Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

There’s a strange feeling of foreboding when you browse a film you’re due to review and find it’s one of those rarest of beasts – one of IMDb’s ‘Worst Rated’. Considering the sheer amount of films which are listed on that site, this means any film getting a mention for how appalling it is must have a very special set of qualities indeed. But then, taste is so subjective, and there’s a surprisingly fine line between so bad it’s good, and just – bad. I’ve pondered this division before, and it turns out it can sometimes be a difficult one to call, at least on first impressions alone. But, still. At the time of writing, Birdemic: Shock and Terror rates an impressive 1.8 out of 10. And that at least says something. Whatever else it is, it’s a noteworthy film in that respect.

It’s not long before Birdemic begins to reveal its noteworthiness in other respects: the opening credits misspell ‘Cast’ as ‘Casts’, for starters, and then with no further ado we’re treated to an excruciating diner scene in which we are introduced to key players Rod (Alan Bagh) and Nathalie (Whitney Moore, who apparently doubled up her role to become make-up artist after the first two make-up artists quit). The film’s first shock revelation now becomes apparent: director James Nguyen only has one camera. This variously means that the same scene has to be stopped and repeated to get a modicum of footage together for editing, which goes some way towards excusing the casts for seeming so pained and awkward. This lack of kit really comes into its own during a scene intended to represent a high-powered business meeting, but more on that later: the point for the time being is, Rod likes Nathalie, and in the universe of Birdemic this makes it acceptable to terrifyingly try to chat her up, eventually wearing her down with glassy eye-contact and an inability to read a menu in a normal human way. Some by-the-by commentary on a TV introduces the theme of the environment going awry, which is as far as we get with context, but, whatever; Rod is having a good day otherwise. He has scared Nathalie into a date, secured a million-dollar deal at his telesales job and chatted to a man about getting a solar panel fitted to his house. It doesn’t get any better than this. It’s the American Dream. A ‘love scene’ ensues where everyone stays clothed, but at least it gets the main characters into a room so that we’re ready for the birds to attack first thing in the morning.

The birds themselves are an obvious facet of the film’s 1.8 out of 10 score, of course. If you think you’ve seen – and hated – bad, cheap, needless CGI elsewhere during your lives, then you could still learn a great deal from Birdemic; looking like animation from a Commodore 64, there has been absolutely no success in making them look like credible critters, nor indeed doing anything to the animation to make them look like anything other than transfer tattoos someone has crudely applied to the film. That’s before we get to the way they appear and disappear, or that some of them inexplicably explode while others don’t, or that their flight doesn’t seem to follow any rules of physics, or indeed that there’s only one type of bird that I could feasibly make out, and that’s some sort of eagle-y thing. A species not native to the part of the world where there is meant to happen, by the way. Attacking for a very ill-defined reason, before one day just deciding to fuck off out to sea (and for once I have no worries about spoilering…)

However, the birds themselves are only part of Birdemic’s epic failure on every single level of storytelling, script, editing, cohesion, and overall skill in filmmaking. Apparently, this film took four years of work on Nguyen’s part, a fact which is strange and unusual; it makes me almost pleased we have a derivative crowdsourced zombie movie in the offing (still) here in the UK which has taken more than double that time, or else this would all seem like a situation which doesn’t make sense, a weird one-off, a rift in space/time. Surely, after all, more years’ work would mean more time to improve, re-shoot, edit better, even re-write. Instead, exterior shots of a car seem like a good idea over and above everything else, although actual knowledge of cars is a bit on the thin side. Amounts of money thrown around in the dialogue don’t make any sense and come across as childish, simply sums pulled out of the air: Rod nails a one million deal from a crappy telesales cubicle whilst barely needing to say anything to the person who’s clearly definitely really on the other end of the phone, let alone rousing himself from his Quaalude fug; the business itself, however, soon after sells for A BILLION (hence the stop-start-shake her hand again business meeting which really epitomises the clumsiness of the one-camera approach). These are Mickey Mouse Club numbers, making it glaringly obvious that the script and its writer are circling the airport. And there’s more. The desperate race away from the occasionally explosive eagles to the coast starts with people armed with coat hangers; the same people eventually opt for automatic weapons, admittedly, but will also drive past a convenience store to go fishing in the open, eagle-infested air (magically catching fish from water barely deep enough to wet your feet in, too) or if they do head into a shop for emergency supplies, Nathalie thinks this means a bottle of Cava – so at least there’s one sensible decision in this film. Oh, and someone’s mobile phone goes off. By that stage in the game, it hardly matters.

None of this, of course, tells you anything about whether I enjoyed it or not.

I think it varied as the film went on, to be honest: to start with, the sheer ineptitude of the edits and the script were absolutely joyous, and I fell about laughing at the initial bird-strikes. But I had some company at the time, whereas I watched the end of the film on my own, and eventually blew my funny fuse. There’s only so much of that sort of hilarity you can really appreciate when watching solo. By the end, I felt as though I was privy to the goings-on of a parallel universe – neither funny nor sad, just different. It’s clear to see that Birdemic: Shock and Terror is at its best as a spectator sport, and a film which could exponentially increase in entertainment value according to how many viewers it has at a given time. Its weird blend of innocence, earnestness and ineptitude is oddly charming, but would benefit by a crowd to appreciate it. This is almost certainly why it’s garnered its reputation as something between an endurance challenge and a cursed videotape (and why I think Sundance was wrong to reject it; the hysteria it could have caused at a mass viewing would have been its own reward.) Definitely one of those movies which needs to be seen to be believed, this one – and as luck would have it, Severin Films are about to oblige.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) will be released by Severin Films on 15th February 2016.

Let’s get one thing straight before we start here: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is absolutely ‘NOT A SEQUEL TO VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. IT IS WHOLLY ORIGINAL…’ and so continues the on-screen legend as the earliest frames of the latter movie start to roll. Are we convinced? Well, Valley of the Dolls – the Swedish original – had emerged three years previously, with identical subject matter, as well as being loosely based on the same novel. Even without doing a bit of digging on Russ Meyer’s own spin on the effects of the fame machine here, it would seem from this protest-too-much declaration that he’s either a fibber, delusional, or perhaps more likely, simultaneously making fun of his film and us even before we really get going. (Turns out that his film was intended as a straight-up parody; more on the success of this later.)

Original film or otherwise, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that this film has a rather unusual pedigree. The somewhat distracting opening titles fail to obscure the revelation that Roger Ebert – yes, that Roger Ebert – was the man behind the story and screenplay on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Turns out that after giving Meyer a couple of generous reviews, the (rather inexperienced) Ebert was invited to work on the project. Now, as his first outing in such a capacity, there’s no denying that this is original.

Onto the film itself. It’s all about an all-girl band eking out a reasonable living playing live, albeit with one eye on the bright lights of LA. The LA of their dreams is represented to us, by the way, via a montage of landscapes, sheer fabrics – and boobs. Whether this really screams ‘musical success’ is by-the-by, and so Kelly (Dolly Read), Casey (Cynthia Myers) and Petronella (Marcia McBroom), together with manager Harris (David Gurian) head there, soon meeting up with Kelly’s long-lost millionairess Aunt Susan, a trusting soul who works in advertising (?) who immediately offers to give Kelly a huge share of the money, to the horror of her financial adviser – who has a point, let’s be honest. Still, Susan is a well-connected woman about town, and she offers to introduce the gang to all the best parties on the scene. News of the band’s prowess catches the attention of a key party host, Z-Man (John LaZar) and soon the re-named Carrie Nations are on for the big time, all under Z-Man’s watchful eye of course. Sadly, it can’t all be digging it and impromptu performances, even though a lot of it is: relationships suffer, greed kicks in, and the corrupting power of hedonism does its thing.

As a film, I’ll be honest and confess I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. It tends towards the dull. The story does head off in a few unexpected directions, and although the film is painfully slow in places, it’ll then suddenly ramp it up with a diversion which is usually in awkward taste: lobbing in material on abortion, murder and disability – well, even taking our rather more guarded times into consideration, it certainly ain’t gonna be for everyone. The film is at its absolute worst when playing with serious ideas in any way, shape or form, and I’ll admit that it tested my patience plenty. That all said, plot clearly isn’t a huge priority for Meyer/Ebert in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and perhaps I shouldn’t be reading the film as if it is. It’s obviously intended as cartoonish, and aims to be ridiculous. In this it patently succeeds. But satire? Nah. It’s too piecemeal, too conflicted. It goes from po-faced development to oddly innocuous titillation just a touch too much for me (the sex and nudity are lower in the mix than you might think).

Equally, and as ever in Meyer’s work, the script is a blend of baffling and charming. I don’t think Rob Zombie has sampled anything from this film, but I’d bet £5 he may in future; you can alternate, if you wish, between playing ‘hippie cliche bingo’ and laughing at the ‘sexy’ chat-up routines, then go from this to Z-Man and his literary stylings, all against a rather repetitive vision of late 60s parties which feel like the fevered imaginings of a mad uncle (Meyer was nearly fifty at the time the film was made, although Ebert was much younger). It just doesn’t really hang together for me.

Still, despite its freewheeling around, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls would be a delight for lovers of high camp, even more so for people who like their 60s and 70s time capsules good and lurid, and as ever Arrow’s presentation of the film is superb. Meyer fans who want to complete their Blu-ray collections will be pleased to know that his lesser-known film The Seven Minutes is included in this release, as well as the usual array of special features we’ve come to expect.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is available now on DVD and Blu-Ray from Arrow Video.

By Keri O’Shea

if genre film has taught us anything (and I think you’ll agree, it has) then we know that death needn’t be the end for that whole boy-meets-girl thing. It’s happened for years on our screens in a variety of different ways, from Return of the Living Dead III through to the rather flawed Burying the Ex and onto the subtle joys of Life After Beth. (Oddly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any films where the male love interest comes back from the dead, with his old character intact, to revisit a female partner, but I digress). Point here is, the basic premise behind Nina Forever was already familiar to many viewers before directors Ben and Chris Blaine decided to put their own spin on the idea. Happily, the story they weave out of these elements is anything but tried-and-tested, and a curious, sometimes challenging film emerges.

We start with what appears to be a death scene: a young man lies, awkwardly sprawled and motionless, across a main road, having just fallen from his motorbike. Here’s the first surprise the film has to offer – he isn’t dead, but he really wanted to be. Rob (Cian Barry) has just attempted suicide in the wake of the death of his beloved girlfriend Nina, who herself died in a traffic accident. All he wanted to do was to join her; he fails, however, and eventually returns to his humdrum job at a local supermarket, where he has attracted the attention of co-worker and paramedic student Holly (Abigail Hardingham). Where most people would tiptoe around the bereaved, Holly is actively interested by what she sees as Rob’s brooding intensity and dedication to his love; she fantasises about what it would be like to fuck someone like that. Life does after all go on, Holly’s clumsy attentions are rewarded and before too long, romance blossoms for this somewhat damaged pair of people.

At first, Holly finds Rob just as intense, but also sweet and self-conscious, as she seems to have hoped. It all seems to be going well and, like most new couples, they can’t keep their hands off each other. Sadly for them, that’s where things start getting …less rosy. See, no sooner are Holly and Rob finally going at it, but the deceased Nina – bloodied, broken, but unmistakably she – re-appears, tearing out of their conjugal bed to look decidedly unimpressed with this new state of affairs. Fully aware of her condition, Nina is quick to play with semantics and pointedly reminds Rob and Holly that she will, for all time, have an unassailable position: never really an ex, never really gone either. Sex seems to be the catalyst – as well generating as an early relationship obstacle par excellence – but with Nina turning up to bleed all over the sheets every time the couple get close, can they work out how to stop it?

It’s possible that you could watch this film and just take it on face value, accepting that a jealous revenant rocks up every time her boyfriend and his new squeeze get together and that this causes some decidedly British ‘difficult moments’. However, I think you’d have to talk yourself out of appreciating many of the film’s more charming and interesting aspects to do this, because for all the sex and gore (and these are pretty abundant, to be fair) it’s very difficult not to see the film on a much more symbolic level, and as such to see it as a much more clever film. Symbolism is definitely in there from the get-go, from the first time the couple share a quiet moment together and wind up sharing a pomegranate (Greek myths and legends anyone?) right through to the film’s brilliant, subtle verbal exchanges, albeit exchanges which chiefly occur between the two women.

And this is something which strikes me about the film – it’s very female-dominated. Whatever Rob’s initial appeal to Holly, his frisson of notoriety dissipates as the story progresses; it turns out he’s not all that brooding or unattainable, not really, whereas Nina is a truly unknown quantity, a woman – dead or alive – with power over the situation and its key players. The battle of wills between her and Holly goes a hell of a lot further than straightforward feminine jealousy, too. Nina Forever has hit upon a novel way to illustrate some fundamental human anxieties, giving the idea of the spectre of the ex-partner a very literal, ghastly form, but also placing it at an intersection, using it equally to explore the weight of grief upon people and how they act as a result. Nina embodies a great deal, and her continued presence stands in for different things at different times, a task which O’Shaughnessy shows herself more than equal to. However, Abigail Hardingham deserves much credit for her performance here: Holly is naive, young, but what’s going on in her head belies her exterior, and she grows ever more interesting as she clearly comes to terms with the implications of her own inferiority issues. So, hey, add a coming-of-age aspect to the list of themes on offer.

A film which contains such a mass of different aspects is always going to struggle in places, and indeed the way in which Holly and Rob initially deal with the appearance of a twisted corpse in their bed is a little more accepting than you might expect, but then again, these sequences have perversely funny aspects to them, too. A sharp, ascerbic comedy runs through the film like a seam, coming to the surface is some unexpected places. Add to all this impressive aesthetics, high production values and, to top things off, a thought-provoking conclusion, and it’s fair to say that the positives far outweigh anything else here.

I started this review by saying that mixing boy-meets-girl with macabre elements is nothing new, and perhaps it isn’t. Thankfully, however, Nina Forever shows that when filmmakers challenge themselves to do something different, they can see this through in some style – and remind us that grisly content never needs to get in the way of a compelling narrative, even if the grisly content is an integral part of the film.

Nina Forever is released on February 22nd 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

It’s perhaps something of a surprise that there’s a sequel to one of the most notorious horror flicks of the 80s, but nonetheless, after a hiatus of a few years, during which interim director Jörg Buttgereit made Der Todesking (another deeply morbid piece of work), Nekromantik got a second chapter. In fact, we start where we left off, with the anguished main character of the first film, Rob, in his death throes – with the film flitting from a sombre black and white right back into lurid colour as he dies on screen, again. So much for him, you might think, but it ain’t over yet. After all – what could be more fitting, for a man of Rob’s tastes, than to be dug back up and given the same treatment he and his erstwhile girlfriend Betty gave to the dead? Before we see that she’s armed with the tools for the job, we might be able to guess that the young woman entering the cemetery (Monika M.) isn’t just there to leave flowers. She digs Rob up, and – somehow – takes him back to her own apartment. There’s no wire around the bed this time, but nurse Monika’s unusual predilections are quite clear, given her decor…

So far, so familiar, but despite being another exploration of a person who is respectable enough by day yet has the sort of secret sexual mores that would get you locked up, Nekromantik 2 is quite different in the way it plays out. In the first film, we have a relationship (between Betty and Rob) which is seemingly all pinned on her aberrant tastes, and his success – or failure – to please her. It is Betty’s exit which precipitates the worst of Rob’s excesses afterwards. In the sequel however, Monika’s struggle is between her obviously unorthodox desire for the dead, and her new (living) boyfriend Mark (Mark Reeder), a man she seems rather fond of. Much of the film follows their developing romance; as things progress, Monika finds it more and more difficult to stop her nefarious activities spilling over into everyday life. It’s by no means a dialogue-heavy venture, this film, nor is it a character study in any conventional sense, but it’s definitely far more about the inner life of a young woman who seems, to all intents and purposes, respectable. There’s a broader sense of place and time here, perhaps because Buttgereit knew he’d achieved a lot of the shocks possible via the subject matter in the first film – so that it made sense to explore things differently.

Of course, this is still a film about necrophilia, and it’s still a Buttgereit movie. We have ample material which repels and disturbs here, perhaps even more so in places than in the first film. As such, these films are never going to be for everybody, and I’d add that they’ll not be to the tastes of most horror fans either (I commented during my review of Nekromantik that I have no wish to see real-life footage of animal slaughter in horror cinema and that is equally true here, where it occurs again – even if I understand why it’s there). This certainly isn’t Weekend at Bernies with some boobs thrown in. That unseemly vibe from the first film is definitely present and correct here, then, alongside the lo-fi appearance which looks part illicit footage, part home movie, and practical effects which are simple, but very good: Rob ‘past his best’ is a horrible thing to look at, for example, and yet a lot of that is via the simple fact of the flesh appearing wet, clammy. Many of the scenes in Nekromantik 2 are grisly, unconventional and protracted along these lines; the soundscape is hectic and the overall feel of the film is unpleasant. Add to that some exceedingly outré sequences, such as the art film which consists of naked people talking ornithology, and you may find yourself asking a few questions at the end. As I say, these films are never going to appeal to everyone; it would be a strange world if they did.

For all that, I did find Nekromantik 2 a compelling watch and in many ways, it’s a striking piece of indie cinema, very much part of a scene where you made up your own rules and found your own ways of achieving what you wanted to achieve. I probably wouldn’t put it on if I wanted to feel better about the world, but it’s a worthwhile continuation of a strange, challenging sequence of films nonetheless. This Arrow release is loaded with extra features, too, many of which shed new light on the making of the film and would certainly be of interest to the more dedicated viewer…

Nekromantik 2 is available from Arrow Films now.

By Keri O’Shea

Although it’s hardly the first musical genre to bear the association, you have to admit that the relationship between heavy metal and black magic is a strong one. Forget your Stryper and your POD; we all know that these bands are basically aberrations in a pleasingly-familiar landscape of devils, witches and caco-daemons. What else would you want from a genre that’s so beloved out of outsiders? Bizarrely, though, despite the fact that more bands than you can count will quite openly pay homage to Old Scratch in their lyrics, merchandise, imagery and interviews, metal has always been dogged by the sort of people who overlook all of this to look for hidden messages of evil. It’s the obvious thing to do, after all; never mind what the lyrics say when you play them forwards – let’s focus on what they clearly don’t say when you play ’em backwards! This idea of covert Satanism has jogged alongside the musical genre since the 1980s, and along the way it’s given us some fun horror cinema. Perhaps most notably to my mind, 1986’s Trick or Treat neatly combined paranoia about metal musicians, strands of the occult and a boy coming of age under extreme duress. It’s an obvious comparison to make to this year’s terrific Deathgasm (2015), but I think for me the newer film has the clear edge, simply because it has the nerve to play out so joyously. It sends metal up as only someone who really gets metal could do – namely by laughing with metal, not at metal.

Teenager Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a metalhead; he’s also just had to move in with his very sour, very religious aunt and uncle, and his obnoxious bully of a cousin after his mother got herself…in trouble, shall we say. For him it’s so far, so bad; adding to this, he gets a hard time at school and gets forced to play D&D with his only friends Dion and Giles at lunchtime. It’s only when he meets Zakk (spelled with two Ks, of course) at the local record shop that things begin to turn around for him. Zakk (James Blake) is a confirmed dickhead, but his musical tastes are impeccable and he offers the rest of the guys the opportunity to form a band at last – the eponymous Deathgasm of the title, and only one of the list of suggested band names mentioned during this film which both a) made me laugh out loud and b) sounded precisely as if I probably already own them. Deathgasm could have gone on as a garage band from this point onwards and caused no harm to anyone, then; Brodie could have pined for the lovely Medina (Kimberley Crossman) and life could have rolled on. It could have, were it not for the fact that Zakk finds out, via a local ‘zine, that one of their mutual heroes from a band called Hexensword has actually resurfaced – as luck would have it, very near to where they live. The best course of action? A fan letter? Hanging around, hoping for a sighting? Nah. Instead Zakk encourages Brodie to join him in breaking into the home of the erstwhile Rikki Daggers (yes, two Ks again) before attempting to steal a rare slab of Hexensword vinyl from his grasp; they fail somewhat, but escape with a strange collection of antique pages – pages which contain music, music which is seemingly being sought by a strange group of occultists, who have been trying to trace Daggers for years. In the meantime, however, Deathgasm of course play the music they’ve discovered…

Doing just enough to craft believable, funny characters with a spot-on script and great pace before pitching them into a maelstrom of blood splatter and demonic possession, not to mention making succinct fun of the association between metal and the occult, this is the most fun I’ve had with a film in a long while. I’d hazard a guess that this is because director Jason Lei Howden and his team had at least as much fun making it. The whole project just beams, every time it gets away with yet another savage SFX take or a deadpan line (or quite often, both in one fell swoop). Howden has some serious credentials as a filmmaking professional, but this is his first feature-length movie, and even as a complete stranger I can almost hear that thought process which goes ‘This is my film, and I’m going to do all the things I’ve been itching to do for years’. Speaking of those SFX skills, Deathgasm will certainly win favour with many genre fans who love to see practical effects rather than a lot of CGI-by-default; I think there’s room for a little of the latter, personally, but the film certainly looks good in red.

There do seem to be some clear inspirations for the film. To name just a notable couple, the possessions here – jerky movements, shrill voices, rapid physical decay – are strongly reminiscent of Sam Raimi at his best (ahem, Evil Dead II) and the sheer levels of gore involved remind me of Peter Jackson, back before he made that mind-boggling leap from lo-fi vomit-drinking to red carpets and Oscars. All in all, though, despite its lineage, Deathgasm is very much its own film too. It always feels affectionate towards the music it’s sending up; this is vital. Metal fans have never minded a laugh and we will readily laugh at one another (by the way, nice homage to an Immortal video in the Deathgasm promo!) but I think, generally, we don’t want to be mocked by someone who has no knowledge or interest in metal, because the jokes are always hackneyed and shit. A real sense of warmth prevents that from being the case here, and helps allow for a balance between human interest – yes, really – and high action, so even if you don’t laugh at the Manowar reference, then you’ll find plenty else to laugh about.