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Review by Nia Edwards-Behi

I confess to not being particularly familiar with Charles Band’s body of work. I know I’ve seen a Puppet Master film, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you which one. All I know is that I didn’t like it, but I can’t remember why I didn’t like it, which is possibly even more indicative of my stupendous indifference to such a prolific genre producer. So, when Subspecies and Subspecies II: Bloodstone showed up in my post box for reviewing I wasn’t exactly enthused. Let this be a lesson to us all about making assumptions about films, shall we? Subspecies is frankly a bit ace, and only somewhat marred by its significantly inferior sequel.

Subspecies follows three students as they study folklore in Romania. Through their studies they find themselves embroiled in a blood feud between step-brothers Radu and Stefan, both vampires, one evil, and one benevolent. Radu has previously killed his father in order to gain possession of the Bloodstone, a mysterious artefact said to drip with the blood of the saints. Stefan befriends the girls, and as they become more familiar with local myths and tales, Radu begins to target the girls. Stefan tries to protect them, which only further agitates his brother. The three students find themselves at the centre of a violent, mythical conflict, and not all of them will escape it alive.

Now, the premise doesn’t sound necessarily promising, but in execution the film is actually quite impressive. Yes, it’s full of vampire clichés and ponderous dialogue, but there’s something quite convincing about the film. I’ve no doubt that this is down to the location shooting in Romania. The sense of authenticity is present throughout the film, so the artifice of the dialogue or stop-motion blood monsters never fully distracts from the story world. Buying into that story world is perhaps made easier because the film bothers to set up a legitimate reason for the girls being in Romania in the first place. Although it seems that more attention is paid to the vampire brothers, at least in synopsis and publicity for the film, the three girls, Michelle, Lillian and Mara, are the film’s protagonists. They’re surprisingly likeable, and within the confines of the story are fairly active as characters that could quite easily have been eye candy and little else. This does make the film’s weakest aspect – the shoe-horned romance – all the weaker. However, this being a vampire film the shoe-horned romance is inevitable, and the film makes up for it by being pretty dark in some of its other aspects. We grow to like many of characters, and very few of them make it to the end of the film.

There are some quite specific references to a certain heritage in Subspecies that, while really quite obvious, are welcome nods to a broader history to cinematic vampires. This is clearest in the design of Radu’s make-up, making the nefarious sibling resemble a rock star Count Orlock. The references to Nosferatu don’t stop there, with some expressionistic stair climbing throwing back to Murnau, and the make-up design and some of the feeding scenes recalling Herzog’s Nosferatu in a very overt way. Radu even has something of the Gary-Oldman-in-Coppola’s-Dracula about him, though Subspecies precedes the more ‘prestigious’ film by a year or so. The brothers Radu and Stefan really do crystalise those two sides to the vampire coin – animalistic monster, or Byronic hero. Given the major successes that would follow soon after (Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview with the Vampire), Stefan’s triumph at the film’s end makes for quite the inadvertent metatextual prediction.

The relatively clichéd ending of the film – human girl must be turned vampire by her lover – is flipped right on its head at the start of the sequel, Subspecies II: Bloodstone, which is impressive in that regard. However, the film is, overall, a massive disappointment, featuring almost everything that I had mistakenly expected of the first. Repetitive, dull plotting, gratuitous nudity and flat characters make for a truly disappointing sequel. Not even the deranged witch ‘Mummy’ – Radu’s mother – can save the film, entertaining though she is. Bizarrely the film does, mercifully, manage to fly by, despite being 20 minutes longer than its predecessor (either that or I really did stop paying attention). Perhaps the sequel suffered in my experience of viewing it – having so unexpectedly enjoyed the first film – so it might well be quite fun on its own terms. I also admit that the film did perhaps lose me completely at its gratuitous shower scene, barely 15 minutes into the film. There’s much to technically commend about the film, I suppose, the practical effects being quite impressive, but I’d quite like those effects to hang off an entertaining narrative, if not necessarily a lucid or original one.

The disappointment of Subspecies II doesn’t stir the slightest interest in me for the remaining instalments of the series, but then, neither does it detract from the enjoyment of the first film. Subspecies is impressive low-budget and independent filmmaking which displays a respectful awareness of the genre in which it places itself. Well-worth watching or revisiting, Subspecies might even convince me to rethink some other Charles Band productions… maybe.

The Subspecies movies are out now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray from 88 Films.

Review by Ben Bussey

One thing we can categorically state about Britsh writer-director Steven Sheil is that he is doing his utmost to avoid pigeonholing. Having made his name with the dingy kitchen-sink ordeal horror of Mum and Dad, which was set for almost the duration in a squalid two-up two-down in the shadow of Heathrow airport, one might not immediately anticipate that he’d follow that up with an HBO Asia co-production set in the jungles of Indonesia, following a ragtag team of mercenaries, academics and wealthy financiers on a mysterious and invariably dangerous treasure hunt involving a long-lost World War 2 bunker. And I love that; I think it’s great that Sheil chose for his second feature something so diametrically opposed to his breakthrough. Sure, the fact that I was not especially enamoured with Mum and Dad may be a factor there; give me the choice between miserabilist torture and gung-ho boy’s own adventure, and I’ll be off swinging on a vine with Tarzan every time. (Freudians, do your worst.)

That said, I did head into Dead Mine with at least a little trepidation given that, as I noted when we posted the trailer recently, the whole set-up does seem more than a little reminscent of Outpost, the men on a mission/Nazi zombie chiller which has thus far spawned one sequel and looks to have at least indirectly inspired a number of movies in much the same vein, such as War of the Dead. Dead Mine may stand apart in that it uses Japanese Imperialists as the big bad instead of the Nazis, and takes place in the humidity of the Far East rather than the chill of Eastern Europe – but we might be forgiven for regarding that as little more than slightly different window dressing on a store that’s selling the exact same stuff. That said, when we get right down to it there’s never going to be anything especially new about any kind of adventure into the heart of darkness (see what I did there?), and all that really matters is how well the familiar material is handled. Happily, Dead Mine does indeed handle it well – up to a point. Sadly, it fails to deliver on the full potential of its evocative premise; a premise which, I might add, is very badly undersold by yet another instance of lacklustre and rather misleading cover art, which stresses only the horror element without conveying any sense of the action-adventure element. Poor show. Alas, in a way that is indeed a fair approximation of Dead Mine, in that it is the film’s failure to fully develop its epic action elements that is its undoing.

On the plus side – the set-up is great. We have the requisite bunch of mismatched personalities bouncing off each other in all the wrong ways, from the overpriviliged snobbery of American rich boy Les Loveday and his girlfriend Carmen Soo, to the bravado of grunts Bang Tigor and Joe Taslim (kind of the biggest name here in the wake of The Raid, although his is very much a supporting role), and the world-weariness of military veterans Ario Bayu and Sam Hazeldine. As in the best of these kind of stories, these are people you’d struggle to envisage getting along under normal circumstances; plunge them into an abandoned mineshaft facing who knows what kind of peril, and obviously things are only going to get worse. For the most part it’s compelling and well acted with a nice chemistry between the cast, in particular the comradery that develops between Hazeldine’s philosophical ex-soldier and Miki Mizuno’s inquisitive historian. As they uncover more of the mine’s dark and weird secrets – experimentation, supersoldiers/hideous monsters, you know the drill – it all seems to be building toward a powder keg of a climax…

And then it just stops. Yes, the real kicker with Dead Mine which keeps me from being able to recommend it is that just as things look to be getting really exciting, it comes to a painfully abrupt non-ending, leaving a barrage of unanswered questions and an undeniable sense of being short-changed. I mean seriously – and this isn’t really a spoiler given they’re shown in the trailer (and I’ve even included a picture of one above) – why introduce an army of zombie samurai if we’re not going to see them do serious battle? Imagine if Neil Marshall had chosen to end The Descent within about fifteen minutes of the Crawlers being introduced, with the women making little or no effort to fight back; the film wouldn’t have been half as effective without those climactic bloody brawls. Unfortunately this is very much how the finale of Dead Mine plays out, meaning that all the tension and conflict beforehand amounts to nothing. Maybe they ran out of time and/or money, maybe they hope to carry on to a sequel – the potential is certainly there for them to do so – but as it stands, Dead Mine is almost certain to leave the viewer feeling cheated. And it really does pain me to say so, as it came so close to being a great bit of action-horror entertainment.

Dead Mine is out now on Region 2 DVD from Entertainment One.

Review by Tristan Bishop

Medical-themed horror is all around at the moment, from the diseased queasiness of films like Errors Of The Human Body and Brandon Cronenberg’s brilliant Antiviral, to the body-modification themes of American Mary. The morbid fear of hospitals, illness and surgery is a universal one, and has been represented in film since the medium was young, with horror stars such as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff playing a stream of sinister doctors with disturbing intentions in various poverty row productions, and with 1978’s Coma proving the subgenre can have serious commercial clout.

The Facility is a British crack at hospital horror, the debut feature of one Ian Clark, which brings a slasher-style set-up to the mix, as seven volunteers arrive at the Limebrook Medical Clinic having signed up for testing to make some extra cash. Each of them is to be injected with a new drug called Pro9, and will be kept under observation in the facility for two weeks. Of course, for some reason there is no internet in the facility, and a phone embargo is in place, but each of the volunteers agrees to the measures as they are being paid £2000 for their efforts. The other stipulations are no sex, no drugs, no alcohol and no exercise.

It won’t be a hell of a jump for most horror heads to see exactly where this is going. The most loathsome character in the film, Jed (an estate agent no less, which I’m sure most readers will agree is already good reason to hate him) is determined to show off his ripped body at any turn, and goes about his exercises despite the warnings. Of course Jed soon has a scary psychotic reaction to the drug, and is carted off by the doctors, leaving the other ‘guinea pigs’ fearing for themselves. (The original title of this film was Guinea Pigs, in fact: possibly changed either to avoid confusion with the Japanese gore series, or to ensure lovers of cute furry animals don’t go renting it by mistake.) Of course, some of the others start to exhibit signs that all is not well with the testing too, and eventually they realize they are locked in the medical centre alone, unsure who will turn next.

Despite a fairly hackneyed set-up (and a large thematic debt to John Carpenter’s The Thing), The Facility actually works quite well. Like many films by first time feature directors it could do with a bit of pruning to get the pacing right (although the film only runs around 80 mins), but for most of the running time Clark manages to keep us interested. The script is pretty average but howler-free, though what really saves the film are some decent, convincing performances – two of which are from Welsh actors Nia Roberts (wife of My Little Eye director Marc Evans) and the very promising young actor Aneurin Barnard (hitherto to be known as ‘The Welsh Elijah Wood’), who seems to be carving a career for himself out of low-budget horror at the moment (not a bad thing in my opinion), having starred in quick succession in this; the, um, slightly muddled (if rather likeable) Elfie Hopkins; and Citadel (which I reviewed at Abertoir). Aneurin always puts a good performance in regardless of the quality of the overall film and here is no exception, with his character Adam (a naïve student) being easily the most likeable here. Also on hand is Steve Everts (From TV’s Shameless and Looking For Eric), playing professional ‘labrat’ Morty, who has unnerving stories to tell about previous medical trials he has been involved in. The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, although the characterizations are mostly on the unlikeable side.

My only real beef with the film is the over-abundance of shaky camera, which can be of great effect if you’re filming a 28 Days Later-styled zombie chase, but serves no real purpose in a scene with two characters chatting in a car park, other than to make viewers feel a little bit nauseous. Speaking of nauseous, there is a lot of blood up on the screen in this one, and a couple of effective gore scenes, but nothing too disturbing for the hardened horror fan (unless, like me, you really hate needles!)

In all The Facility is worth a rental. It won’t be appearing on any top ten lists but it passes the time adequately and efficiently, which may be just what the doctor ordered.

The Facility is out now on Region 2 DVD from Momentum.

Review by Ben Bussey

High Rising Productions have long been a familiar name in the horror scene. The team of writer/director Calum Waddell and editor Naomi Holwill have been responsible for the bulk of the extra features on the exemplary Arrow Video range, grabbing interviews with the cast and crew of too many cult favourites to list here. Slice & Dice marks their first stab (pun intended) at breaking out of the DVD bonus section and into the feature presentation, in the form of a 75 minute documentary on arguably the most enduring horror subgenre of the past half-century: the blood-spattered, alcohol-fuelled, weed-scented, shag-happy morality play we know as the slasher.

However, the horror documentary can be a tricky field. Much as how any given horror movie may inspire different audience reactions according to how familiar the viewer is with the film’s influences, a documentary is perhaps even more liable to prompt wildly diverging responses according to viewer familiarity with the subject matter. For example, I personally adored Jake West’s Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape for the simple reason that it shed a great deal of light on aspects of the video nasty era with which I had been hitherto unfamiliar; likewise Jason Paul Collum’s Screaming in High Heels and Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime, both of which exposed me to periods in film history of which my knowledge was limited. However, I have no doubt that all the aforementioned documentaries might leave the viewer cold if their knowledge of the particular subject was already up to speed; indeed, I’ve heard this remarked of West’s film.

In the case of Slice & Dice… as much as I can respect Waddell and Holwill’s intentions to pen a love letter to a subgenre which I too hold dear, my gut feeling right away was that they had done themselves no favours in choosing a subject matter that has already been so well covered. For one, we already have the above average documentary Going To Pieces, which documents the slasher cycle pretty thoroughly with contributions from just about all the major players in the subgenre; then there’s The American Nightmare, which offers a more academic analysis of American horror cinema from Night of the Living Dead onwards. (There are also others I’ve yet to see, such as Nightmares in Red, White and Blue.) I suppose Slice & Dice might stand apart inasmuch as it recounts the slasher from a primarily British perspective, but given how few slashers have ever been made in the UK, I’m less than convinced as to how valuable that perspective really is. Indeed, sad to say I’m far from convinced that Slice & Dice really has much at all to offer that any horror fan worth their salt has not seen, heard and/or read a great many times.

You don’t even need to have seen any of the aforementioned slasher documentaries: the subgenre is deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious – and not just that of genre enthusiasts – and I’d say it has been even since before Scream laid down the rules in black and white. Everyone knows the basics of what a slasher is. Everyone knows what a final girl is. Everyone knows that to behave sinfully is to sign your own death warrant. As such, just how valuable is it to have a bunch of filmmakers, actors and critics of varying degrees of familiarity repeatedly relaying swathes of information with which we are already well aware? Again, I’m sorry to say it, but I really don’t feel there’s much value to it at all; certainly not enough to warrant a standalone DVD purchase.

To be fair, there’s plenty about the documentary that works. The presentation is simple but effective, directly continuing in the style established on the Arrow Video extras, with quaint use of animation likely to raise a smile. Note the stills above of Tobe Hooper framed within the body of a chainsaw, and Corey Feldman on a cinema screen; the bulk of the interview subjects are presented similarly, their faces framed within TV sets, meat cleaver blades, puddles of blood and so on. The absence of big name interview subjects like Carpenter, Cunningham and Craven isn’t actually too great a hindrance, given how widely all three men have spoken on the subject elsewhere; it’s nice to see the spotlight given instead to less celebrated figures like FX guru/Friday the 13th Part VII director John Carl Buechler, Night of the Demons director Kevin Tenney and others. Likewise, instead of overfamiliar clips from the Friday the 13ths and Halloweens there is instead an emphasis on clips from comparatively lesser-known titles like Tourist Trap and The Initiation, which is also relatively refreshing. One particularly pleasant surprise is what an insightful and articulate interview subject the above-pictured Feldman proves to be, offering up some of the film’s most compelling observations. Alas, for the most part such rare insights are few and far between; the likes of Adam Green and Emily Booth come off as enthusiastic as ever, but again tell us very, very little that we haven’t been told umpteen times elsewhere. There’s also a rather haphazard feel to it all; while most facets of the slasher phenomenon are touched on, none of them are really explored in much depth, or – the presence of chapter headings notwithstanding  – with much discernible structure.

This two disc set may pack in just enough to please, notably a decent trailer reel, and Don’t Go In The Backwoods, a 37 minute bonus documentary which looks to have been culled from the same batch of interviews as the main feature, focussing solely on the slasher’s hillbilly cousin, the backwoods horror. (Strange that Alex Chandon, director of British backwoods horror Inbred, is interviewed in the main feature, yet his thoughts on backwoods horror are not aired here; one of many missed opportunities.) For a new generation of fledgling slasher fans, this DVD may well prove a useful means of pointing them in the right direction, and it might prompt more seasoned fans to dig out some oldies that they’ve either missed or haven’t seen in years; indeed, I can’t deny that it’s inspired me to track down a few that I still haven’t got round to seeing. For the most part, however, Slice & Dice just feels like it’s preaching to the choir; reminding us of what it is we love about these movies without really shedding any new light on the matter at all. But hey, given how heavily the slasher genre plays on repetitive stereotypes and tried-and-tested conventions, perhaps it’s only fitting that a documentary on the subject should have a rather ‘been-there, done-that’ feel.

Slice & Dice: the Slasher Film Forever is out on Region 2 DVD on 13th May, from 88 Films.

Review by Kit Rathenar

Having been impressed by Thai director Piyapan Choopetch’s ghost revenge horror My Ex last year, I was hoping for more of the same from My Ex 2: Haunted Lover. Not quite a sequel, though very much in the spirit of the first film, Haunted Lover instead hooks to its predecessor by a bit of meta-cinema: actress Atthama Chiwanitchaphan, who played a supporting role in My Ex, here has the part of Bowie, an actress and sister to main female character Cee. So Haunted Lover opens with Cee and two of her friends emerging from a screening of My Ex, and discussing “Bowie’s” performance in it. It’s a neat if somewhat arch way of linking the two movies together, and also sets a rather self-referential tone that persists on and off through the film.

As with My Ex, the plot of Haunted Lover is simple and in many ways purely archetypal. Cee is in love with the handsome, fickle Aof, whom she catches two-timing her with another girl, Ying. They quarrel; Aof and Cee are in the midst of making up when Ying sees them together, overhears Aof declaring that he doesn’t care for her, and in despair throws herself from a rooftop. By the time her death makes the news, Cee, Bowie, and their two friends are away on the set of Bowie’s latest movie, which is being shot at a beautiful island resort owned by entrepreneur Karn. Aof wants Cee back; Bowie wants Aof to leave her sister alone; Karn is falling in love with Cee; and Ying’s ghost, of course, is determined to destroy them all.

But starting from that very conventional setup, Haunted Lover emerges as something of a film of two halves. While I love Choopetch’s visual direction – he has a real eye for colour, light, and subtle imagery – he’s at his best when handling slower scenes, and the opening half-hour of Haunted Lover is filled with rather too many jarringly quick cuts and short segments that often don’t so much set the scene as obfuscate it. I found the characters less easy to relate to off the bat than those of the original My Ex; Ratchawin Wongviriya’s Cee is especially tricky to get inside the head of. She’s a deeply isolated young woman who doesn’t seem to have any impulse at all to reach out to those around her for help or support, even when she’s seeing ghosts. At least until the action shifts to the more isolated space of Karn’s island resort, there’s a gloss of superficiality to this film; it’s pretty to watch, but it leaves the viewer without much to hang onto it by.

From there on, though, Choopetch’s slower, more poetic style takes control. The focus becomes almost solely on Cee and her sister and friends, Aof’s presence fading into the background and even the ghostly Ying keeping a rather reserved distance, and Choopetch makes the most of the chance to slow down and build atmosphere. However, I rather suspect that Haunted Lover was written backwards from its climax, as the final quarter-hour feels like the sequence that the whole film was waiting to get to: a denouement of trancelike, almost Fulci-esque human and supernatural horror, with the dead, the spirits and nature itself all conspiring to drag our heroine inexorably to a fate all the more terrible for its dreamlike qualities. While the boundaries between reality, nightmare and imagination are fuzzy throughout this movie (to the extent that this very fact is lampshaded in a brief exchange about the role of dream sequences in horror cinema), by the end you start to think those boundaries are gone altogether – only for the final punchline to both restore them, and leave you suddenly and horribly on the wrong side of them. Haunted Lover managed to tap into my atavistic enjoyment of all things dark, phantasmagorical and monstrous while still making my blood run cold, and I’ll always accord any film bonus points for that combination. I love, too, the completely integrated way in which the religious elements of the movie are handled. There’s significant reference to Thai spiritual beliefs and practice, and since Haunted Lover was made primarily for the home market there’s no explanatory catering to a Western viewer. You just have to figure out the significance of these scenes on the fly, and I always approve of art that doesn’t feel any obligation to explain its own culture for the benefit of external observers.

On balance I still don’t think Haunted Lover is as good a film as the original My Ex – the pacing and script simply aren’t as good – but for that final sequence alone I am very glad I sat through this to the end. I really hope that Piyapan Choopetch decides in future films to play to his aesthetic and pacing strengths and do more of this kind of thing, as while there are a hundred directors who can bang out genre horror movies, it would be sad for one with his obvious talents to simply join those ranks. A mix of flaws and strengths; not a classic in itself, but certainly watchable and hinting at something underneath that’s well worth keeping an eye on.

My Ex 2 – Haunted Lover is out on Region 2 DVD on 3rd June, from MVM.

Review by Nia Edwards-Behi

Back in 2010, I saw The Collector in the screening room of the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and almost immediately dismissed it. The film which started life as a Saw prequel came across as nothing more than a dull rip-off, Saw and its several sequels making it seem derivative and unimaginative (which is saying something). Needless to say, when I had the opportunity to see the sequel, The Collection, I was incredibly dubious.

The Collection picks up where its predecessor left off, with the serial killer known only as the Collector on the loose, having murdered a slew of people in inventive ways, while kidnapping a whole bunch of others. While a police manhunt is underway, teenager Elena sneaks off with her friends to a secret warehouse club. Oops! It transpires that this club is also the personal gorehouse of none other than the Collector himself. Luckily for Elena, Arkin, a survivor of the Collector from the previous film, escapes and is arrested by the police for having a criminal record. In exchange for wiping clean his record, Arkin agrees to lead the police to the Collector’s lair, where a lot of running around and dying ensues.

A plot synopsis is essentially pointless for a film like The Collection. Whereas that bothered me immensely about the first film, this sequel is in fact quite a lot of fun, if you like that sort of thing (which I do, sometimes). Now, maybe if I went back and watched The Collector, I’d like that too, having had some distance from the Saw franchise after its conclusion, and having not watched a cheap imitator for quite some time.

However, it might just be that I enjoyed The Collection for the scale of its goriest set pieces. A comparable example might be Ghost Ship, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat through in its entirety, but my god, I do enjoy that ridiculous opening massacre with the wire and the people being cut in half and the blood and stuff. The opening quarter or so of The Collection features a similar scene, or a messier variant of it, but then follows it up with further mass-murdering traps within the warehouse. The film is worth a look for that alone, to be honest, though there are some further entertaining moments to satisfy gorehounds later in the film. There’s some reliance on CGI in these scenes but there’s also enough practical work that it’s not too tiresome to see red pixels flung about the screen.

Aside from the entertaining gore, the film’s pacing is punchy enough to keep you interested in the paper-thin plot. Elena is a sweet enough protagonist to root for, without being particularly fleshed out, while the rest of the cast is passable enough as stock characters. The look of the film is unremarkable, Dunstan’s direction edited to hell in that ADD-style that’s so irritating to watch. Luckily, the film’s barely an hour and a half long, so stylistic annoyances don’t really get a chance to get under the skin and frustrate.

The film’s brief running time means that it really doesn’t let up, and while not particularly suspenseful or clever, the cheap thrills are there and if you let yourself get carried along by the film, there’s not too much to complain about. The one thing I will complain about, though, is the addition of crazed drug-tortured captives in the warehouse who speed around like those new-fangled fast-moving zombie types. The sequence involving these characters just seems to belong in a different film, as though the filmmakers thought to themselves ‘you know what this film needs? Fast zombies!’ but then decided they couldn’t possibly get away with it.

There really is not much else to say about The Collection, other than it is entertaining and worth a watch if you’ve nothing better to do or quite fancy not having to strain your thinking-organ too much. If you fancy wall-to-wall gore and minimal plot, then get some friends round, maybe get them to bring some beers, and stick this film on.

The Collection is released to Region 2 DVD on 29th April, from EntertainmentOne.

Review by Ben Bussey

Ideas: those little sparks of inspiration that are the backbone of all creative acts, yet so often seem painfully thin on the ground. All movies need at least one big idea to bounce off, and to a certain extent it doesn’t really matter whether it’s good or bad, new or old, incredibly smart or monumentally stupid… just so long as it’s there. The ABCs of Death is built around a very eye-catching idea indeed. What if twenty-six films of around four minutes or less in length were made by twenty-six (or as it turns out twenty-eight) independent filmmakers, all working independently of one another, all with a budget of $5,000, with complete creative control and no stipulations beyond the need to open and close on an image of the colour red, and a letter of the alphabet to stand for a form of death – and the resulting 26 films were shown in alphabetical order to comprise a single feature-length movie? Again, regardless of whether we consider this idea to be great, stupid or whatever, it is most definitely an idea that stands apart, and sometimes that’s enough.

As for the ideas that have sparked from that idea… rarely has the descriptor ‘mixed bag’ seemed quite so apt. As remarked by my esteemed colleague Tristan who reviewed The ABCs of Death before me (following on from Eric Lefenfeld, who reviewed it before him), this film is at once very easy and very hard to review. The temptation is there to simply go letter by letter and give a brief synopsis of each with a thumbs up or thumbs down, but I think we’ve seen a lot of that already in relation to this film. I’d like to consider The ABCs of Death from a slightly different angle. See, it’s not only a multi-filmmaker production, it’s a multi-national production, drafting filmmakers from across the globe far and wide, from Japan to Norway, Argentina to Serbia, Austin, Texas to just down the road from me in Leeds, England. Why, it almost feels like the Horror Olympics, what with representatives of all these nations meeting in the same place with the same goal. And if you will forgive me for approaching this with a similarly sports-like, statistical mindset, with an eye on national averages and whatnot, I have one very key thing to say… with moderate spoilers to follow…

USA, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Really now. Look at what some nations brought to the table. Norway gave us a burlesque show featuring anthropomorphic animals set in World War 2 (kudos, Thomas Cappelen Mailing). Japan obliquely recreated the finale of 2001 with toilet humour (bravo, Noboru Iguchi – and Yoshihiro Nishimura also did your nation proud). Indonesia brought a mix of hideous sexual depravity and technical panache to rival that of A Serbian Film (good work, Timo Tjahjanto). On which note, Serbia didn’t fare too badly either (hope you’ve forgiven me for that April Fool’s, Spasojevic). Even Canada managed a gun-toting robot that wouldn’t look out of place in a studio summer blockbuster (almost enough to make me forgive you for Altitude, Kaare Andrews).

And what did you manage, USA, with the same brief, and rather more importantly the same budget? People sitting around apartments for a few minutes. Oh-so-witty, self-aware scenes of the filmmakers themselves talking about how they can’t think of anything. How ‘meta’. And what an absolute cop-out. I’m half surprised we didn’t see some of you literally wiping your asses on the $5,000. I’m only half-kidding here, by the way. The sheer contrast between the level of invention and effort put into some entries, and the complete and total lack thereof from some of the others is just staggering – and in most cases it’s the Americans not putting the effort in. And I do think this matters: so often the US indie scene bemoans the major studios for their excessive budgets and controlling ways, how they stifle creativity and squander resources. Given 100% free rein, and – I’ll say it again – five thousand dollars with which to make a four-minute film, you’d hope there would be nothing but mind-blowing shorts in store from the American independents. Not quite…

Fuck it, I’m going to name and shame the worst offenders: Ti West and Adam Wingard. Bad form, both of you. Not so long ago some of my colleagues at Brutal As Hell have sung your praises highly, hailing you as the future of unique, creative, intelligent, independent horror filmmaking, but on the basis of your efforts here and in that pile of shit to rival the Triceratops droppings from Jurassic Park (otherwise known as V/H/S), I’m as good as done with the pair of you. The laziness of your entries is just painful, and reeks of a sense of entitlement; resting on your laurels, coasting by on your existing kudos within the indie horror community. (Angela Bettis – you also disappoint me.) How these pale in comparison with the entries from lesser-known filmmakers rightly seizing this as an opportunity to grab a wider audience – say, Britain’s Lee Hardcastle, with his unique brand of adult-oriented Claymation. Indeed, in almost every case the bigger name directors are not the ones whose films are most likely to be remembered.

Lest I blanketly condemn the US, though – big pat on the back for Marcel Sarmiento. Unique idea, beautifully realised, every penny and more visible on screen. Just as it should be. Hurrah.

Being British, I suppose I should remark on how ‘our boys’ fare: Lee Hardcastle I’ve mentioned of course, and his entry is particularly pleasing as he won a contest of amateur filmmakers from around the world competing for the vacant letter T. Simon Rumley’s is by far the most grounded, realistic entry, no great surprise given his track record with Red White & Blue and The Living and the Dead; it’s an awkward fit amidst so much excess, but again it stands apart. Ben Wheatley takes a classic horror motif and approaches it from an unusual perspective; very commendable work. Then there’s Jake West, whose attempt at a cool Russ Meyer homage sadly falls flat thanks to a weak twist ending; a common problem with short films, of which West is by no means the only guilty party there.

I could go on listing favourites and least favourites, but like I said, that’s already been done a great deal. The long and short of it is, The ABCs of Death is unlikely to end up replacing Creepshow, Trick ‘r Treat and the Amicus movies as everyone’s favourite horror anthology movies, but there can be little doubt that from here on whenever the subject of the horror anthology movie is raised, this is a film that will always get a mention, and deservedly so. While it’s very hit and miss indeed, the sporadic moments of greatness more than justify the drivel you have to sit through in-between. Oh, look at that; this one film can serve as a metaphor for the entire horror genre…

Courtesy of Monster Pictures, The ABCs of Death opens in 26 UK cinemas this Friday, 26th April (full list of cinemas here), then comes to DVD and Blu-Ray from 3rd June.

By Stephanie Scaife

Although Cronenberg had made a name for himself in the 70’s as the master of low budget gross-out body horror with the release of Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979) it wasn’t until the release of the slightly more accessible sci-fi action flick Scanners (1981) that he really hit the mainstream and garnered a level of box office success.

For those not already in the know, Scanners is about a group of people with telepathic and telekinetic abilities known as “scanners” who are being hunted by a nefarious corporation called ConSec, which under the guise of protecting the public from these scanners is actually trying to harness their abilities for their own evil plans. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is a scanner with particularly powerful abilities who is captured by ConSec and pitted against Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), a rogue scanner who is planning to create his own scanner army to declare war on ConSec.

Scanners isn’t the strongest film in narrative terms, perhaps due to the screenplay not having been finished prior to filming, and Lack’s acting abilities are precisely that – lacking – making it for the best that after this brief dalliance with fame he returned to his original calling as an artist. However, Scanners still has a lot going for it, most famously the exploding head scene, apparently constructed with the use of a watermelon and a sawn-off shotgun, which holds up today and looks absolutely fantastic on Blu-ray. Michael Ironside is an absolute joy to watch as Revok and his final showdown with Vale is really quite something. The score by Howard Shore is some of his finest work in my opinion too. Scanners is very much of its time, and although Cronenberg has made many better films (The Brood, Videodrome, Naked Lunch to name a few) this remains one of his most well loved and best known, making its arrival on Blu-ray a must have for any fan.

Also arriving on Blu-ray are Scanners II: The New Order (1991) and Scanners III: The Takeover (1992) both of which I’d been completely unaware of until the screeners arrived on my doorstep. Released ten years after the original and with no involvement from Cronenberg, both are predictably rubbish. Filmed back to back and directed by Christian Duguay (Screamers, The Art of War) they are stand alone films that bare little relation to the 1981 film and contain none of the original cast or characters.

Although made in 1991 Scanners II: The New Order looks far older than that, not least of all due to the appalling mullet sported by the central character David Kellum (David Hewlett) and the dated production values. The plot is in itself fairly thin on the ground, centring around Kellum, a lowly country boy who after stumbling across a crime scene is caught on CCTV killing an armed robber using his scanner abilities, which brings him to the attention of a shady cop with delusions of grandeur who soon drafts Kellum to aid him in tracking down criminals. The only mildly interesting thing in the film is Raoul Trujillo who takes his scenery chomping to a whole new level as evil scanner Peter Drak. Overall though I found The New Order to be dull and almost entirely forgettable. I don’t know if after ten years the rights fell into the public domain or were available super cheap because there is no other tangible reason why anyone involved with the original would have allowed this film to be made.

As if that wasn’t bad enough Scanners III: The Takeover (also known as Scanner Force) arrived shortly after, and although directed by Duguay it is another stand alone film that doesn’t follow on or use any of the characters from the first sequel. Helena Monet (Liliana Komorowska) is a female scanner who after taking an experimental drug that blocks moral conscience becomes a power hungry mad-woman bent on global domination. In some ways the sheer ridiculousness of The Takeover makes it slightly more watchable than The New Order, stand out scenes such as Helena exploding a pigeon using her scanner abilities because it shits on her and a kung-fu/scanner fight in an Asian marketplace, which are at least faintly amusing.

Cronenberg’s Scanners is a classic, and in the unlikely event that you haven’t seen it then I highly recommend that you rectify that immediately. You can’t do much better than this excellent Blu-ray, which although slim on bonus features comes with a host of new and insightful interviews with the cast and crew. The release of the two sequels seems unnecessary and for completists only; mercifully both discs were vanilla so I didn’t have to sit though any special features.

Scanners, Scanners II and Scanners III are all out now on Region 2 Blu-Ray from Second Sight.

Review by Tristan Bishop

Do you remember the J-horror boom of the early noughties? My first experience was The Ring, on an Asian VCD purchased in London’s Chinatown after reading about the buzz it (and the subsequent sequels) were generating in Japan. This was sometime in 2000 – by then the film had been out in its native country for two years (we were pretty slow to catch on in the West), but thankfully this meant I could then binge on a succession of films inspired by the success of Hideo Nakata’s smash hit. The initial impact of these films can’t be dismissed – the likes of Ju-On and Dark Water (my personal favourite) eschewing both the extreme gore of previous Japanese horror cinema and the done-to-death ‘smart’ teen slasher films from the US in favour of slow-burning supernatural creepiness. They were a breath of fresh air that the genre desperately needed. Of course all great success must be replicated and copied until all we are left with is faded celluloid facsimiles, and by 2007 the genre reached its conceptual nadir with the release of Exte, a film about, I shit you not, haunted hair extensions.

But J-horror wasn’t exactly gone forever. Instead it went travelling to the USA, changed its identity and ended up making a pile of money by heavily influencing the current wave of big budget ghost stories – The Woman In Black (2012) and Sinister (2012) are both good examples of the J-horror ethos writ big, making a pile of cash and no doubt about to influence the next five years of horror cinema themselves.

The interesting thing about The Echo is, on first viewing, I imagined it to be a film knocked out in the shadow of the big budget ghost boom. But it isn’t. It’s from 2008 for one thing, and only just making its UK debut – which in itself would be cause for concern. It is also, it transpires, a remake of a 2004 Filipino film called Sigaw, which I am ashamed to say I had never heard of (although it was apparently a box office smash in its home country). And it is a remake which is also by the director of the original (one Yam Laranas). Keeping up? Well done.

Bobby, played by Jesse Bradford (of Swimfan fame!) has been released from prison, and moves back to his late mother’s apartment in New York’s East Village. He attempts to rebuild his former life but everywhere he looks his former friends no longer want anything to do with him. He manages to find a job at a garage which employs ex-cons, and looks up an old girlfriend, Alyssa (played by Amelia Warner), which doesn’t go all that well at first. However, Bobby is nothing but persistent, and Alyssa, it transpires, feels some guilt about his incarceration (I’m not going to spoiler this as it gets treated as a big reveal later in the film, although not to any great effect to be honest).

Of course there are more sinister things going on, and no sooner than Bobby starts hearing strange noises and finding bloodstains in the apartment, he discovers that, prior to her death, his mother began to lock herself in her apartment for weeks on end. He soon starts to seemingly hallucinate crying women outside the apartment, and things start to build to a head when he overhears his neighbour, a police officer, being abusive to his family. Eventually Bobby will need to confront whatever demons are at play – but are they real or in his mind?

The first problem with The Echo is one of over familiarity. Anyone who has seen a few of the J-horror pics mentioned above will find nothing new here. I personally guessed at the course of the film around twenty minutes in. The second problem is the acting. Bradford is, well, exceedingly average at best (and looks remarkably like a younger Matthew Fox from Lost), and aside from Kevin Durand (a familiar face from such fare as Wolverine, Real Steel and, oddly enough, Lost!), who is badly underused in his role as the sinister cop, turns out to be the best actor here. They aren’t given a heck of a lot to do with a by-the-numbers script, either, which lacks decent characterisation or believable dialogue.

What is to enjoy is the slick direction of Laranas, who ensures the film at the very least looks like it cost a lot more than the $5 million budget (as estimated on a certain film database, anyway) and he and cinematographer Matthew Irving (who also shot Quarantine 2 and Dolph Lundgren-starrer Stash House) pull off some very pleasing set-ups and camera movements – I was even reminded of Mario Bava at a couple of moments in the way which the camera tells the story far more impressively than the perfunctory script. I can’t deny a couple of creepy moments earlier on too, although by the time we understand exactly what is going on any tension has been replaced by tedium.

I can see why The Echo has only now been released – the ghost story boom is at its height, with Dark Skies currently in cinemas, Insidious part 2 around the corner, and any number of Paranormal Activity films defying logic by smashing the box office again and again, but do yourself a favour and don’t bother with this one. It really is very dull.

The Echo is out now on Region 2 DVD from Metrodome.