards. There was only ever one print of The Movie Orgy, and it played 200 dates, constantly falling apart, being added to, cut and re-spliced. No permission was sought for the use of the Orgy footage, and it carries a sly 68 anti-Establishment charge; Vietnam hangs heavily in the background (a trailer for John Wayne’s The Green Berets is one of the few contemporary clips to turn up), and the sexual and racial attitudes of the 50s are repeatedly brought into question. You can almost smell the dope smoke as you watch it today.

The teen hoodlum flick is called Speed Crazy, the cheapo Western remains unnamed, a random pattern that continues throughout; we know that Teenagers from Outer Space and The Giant Gila Monster are in there, and devotees will recognise Bert I Gordon’s The Beginning of the End and Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, but for much of the rest we’re on our own in a world devoid of explanation, the only context being provided by juxtaposition. Whole features are hacked down to their essentials, mined for weirdness and hilarity, the stuff that Dante and friends found funny at NYU at the time, and the stuff that they thought was cool when they were nine years old. At times it resembles a teenage mix tape made with love, at others a scabrous unveiling of the American subconscious, and mostly it’s a goofy mess. With its hand-lettered titles, varying sound levels, clicks, pops and hisses, it’s a distinctly low-fidelity experience, but that adds to its crude power. It’s like Andy Warhol via Mad Magazine, and though it’s largely shapeless there’s a definite method in the madness somewhere. Dante recalls that the original epic ended with a solid 20 minutes or so of the closing moments of dozens of different old shows, and the whole ‘happy trails, buckaroos’ montage would reduce most of the hardy souls who had sat through the whole thing to tears. In a world without video, DVD or the internet, all this material, this 50s juvenilia, had disappeared from people’s lives, and The Movie Orgy dredged it up, sliced it into pieces and fed it back to the viewers, in what must have been a strange and heady experience. Dante had the idea for The Movie Orgy after noting the popularity of a college screening of a complete 1940s Batman serial over five hours. Without the week-long wait between episodes that characterised the original run the audience were made forcefully aware of the repetitions of footage, the outrageous cheat cliff-hanger endings, and all the absurdities and narrative contortions of the type of entertainment that they had doubtless accepted at face value when they were children.

Susan Sontag’s influential essay on camp had recently been published, and The Movie Orgy followed its lead: to be included, footage had to be played totally straight, otherwise it wasn’t funny, and it should ideally push the buttons of the baby boomers in the audience. Rules are made to be broken, and some knowing satirical clips appear amid the Howdy Doody and Puralin, but for the most part it’s an unpolished, disarming trawl through the cathode ray hinterland I only knew through Drew Friedman’s genius comic strips. Here they are, the aging music hall comedians, hard-sell commercials and nightmarish kids’ shows, a festival of hokey staging and stiff delivery. It’s baffling and alarming and hilarious by turns; one moment you could be watching an ad for the Little Hostess Buffet set ‘by Marx’, a toy full dinner service for the career-free little girl, the next you’re pitched into the sheer proto-Lynchian hell of Andy’s Gang, where a live cat and mouse (Midnight and Squeaky) have been strapped into torture devices so that they can be filmed playing Salvation Army drums from a variety of angles while a distressed-looking fat man warbles ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so’ over the footage. It’s a good thing that the kids in the Andy’s Gang audience are provided by stock footage, otherwise they would be screaming in abject terror, as I would have been had I not been laughing so damned hard.

I would love The Movie Orgy for this sequence alone, and there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s a social document from the heady days of revolution, it’s a post-war treasure trove, and for Joe Dante fans it’s a touchstone. This is where the strait-laced dialogue from Mant, Matinee’s film-within-a-film came from; here’s the first evidence of the anti-corporate, anti-military creator of Gremlins, Small Soldiers and The Homecoming; hell, here’s even the puerile knucklehead who had a hand in Amazon Women on the Moon. It’s a gas. Now, let’s get the full seven-hour cut over, somebody score some Schlitz beer and home-grown, pull up a beanbag, let’s watch this bastard properly.

Mark Stafford