Keri O'Shea

Decoding ‘The Witch’ (2015) Part 1

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Editor’s note: this article discusses The Witch in detail, and as such contains some spoilers. Please read it after you’ve seen the film. For a spoiler-free review, click here.

One of the most unusual and atmospheric films to hit the festival circuit late last year, The Witch – a claustrophobic tale of isolation, privation and the possibility of malignant supernatural forces in the New World – is about to get its general release. There’s been a sizeable promotional campaign behind the film so far, and it seems that the distributors have high hopes that it will make something of a breakthrough into the mainstream. We’ve already commented that we think some of the choices behind this promotion have been questionable and may even risk misrepresenting the film to a potential audience who expect something different; I certainly hope that isn’t the case, and that those who go and see it properly appreciate this rather understated historical thriller. Misleading poster campaigns are, after all, par-for-the-course these days; that isn’t really the topic of discussion here. Rather more relevantly, many hundreds of films have boasted that they are ‘based on true events’, and The Witch is fascinating because it, too, declares that it is based on a number of alleged real-life accounts from the 17th Century – it’s the nature of those accounts which gives this film both a unique perspective and an otherworldliness which reaches right back to the real New World settlers of the time.

“If ever there were witches, men and women in covenant with the Devil, here are multitudes in New England.”
The Rev. Samuel Parris (1692)

Those who set off from England seeking to build their ‘City on the Hill’ – their Christian utopia, unfettered by what they saw as the corruption of Europe – nonetheless took with them many of the anxieties which had plagued them in the Old World. Frequently, these anxieties concerned witchcraft. In making the claim, therefore, that The Witch is uniquely closely based on the accounts of settlers who found themselves threatened by magic in their new communities, these ‘true-life events’ are poised at an intriguing intersection between real and unreal, natural and supernatural, Christianity and its dark, persistent underbelly. Names, places, dates, ages – many of these things were meticulously recorded by the Puritans and are verifiably true; they just happen to occur in these meticulous narratives alongside descriptions of malevolent curses, plagues, blights, possessions, shape-shifting and unholy covenants with the Devil. Many early American settlers adamantly believed in the phenomena which scares Thomasin, her parents and siblings, and adjudicated against it accordingly. This article takes a closer look at some of the accounts which may have influenced the filmmakers, showing how they intersect with a sensitive and accurate exploration of these themes in the film and how The Witch captures this (to us) incongruous state very well, forcing us to peer between the lines of its narrative and wonder just what, if any, evil influence is holding sway over the family.

THE HAMMER OF THE WITCHES

In order to look at the society of the 17th Century, however, we need to look back further and to understand more about the belief in witchcraft which the Puritans first inherited, then exported. Times of unrest have long given way to periods of panic and unreason, and despite the Renaissance being known for great leaps forward in science and the arts, throughout the Late Medieval and Renaissance years various calamities were more and more often explained away as malignant interference caused by witchcraft. Whilst certainly not the only word on the subject, one book in particular encapsulated much of the paranoia about witches, whilst also exerting a surprising amount of influence in Europe (as well as taking advantage of new technology such as the Gutenberg Press, thus neatly representing how the shock of the new doesn’t necessarily dispense with the old). This strange nexus of officialdom and folk belief, peppered with unsubstantiated anecdote and meticulous rule of law, was a tome entitled the Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of the Witches’) which appeared in the late 1480s and came to act as something of a ‘witch-hunter’s manual’, repetitively dismissing all cynicism on the subject in order to advise on how to detect, arrest, try and punish witches. Gaining credence and influence in the following decades, the MM thereafter turned up in the royal courts of Europe and the higher strata of the law, excusing and bestowing jurisdiction on the subject of witchcraft.

We shouldn’t underestimate how important something like the Malleus Maleficarum was; it set the bar for the treatment of witches for all of the subsequent ‘witch crazes’ which followed, and its words on what witches did (and why they did it) can certainly be seen in 17th Century New England. For instance, the book relates the words of an alleged witch and child murderer, who told her accuser “with our spells we kill them in their cradles or even when they are sleeping by their parents’ side…then we secretly take them from their graves, and cook them in a cauldron, until the whole flesh comes away from the bones to make a soup which may easily be drunk. Of the more solid matter we make an unguent which is of virtue to help us in our arts and pleasures and our transportations.” This unguent, then, was applied to the broomsticks of legend (the same witch also mentions enchanting chairs in the same way) and used for flight. It’s an idea about witchcraft which has lasted over five hundred years so far, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it makes sense within the remit of Puritan society too, and is referenced shortly after the baby disappears in our film. The Devil and his followers couldn’t create matter (only God had that power) but he could certainly help his practitioners to break the rules of the natural world, and – in keeping with a subtext of witchcraft belief that witches abhorred conventional gender roles, including motherhood and child-rearing – dispatching an infant would have been little concern to them, but monstrous to mainstream society.

Likewise, witches were believed to have the ability to shape-shift, taking on animal form; they were also frequently linked with ‘familiars’, animals which usually lived with the witches and worked on their behalf for the fee of suckling from them (and there’s that monstrous spin on motherhood again, folks). In The Witch, the family first hunt a hare which seems to have some sort of supernatural significance; they fail to catch it, and it lures father and son deeper into the unfamiliar woods near which they have settled, whilst also later re-appearing near the farmstead, inevitably a portent of far worse things to come. An association between witches and creatures such as rats, cats and hares (as well as alleged hybrid species, unrecognisable to witnesses) has been of longer duration, and the Malleus Maleficarum describes “a workman [who] was one day chopping some wood to burn in his house. A large cat suddenly appeared and began to attack him, and when he was driving it off, another even larger one came and attacked him with the first more fiercely. And when he again tried to drive them away, behold, three of them together attacked him, jumping up at his face, and biting and scratching his legs. In great fright and, as he said, more panic-stricken than he had ever been, he crossed himself and, leaving his work, fell upon the cats, which were swarming over the wood and again leaping at his face and throat, and with difficulty drove them away by beating one on the head, another on the legs, and another on the back. After the space of an hour, while he was again engaged upon his task, two servants of the town magistrates came and took him as a malefactor and led him into the presence of the bailiff or judge…the judge broke into these words: ‘You most wicked of men, how can you not acknowledge your crime? At such a time on such a day you beat three respected matrons of this town, so that they lie in their beds unable to rise or to move!'” Eventually, the hapless man is able to prove that the ‘respected matrons’ and the animals are one and the same. Ideas about animal familiars certainly persist into the Hopkins days in England, and cross the Atlantic too (as late as the 19th Century, the infamous story of the Bell Witch hauntings tell of a strange, large hare on his property which farmer John Bell initially attempted to shoot. This creature seemed to herald a widespread array of supernatural phenomena at the Bell family home, much of which later centred upon alleged visitations by a malign witch, often called ‘Kate’.)

So, from the time of the Hammer of the Witches and beyond, a rich seam of fear and accusation had frequently placed women in particular under suspicion of covert attempts to subvert and destroy Christian society via magic. It’s little surprise that, labouring under the dual weights of expectation and persecution which drove them to seek the New World in the first place, the Puritans would end up taking the old and deep-rooted belief in witchcraft with them, where it often became intensely magnified and distorted by their extraordinary, often challenging circumstances.

In the second part of Decoding The Witch, I’ll look more closely at contemporary accounts of witchcraft in 17th Century America, identifying further aspects which overlap with the narrative of the movie: assaults on crops, livestock, children – and the particular enticements offered by Old Scratch. To quote the Malleus Maleficarum one last time, we’ll look at the ways “witches can with the help of the devil bring harm upon men and their affairs in all the ways in which the devil alone can injure or deceive, namely, in their affairs, their reputation, their body, their reason, and their life” – a definite focus for the events in the film, not forgetting that level of uncertainty it’s able to maintain.

Click here for Part 2…

From ‘Too Crude’ to ‘Twice as Vulgar’! An Interview with Deathgasm Director Jason Lei Howden

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

Interview by Keri O’Shea

If you haven’t seen Deathgasm yet then, if I may, it’s time you climbed out from under that nice, safe rock of yours and ascended to the top of a towering crag (preferably where there are some obliging women in chainmail to cling to your legs, Manowar-style). It was one of my favourite, laugh-out-loud movies of 2015, as well as a real kickback for the sort of splattery gore we rather rarely see these days and as such, I’m delighted to see it going from strength to strength this year too: it gets a UK release in a few short weeks, and news of a sequel in the offing is music to my ears, thus giving us the idea to catch up with director Jason Lei Howden for a quick chat about the film, his career to date and his future plans.

BAH: Deathgasm made a big impact in 2015 – so many people rate it as one of their favourite films of the year, so congratulations on that! First up, why did you choose to base your horror movie on metal fandom – is it an idea you’ve had waiting in the wings for a while?

JLH: Thanks! It’s great that it clicked with so many people. I never had any expectations other that I hoped my friends would get a laugh out of it. All of the things I write are based on life experiences, so it seemed inevitable that I would do a story about metalheads at some point. Maybe my next film will be about my Spice Girls phase?

(BAH: quietly thinks this would be an excellent idea, if it was suitably grisly)

BAH: One of the things I commented on in my review was the sense of fun in the film – not just from the OTT gore, but from the fact it felt like it was on metal’s side, laughing with that genre, not pointing and laughing from a distance. Is that a fair assessment?

JLH: Totally. I didn’t want to go full ‘Bill & Ted’ metalbro. Instead I wanted to show that, despite the clothes and tastes in extreme music, metalheads are just normal people. I was definitely coming from a fan’s point of view. It’s weird, I keep finding subconscious metal references in the film, not things I intended. After Lemmy passed, someone said ‘Great you had that Motörhead joke in the film’. I didn’t know what they were talking about – then they pointed out that a character dies after getting an engine dropped on his skull. I had no idea.

BAH: You’ve had a career in film for a long while, having worked in different capacities on many successful movies: how well did this prepare you for finally getting into the director’s chair?

JLH: I’ve been in the industry since I left high school. It’s hard to say; it’s been such a big part of my life for so long I don’t really know anything else. I’ve been doing VFX for the last 6-7 years, which is great, but you are often concentrating on one frame, or even one pixel – so it’s very abstract. I think it taught me a lot about shot composition though. But the best tool that a director can have is empathy, even with a film as silly and gory as Deathgasm. Only life can teach you that. The audience needs to relate to the characters on a human level. After that, you can take them anywhere you want.

BAH: On that note, there’s been talk that the Deathgasm sequel is happening: can you tell us anything at all about the new screenplay? And were you always keen to keep the door open for further films for these characters?

JLH: I hope it happens. It’s a lot more ambitious, and splatter movies are hard to sell. But it’s set in the future, Brodie is older and washed up, trying to get his life back together. The world has changed but Brodie hasn’t adapted well. And there is SO MUCH GORE: the intro sequence has more gore that the first Deathgasm altogether, and it just gets more extreme. Deathgasm got looked down upon in some circles for being too crude, so the next one is going to be twice as vulgar…

BAH: So – why go for the gore? What is it that you enjoy so much about shooting the gory stuff, and why do you think audiences like it so much?

JLH: All good humour is based on human suffering, from Charlie Chaplin to internet FAIL videos, and I personally think Splatstick movies are the ultimate extension of that. I see them as Looney Tune cartoons for adults, over the top, unrealistic and fun as hell!

Deathgasm will be released in the UK on February 29th, 2016. You can keep up with Jason Lei Howden via Twitter.

Blu-ray Review – Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

Posted on February 9, 2016 by 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.

Blu-ray Review: Nightmare Castle (1965)

Posted on January 31, 2016July 7, 2017 by Keri O'Shea

By Guest Contributor Marc Lissenburg

I daresay most of you reading this will have a unique personal evolution regarding your horror fandom. Born in 1972, I remember as a five year old in the mid-seventies being drawn to anything remotely to do with vampires. By my teens, driven hugely by the whole video nasty furore, EVERYTHING I watched back then was judged through ‘gore tinted spectacles’. But as I matured, and access to tapes and DVDs became more global, my horror viewing obsessions were inspired by one word – ATMOSPHERE! I distinctly remember the sole movie that marked that apparent change in my perception: Mario Bava’s classic BLACK SUNDAY. The picture remains one of my all-time favourites and ignited a passion in viewing all things Barbara Steele.

Ms Steele, if you are unaware, was born in 1937 and at the dawn of the 1960s was the leading lady in several Italian gothic horror movies. The good folk at Severin Films have duly embraced this unique period in horror history and recently released a quite wonderful Blu-ray disc centred on Mario Caino’s 1965 classic, NIGHTMARE CASTLE. Let me state at this point that this is NOT a screener I have been supplied with, but a review I felt obliged to write due to being enthralled with my wonderful, yet rather pricey, purchase. More on that later, but for now, let’s start at an obvious place. The feature itself: NIGHTMARE CASTLE…

The somewhat strained marriage of Muriel (Barbara Steele) and Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) comes to a head after he departs on a fake business trip. Not only is Muriel having a secret affair with David the gardener (Rik Battaglia), but Arrowsmith himself is also having nefarious romantic liaisons with housemaid Solange (Helga Line). When the former get discovered romping in the opulent greenhouse, Arrrowsmith’s spite erupts and culminates in chaining the couple to a wall before giving the gardener a beating and his wife a good ole fashioned flagellating! But the shackled Muriel turns the tables by revealing she has altered her all important will to ensure her estate (obviously including the castle of the piece) all goes to her stepsister. A crude divorce of sorts follows when Arrowsmith torturously disposes of the pair. His convoluted secondary plan involves marrying his wife’s semi sibling, Jenny, who we learn has had a history of mental health problems. Merely coil her mind with some hallucinogens and voila, he will become her legal executor, thus taking control of the estate. Jenny, also played by Steele but now sporting platinum tresses as opposed to her more natural raven locks, now enters the narrative. Fans of Steele will be no strangers to this archetypal duality that almost became her trademark. It’s an absorbing performance as she drives the picture to its conclusion. With a healthy run time of 105 minutes, there is plenty of room for the tale to take many a twist and turn flitting from a sinister thriller to the supernatural suspense. The climax itself is an extravagantly satisfying one with Steele in splendid form.

The back cover of the disc duly boasts that the main feature has been “remastered and restored from the original negative”. I often wonder whether vintage restorations seem that extra bit special due to my habit of scrutinizing every frame with a little more attention than I normally would. Even so, I found the print to be truly sumptuous. Sure, there were a couple of notable flaws evident, but overall I found the transfer mightily impressive. The detail revealed in close ups in particular are remarkable while Enzo Barboni’s evocative cinematography is showcased with aplomb.

The LPCM 2.0 mono track providing the audio is a wonderful accompaniment to high calibre ocular feast. Rake through online reviews and I am sure there will be some negative annotations regarding the disc’s acoustics. But personally I found the meld of Ennio Morricone’s inaugural horror movie score along with the redubbing of Steele’s actual voice (something of a rarity with her work from that period) elevated a wonderful viewing experience to even greater heights.

I must admit to growing a little stale over the last few years in regards to sitting through feature length commentaries. But the new track mediated by film historian David Del Valle and horror’s High Priestess is a very welcome addition. I was thoroughly absorbed with the combination of Del Valle’s laid back probing and Steele’s thoughtful recollections which surpassed merely paying the horror genre respectful lip service. Her assertion that the horror roles she played were enduring due to the characters’ internalisation of dread as opposed to contemporary graphic gore is beautifully referenced throughout her reminiscences. The pair’s deliberations, however, are the mere tip if the iceberg as far as supplement material goes.

Also included is not one but two ‘bonus features of terror’ inspired by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and naturally, starring Ms Steele. Antonio Margheriti’s 1964 picture CASTLE OF BLOOD is first on the menu. Based on Poe’s Danse Macabre novel, the movie starts with ‘Poe’ himself (Montgomery Glenn) discussing his latest idea in a tavern. When journalist Alan Foster (George Riviere) enters, Poe’s reluctance to give an interview soon turns into a bet made by the owner of the nearby castle. If Foster can survive one solitary night in the castle, he will win and be able to print an ultra rare interview with Poe. Betting aside, Foster thinks he has hit the jackpot when, within the castle’s stone walls, he runs into Elizabeth (Steele) and Julia (Margrete Robsahm). But all is not what it seems… Again this is another wonderful slice of Italian gothic that’s positively saturated with mood and ambience. Running at 1hr 22mins the version on the disc is described as the “rare US print of the movie”. With the legendary Riz Ortolani providing an exceptionally haunting score, CASTLE OF BLOOD is a wonderful second feature on the disc.
The linear notes boast of a 2k transfer. While this is undoubtedly true, it is obvious it a transfer WITHOUT restoration! The print is laden with scratches and speckles throughout. Personally I adore these little indiscretions. The crackles and pops in the soundtrack, in my humble opinion, provide the perfect paradox to HD transfers preserving organically aged celluloid reels from yesteryear. Fans with a more specific idea of what High Definition should represent may well disagree but personally I find it futile to whinge about such matters.

The second bonus feature is Massimo Pupillo’s 1965 sensationally titled TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE. Again we are given a HD transfer conspicuously free from any restoration. At times the interference is quite alarming but, as before, I prefer to retain a positive gratefulness for owning such a rare print as opposed to moaning about the its conspicuous flaws. TCFTG is another enjoyable b/w Italian gothic romp with a run time of 1hr 24min. The story itself, revolving around a mysterious will left by the late Jeronimus Hauff, is quite original and infused with occultism. Steele, playing Hauff’s widow Cleo, is the villainess of the piece from the outset exuding an ominous guise in every frame she features in. There is a notable level of gory violence throughout along with, dare I say it, unnecessary glimpses of female flesh peppering the movie. Whilst monotone celluloid from that era has its fair share of blood even I, (Mr teenage gorehound remember!) was genuinely surprised to observe a lingering shot of guts spilling out of one unfortunate victim’s stomach at one point!

The triple bill is rounded off with a few quality supplementary treats. Weighing in at a healthy 29m 30s (which just flies by) is “Barbara Steele in Conversation” which admittedly was included on a previous Severin release. It is nevertheless an enchanting recollection of her career as told by ‘Babs’ herself. In a refreshingly candid manner she recalls the start of her career and talks with genuine gratitude about her Italian Horror endeavours. “Black White and Red -An Interview with Director Mario Caiano” runs a minute shy of a quarter of an hour and basically comprises an Italian language interview with NIGHTMARE CASTLE’s director. It’s an intriguing natter conveyed via clear-cut subtitles. I couldn’t help be a little distracted in the opening minute however by the sight of Caino’s ginger cat doing its upmost to chomp the bejeezus out of the directors knuckles! “Vengeance From Beyond” (26 mins) is a fresh featurette focusing on TCFTG whereby the special effects are explained along with a brutally honest yet humorous chat with actor Riccardo Garrone, who played “Joseph Morgan”, in the picture. “A Dance of Ghosts” is a micro-documentary running a few seconds short of 17 minutes and relates to CASTLE OF BLOOD. Director Antonio Margheriti’s disclosures regarding his pseudo name in the credits is just one of the many factual morsels offered to the viewer. The mandatory inclusion of the features theatrical trailers completes a quite stunning package.

OK, so I suggested earlier to the fact my purchase, although easy on the eye, was perhaps not so amenable to my pocket. It was due to me being seduced into purchasing an inimitable option Severin Films are offering fans who are open to throwing a few extra pennies their way. Whereas all of the aforementioned material is available for $25, for an extra 20 bucks you can be the proud owner of Barbara Steele’s autograph! The signed edition has Steele’s handwritten signature liberally splashed in chunky silver ink across the front cover featuring the classic Italian movie poster artwork. In UK terms, taking this unique option and allowing for overseas shipping direct from Severin, I was £42 worse off. I yearn for the opportunity to get my BLACK SUNDAY paraphernalia signed in person should the great lady ever appear at a UK festival. But until then, the guys at Severin have given us the opportunity to purchase a genuine piece of horror folklore…

Blu-ray Review: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Posted on January 21, 2016October 17, 2018 by Keri O'Shea

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.

DVD Review: Nina Forever (2015)

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

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.

“Are They Records?” Horror Fandom and the Laserdisc Phenomenon

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Guest Contributor Marc Lissenburg

The above exasperating question was often put to horror fans around 20 years ago, when proudly displaying the latest additions to their film collections. The query arose due to less informed peers confusing analogue vinyl music (‘records’ as they were commonly known) with a groundbreaking digital development in domestic movie collecting. Sandwiched between the VHS tape boom of the 80s and the birth of DVD in the ‘noughties’, was a medium that was born, and effectively killed off, in the same decade. I am talking, of course, about the LASERDISC.

Laserdiscs, or LDs as they were commonly known, created a furore of excitement for film fans in the mid 1990s. The 12 inch, mirrored platters were notably superior in quality to their magnetic tape predecessors. The infamous VHS blur and hiss were superseded by, at the time, unprecedented pristine pictures and digital sound. ‘Home Cinema’ had started to evolve in 1995, and Dolby Surround Sound was all the rage. While all film enthusiasts benefited from this leap in technology, it was the UK horror community who had a few special reasons to embrace it…

With the BBFC keeping UK domestic horror releases on a short leash in the early 90s, the main source of owning uncut copies of gory epics were European video tapes. More often than not though, the tapes in circulation were copies, several generations old. Fuzzy ‘pan & scan’ reproductions, hard-coded Dutch subtitles and a muffled soundtrack was the tithe for owning that elusive uncut version. But LDs changed all of that. The swift side step of the censor’s scissors with internationally-imported discs meant horror fans didn’t have to fret over the BBFC’s frigid attitude.

Although their picture quality nowadays leans ironically more toward VHS, they were a significant stepping stone toward the cutting edge Blu-Ray discs that horror fans have grown accustomed to today. Gone was the mere bleary insinuation of blood-drenched special effects. Tom Savini’s amazing work on William Lustig’s Maniac with his ‘shot gun blast to the head scene’ was vicious enough on hazy videotape. But, when watched digitally, the clarity of blood, skull and brain drifting across the screen had a supreme lucidity about it that had never been witnessed domestically before. This was just one example of how new life had been infused into depraved scenes of death. And it wasn’t simply the improved visual quality that endeared LDs to horror aficionados. It was the accurate presentation as well. Anamorphic, letterboxed prints in the director’s original aspect ratio that are taken for granted today, gave purists the opportunity to watch organic renditions of movies delivered from the silver screen onto the cathode tube for the first time.

Lest not forget the impact that the sonic improvements of LDs made either. The irritating hum of videotape that impeded a movie’s ambience as was finally overcome. The squelch and crack as intestines were munched on and skulls were crushed, suddenly had a newfound intelligibility about them. Never before had the award-winning resonance of Regan’s demonic aural onslaught in ‘The Exorcist’ sounded so disturbing. As the possessed child’s churlish blasphemy flitted from speaker to speaker, wallpaper nationwide would almost peel in fear!

Whilst the multitude of benefits to owning LDs was obvious, the means of obtaining them were not. Before the dawn of e-purchases had broken, acquiring these much sought-after treasures was far more complicated than simply clicking your computer’s mouse a few times. One method was through specialist mail order companies. Companies, such as the France-based Laser Enterprises, would use airmail instead of email to get their latest catalogue to you. An austere black and white photocopied document contained typed descriptions of their wares. It ultimately meant you rarely got to see the cover artwork of the LD until it actually arrived.

Although a good source for uncensored discs, the arrangement was not without its obstacles. Shipping costs were high due to the fragility of the items. The perilous journey via airlines and courier vans meant there was always a chance the condition of your LD could be compromised before it even reached the confines of your laserdisc player. Then, the lurking threat of UK Customs and Excise seizing a foreign disc once on these shores was yet another complication. True, the area of law concerning importing laserdiscs was a grey one, but with overseas editions retailing in excess of £50, buying from abroad was still a little risky.

Who could forget the tension we had to endure of waiting for our airmailed package to arrive? It was almost on a par with Argento’s finest moments on celluloid! Even if you were fortunate enough to be home when the disc eventually got there, a further haggle usually transpired at your front door. Trying to assess any damage to the package before signing for it, pitted against the courier’s reluctance to hand it to you before ascertaining your signature, was all part of the ‘fun’!

A much safer way of procuring these scarcities was at film fairs up and down the country. Leisure centres nationwide would play host to these assemblages of horror devotees, looking to buy or sell macabre memorabilia. Traders would display their merchandise with a little round “BBFC 18” sticker placed on the outer cellophane of its packaging. The gesture seemed enough to give them a dubious licence to sell imports. How much knowledge Trading Standards possessed regarding the Laserdiscs country of origin was unclear, but with pirate tapes being the main focus of the odd raid, the little red dot (probably also bootlegged!) clinging to the wrapping seemed to suffice.

An obvious advantage of film fairs was being able to actually see what you were purchasing. The cost of this convenience, however, was, well… the price. Discs at fairs would start at £60 and spiral upwards, depending on the rarity. At a time when internet fan forums were not yet in vogue, and a feedback system was unheard of, there was an utter reliance upon the scruples of the seller. A dear friend paid £140 for the Japanese uncut LD of Flesh for Frankenstein: upon getting it home, he was given a harsh lesson in Japan’s attitude to pubic hair on film. Although no cuts were made to the movie, it was, in effect, censored with the offending furry regions blurred out.

Those unfamiliar with laserdiscs may be interested to know that, regardless of the generous surface area, the actual playing time per side was limited to around 60 minutes in CLV (Constant Linear Velocity) format. This meant the cumbersome platter had to be flipped over manually every hour or so. While the awkward nature of LDs didn’t help with the atmospheric continuity of a film, it did allow for some extravagant packaging. Glossy, full colour covers dwarfed the paper VHS counterparts, allowing for more macabre artwork to be displayed. These soon evolved into lavish gatefold sleeves which doubled its canvas even further. The EC Entertainment release of Fulci’s CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, for example, unfolded to reveal a vibrant photo of Giovanni Lombardo Radice’s Bob character meeting his classic demise courtesy of the infamous ‘drill through the temple’ scene in all its gory glory. The decorative casing still remains a major factor for LDs retaining their place in many a horror enthusiast’s collections.

We take for granted the ability of being able to pause a movie and step it forward frame by frame. But with LD technology, this was only possible if it was a standard play CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) disc. You could still pause a CLV disc, but instead of a frozen picture, the viewer was left with a blank gaudy blue screen. The technological advantages of CAV were counterbalanced by the fact it was limited to a paltry 30 minutes per side. With this multiple disc quandary in mind, distributors soon slashed a new niche into the LD market – luxurious collector edition box sets.

Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser got the deluxe box set treatment seven years after its theatrical debut when released by Lumivision. Limited to 2500 pressings worldwide, the double disc set offered a re-mastered transfer in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. With the aforementioned CLV and CAV formats cleverly employed, it meant the gruesome culmination of Frank being hooked and ripped apart could be devoured frame by frame. The concept of ‘extras’ was an innovative one at the time, so the deleted scenes, interviews and audio commentary by Mr Barker also significantly added to its appeal.

The discs were housed in a sumptuous gatefold sleeve, which naturally had Doug Bradley’s Pinhead sinisterly gracing the cover. Opening the plush sleeve revealed some opulent rare art of the demonic Cenobites adorning its inner fold. Remove the exuberant sleeve from its plastic casing and a bound original screenplay, signed by Clive Barker himself, was revealed. The whole ensemble was contained in a sable, 2 inch wide, vinyl coated box. Its façade had an indented depiction of Pinhead, uncoloured but for the silver pins protruding from his skull, along with the movie title emblazoned across the top in lustrous red lettering. Although retailing at a staggering £90 upon release, it remains an arduous task trying to prove this morbid assemblage is not worth every penny!

The advancement of technology means Laserdisc players appear more redundant then ever these days. But while Dominoes Pizza et all did a roaring trade as pizza boxes were recycled as LD packaging for Ebay sales, horror fans by and large held on to the gems of their collections. How foolish it would be to part with the exclusive red pressing of the uncut Evil Dead 2? And who was heartless enough to flog their copy of Cannibal Ferox that, was not only gorgeously presented, but also had enclosed a 7 inch vinyl record containing the soundtrack and tongue in cheek ‘vomit bag’!

Gimmicks aside, there were some features that even to this day are exclusive to their LD formats. The Italian based Cult Epics release of Deodato’s infamous Cannibal Holocaust, for example, had an isolated analogue soundtrack, which retained all the music but was devoid of any dialogue. Regardless of the numerous DVD editions that have materialized over the years, the isolated soundtrack has never featured on any of them. The special edition of George Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead is another instance. It contains a rare director’s audio commentary that, again, has failed to appear in any of its recent releases.

Despite all the advancements of deathly digital delights from the aforementioned era, decomposing corpses were interestingly not the most frightening thing about preserved LD collections. The threat of ‘laser rot’, due to poor quality adhesive being used in manufacturing older discs, looms over fans’ precious compilations to this day.

Given the ongoing innovations in technology continually revitalizing cherished classic horror films, it is highly debatable as to whether anyone actually watches their old LD wares or simply delves into them to admire the sumptuous artwork. A distinct retro romanticism surrounds the VHS tape, however, with Laserdiscs perceived as more ‘old hat’ then Freddie Kruger’s Fedora. But just think forward a few years. When we are enjoying a Fulci classic play out in the centre of our living room in its new holographic format, will our children ask of a Blu-ray disc, “Is it a drinks coaster?”

2015 in Film: Keri’s Pick of the Bunch

Posted on December 23, 2015December 28, 2025 by Keri O'Shea

deathgasmm

By Keri O’Shea

My god, this year has flown by, and once again I find myself pondering what I most and least liked in the year which is death-rattling as I type – with the usual proviso that I haven’t even seen all of the films I was most interested to see, for the usual reasons (buy me a beer and let me bore you to death with my tales of a 50 hour working week; ah go on. It’s Christmas.)

Still, I’m not sure how useful a regular Top 10 or even a Top 5 would be, from my point of view, so I’m not going to write one in a conventional sense this year. Truth be told, I only ever cast my eye over other people’s film lists, of which there are always so many by now, so my engagement with them is limited at best; if a writer has named a movie I haven’t yet seen, I feel like I have to skip their rundown because I don’t want to have the entire film summed up beforehand; if they’ve overlapped with a film I also loved, then great, but it smacks of preaching to the choir; if they’ve listed a film I hated, or just merely gone through the rinse, repeat of (as a relevant example this year) ‘Mad Max: Fury Road/feminist statement/high time’ then I’ve already read those articles, and worse still, seen the memes; I quite liked the film, but I don’t need to see any more, thanks.

For all that preamble, you’ve guessed it – I am now going to segue into my, albeit rather arbitrary pick of the bunch. But I’ve gone for noteable features of the films in question, rather than rehashing reviews I or others on the team may have written already (though links to these will be added). I’ve also endeavoured to do this without – and here comes that word – spoilering the films, either, as although the online reactions to seeing plot details revealed can be …excessive, it is also bloody annoying, and is best avoided if possible.

Here goes…

Best performance – Henry Rollins – HE NEVER DIED

rollins-never-died

I had the real privilege of going into this film knowing nothing whatsoever about it except that Rollins was in it; no clues on the plot, or the genre, or anything. But, as Ben noted at the time in his Celluloid Screams review seeing the name ‘Henry Rollins’ attached to a project doesn’t instantly make you think that you are going to get a sterling performance, as his roles up until this point have been variable to say the least. Still, whilst I don’t always agree with Rollins on a personal level, I am a fan of his music and his stand-up; the perfect role for him could still be out there, I thought. Well, it was, and turns out it’s this one.

Admittedly, one of the reasons could be that – as when Courtney Love played Althea Leasure – the role wasn’t a massive stretch, at least at the outset. Rollins plays Jack, a somewhat grizzled, middle-age man who tends towards the terse; not only does he not suffer fools gladly, but he seems to swat other humans away, barely engaging with them at all beyond what is strictly necessary. He has his life, his apartment, his isolation, his…bingo; nothing else seems to move him. However, as the film progresses, Jack is forced to re-integrate himself into humanity thanks to a drama which has the audacity to begin playing out around him, and for reasons close to home. Jack is one of those great characters in film which simultaneously hold you at arm’s length, yet convince you of a fascinating inner life – and when this is finally revealed, it’s a real tour de force, a credit to director Jason Krawczyk and to the excellent casting choice he made in Rollins. I know, I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but were I to nominate my film of the year, this’d be it.

Most (Un-)Pleasant Surprise: The Interior

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It’s a sad fact that, when you write about film on a regular basis, what starts out as a fun hobby can begin to feel like a chore. I’m sure we’ve all felt it. Whilst it’s decent of filmmakers and distribution companies to keep on proffering new releases to humble websites like ours, it’s still the case that, once you’ve spent several weeks sitting through what essentially feels like the same found footage movie (deja-vu is an occupational hazard), it takes the shine off. So, when I sat down to watch The Interior, to be honest I’d been through a run of screeners which weren’t to my tastes, and my initial impression was that The Interior was going to be a slightly jarring attempt at black comedy, and not to my taste either. True enough, there is some errant humour in the early scenes, but then the film manages so successfully to break away from this, crafting something completely different, that it’s hard to reconcile the two approaches. I say this, I hope, in a complimentary way.

This film manages to take a symbolic approach to its subject matter without carving it in foot-high letters, achieves frankly horrific scares without the obligatory jump-cuts, and weaves a very claustrophobic, uncanny tale out of elements you can be forgiven for supposing would be turned to different, less successful uses. In essence, this turns out to be a truly unsettling, unconventional horror tale; finding films like The Interior is, in a nutshell, exactly why I go on reviewing. You can check out my full review here.

Most Laughs: Deathgasm

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The more I reflect on it, the more I think Deathgasm is one of the most successfully funny films I’ve seen since Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. I used to give horror comedies a hard time, and rightfully so in many instances, but it’s often good to be proved wrong and there have been some really good films along in the past few years. Deathgasm is simply glorious: as I commented in my full review, it doesn’t come across as a sneering outsider picking a non-mainstream culture and getting the gags wrong because the basic premise is all off; it’s got a bit of love for metal, rather, and it’s that which makes it funny, as it goes from ‘plausible kids’ through to ‘long-rumoured occult links made flesh’ before threatening the end of mankind via copious blood splatter and dildos as deadly weapons. I mean, do I really need to say anything else here? I laughed out loud throughout this film, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to yourselves. Roll on the sequel.

Best atmosphere: The Witch

Witch

Ah, a completely different take on occult horror, then. I will have far more to say on The Witch in the weeks to come; for now, I think it’s a noteworthy film in several of its aspects, not least of which how it boasts of its meticulously-researched basis in the real-life accounts and trials of alleged witches, from the time in which the film is set and earlier. The way it combines this kind of attention to detail with such a slow-burn tale, careful characterisation and a remarkably ambiguous, and thus effective spin on the occultism possibly at play in the New World makes it one of the stand-out films of 2015. These very qualities, sadly, will probably make it a tough sell for the mainstream market, which is exactly where the makers/distributors seem to want it to thrive. For reasons such as this, you get decisions like the disastrous, misleading poster art which Ben discussed earlier in the week – promising titillation, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any. I suppose we should be grateful we don’t see Thomasin re-cast as a thirty year old being dragged backwards down a subway by Black Philip.

Still, let them reap what they sow, if they can grow it at all. The rest of us can appreciate the sheer dread which permeates each frame of this film, that sense of the inescapable, crowding out what is essentially a loving family trying to make their way in a harsh new environment. I think it’s important that the family do care about one another here, and try to resist the series of misfortunes which slowly blight their home and their land; it makes the events which ensue all the more awful, and by degrees strips the potency out of the religion they adhere to. After all, where’s the interest in seeing the already corrupt, corrupted? Ultimately a psychological horror which deserves better than to collapse under the weight of expectations now attached to it, The Witch is absolutely gripping, and you should check out Ben’s words on it before doing your best to see it early, when it gets a full release in February 2016.

Blu-ray Review: Nekromantik 2 (1991)

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

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.

Film Review: Krampus (2015)

Posted on December 6, 2015November 24, 2018 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Whilst horror films which centre around Xmas time are nothing new, in the past few years more and more filmmakers have started to pay attention to Xmas folklore: films such as Rare Exports (2010) had fun playing with the idea that Santa isn’t necessarily the sanitised, commercialised figure we now consider him to be; ditto the Dutch spin on Saint Nick as a bit of a bad ‘un, Sint (‘Saint’) which came out in the same year. It was surely only a matter of time before the figure of the Krampus got his own stint on our screens; after all, if you’re going to the trouble of representing the good guy as a bad guy, then why not use source material which has the bad guy already good to go? The Krampus is a scary looking figure: probably harking back to pre-Christian times in some way, shape or form, Germanic traditions pitch him as a cloven-footed, nasty piece of work who punishes wicked children (and young women, particularly – some of his incarnations are a little sexual in nature). Over the years he came to be associated with Christmas and Saint Nicholas, operating as the bad cop to his good cop; where the good children receive presents, bad children may end up faced with the Krampus instead, and varying accounts have him offering a piece of coal in lieu of a gift, thrashing the offending kids or even spiriting them away. Whatever it takes to get the entitled little shits to behave, quite frankly, but you have to admit the Krampus has an arresting image; of late, a fair few filmmakers have agreed, not least of which is Trick ‘r Treat director Michael Dougherty. I didn’t cotton on to this connection until I was on my way to see the film, quite honestly, but having loved Trick ‘r Treat I was quietly hopeful.

Krampus (2015) focuses on a picket-fence American nuclear family who are bracing themselves for the arrival of family for their traditional yearly attempt not to fall out with them spectacularly. Mother Sarah (Toni Collette) is anxiously ‘getting everything ready’, the children are bickering, and the only person who seems calm in the face of adversity is grandma, a woman who is signposted as GERMAN, definitely GERMAN, up to her elbows in Stollen from the moment she appears on screen and relentlessly speaking German even when people are responding to her in English (until she starts speaking English later in the film, but I digress). When Aunt Linda and the NRA-happy Uncle Howard finally rock up with their awful offspring, they’ve apparently brought the wise-cracking Aunt Dorothy with them without checking first – so there’s a houseful, and the cousins quickly settle down to mocking young Max (the phonetically-named Emjay Anthony) for his belief in Santa Claus. It’s all a bit much. In a temper, Max decides to tear up his letter to Santa and with it, all his altruistic requests for his family to just get on a bit better. No sooner has he done this, when a freak snowstorm lands, cutting off all the power to the local area. And that’s just for starters. Sucks to be the neighbours who presumably haven’t done anything to cause all of this, but it seems that supernatural forces are at work, systematically going from house to house to wreak havoc and picking off the family members one by one.

There is some good stuff going on here, with the early glimpses of the Krampus itself amongst the film’s strongest moments (less is definitely more) but by and large, Krampus is tonally all over the place. Kicking off along the lines of a National Lampoon style farce with a slow-mo fight at the local sales, the comedy approach dips when we get indoors and bear witness to the deeply awkward family exchanges, then it picks up again, then gives way to some pretty saccharin moments where an earnest little boy ponders the true spirit of Christmas. So far, so patchy. From here, the film tries to shift into what the BBFC would probably call ‘scenes of peril’; it starts reasonably well with this, with the alluded-to early scene as a high point, but then it seems like it wants to segue into the sort of camp, grisly fare beloved of films like Gremlins.

Still, though, it can’t quite commit itself to that either. The barrage of nasty gingerbread men and evil toys which provide nearly all of the ‘scenes of peril’ throughout the film – a strange choice, all told, given the title – are omnipotent in some cases and not much more than a bit of a nuisance in others, and the characters react to them differently every time (with some members of the family simply standing there as onlookers in some scenes). Then the film is bloodless enough to make it as a kiddie horror film, but lacks other elements which would qualify – but it’s just too kitsch and simplistic to really stand up as a horror film, or indeed a film which would appeal to an audience of adults. Hmm. And then there’s the figure of the Krampus himself. Having picked up on the association of the Krampus with Santa as Santa’s ‘dark half’, Dougherty has simply represented him as a dark Santa, which was a little underwhelming – especially as when the end credits roll, we’re treated to a plethora of old images of the Krampus, all of which would have made for more engrossing versions of the figure than the one we get.

For all of that, despite the issues, I did laugh a fair few times during this film. Any film which keeps up the momentum in terms of throwing silly creatures at you stands a good chance of being engaging, and the creature effects themselves are pretty good fun. For a Saturday night movie which raises questions that it doesn’t really matter go unanswered, Krampus fits the bill just fine, and it certainly looks the part as a festive film. However, given that the tone and the storytelling is rather lacking, I’d say a really good Krampus movie remains to be made, which is a shame, given the proven calibre of this film’s director.

Krampus (2015) is in UK cinemas now.

Film Review: Deathgasm (2015)

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

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.