Keri O'Shea

RIP Wes Craven

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

I think I speak for all of us on that thing where you’re casually scrolling through social media, and then all of a sudden, something hits you hard. There have been many examples, but today’s is definitely finding out that one of the all-time most important horror directors has shuffled off the mortal coil. Wes Craven, having fought against brain cancer, has passed away.

I don’t want to make this eulogy about me – but I have experience of losing someone to that illness, and I can only testify to its ruthless vigour and appetite. I did not actually even know that Craven was ill, so it’s more of a shock to find out that the director of Last House on the Left – which as Nia has posited was one of the most important exploitation films ever made– has died.

For those of us who grew up with the VHS revolution of the 80s however, then we’ll all remember the utter terror of Freddy Krueger (a new-wave folk devil who has stayed with us as much as any fairy story ever could). Few directors could have achieved that level of influence, audience engagement and saturation. I always found it a great pity that the massively successful Scream franchise at first seemed to be disparaging of the horror tropes which Craven helped to establish – never good to shit where you eat – but subsequent films like Red Eye seemed to be more amenable to the horror ethos which made his name. All in all, Craven definitely helped to birth the modern nightmare; those things that scare us, even if we come to expect them, are often down to Craven’s directorship, and even snippets of his work was enough for many of us to feel scared, even in adulthood. For a horror director, I can give no better praise.

Wes Craven will be missed. No doubt about that. And for many of us, key cinematic scenes which have scared, upset or otherwise imprinted upon us will always be his doing. For a good director to die of such an illness is never something that can just be brushed over, but the work which he did so well will always stay with horror fans all over the world, as long as they are as invested in this genre as he was.

RIP Wes Craven.

Book Review: Home by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Much is made today of the phenomenon of ‘privilege’ – who has it, who does what with it, and just what should be done about it. People are advised to acknowledge their privilege, or check their privilege…people quibble about how much privilege they really have and what it all really means, and as such there’s rarely a day which goes by when there’s not a new debate on the relative levels of good fortune which we enjoy, don’t enjoy, and so on ad infinitum, with new debates billowing out like smoke on the internet on a dizzyingly regular basis. However, perhaps it’s the hidden truth behind all of this discussion which really has the capacity to act as a leveller, and it’s something we confront only rarely.

We in the West belong to ageing populations; we might all have the leisure time and technological advancements to allow us to pontificate online about other topics to our heart’s content, we might enjoy better health and longer life generally, but the last chapter of this life will be old age, and it’s something we have great trouble acknowledging. There is, of course, good reason for this. Old age is frightening and devastating. Wealth, status, background…these things we argue about throughout our twenties, thirties and forties can offer us only limited comfort or protection against the inevitable. At the end of it all we face growing old – we face the loss of our autonomy, our influence, our health, our vitality and even something as fundamental as our personal identities, our memories of loved ones and friends and deeds, all those things which make us human. These are all things we take for granted, as long as we have hold of them. But we can’t face the threat of their loss, and thus being unable to face ageing, we immure it. The elderly often live segregated from the rest of society, their presence on its fringes a whispered reality, something almost shameful. Author Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone forces us to confront this unpalatable truth both about what we’ll face and how our culture deals with it in her novel, Home. The result is a difficult read, because it is so compassionate as well as visceral in its horror.

Steve, an older guy and something of an everyman figure, is devoted to his wife Fran; they’re one of those couples who have been together so long that they really are two halves, the one complementing the other. Fran, however, has terminal cancer, and knowing her husband so well she finds she can’t just leave him to brood and cope with the fact of her imminent demise at home, so when a caretaker’s job comes up at a local care home, she urges him to take it. Her reasons are straightforward – give him something to do, get him out of the house. Steve’s retired, but he also sees the logic in coming out of retirement for the time being, so he applies and gets the job. The home is in dire need of repair and maintenance, and he has plenty to keep him busy, although he can’t help but think that the home is an odd place – very few staff, and very few clients either. As he develops a closer relationship with Milos, one of the nurses, he begins to become more aware of goings-on at the home which just don’t seem right – until a chance discovery places Steve on the cusp of discovering something repugnant and dangerous about this place.

The structure which Home employs is to use three narrators – Steve and Milo being two of them, and an unnamed client of the home making the third. This means there is no sense of omniscience, and like all of the characters not part of the innermost cabal of the care home, readers are locked out of what’s going on until our protagonist Steve can piece things together. This is the best approach – it’s meant to be alienating, and it really comes into its own in the latter chapters. The fact that Steve is such a likeable, credible man – who has been through hell, and only wants to do the right thing in life – makes you deeply invested in the events which surround him, and the people who evidently know more than he does. In particular, the rest of the care home staff are unknown quantities, perhaps sinister or perhaps innocent (as unappealing as they are personally) so the book retains a sense of the reader being smaller than the place, on a par with Steve as an outsider. Milos, as one of the staff, seems at first to be an unfeeling, inhuman character – but as his narrative provides him with a past and an inner life, it grows more complex than that. Finally, the ‘woman’ who is given a voice at intervals here makes for a heart-rending, disturbing sequence of narratives. I found her sections of the text hardest to read, because Lattin-Rawstrone uses plaintive, yet straightforward language to create an impression of someone utterly unsupported and dehumanised, unable to remember herself or her life, imprisoned within a medical setting and lacking in even a first name. The author does not need to use frilly simile or hyperbole to make this situation hideous, writing descriptively but quite sparsely to allow the woman’s plight to unfold via a series of deeply introspective moments as well as very physical shocks.

Finally, I should say that I did not know what to expect from the plot of this book, other than an awareness that something was of course very wrong with the care home at the crux of it, but the way things go is an unpalatable surprise, one which perhaps pushes believability in places (and doesn’t particularly need its mentions of consumerism as this comes through as a contextual factor of its own accord) but nonetheless, its developments have the power to shock – forming an existential horror blended with elements of body horror.

Home is ambitious, but it delivers, and it delivers on subject matter which most people would shudder to be faced with. Most disturbingly of all, having effectively ratcheted up the tension in its latter chapters, it refuses to allow us a nice, neat return to order. Despite being a page-turner, you turn the pages here with a sense of dread. The overwhelming feeling I had after finishing this book was one of profound sadness, but given the subject matter of the novel, this sadness is integral to the unmistakable horror at play.

You can find out how to order Home here.

Asami August: Sukeban Boy (2006)

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Sometimes it’s completely unnecessary for a film to have a slow, believable build-up, let alone a believable set of circumstances, and for so many of Noboru Iguchi’s lunatic technicolour battle epics, it would frankly slow things down until they weren’t as entertaining. We know this, we love this, and it’s why we’re talking about these films so much this month with regards Asami’s career. Picking up on one of these in particular (which Nia has already mentioned in the first part of her excellent study of the splatter movies which helped Asami cross from AV to main-ish-stream) Sukeban Boy (2006) is a slightly less well-known example of Noboru’s output over the past ten years, but in terms of what he manages to cram in to one hour, it’s a more than worthwhile mention – and properly pure Noboru Iguchi, free from any outsider constraints whatsoever. Seeing as how it starts from the point of ‘insane’ and sort of goes from there really, it definitely fits in with his other work, but if anything it manages to be even more lewd and eyebrow-raising than his other films – which is quite some achievement, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In the first few minutes of Sukeban Boy, the film’s determination to use gender and sex as part of its arsenal of jokes and improbable plot devices is made clear, as we start out with what appears to be a pretty teenage school girl kicking seven bells out of a group of grown male assailants (who both want to beat her up, but are also mortified that a young woman would be acting so inappropriately). No problem: the schoolgirl raises her skirts to show that’s she’s actually male, and the kicking can continue. To clarify – we then find out that Sukeban (Asami) is a boy who has been cursed with the face of a girl, but all other male body parts are intact. She’s (I’m just going with ‘she’ to make it simple) tried to look more male but no matter how much she beats herself up (yes, literally) she still looks pretty, and her life in school has been made hell for it. Helpfully, her ‘freak biker’ dad suggests she start disguising herself as a girl, moving to a new school to help maintain the disguise. She agrees, though she struggles with the facade, and it doesn’t go so well at first: the other girls are suspicious of her for the amount of bad language she uses and as she’s introducing herself to her new class in that way we so often see in Japanese cinema, someone throws a knife at her. Hmm.

She eventually makes friends though, particularly with the sweet and innocent Mochiko (Emiru Momose) and although she warns her new friend of a ‘gang boss’ being present at the school, Sukeban’s embroilment with this leads her to become friends with the gang leader Kanko (Saori Matsunaka) after giving her a thorough whooping during a lunatic interlude where schoolgirls are being forced by the girl gang to practice fainting of embarrassment whilst stripping at the school ‘Humility Club’, and Sukeban takes issue with Mochiko being compelled to basically moon the group. So far, so Noboro Iguchi – very much doing his own thing with the staid old topics of high school rivalries and gang culture. This heady combination grows far more unlikely as we go on, though, with the mysterious arrival of a leg-chopping Full Frontal Woman (poor Kanko – though she gets an unexpected boom, sorry boon), the vengeful Braless Women, the deadly Monk Women (naked, obviously) and for balance, a bunch of Sukeban supporter males…in schoolgirl garb.

Spoiler: there’s lots of boobs and fighting in this.

When I say ‘lots of boobs’, I actually mean noteworthy amounts of boobs, and that’s even coming from a Jess Franco fan here. Yeah, that’s what I said. The nudity is absolutely gratuitous (though due to her role, not so much – so much – from Asami herself) and had this film ever been presented to the BBFC, I’m sure the combination of flesh and youth would have sent them into utter apoplexy – but the thing is, the context is so cartoonish that it really doesn’t seem titillating. It’s silly rather than sexy. And if you start even trying to zone out the action to focus on the flesh, then tough luck, there’ll be a fart joke along presently to ‘bring you back to yourself’. This is essentially most like the Beano for adults, with breasts and biotech to go with the school life observations and physical comedy – though of course the manga tradition would probably provide far better comparisons, and but of course this film is based on a manga series, ‘Oira Sukeban’.

The whole cast routinely send themselves up, pull faces and perform pratfalls worthy of vaudeville, whilst Asami’s comic turn here is hilarious, if you like your comedy lowbrow – and that’s an absolute must. Remembering that we have a young woman playing a young man playing a young woman, she does a great job; her ‘male’ walk with her briefcase slung over her shoulder as opposed to being carried in a demure, ladylike way, together with that voice…very funny, and perhaps even funnier to a Japanese audience who would know that typically, polite women will raise the pitch of their voice slightly when talking to strangers, particularly men. Asami’s voice at the best of times is a force of nature; get her impersonating a male and it’s like a foghorn. I laughed.

As for the gore, it takes a little while to get going here but once it does, you can feast your eyes on spurting blood, flying limbs, boob guns, women spitting bullets with enough force to kill (and getting the actors to pretend like they’re being shot even when they’ve run out of the FX to do it properly) oh, and hormone injections being used as warfare. All present and correct, I think you’ll find.

Sukeban Boy is silly, grisly, and doesn’t take itself seriously for a second; you may be able to wring a message of ‘acceptance whatever you look like’ out of the film, but I think you’d agree this isn’t the main point of the exercise. As a lesser-known movie by a now beloved cult director, it’s well worth a look if you like this genre, and because I can’t finish this review in any better way, I’ll end by saying that yes, worry not, Asami does her robot dance in this…

Asami August: Gothic & Lolita Psycho (2010)

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

“Why is there a knife blade in the tip of your umbrella?”

It’s fair to say that when the Japanese get hold of a youth subculture they like, they more than make it their own – and the ‘Gothic Lolita’ phenomenon is a good case in point. A pretty mash-up of I suppose what you’d call ‘trad Goth’ and far more cutesy, frilly add-ons, it was perhaps inevitable that the visually-arresting style would make its way into cinema eventually – particularly the sort of cartoonish, frenetic vengeance flicks that we so enjoy, because nothing catches the eye quite so much as a well-turned-out angel of death (see also: Geisha Assassin, by the same director Gô Ohara). The reasoning doesn’t really go any further than that here, to be perfectly honest, and there’s no especial reason why lead character Yuki has adopted the clothes she has, but what the hell. This film is a lot of fun.

The year is 20XX (?) and the location is Tokyo: Yuki (played by the apparent winner of the 2007 award for Best Buttocks, Rina Akiyama) – under the watchful eye of her father, who seems to be an out-of-work vicar, is about to raise hell as a method of avenging her mother’s death. Mother was dispatched in a particularly nasty way on her daughter’s birthday by a group of cowled assassins; Yuki has had a costume change since that fateful day (well to be fair, white was not the colour to be wearing) but she knows who was responsible, and she’s coming for them – armed with an array of killer parasols. Starting out by paying a visit to a nightclub which boasts synchronised Geisha dancing, a fighting pit and a gambling den (though they only serve Budweiser, so you can’t have everything), Yuki is quick to put her blade to good use. We only see the back of her head for the first ten minutes, but rest assured, the choreography and OTT special effects are glorious: arterial spray, severed heads and flailing bodies abound.

Of course, all of this is plot-lite. The reason that Yuki’s mother met the fate she did is not really explored until the very last handful of scenes, but then it’s not really important; we know enough to know that Yuki is justified to lop off a lot of limbs and that’s enough, no further philosophy needed. More of a computer game with end-of-level bosses than a film with a subtle story arc, the film is a sequence of overblown, worthy opponents, each one marked off by Yuki on a corresponding Gothic tarot card. Everyone playing here has superhuman abilities and ridiculous weapons; gambling den owner and Gothic geisha Sakie rolls her dice in a skull and decapitates people who get in her way, for instance, and perhaps the most jaw-dropping adversary, Lady Elle (Misaki Momose) has a sparkly pink mobile phone built in to the handle of her pistol so she can talk to her bae whilst she’s stamping on someone’s ribcage. As you do.

As you may expect, the film is choc-ful of action sequences, and these consist of some fairly challenging martial-arts style fights as well as masses of firepower and improbable stunts. Rina Akiyama looks like she’s properly out of breath in some of the scenes and I’ll bet she was – but, she holds up admirably, and certainly isn’t let off the hook just because she’s wearing good boots. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously either (the Kamikaze Gang are a comic highlight) and manages to find the time to add in a few fart jokes, gratuitous ass shots and a teacher who’d almost certainly end up on some kind of a list. Really speaking, it does a hell of a lot in less than ninety minutes.

Whilst Gothic & Lolita Psycho doesn’t cast Asami in a starring role (though her appearance, replete with a head tattoo, is pretty damn memorable anyway) I think it’s still an interesting role for her, because by this point she was clearly a go-to girl for horror-comedy and had established herself as a name in this kind of quasi-mainstream – whilst certainly not AV – movie world. A lot of the visual effects in Gothic & Lolita Psycho are put together by the team who also worked on, for instance, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl – so there’s a lot of commonality of aesthetics and approaches throughout a hell of a lot of these films. Remember also that by this stage, Machine Girl was A Thing and Asami had enjoyed some starring roles elsewhere; 2010 was also a hell of a busy year for the actress, with a staggering 13 projects reaching completion. She also played an eye-patch wearing assassin in Mutant Girls Squad that year, so maybe it would have been a push to see her do it twice had she taken the role of Lady Elle here, but still. A decent project to have under your belt whatever you happen to play in it, though, Gothic & Lolita Psycho is one film in a now relatively busy market for splattery, gratuitous body horror comedy. Like Gothic Lolita generally, Japan is good at adding aesthetically pleasing flounce to traditional forms, and having a blast along the way.

Film Review – Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015)

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Tristan Bishop

Dead Rising: Watchtower, for those of you not in the know, is a video game adaptation. The game series (3 main entries and numerous spin-offs) is basically a spin on Dawn Of The Dead, and has you attempting various missions in shopping malls which are infested with slow-moving but incredibly numerous zombies. The joy of the games is a pretty simple one – you are able to free roam (although within occasionally tight time limits), pick up almost any object imaginable and use it as a weapon. Who can resist plopping a traffic cone on the head of a flesh-eater (and maybe then hitting it with a baseball bat)? Not me, that’s for sure. Truth be told I’ve never come near to completing one of the games (those harsh time limits) but I’ve had hours of fun wandering and wiping out waves of the undead. Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure that a film adaptation of Dead Rising would be half as much fun, however – I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how disappointing the majority of game adaptations are, with the exception of Christophe Gans’ 2006 Silent Hill film (and I also have a soft spot for the Resident Evil series, but let’s not go into that).

Dead Rising: Watchtower is set between the events of the second and third game. The town of East Mission, Oregon, has been fully taken over by the living dead, although a few survivors remain scattered around the city. The Federal Emergency Zombie Authority (FEZA for short) has been distributing the drug Zombrex, which halts the effect of infection from zombie bites, but supplies are running low. Reporter Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalf), who is trying to get a hard-hitting story in the quarantine zone set up around East Mission, instead becomes trapped in the city itself, and, teaming up with kick-ass lady Crystal O’Rourke (Meghan Ory) and Virginia Madsen as Maggie, a distraught mother who has lost her daughter, tries to escape. Unfortunately reanimated corpses are not the only thing standing in their way, as psychotic Mad Max-esque bikers and a military who are determined to wipe out the zombie plague at any cost are also looking to cause them some problems.

My first impressions of Dead Rising : Watchtower were pretty positive – Metcalf looks every inch the classic Dead Rising hero, Ory is suitable appealing as the femme-fatale-with-a-dark-past, and the level of detail from the games which has been shoe-horned in is impressive. However this soon began to dissipate. To start with, let’s be honest, zombie films have had a good run since 28 Days Later (2002) gave the genre a shot in the arm and bought zombies back from the realm of shot-on-video (in the days when that meant something) amateur gore-fests and onto the big screen. In the last few years however, boredom has naturally set in, and the flood of zombie films has slowed to a trickle, with only The Walking Dead TV series really still making much of an impact (due to the slow-burn character development it does so well). We’ve basically seen it all, and Dead Rising really doesn’t offer us anything new – part of that problem being that the games themselves are so indebted to George Romero anyway. The other issue is the pacing. For a film based on a game which features some heart-pounding time limits to negotiate, it really does take time going places, and the action sequences (some of which are admittedly pretty good) are just too spread out to involve you. This might be acceptable if the rest of the time was spent building character and tension, but it isn’t. Annoyingly there’s enough plotting in here to make a decent 87 minute film, but at two full hours it just gets boring, and those who don’t have added value of recognising elements from the game will find themselves getting bored a whole lot sooner.

On the plus side, the production values are pretty good – and despite that cursed dodgy CGI blood used on too many occasions, this is way above the level of most TV movies (which is what I was expecting it to be). It’s certainly a damn sight better than the last film I saw from director Zach Lipovsky, which was the execrable Leprechaun: Origins. Unfortunately there’s not enough here to recommend to anyone but fans of the games.

Dead Rising: Watchtower is available to buy now from Platform Entertainment.

Comic Review: Wolf #1

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Svetlana Fedotov

Well, here we are, another comic about a supernatural detective who’s seen too much and is SO over it. Of course, there’s a wildly vast array of characters with weird faces whom the populace may or may not see and uh, vampires? Yeah vampires. So of course, you’re asking, ‘Svetlana, why are you reviewing this comic then? Why waste my precious internet time here, at the world famous Brutal as Hell, when I could be jerking it to clown porn?’ Woah there, Pogo. Aside from my well-known love of sexy men fighting sexy ghosts, Image Comics newest venture, Wolf, is pretty damn good. A genuine noir horror mystery that actually does take itself seriously, the comic reads like an old timey pulp novel updated for modern audiences and set dead center in the last vestiges of American debauchery, Los Angeles.

The comic opens on the glowing landscape of the City of Angels as a figure encased in flames makes his way down the starlit desert. Suddenly, the issue cuts to said figure sitting calmly in an interrogation room, exchanging mythology lectures. Meet Antoine Wolfe, part detective, part soldier, part mythological creature; you know, he’s complicated. He’s blessed (or cursed) with immortality and uses his death dodging abilities to help others with the abilities to exist between the spots in our vision, or at least stop the bad ones from running amok. Of course, no power of the gods comes without its share of problems and when he’s sucked into a prophecy of end-of-the-world proportions, he has no choice but to answer the call, even when it comes in the form of an orphaned teen girl.

As stated, what really separates Wolf from other supernatural detective mysteries is that it actually takes itself seriously. Antoine feels like a genuine character and despite his “too damn old for this shit” air, it doesn’t weigh down his character. That’s the problem that occurs with a lot of other work; the leads become caricatures of the down-trodden detective ideal and lack any sort of depth. They turn into common tropes, a different version of John Constantine. With Antoine, by making him a recently retired soldier and a black man who faces racism, it gives him something else to work with and creates a genuine personality. I also love that the comic has decided to focus on mythological backgrounds for the creatures in the comic instead of popular culture ideals. We’re talking some Old Gods stuff, especially the side character Freddy who actually has tentacles for a face and speaks in the grandiose language of Lovecraftian writing. Fans of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will seriously dig this work.

The creative team of Ales Kot and Matt Taylor do a great job of bringing this hard mystery to the general audience. The power couple gets creative on a burnt out genre and sure, they throw in some standard fanfare such as a prophecy-telling crazy lady and jerky vampires, but it still works. In fact, it does what it’s intended to do, move the story along to its wild cliff hanger. I dig Taylor’s artwork too. It’s not overtly complex but, like the writing, flows organically. Some of the angles are a bit rough but he knows when and where to accessorise the backgrounds and when to wash them out, so it all evens out. I would love to see more from these two in the future, I really feel that they could become the next hot comic team, like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips or Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Either way, definitely go check out Wolf #1, it’s a double issue spectacular!

Asami August: Who The Heck’s Asami?

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Well, as my esteemed colleague Ben has already told you all, we plan on making August a huge celebration of the life of Asami Sugiura as she approaches her thirtieth birthday. But it also occurs to us that, out there, some of you may be completely uninitiated into the ways of one of our favourite horror and exploitation actresses. Firstly, we pity you if that’s the case, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Here’s a little introduction, from us, to you.

So just who is this Asami?

Tokyo-born Asami started out as an AV idol in her native Japan, getting her launch at the age of nineteen and staying in the industry until 2008, when she retired. Now, it’s worth saying that in Japan, the world of the AV – Adult Video – industry is rather different to how we’d probably recognise porn in the West. Japan generally has an oddball relationship with sex and its sex industry reflects that; it’s both overt and coy. You can access everything and anything that suits your tastes, but what you get is heavily pixellated; there’s a ferocious appetite for pornography, and you can buy it readily most anywhere, but no one really talks about it in polite society. In any case, your average AV/V Cinema (direct-to-video genre) starlet starts at a young age, and performs in any number of ‘niche’ cinema projects, usually also appearing in supporting photo spreads for magazines and the like for a couple of years at best. Thousands of girls get their big launch every year, and most of them disappear not too long after; it’s a crowded market, with heavy demand, and lots of girls eager to get their big break. Although the world of AV is different to the porn industry in the West, though, what’s common there as here is that it’s incredibly rare for an actress to make the switch from porn to mainstream roles. Can you name more than two or three Western porn stars who have made that transition? Nope, me neither. Asami is remarkable because even while she was still appearing in V Cinema, she was concurrently working on…well, I don’t know if we can call The Machine Girl ‘mainstream’ as such, because everything about it screams ‘I am not for everyone’, but the very fact that she was in it marks her out as different to so many of her peers. She took a risk – Noburu Iguchi took a risk – and it paid off. Speaking to Dazed magazine, Asami credits her former porno business colleague for giving her that opportunity: “He had directed adult movies and when he got the chance to do a low budget horror film he wanted to work with people he knew and trusted. I was very lucky because he realised I was interested in playing more legitimate roles.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

So how has she done so well?

Nia will be talking in more depth about Asami’s transition from AV to horror and her work with two directors in particular, but suffice to say that her career has now forged ahead into other territory, and it’s what we know and love her for. It’s not as simple as simply catching a lucky break, though. Luck plays its part, sure but there’s good reason that Asami has been able to achieve so much.

Japan may in many ways be a misogynistic culture, but it does have a tradition of heavy female representation on screen, and it acknowledges the fact that it must also cater to a large female audience; women have readily entered every cinematic genre there is in Japan, and Asami has now found her place in a long line of striking and talented B-movie actresses who know who their audiences don’t just comprise of men. To do well within the country, you have to get your head around this truism. As long ago as 1991 in his work Pink Samurai, critic Nicholas Bornoff was paying tribute to a “new breed of beauteous bloody mamas” gracing the screen in Japan; joining the ranks of Meiko Kaji and Eihi Shiina, Asami has proven that she has the charisma and work ethic needed to establish herself as an actress.

Of course, the reason that we can talk about her appeal at all is because her movies have made it across the hemisphere divide and got her known in the West, something which is tough to achieve, even in these days. A lot of her work still lacks legitimate release here sadly, but (to name but a few) titles like Mutant Girls Squad and RoboGeisha are always going to get you noticed. These films are gloriously loopy and a lot of fun, and you can expect a lot more chattering about how awesome they are over the coming month.

So, why her? Aside from the happy circumstance of her being given the chance to prove she could do the work in the first place, we can see in Asami an utter willingness to throw herself into her work (never has this girl phoned her performance in), a real hunger for her work to be accepted and valued, and of course a self-effacing streak when she talks about all of her successes to date. She’s in it for the long haul, she’s unconventional and as Ben noted, she’s one of a rare breed of actresses who really qualifies for the monicker ‘scream queen’. That’s reason enough, we feel, to pay a little thanks to Asami on her birthday. So if you didn’t know who she was before, you sure as hell will by the end of the month!

No Jump Scares Needed: 5 Stand-Out Supernatural Scenes in Horror Cinema

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

Pardon me a ‘get off my lawn’ moment, if you will: supernatural horror-making in recent years has gone down the drain.

Oh sure, on occasion you’ll see a film which has its moments, but the fact that this often strikes us with such genuine surprise and delight should testify that for the most part, supernatural horror is badly-done, poorly-executed and just plain lazy. Box office success seems to hinge on the following: winning favour with a horde of recalcitrant teens who measure quality according to how much or how little a horror film makes the weakest member of their group amusingly shriek out loud. More and more films have begun to follow a formula, one which plumps for cheap thrills and sudden shocks over all else. Actually, to call it a formula is to suggest it has a number of elements which combine successfully. That would be overstating things. Lacking the wit to craft a slowly-building story, one which immerses you in the world of credible (even if unlikeable) characters whilst allowing you to feel the tension they feel in an incredible, otherworldly situation, the tendency now is to lob in a cookie-cutter family unit and then haunt them with all the subtlety of fireworks at a funeral. Move them in to a spooky house and then have a shitty CGI child leap out at them for eighty minutes so that the evil can be resolved for the final ten minutes before everyone – on screen and in the cinema – leaves. Promise some extra footage of said shitty CGI child for the DVD release, and rake in those pennies. You did good!

There’s a reason advertising campaigns rock out the night vision to promote their films these days. It’s because they make the error of thinking that the quality of horror is measured by how much – and how high – the audience members jump. That’s what it’s all about now. Terror has become a Richter scale of involuntary leaps and jerks; it’s a lowest-common-denominator way of thinking, and confusing a reflex action with genuine fear is a hell of a mistake to make. For example: if someone comes around a corner ahead of you and you didn’t hear them approach, then you’ll jump when you see them. This is the brain’s way of getting you ready for action should you need it; the good old reptile brain stops you daydreaming and puts you in ‘drive’ in case this new, unanticipated person is a threat. It’s non-discriminatory and it’s instantaneous. We can’t control it; we’re just primed to jump a foot into the air if we’re caught unawares. A small child can make you jump by popping up and shouting ‘boo!’ but give it a second and you realise you were just caught off guard.

In a movie it’s not foolproof, but it’s pretty foolproof. Yeah, you do get the odd build-up which is so ridiculously obvious that the scene fails because you’ve been tensed against it for a whole minute, but filmmakers aren’t about to give up yet. Perhaps even they are in doubt of the permanence of this approach in horror, as if even our oldest brain structures will eventually completely disengage from whatever is in front of us, we get the regular-as-clockwork ‘boo!’ moment, so what we get now is that hugely annoying sampled screech sound which is dubbed across every jerky GRAB! Or BOO! scene. Case in point: the Poltergeist reboot. At Brutal as Hell we were actively drawing straws against even going to see the film until Dustin stepped up to the plate, but for me the scene in the trailer where the kid gets yanked up a flight of stairs accompanied by that tedious bloody cacophony of screeching was proof positive that I would think it was shit.

The human imagination has the capacity for so much more than that. That’s where we feel a real scare; that’s where we try to process events which seem to point to an existence of ours beyond us, and consider the implications of this. Think back to when you were a child, which is when a lot of us get a taste for the type of frights we rarely see in modern horror cinema now. If you believed in ghosts, or monsters, or the thing in the closet, you feared its quiet presence, its potential, its all-seeing eye. You may have thought from time to time you heard something breathing, or saw something out of the corner of your eye, or heard something – but that initial shock invariably gave way to greater fears, and so, the best supernatural horror manages to accommodate that. The most frightening things don’t always move fast. They certainly don’t have to land on you like a tonne of bricks.

Of course, and although I’ll post video clips where they’re available for the following list, it’s important to remember that, taken out of context, any scene can lose its impact. In fact, if you haven’t seen the films or programmes I’m about to mention, I’d avoid the links and track down the end product.

Dracula (1979) – Mina’s Reunion with Van Helsing

Actress Jan Francis has been cheated of her horror reputation, in a way, as when she ‘made it big’, it involved crossing over to a lot of frankly underwhelming British TV, and this is what she’s now best-known for. However, before she was making the likes of Just Good Friends, she had turned her hand to Hammer’s television series House of Mystery and Suspense, tackled M R James in an ITV version of Casting the Runes, and – most notably of all – appeared in John Badham’s 1979 retelling of Dracula. It’s not a long filmography then, but it’s a good one. In this version of Dracula it’s Mina (Francis), rather than Lucy, who falls prey to the Count’s advances, sickens and dies. Her father Van Helsing, suspecting some sort of supernatural foul play, tracks her to the vault where she’s buried – with, for me, skin-crawling results. His shock and her blank-eyed, quiet requests for her father to go with her – in their native Dutch – are haunting. Badham has the good sense to keep her appearance low-key too, enclosing the whole scene in near total darkness.

Lost Hearts (1973) – the Hurdy Gurdy

Lost Hearts is probably M R James’s most visceral horror story: although framed with the usual (if still brilliant) rational account of a sequence of events which challenges convention, we shouldn’t forget that at the crux of the story, there are two ritually murdered children. MR James veteran director Lawrence Gordon Clark takes the story in some unanticipated directions here, including making the boy play a hurdy-gurdy: it seems to work, and the fact that it’s not a crashing cymbal or sharp flurry of violin notes makes it both quaint and defiant to modern ears. These ambiguous child spirits don’t seem to want to harm Stephen; they simply want to show what has happened to them, and when they reveal their chest wounds to him in his dream it’s a shocking moment, but one which appalls, rather than startles.

The Haunted (1991) – “Janet”

Once upon a time, the whole ‘inspired by real events’ was a lot rarer on our screens, and in the case of this largely unassuming direct-to-TV movie, the fact that the ‘real events’ were linked to a family called The Smurls would not have meant a great deal to many people. However, this family had sought the help of a pair of celebrity – if there can be such a thing – demon hunters, by the names of Ed and Lorraine Warren. If you’ve picked up The Conjuring and Annabelle of late (and my condolences for the latter, if you have) then you may know that these films are also ‘inspired by real events’ and that these events also involve the Warrens. However, despite the at-times hokey TV vibe of The Haunted, I think it is a deeply creepy film which outstrips Annabelle by miles and has the edge on The Conjuring too, although this is the better film of the two newer offerings. Its believable domesticity and order are most horrifically impinged upon by the quiet little shocks the film offers. There are manifestation scenes in here along the way, but for me the simple addition of a voice is one of the most effective, when Janet Smurl is called by – what she thinks is – her mother in an adjoining room. She’s not there. In fact, it’s just the start of their ordeal. If you wish, and this is correct at the time of writing, you may watch the whole film here.

The Innocents (1961) – end sequence

A great deal has already been written about The Innocents, a highly-regarded film based on Henry James’s lone decent book, The Turn of the Screw. It may have dispensed with the original title, but the action described in that title is abundant on the screen, as the hysterical, obsessive governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) becomes convinced that her employer’s house is haunted by the former governess, Miss Jessel, and another employee – Peter Quint, and gradually creates an unbearable situation at the house. With mental illness and sexuality bubbling cold beneath the surface, that old adage that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is never more true than in the case of Miss Giddens; in trying to protect the children, she causes immense harm, culminating in the end scene of the film. It’s able to its maintain ambiguity, however. Is there really something there? Does Miles see it? With no fanfare, the film’s tragedy unfolds here and we are never permitted a neat, one-size-fits-all ending – not for us or for them.

The Woman in Black (1989) – bedroom scene

I think this is a perfect point on which to end, as we now have two cinematic versions of the original Woman in Black story by Susan Hill. One was made over twenty-five years ago; the other is one of the smash-hit horrors of recent years, released in 2012. These don’t compare very closely.

It probably won’t be a surprise to anyone, by now, that I prefer the earlier film; although I quite enjoyed the 2012 retelling of the story for its locations, costumes and performances, it definitely had all the hallmarks of the jump-scare-horror (though, in fairness, so does the successful stage production of the novella). The whole film felt like a showcase for screenplay-writer Jane Goldman to have her spooky Victorian toys mysteriously start working; the Woman in Black here was bobbing up on camera on a regular basis, and she didn’t go about it quietly either. Clearly made to corral Harry Potter fans who turned up in their droves to see actor Daniel Radcliffe in his role as Mr Kipps, the lawyer, the newer version of The Woman in Black concentrated on how high it could get people out of their seats. Yes, it’s one of those films, and overall it’s a shame.

The Nigel Kneale production of two decades previous didn’t attempt to make people jump. It kept the Woman in Black herself off-screen most of the time, and for its fright effect it called to our thinking brains with quiet glimpses, or sounds, or other low-key phenomena. It had one trick up its sleeve, though; hence, this clip shows the film’s most startling moment. This was certainly a break from the material which had preceded it, and as such it seems to have stayed with people (hence the clip’s title!) One surprise change in direction – again, without massive ceremony – is more than adequate here, and works well with the film overall in this dynamic and well-wrought version of a classic story. Sure, to many modern viewers more amenable to ghosts who all look a certain way – and they do – this character may seem dated to you. Some of the comments on Youtube complained that the ghost wasn’t attractive enough; I know you shouldn’t put too much faith in what you read on the bottom half of the internet, but all the same – this has to tell you something about what people expect from their supernatural horror these days.

Less is more, folks. Less is more. And long may there be this kind of creeping, uneasy, understated cinema to remind us of this fact.

Film Review: The Devil of Kreuzberg (2015)

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When a film is described by its maker as ‘modern Gothic’ then I have to admit, I’ll always jump at the chance to see it, even if I’m often disappointed. The term ‘Gothic’ is tough to define in many ways, but even if we can’t always agree what Gothic is, then we can often agree on what it isn’t. Many modern horrors consider themselves Gothic, after all, and attempt to trade off the name, often for the lucrative October market, though often presupposing that a certain aesthetic is quite enough – usually women in black, pop-up ghosts which screech and a few obligatory nods to creaky architecture. I don’t think this really fits the bill; I’m looking for atmosphere, that skin-crawling sense of some lowering presence which overshadows and overpowers us. So hand me a film that calls itself Gothic and is set in one of my favourite cities? Sold.

In many ways, then, I’m so glad I liked The Devil of Kreuzberg – I don’t think the ol’ sensibilities could have coped with a dead loss here. Happily this isn’t the case, and despite clearly being made for next to nothing (IMDb suggests a measly 3,000 euros) it has three things which sustain it through that rough terrain of low-budget filmmaking in which others flounder: ideas, ambition, and a sense of where it belongs in the long tradition of films which came before it. Had director Alex Bakshaev pitched this film as Gothic because it was simply a bit dark some of the time, then it would be easy to knock holes in The Devil of Kreuzberg. But he knows his stuff, both in how he shoots and in what he references along the way. The film does have its limitations, but a lack of imagination – or knowledge of Gothic cinema – isn’t amongst them.

I can even forgive the fact that this film begins with some dancing (and has some more along the way) – because the film quickly improves, and we are introduced to what at first seems to be a loving couple, reclusive writer Jakob (Ludwig Reuter) and Linda (first-time actress Sandra Bourdonnec). Jakob reflects on how he typically likes to hide from the world in general, but so far, he’s made an exception for Linda. However, he’s begun to have some disturbing dreams about his lady companion in which she straddles and then kills him – which is leading him to withdraw from even her. Linda just wants to help. Jakob however is becoming afraid of Linda, and confides in his best friend and sometime-hitman Kurt (Suleyman Yuceer) how he feels, hoping for a resolution. In the ensuing tangle of who should fear who in this film, it does transpire that perhaps, Jakob has reason to feel afraid.

The first thing to greatly admire about this film is how it gives Berlin back a bit of the demi-monde allure it deserves (and I mean that in a complimentary way). The city looks rich and alive in the way it’s shot, all colourful long-shots of driving rain and neon lights, not to mention excess a-plenty in the form of numerous sex shops and porno cinemas. To me, this all qualifies as Gothic. The idea of the city as vast, alluring but potentially threatening is every bit as Gothic as your lofty landscapes and castle dungeons. Some of the shots used here are brilliant, too, giving a nod of reference to even the oldest horror movies, and successfully making concrete monoliths and desolate urban places into evocative spaces. These stylistic choices are fun in and of themselves, but add in a cemetery which looks great on screen as highly plot-relevant and then reference one of the most famous 19th century stories of love as consumption (no, probably not the one you’ve just thought of, but one you might think of quite soon after that) and there’s enough going on to keep me engaged. Hearing a familiar name from horror history being invoked can make you feel a little cautious, true, but make it interesting and it’s definitely good to have them around again.

At the unusual running length of fifty minutes, The Devil of Kreuzberg is somewhere between a short and a modern feature, and as such it doesn’t spend a great deal of time elaborating on its themes and developments, which may keep some viewers at arms’ length. It does have some initial issues, too, with the nature of a multi-lingual production where some of the cameo actors seem ill at ease speaking English, which could be seen to compound their inexperience. All that said, I thought the slightly unorthodox leads worked well together (again, that dancing notwithstanding) and Bourdonnec really is good, maybe even off-screen a bit too much. The ending, with its dreamy dialogue and setting, reminded me a bit of Jean Rollin – The Iron Rose or Fascination, maybe. All interesting things to pick out, in a low budget movie in 2015.

Full kudos to Bakshaev for putting this project together: he’s clearly a man committed to horror, knows his stuff and takes pains to capture that on-screen despite the constraints. Honestly – I wish there were more opportunities to give this kind of praise to low-budget filmmakers. I really do.

Blu-ray Review: Quatermass (1979)

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When creator Nigel Kneale brought Professor Bernard Quatermass to the screen in the late 70s, it was not the first time that this intriguing and rather under-appreciated figure had appeared; since the 1950s, when he was first introduced, he had become a quiet but interesting institution, a man whose scientific acumen was often acutely thrown into disarray by the forces he encountered as part of his work. However, by the late 70s – when it seems the Prof had decided to take time out from shall we say a ‘challenging career’ – there was no escaping the chaos on the streets of Britain, and it seems fair to say that this later TV series carried with it some of the anxieties of its own time.

I say ‘chaos’, and the strikes, three day weeks and power cuts which were really taking place in the UK in the years around the making of this series certainly look that way, but in the fictional universe of Quatermass, it’s not really full on chaos at all. There’s something oddly polite and rather British about the breakdown of society in the early scenes of Quatermass; the marauding thugs of London all speak with Received Pronunciation (damn you, acting school) and although many parts of the city look like ghettos, TV continues to run, there’s clearly fuel for vehicles and the police are still around too. This ain’t Threads. But what is behind this unprecedented dysfunction, this so-called ‘urban collapse’?

If he has any suspicions, Professor Quatermass (John Mills) is keeping quiet about them, at least at first. The multinational (read: Russia and the US) space project ‘Hands in Space’ seems to be the priority for TV output rather than the conditions on the streets, and in his professional capacity as someone who has worked in space research and development, Quatermass has been asked to participate in a show which will air at the time a new mission is taking place. When asked about his feelings on this superpower-driven new project, Quatermass goes off-message and declares his skepticism; thus when the mission ends in disaster moments later, with some unspecified disaster causing the US and Russian craft to decompress (including one haunting scene when one astronaut desperately tries to escape) the superpowers begin to wonder if he’s involved. However, alongside fellow scientist Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale) he’s able to flee, with Kapp offering him refuge at his home. All Quatermass is really interested in at this stage is finding his missing granddaughter; however, his attempts to find her are interrupted by their burgeoning scientific suspicion, based on data collected at Kapp’s place, that the space accident was caused by a hitherto unknown phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the country’s youth seems to be broadly divided between the mercenary street people and the Planet People – a slightly more sinister version of Age of Aquarius hippies, who all claim to be on the verge of escape to a new planet. Well, many cults have said as much; what’s different here is that a new call to a stone circle seems to be common among them, with thousands making their way to the same site. It’s the scientist’s nightmare: the possibility of a relationship between supernaturalism – magic – and forces which seem more from the realms of astrophysics. Quatermass and Kapp have to entertain the possibility that what they see unfolding challenges and endangers everything they know or indeed hold dear.

As I said, this is in its way a rather gentle take on dystopia: no viruses, no zombies, no cannibalism through necessity (or choice), but rather a culture verging on the precipice of complete breakdown, at risk from forces outside itself. It’s a completely recognisable world with some additional touches, which would have made it more relatable for contemporary audiences and makes it interesting in subtle ways for us. The Planet People would have been, and still are, familiar characters – the series mentions that their likes would formerly have ‘visited Glastonbury or Stonehenge’, and they’re hardly the most threatening cult ever to appear on screen. But what we have here is a series which can ratchet up the pace rather carefully, gradually intermeshing human behaviour with an astral cause, then allowing the situation to grow ever more threatening and hostile. This is a very character-driven story too, and whilst it may appeal to nostalgists who watched it the first time around (it comes complete with breaks where they originally appeared) it will also appeal to new viewers, who may like to see science fiction with a different focus and handling, particularly via a man of science who has come to an impasse; he just wants his family safe, and recoils from the horrors which are taking place.

Nigel Kneale was an absolute master at crafting tension, and he had an eye for framing scenes in such a way that they stay with you (I contend that anyone who has ever seen his version of The Woman in Black can be rendered prostrate with fear by simply mentioning ‘the bedroom scene’). He was also superb at introducing a cynical veneer to his scenes: in Quatermass, the stalls of books ‘guaranteed to burn well’ and the coddish Paganism embraced by a desperate and ragged population – with trinkets to match – are just two examples of opportunities he seized which go on to look amazing on screen, thanks of course also to director Piers Haggard, whose horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the UK’s finest. Quatermass does far more than give us effective scenes, of course, and sets up its overarching tension between rationalism and supernaturalism very well, sustaining it across its episodes; Kapp’s sincere assertion that a love of learning is ‘the only way’ indeed seems the only way in the face of what is going on, but then again, Kneale forces us to give some credence to the big ‘what if?’ – here, learning and science has hurtled into forces beyond itself, and its proponents have been forced to consider things previously thought impossible. All of this is achieved with a good balance throughout between quiet pause for thought and high action.

This series had been unavailable for some time prior to this new release by Network, and their presentation here is of a good standard (with only one niggling omission – one of the episode synopses included on the disc is mute for some reason). Still, good quality new releases of these otherwise-lost series can only be a good thing, so for a still-innovative spin on how humanity just might unravel, it comes recommended.

Quatermass (1979) is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Network now.

Comic Review: The Island #1

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Svetlana Fedotov

Comic anthologies are hard to pull off. There’s always someone that doesn’t pick up the slack in one of the stories, whether it’s the crap art or dull dialogue, and that one anchor can weigh down the entire ship. Luckily for The Island, while perhaps a mixed bag of story quality, it is at least beautifully drawn, fantastically dialogued, and pretentious in the best way possible. If you ever wanted to feel fancy reading a comic, this is the way to do it. Mostly sci-fi with a touch of bizarre, The Island brings together three creative people and lets them loose in a Heavy Metal style madness to poetically explore the world around us.

Made up of three comic works and one short story, The Island opens up with the Emma Rios’ short work, ID. In the not-so-distant future, a riot breaks out in the street outside of a café where three people sit and discuss changing their bodies with experimental technology. Just as they wrap up, both the rioters and the police break into the café, forcing them into the streets and into the reality of a future obsessed with war and beauty. The second story, Ghost Town by The Island founder Brandon Graham, is a nonsensical exploration of a guy with a gifted werewolf penis living in a strange fantasy world filled floating whales, talking creatures, and pun based humor interweaving with mind-bending buildings and future technology. Does anything happen in it? Not really, but it looks cool. The last story, Dagger Proof Mummy by Ludroe, is set in a place where anamorphic cat creatures run the streets and one girl is on the hunt for her friend who disappeared while skateboarding. (Oh, and the short story is a small work dedicated to poet Maggie Estep).

The Island is a weird read. This is definitely one of those anthologies that was created to push the boundaries of the imagination of the contributors, but it seems to do that at the cost of alienating the reader. But, like a lot of collected works, it needs to be judged on individual work as well as a whole so that’s what I shall do. My favorite so far is definitely ID. I love the easy flow of dialogue and the story, while fantastical, is easy to understand in context to the real world. The art is absolutely gorgeous as well. Well placed panel spacing creates a unique visual experience and the aesthetic harkens to an adult manga vibe that moves well along the pages.

Ghost Town, on the other hand, while a huge pictorial undertaking, does not do much for the story. It seems like Graham spends most of his time trying to get a dream world onto the page than a story that goes with it. I guess it’s like a poem; you have to read between the lines. While the claustrophobic beauty of the art is a thing to behold, I just wish there was something else going on.

Dagger Proof Mummy is alright. It harkens back to the early 90ss indie art with thick inking and blocky letters – you know, like clip-art from an early writing program. The story is fairly straightforward with an interesting twist at the end and is definitely the easiest one to get into. The characters are a bit flat and kind of go to the wayside of the story, but they work for what needs to get said.

So, all in all, The Island is alright. It’s big, it’s colorful, and it’s visually enthralling, but dig a bit deeper and it’s hard not to get stuck on the lack of direction. That being said, it just screams potential and I’m interested in seeing where it goes from here.