Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

“It’s Showtime!” 25 Years of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Everyone seems to remember the first time they saw Beetlejuice.

I’d say it’s just one of those films which sticks with you, through its zany plot, its manic energy and wit; Beetlejuice is a rite of passage almost, something to recommend to your friends. I remember someone being allowed to get the film out of the long-gone Palace Video in my home town, making them the first in our class at school: said kid became instantly cool, especially when they’d watched the film enough times to be able to parrot its catchphrases. (If I remember rightly, they later got a detention for shouting “Nice fucking model!” in the playground.) Beetlejuice was definitely the film to see: I watched it with friends after class one evening, and I had never seen anything like it. I’d go so far as to say it warped my sense of humour forever: come on, how could you watch a film where characters humorously pull their faces off, pop their eyes out, get possessed by the spirit of the Banana Boat song, visit undead hookers, and of course there’s the dead guy who wants to marry a teenager – and not end up a little weird? Naturally, thankfully, I laughed all the way through. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay to it is to say that, even as an adult some twenty-plus years later, I still grin all the way through, every time I watch it, and I have seen this film many, many times. It appeals to a younger audience, but it works brilliantly for older audiences too.

Maybe you have to be a little older to appreciate one of the things it does so well, though, and it is this: Beetlejuice completely decimates received wisdom on death. And we have a hell of a lot of received wisdom on death: even if you grow up only tangentially aware of religion, then you will have somewhere in your mind the notion that when we die, we continue existing in some form, either in Heaven, or in Hell. If you get to the point where you reject this idea, you are still aware of the archetypes, and you can trot them out if need be.

Burton not only ditches these archetypes, but gives us an entirely new afterlife mythos. It’s smart, it’s bold and it’s unique. When the unfortunate newlyweds Adam and Barbara go to their watery graves, they slowly, but surely come to realise that the afterlife isn’t what they thought it would be. “Are we halfway to Heaven or halfway to Hell?” asks Barbara; well, neither, actually. The afterlife is in fact a bureaucracy, with a user’s manual, paperwork, case workers and very definite rules. This isn’t some serene, aspirational place where you instantaneously unite with your loved ones and enjoy eternity together. Far from it. One thing’s for sure in all of this: “Being dead really doesn’t make things any easier”.

Adam and Barbara come to appreciate this truism sooner rather than later, when they’re forced to share their home – the home they can’t leave, for fear of those damn sand worms – with the Deetz family, a bunch of renegade yuppies up from New York for some ‘peace and quiet’. As ‘artist’ Delia spraypaints her way through the house with her guru Otho in tow, the Maitlands start to get desperate. They can’t share eternity with these people. They do their best to scare ’em off, but as the living don’t generally see the dead, all of their (highly) creative efforts are in vain. Still, in the highly-organised afterlife they find themselves in, there are freelancers who might be able to help. Against the advice given to them by their case worker, they decide to employ a bio-exorcist – to get rid of the living. All you have to do is call his name three times…

Casting Michael Keaton as ‘the ghost with the most’ was an absolutely inspired choice: can you seriously, seriously imagine anyone else playing the character of Betelgeuse, or ‘Beetlejuice’, with as much glee? Beetlejuice is a true original, unsurpassed and a joy to watch as he sleazes it up. It’s no coincidence that a lot of his hijinks are accompanied by circus music, or resemble circus acts – he’s as much a demented clown as he is a ghost in any conventional sense, though of course, it’s not as if this film really holds much truck with convention at the best of times. It’s notable that the film really belongs to Keaton, even though he’s not actually on screen for that much of the film. Less is more maybe, because when he is around, he’s a paragon of demented, chaotic energy. If one word could sum up this movie it would be ‘mischief’. Keaton is key to that mischief. The whole film is filled with playfulness, though, which may be one more reason it made such a big impact on me, and others, as kids. It has the jokes, the pratfalls, the daft physical humour, but it also has something of that childlike ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you could…’ as it flouts physical rules, from doors which magically open when they’re drawn on a wall, to the ability to lop off your head but still walk around.

So, Keaton steals the show, but all the casting in this film is spot on: Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are sweet and likeable as the straight-laced Maitlands and Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones as the Deetzes are easy to poke fun at without just being stooges. I can’t go any further without talking about Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, though, can I?

With the exception of a redemptive performance in Black Swan, it feels like we don’t see that much of Ms. Ryder these days – or at least she’s not routinely in the types of films I end up seeing – and she’s no doubt had her share of problems, but back in the late eighties and early nineties, she appeared in some superb films in some superb roles, Beetlejuice being one of them (and who doesn’t love Heathers?) Her portrayal of Lydia Deetz is pitched perfectly, has a great balance of vulnerability and dark humour, and I wouldn’t mind betting that Lydia is one of the most famous goth girls in existence. When I was a kid I didn’t just like Lydia, I wanted to be Lydia, and I bet a lot of you ladies reading felt just the same. She meant it could be cool to be weird. Hard as it is to believe now that, for my sins, I have to go to work in smart/casual dress and long since gave up dyeing my hair unnatural shades of red or black, but Lydia was a big influence on my preferred aesthetic, back in the day. And I have to admit, I still go a bundle on the pale skin, dark hair and sardonic one liners. In Lydia, Burton created a classic character, and again, chose exactly the right actress to play her.

Beetlejuice came right at the start of Tim Burton’s career: a Pee Wee Herman movie (?) and his short films aside, this was the first proper cinematic foray into the world of his imagination, and being so early on, Beetlejuice came to be before Burton’s quirks became tropes. As much as I love Tim Burton, always will, his visual style and subject matter have become a tad…stale to me in recent years, and I’ve found myself questioning some of the directorial choices he’s made. So, it’s been refreshing to revisit an early movie like this one to get the benefit of his distinctive creativity, when it felt like just that. The Tim Burton aesthetic was in development in Beetlejuice, but it wasn’t as set in stone: there’s a bit more variety at play here, so you get the recognisable visual tics (like that love of black and white stripes) but there’s lots of colour and experimentation with the appearance of characters on screen. The Burton obsession with outsiders is here, but it’s understated. The fascination with morbidity is here of course, but plays out in a novel, unexpected way.

For me, everything here just works. It’s lively, it’s funny, it’s well-written and it’s aged pretty damn well, right down to the special effects: I’d say that this is Burton’s finest moment, and it’s stood the test of time for good reason. This is one film which definitely deserves the cult status it has garnered over the past twenty-five years; it’s one of the most original, enjoyable pieces of storytelling ever to be committed to celluloid. Thank-you, Tim Burton and thank-you, Beetlejuice: trust me, there’s absolutely no more fun way to be sent strange…

DVD Review: Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Naming films is a tricky matter. Of course, you want your title to appeal to its right audience, of course you want to generate anticipation, but by the same token, you run the risk of false advertising if you put too much in there. It’s like the perils of advertising a film with something like, ooh, I don’t know, ‘the most terrifying movie you will ever experience’. It sets the film up for a fall; the chances of it living up to that sort of hype are slim to none. This is very much the case with Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death: okay, yes, there are women in it, there’s even a suggestion of cannibalism, and there is at least one avocado. But does it deserve such an overblown title? No it bloody well does not, and once I’d seen the Full Moon Productions logo appear on my screen, I began to feel a little bit like I’d been cheated. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as much a fan of Charles Band’s insane little monster movies as the next person, but I’m not sure I’d trust him to put together what at least ostensibly sounds like an exploitation flick, or at least a pastiche of same. Knowing absolutely nothing about this film before viewing it, I was hoping for something grim and Ferox-y. What I got instead was Cannibal Capers. More or less minus the cannibalism.

It seems at first that director J. F. Lawton – a man who bizarrely went from directing this to writing the feelgood prostitution rom-com Pretty Woman – is indeed making an exploitation film, though. The thing is, the film puts nearly all of its nudity and violence into the first five minutes, as two explorers stumble upon a group of bathing so-called Piranha Women (in the heart of the Californian avocado jungle?) who don’t take kindly to the interruption. They attack the men and, it is suggested, turn them into jerky. And that’s pretty much your lot; the rest of the film is decidedly exploitation-lite. If I was a cynic, I’d suggest that the director front-loaded the film with nudity to get the rights sold, but ours not to reason why…

The plot is as follows: this Californian avocado jungle is the only source of avocados in the free world, and as such is of great political significance. The thing is, there’s this remote tribe of cannibal women in there who keep killing all the men who get anywhere near them. To solve this problem the government approaches Feminist Studies specialist Dr. Margo Hunt (played by soft-core doyenne Shannon Tweed) and tells her she has to go and make peace with those damn radical feminists. Dr. Hunt does so, accompanied by a bimbo student called Bunny (Karen Mistal) and…Bill Maher, who apparently enacted being a feminist-hating macho man long before being reincarnated as a political polemicist. Have I said feminist too much? Believe me, the term is used far more in the film. Take a drink every time you hear it, and you’ll be flat on your back by thirty minutes in. Oh, and Dr Hunt and her followers also have to retrieve a feminist academic who was sent into the jungle to negotiate with the Piranha Women, but went native instead. The missing academic is one Dr. Kurtz (Adrienne Barbeau). Do you see what they did there?

It all sounds diverting, I recognise that, and the cast features some interesting faces; sadly, it’s so much better in writing than in actual fact. The film veers from obvious parody to plain awfulness as it desperately tries to crack jokes at the expense of feminism, shoehorning masses of dialogue in there because evidently someone couldn’t bear any of their research to go to waste. There’s ever a suspicion that underneath all the bad jokes, someone has a genuine chip on their shoulder about gender relations, but that’s by-the-by. Never knowing if it wants to be sly or goofy, this film throws pratfalls and silly physical humour into the mix but in so doing, never manages to feel consistent. You’d think it would be hard to get things so wrong when your basic premise is dropping a Women’s Studies professor behind enemy lines for the sake of avocados, but the jokes don’t land or they’re hammered into the ground like tent-pegs until all semblance of humour is extinct. The key to good comedy is knowing when to STFU; alright, a handful of the jokes here land, but most do not. This doesn’t stop them taking up masses of screen-time anyway.

Lacking humour, the film could have played up the Piranha Women themselves, but after the misleading boob deluge of the first five minutes you have to wait nearly an hour to see the women again. There’s not so much as a drop of blood either, not really, let alone any attempt at showing us The Other White Meat. The closest you get is someone tied to a sacrificial slab, and he sodding escapes. New rule: you can’t use the word ‘cannibal’ in a movie title if you’re only going to hint at it. Although some of the closing scenes were amusing enough, by that point I was totally disengaged and, although the film isn’t particularly long, it had blotted its copy-book long before then.

Intriguing people on board it may have, and an oddball 80s vibe to it too, but Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death fails to live up to its name. Hey, it was always going to be a risk. Whilst this may fare better as a beer movie with a group of friends, it didn’t work very well for a solo viewing. Bring back the endless stock footage of animals killing each other, the 70s synth soundtracks and the hungry natives: I just prefer my cannibal movies that way. Even Adrienne Barbeau couldn’t save this one.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is out now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.

DVD Review: Dead Head

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Once upon a time, back before the BBC discovered the joys of lowest-common-denominator, Coliseum for Cowards television which allows members of the great unwashed to feel like their opinions matter (dross like Strictly Come Dancing, for instance) it was much more willing to take chances on unusual original series, and Dead Head is one such of these. Fondly remembered by those who saw it the first time around, it’s at least as notable for the fact that, having been shown once, it disappeared. It’s quite odd for the Beeb not to repeat their programmes at all, so Dead Head has acquired something of a reputation – maybe even benefiting by omission, becoming a sort of forbidden fruit. Well, if you count yourselves amongst the original nostalgic audience, you can at last get your hands on a release – and if not, you may well enjoy this in its own right.

What we have here, essentially, is cockney noir. Director Rob Walker worked very hard to establish this classic noir style on the streets of 80s London, uniting visual features such as foggy streets, rain-soaked alleys and urban sprawl with recognisable themes like criminality, a wronged man, and a corrupt establishment. Our protagonist, Eddie (Denis Lawson) is a petty crook who supplements his income with the odd dodgy deal here or there. When he’s instructed to deliver a package to a smart address in London, he takes the job but finds there’s no one in: suspicious, Eddie takes a look in the hat-box he’s carrying and realises it contains the severed head of an unknown woman. Eddie doesn’t know what to do; he panics, and he throws it into the Thames – but it finds its way back to him, via a group of heavies who inform him that he’s been framed for the murder. To stand a chance of escape, Eddie must find out who has set him up and why: his fingerprints are all over the hat-box, and he has limited time before he’s traced. This voyage of discovery takes him all the way to the corrupt heart of British government…

Whilst Dead Head plays out like a Who’s Who of British TV (with a superb star turn by Simon Callow who utterly steals the show, in my ever-humble opinion), it does a decent job of generating atmosphere and suspense despite evidently not having a massive budget to play with. The impoverished London streets look interesting on camera, having that time-capsule feel which you often get with older series like these, the ominous soundtrack works very well and, although the script is a bit clunky in places, all of the actors give earnest performances, creating a sense of curiosity to see how things will play out. By even one episode in, Eddie – albeit a dodgy character in many ways – comes across as something of an Everyman, a person who has been swept up in events completely beyond his control as he struggles to make sense of what has happened to him. The plot thickens steadily and successfully here.

One element which may lose people a little, though (as it did me) is the heavy-handedness with which elements of class are explored in the series. Possibly this is just something which has got ‘lost in translation’ over the twenty-five years or so since Dead Head was made; certainly class exists, certainly it affects people’s lives, but the way in which it’s handled here grates a little. The script, which as noted runs into problems elsewhere, comes apart in some places, the dialogue growing increasingly contrived as encounters between working-class Eddie and the upper class are recounted, and worked against the tension, as much as it’s the case that Eddie is exploited because of his background in so many ways here.

Another potential snag is this: the point in time which sees Dead Head’s re-release is a real high point in TV drama. Whilst Dead Head has much to offer, we live in the days of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Dexter…and although there is a substantial amount of trash on our screens, I’d still say that we are living through something of a golden age of TV. Can Dead Head stand up to the examples given, for those of us who aren’t driven by nostalgia for having seen this the first time around?

Well, of course Dead Head lacks the polish of the types of programmes for which we can thank the likes of HBO, that much is certain. We’re also used to high-octane drama, which Dead Head doesn’t have on offer. There are moments of intense violence, sure, but overall this is more of a steady paced-programme which relies on mood. It is a worthwhile watch in its own right: it’s fairly gritty, fairly bold and the performances are strong enough to overcome the few difficulties it runs into. I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, but I was engaged enough to want to know more. And, hey, even if you aren’t familiar with this at all, it’s an interesting glimpse into how the mighty have fallen; more heads in hat-boxes and less prats on ice wouldn’t go amiss.

Dead Head will be released by Eureka Entertainment on 15th April 2013

Comic Review – Death Comes a-Knocking: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Review by Comix

Death is the dark mistress who awaits every living creature at the end of their time on Earth. When that final bell strikes, we will find ourselves existing beyond our pitiful lives; lives that were once immersed in pain, hate, sorrow, and, if we’re lucky, love and happiness. But for some poor souls, and many ghost stories, the human spirit refuses to pass on and is instead stuck to the material plane suffering the plight of “unfinished business.” This is where the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service comes in! Are you recently deceased with a grudge? Do you have a family member or a friend that you desperately need to get a hold of but your decomposed, greasy body won’t let you? Or do you just feel like getting buried in the sweet, sweet earth because you’re sick of hanging off that noose in the woods? Well, you’re in luck! The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service will not only hear your cries of the undead, but will (for a small fee) deliver your body whereever you need to go! Wanna scare your cheating wife? Done! Want to stick it to your boss one last time? Done! No project too big, no request too small, they do it all.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a fantastic horror manga currently published by Dark Horse Comics. It centers around a group of college students at a Buddhist University in Japan (and yes, they actually have those), who, to make ends meet, go corpse hunting and deliver the bodies to their final resting place. Of course, you must be wondering, how exactly do they know where the bodies want to go? Well, thanks to their resident psychic, Kuro Karatsu, talking to bodies is a breeze. With his ability to talk to the dead, he and his eclectic crew of misfits, made up of an embalmer, a dowser, a computer hacker, and a guy with a possessed puppet have no problem fulfilling requests. Of course, the requests are as strange as the bodies themselves, such as the ear that can only communicate in song or the body stuck in a robotic suit fighting to get free. There is also a longer story that entangles all the members of the crew, and its center is Karatsu and his guardian spirit. A fantastically morbid trip into Japan’s death and funeral practices, Kurosagi is as spooky as it is educational, and has gained a following both locally and abroad.

Kurosagi is a seriously great work of horror. This is not one of those Japanese horror comics that only appeals to fans of manga. It manages to translate very well for audiences around the world and despite focusing mostly on Eastern concepts of death, it’s the way it handles the subject that makes it so accessible. With a mix of black humor and genuine human emotion, the comic comes off as something that everyone, no matter where they’re from, can understand: death and the ghosts it leaves behind. Another part of its mass appeal is its ever-topical focus on issues of death and the morbid nature of human beings. Once again, it is mostly Japanese related, but who doesn’t want to know more about death in Japan? They address such interesting issues such as coin-locker babies (newborn babies left to die in subway station coin-lockers by young mothers), a little girl accused of murder which is reminiscent of real-life Nevada-chan, and the crying woman, a reflection of women in Japan who are hired to be mourners at funerals of not-so-popular people. One of my favorites is their take on postmortem weddings, where a woman is married off to a photograph of a man who didn’t live long enough to get his own bride. The characters even trot off to actual suicide spots, like Aokigahara Woods at the foot of Mount Fuji, where every year, they have teams of real volunteers scour the area for bodies.

The comic was first started in 2002 and published in the monthly Japanese comic magazine, Shonen Ace. It was later picked up by Young Ace (in which it still runs) and has totaled sixteen volumes in Japan. One unique aspect of the comic is that, unlike most manga, it has a separate artist and writer, instead of one person doing both. The author, Eiji Otsuka, is a type of scholar on the culture of manga and has also written for the comic MPD Psycho with artist Housui Yamazaki, who is also the artist for Kurosagi. Yamazaki, though, tends to be a bit of mystery. All that is known about him is that he illustrated the two previous comics and has written and drawn his own work called Mail. All three of the series seems (but are not officially confirmed) to be in the same universe and characters from one comic tend to find themselves making guest appearances in others. Yamazaki’s art, by the way, is amazing. The sequential art gets a bit choppy in places, but when it comes to large, gory splash pages, he can’t be beaten. His attention to detail is almost medical, bringing all the little bloody tidbits to life in a fantastically gruesome way. If anything, the art alone is worth the purchase.

The translated Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is currently on volume 13 and comes with a whole grab-bag of extra stuff. Each volume has an afterword from the author and several pages of explanations on all those little Japanese intricacies that readers come across in the comics. They are also bound in nice, heavy stock cover but unfortunately are being changed to the glossy version due to costs. The good thing is that a lot of the comics are self-contained, so you don’t really have to read them in order. I mean, if you want to get the background story, then read in order, but if you just want to read some of the fun, side stories, it’s not necessary. Also, both MPD Psycho and Mail are both printed by Dark Horse and are easily available, so, you know, you don’t have any excuse.

DVD Review: The Bay (2012)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

I have to say, I was somewhat blind-sided by the press release for The Bay – enough so that it completely took my mind off the fact that I was about to watch a found footage film, a sub-genre I have ranted about at length in the past. Perhaps this was even deliberate, a way of diverting attention from that fact. Lemme see: The Bay is brought to us by the producers of Sinister (fine) and Insidious (also makes sense) and…the director of Rain Man. Hang on, the director of Rain Man? I’ll admit it, that did give me pause for thought. To be fair to Barry Levinson, he hasn’t leapt straight from a heart-warming story of a man with autism to the horror genre – but, actually, he hasn’t had all that much to do with horror either, so I was interested to see what I was going to get here.

It turns out that Levinson’s plentiful experience as a director, regardless of what he’s directed, set him up rather nicely to make a pretty good job of The Bay. And, of course, there’s the fact that despite the style of filming, someone bothered to write a script, come up with a plot and cast real actors, which some of the worst found footage offenders still believe they are exempt from doing. Let’s not get me started on that again, though…onto the film at hand.

The Bay’s set-up is thus: a once-wannabe news reporter, Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) is working with a Wikileaks-style website to compile a film detailing the events of July 4th, 2009, in the Maryland coastal town of Claridge. This framing device neatly – and mercifully – allows The Bay to have a good explanation for all the careful editing, ordering and ongoing discussion of these events as we are shown them. Donna explains that she is a survivor of that day – cue footage of people all having a lovely time by the water, which as we all know can never end well in a horror film – and that she feels unable to move on with her life until she’s gotten closure by blasting through the cover-up now in operation, hence her collaboration with the site. She then talks us through the events of 07/04/09, which she saw first-hand as a rookie reporter for a local news channel.

Unbeknownst to the townspeople all enjoying their Independence Day that day, some weeks previously two oceanographers had tried to raise an alarm about the bay’s ecology, as agricultural dumping had seemingly damaged the ecosystem there and was flooding the bay area with pollutants. They never got very far with their concerns; the mayor’s office ignored their evidence, and later, their bodies were recovered from the water…then, bang on cue, the locals all start developing painful boils and lesions – symptoms which rapidly escalate…

Okay, I don’t think I’ll be too guilty of spoilers, considering the film’s title, cover art and very earliest set-up, if I say that There’s Something In The Water. The Bay hasn’t revolutionised the horror genre through its subject matter to be fair, and some of what you see in the film will feel pretty familiar. However, it gets a pass nonetheless because it’s handled very well. The set-up makes sense, and enough time is taken to craft a believable town with believable people that, when the horror does unfold, it feels just as believable. The panic, the reluctance on the part of the townsfolk to get near anyone who appears ill, even if they’re frightened and in pain, and the escalating tension, well, it all seemed authentically how people would (and do) behave in times of crisis.

The Bay is also careful to hold out on its explication. I spent the first half an hour or more anticipating some sort of zombie action, or zombies-by-another-name maybe, as in 28 Days Later; the film’s forté is that it avoids this. People remain confused about what’s happening, whereas that would all soon melt away if they were suddenly chased by half-rabid virus carriers. Instead, the people of Claridge have to start guessing, sometimes wildly. This is much more creepy than a sudden outbreak of the undead, this partial and slow dissemination of information, as life goes on as normal just a few miles down the road, Claridge’s neighbours having no knowledge of what is unfolding. That events can be successfully covered up is horrific in its own right; it’s just the right side of plausible. That plausibility renders the big reveal of what is actually going on very humane. The Bay balances emotion with action, eeriness with (serious) ickiness, and it does it well. It’s economical, too, coming in at less than eighty-five minutes. See, it can still be done.

Perhaps The Bay felt like such an effective, if familiar-feeling horror story because it has arrived at a time when we’re all too aware of how dependent we are upon the authorities, and the vagaries of bureaucracy, for practically everything, right down to what we eat and drink. At the time of writing, the UK has just gone through paroxysms of disgust after finding out that its citizens have been eating horse meat, not beef, in their cheap ready meals – and, before I get smug about that as someone who doesn’t eat meat at all, they’ve now worked out that there’s been faecal matter in IKEA cakes…who knows what we’ve eaten or drank over the years? We mostly live in a state of ignorance. If we’re being honest, society as we know it would utterly collapse if our electricity was off for much longer than a week. Our comparatively comfortable lifestyles are then, really, ever hanging by a thread, and The Bay does a nice job of playing with this truism. It’s definitely worthy of a look, and proof positive that found footage films can definitely still work as effective stories when done properly.

The Bay will be released in the UK by Momentum Pictures on the 18th March, 2013.

Trailer warning: it reveals far more plot details than the review!

Horror in Short: Fist of Jesus (2012)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Some of you may remember, a few weeks back, we featured a nifty and very gory short film by the title of Brutal Relax? Well, wouldn’t you know, but filmmakers Adrián Cardona and David Muñoz have only gone and taken their madcap visions of the walking dead back to the time of Christ…

This is, at least at first, a very recognisable Jesus (played by Marc Velasco) with some very recognisable followers. Ours not to ponder how a Middle Eastern man transmogrified (I love that word) in popular consciousness into a benign, blue-eyed hippy with facial hair, but regardless of that, Velasco is our Jesus, and he’s obviously having difficulty keeping a handle on the whole miracle thing. So much so that, as per the story of Lazarus, when Jesus brings him back to life he turns out to be a Bible-era zombie. Damn.

You’d better take a look for yourselves…

Yep, so before long we have Pharisean zombies (understandable), Roman Legionary zombies (equally so) and…cowboy zombies? Hey, we’re dealing with the dead coming back to life here, so it wouldn’t do to get too skittish about anachronisms. The point is that our Lord and Saviour has a situation on his hands and he has to do what he can to re-establish order. Like Brutal Relax before it, this film is played for laughs, as well as being endearingly tongue-in-cheek and splatter-happy. I’ll admit to laughing out loud at the multiplying fishes as weapons idea; why not employ a piranha as a means of eviscerating an undead cowboy?

This is not a philosophical work by any stretch of the imagination, then, but if you like your films shot through with flying limbs and various other splatstick humour, then Fist of Jesus is a blessing. Cardona and Muñoz know how to have fun with their screenplays and hey, if you like this film, it turns out they’re hoping to make it into a feature-length, so by all means go and show your support at their website or at their Facebook page. Amen.

Theatre Review: The Woman in Black

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Outside of the novella itself, Susan Hill’s quintessentially British ghost story The Woman in Black is perhaps best-known to most Brutal as Hell readers via last year’s film starring Daniel Radcliffe as the unfortunate solicitor Arthur Kipps, or maybe through Nigel Kneale’s (ahem, superior) televised version from 1989, but it has also been running since the 1980s as one of the world’s longest-running stage productions. Having seen, and enjoyed both filmed versions of the story, what could the theatre offer which equalled or surpassed these? I went along to the York Theatre Royal to find out why the play boasts such longevity, in a day and age of movies which can give us flashy special effects and big budgets. And, like any good ghost story, it turns out that the terror is all in the telling.

The first thing to say about The Woman in Black stage production is that it makes a feature out of its economy. Being obviously unable to create a perfect representation of all the characters, places and objects mentioned in the novella, it pares things right back, so that all which is present on stage for the bulk of the performance is an old chest, a clothes rail and a chair – although a few more props creep in as the play moves along, and are very well used to maximise their impact. Something as simple as the projected outline of Eel Marsh House onto the backdrop provides just enough for your imagination to do the rest of the work. Careful use of lighting bolsters the effect of these small but effective touches to a surprising degree; the stage was frequently plunged into darkness, with the actors using torches or lamps in order to barely pick out the outlines of objects on the stage…

As for the actors themselves, the economy of the surroundings also extends to the cast. Largely comprising two people only – and one ghost, barely present and all the more effective for it – the story itself was rewritten by the late playwright Stephen Mallatratt so that in the stage version, we meet an older Arthur Kipps who seeks to exorcise his demons by performing the events of years previously in the form of a play. To do this, he enlists the help of a young actor. As they begin to work through Kipps’ manuscript, with the younger man taking the role of Kipps himself, the story proper unfolds.

During the first act, I found the meta-narrative style quite difficult to get into, mainly as the actor/older Kipps frequently step out of their roles as young Kipps/other characters to reflect upon what they’re doing. Some of this is played for light relief, which for me made getting into the right frame of mind to be scared a little tricky. Once the central premise was set up, I didn’t feel as though I needed to keep being reminded of it; however, by the time we had reached the second part, the momentum of the story took over and definitely carried me along with it.

So – the story gradually unfolds via the idea of someone feeling the need to tell it for the sake of their own sanity; as they tell it, via an actor, the story proper comes to the fore, The burning question here, of course, is – is it scary? At times, the answer to that is definitely yes. The play as written can’t resist lobbing in a few jump-scares to get the audience’s nerves on edge, something which I’m not fond of either on screen or on the boards, but the play is really at its best when it’s developing its more slow-burn scenes of horror. Very straightforward things scare us, really. We don’t need much – just a hint that something is incorrect, that natural laws are being messed with, that our expected patterns and rules are being subverted. A door opening seemingly of its own accord, a strange noise, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye…all of these things can scare us, and The Woman in Black has them all. It is very effective at generating atmosphere, and holding back on the woman in black herself is absolutely the right thing to do. I will admit to getting a shiver in one scene, where Kipps has been asleep at Eel Marsh House, wakes, shines his light and catches the woman’s skeletal face looming over his. All of the tied-to-chairs shenanigans in the world can’t equal that sort of sensation, which is one of the reasons I’m so pernickety about supernatural horror. I want it done right. As much as it took me a while to get into the narrative style here, The Woman in Black does it right.

I’m not a regular theatre-goer by any means but I very much enjoyed this show; for any horror fans who would like to experience the genre through a different medium, one well-acted and realised, I’d say that catching The Woman in Black is an excellent way to spend £20. See it if you can.

‘We came to wreck everything, and ruin your life – God sent us’: twenty years of Romper Stomper

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Warning – as this retrospective contains a detailed discussion of the film, it as such CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Well, last time I checked, this website was still called Brutal As Hell – and so, it is fitting that we should take a moment to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the UK release of a film which is definitively brutal as hell. Romper Stomper – from the very get-go – is not easy viewing. Its portrayal of skinhead violence is unflinching; as such, it seems to have garnered something of a laudatory reputation amongst right-wing skins themselves. Go and look up clips from the movie or songs from the soundtrack on Youtube, and you will almost invariably find comments which rejoice in the film’s racism or see Hando and his boys as people to emulate. It’s right what they say: you should never read the bottom half of the internet…

So, let’s get this out of the way first and foremost: anyone – anywhere in the world – who sees Romper Stomper as in any way, shape or form a pro-racism or pro-racist film is a fucking idiot. No exceptions.

Ignoring the sad irony that so many of the most vocal pro-Hitler fans on the internet who bark the loudest beneath the Romper Stomper vids in question seem to be based in Russia or Eastern European countries, and as such are people Hitler would have considered sub-human, let’s think about the film for a moment. The opening scenes of the film show the boys attacking and beating a group of Vietnamese children. Children. Even the worst coward or bully would (or should) surely have a hard time seeing this behaviour as bold or praiseworthy. It isn’t intended to be suggested conduct, and you can bet your bottom dollar that director Geoffrey Wright never ever had this in mind when he filmed it. Think further; the boys, as predicted by hangers-on Megan and Tracy, do indeed ‘all end up fucked’. They lose everything of the little they have. The only way out of the gang is enlightenment – or prison, or death. Makes you want to sign up on the spot, doesn’t it? One of the film’s many razor-sharp moments of irony comes when the gang flee a retaliatory gang of Vietnamese men as the superb soundtrack starts to assert that these ‘Fourth Reich fighting men [are} living in the sewers but they’re gonna go far’. Meanwhile, at this same moment, we see their number depleted, their squat decimated and them running like rats. Make no mistake, then – Romper Stomper in no way glamorises skinhead violence. You’d have to be selective to the point of idiocy to really think so.

However, one of the film’s towering strengths is that, although it doesn’t shy away from getting up close with the philosophy and mindset of these young men and women – with a particularly potent scene as Russell Crowe’s Hando reads from Mein Kampf – the film doesn’t simply depict them as ogres. Nor does it simply whirl through an array of violent set pieces with no point. The really unsettling, and gripping thing about Romper Stomper is that it shows us real people. Sure, some of the more minor figures in the gang – Sonny Jim, Chuckles – don’t have the most vibrant inner lives, but they’re believable nonetheless. See, at the heart of this story we have a group of displaced human beings, broke, isolated and lacking any of the usual safety nets like work or family. They live hand to mouth, moving from one shitty squat to another, and they resent it. Without excusing the gang’s obsession with fighting economic migration into Footscray, Melbourne, we’re shown why it might be that they’re lashing out, and how these people have all washed up together, evidently seeking a sense of belonging from one another. You can hate what they espouse, of course you should, but by the end of the film I always find it impossible to hate the gang members – something which is a huge compliment to the writing, acting and direction. I don’t hate Hando either, despite his escalating, menacing behaviour. Considering the research and work which Crowe (who apparently still gets the odd acting job) and his fellow gang members did to prepare themselves for as realistic a gang vibe as possible, perhaps the pathos isn’t a surprise. But does that make me feel a little uncomfortable in places? Yes, because good filmmaking always has that potential.

So – we’re given our basic set-up early on. A group of young men and a couple of molls have congregated around the charismatic Hando, and he in turn is part of a loosely-organised network of Neo-Nazi footsoldiers, dedicated primarily to scaring off the Vietnamese who are, they feel, crowding out the white areas of the city. Life already seems pretty precarious, and then the arrival of the deeply damaged, but warm-hearted Gabrielle (Jacqueline McKenzie, incredibly starring in her first film role here) starts off a spiral of events. Herself seeking love and stability, she throws herself into the centre of the gang, becoming smitten with the brutal but charming gang leader. However, he is unwilling or incapable of forming a relationship with her; the only real flashes of warmth and humanity we see from Hando are in relation to his boys, and second-in-command Davey (Daniel Pollock) in particular. Where Hando has no real interest in Gabe, Davey sees the hope of love with her, which fundamentally undermines the gang at a moment when their fortunes are balanced on a knife-edge as ‘their place’, their local pub gets bought out by a Vietnamese businessman and his sons. The resultant events play out as a modern working-class tragedy, as Gabe, Hando and Davey each try to find in one another the something which is lacking from their respective lives. The opportunity to exchange one sense of belonging for another, in effect, irrevocably undermines the existence of the gang. The centre cannot hold.

The story, as it plays out, is told with equal measures of veritas, pathos, irony – and yes, even humour. Hear me out.

As aggressive as these guys can get, as horrific as the situations are as they unfold, you cannot tell me that Romper Stomper doesn’t have its moments of deft black comedy. In fact, I’d argue that those moments, as brief as they are, are fundamentally important to the plot. They are essential in humanising the characters, making them seem more than their appearances first suggest, and in giving the characters something everyday and mundane to react to as humour takes them out of their stock characterisation for a while. Regard Sonny’s dismissal of going fruit-picking with the girls instead of waging war against the ‘Gooks’ who just gave his gang a kicking, with his pointed retort, ‘I hate the fucking country’. Or the tragicomic figure of Flea, a new recruit to the gang who looks ‘like a fucking hippy with hair that long’ – a guy who only joined up because, in his own words, he needed a job. There are even some moments of daft physical humour too which are, whisper it, quite endearing. When Gabe accidentally and then not-quite-accidentally soaks Davey as they wash dishes together, it comes across as natural and charming enough to work. Of course, all of these moments are short-lived. Humour is there, it’s important, but it’s always book-ended with something nastier or sadder. Light relief in Romper Stomper is momentary, and then we’re back into the tension – that change-around is something else which feeds into that seam of irony running all the way through the film, starting with the cold irony of immigrants telling immigrants that Australia is ‘not their country’ in the opening reels and ending with events leading up to the staggering finale, which layers ironies so effectively that I am always emotionally involved in the ending of this film.

If Romper Stomper contains strong currents of both love and hate, then, both of these emotional states are linked together by the desire for vengeance, which grows stronger and shifts around, first finding one target and then another. The gang’s need to destroy the Vietnamese who lately did so much harm to them aids and abets the abused Gabe in a plot to implicate her father Martin; his desire to avenge himself on the boys who have dared to take his daughter away escalates the tension in the gang, and when they then reject Gabe, she makes the fatal decision to avenge herself on them. Davey is spared, because he finally moves on – he goes home, back to a family he is apparently unique in having had all along – and then finds love. But, when you open a floodgate, you don’t get to control what happens. The plot descends into nightmare as the collision course between Gabe, Davey and Hando reaches its inevitable point, but finally there’s resolution. At last, the anger is dissipated. As Davey looks up at those watching him and Gabe, there is no animosity left. He has come full circle.

That touching last scene, tragically, is also the last filmed scene ever to feature Daniel ‘Davey’ Pollock, the young man whom director Wright calls ‘instinctively brilliant’ in his performance here. Pollock never got the chance to reflect on his work in Romper Stomper; he committed suicide prior to the film’s release. Whilst his best-known character was able to escape his own demons in the end, sadly, Pollock himself could not, and his death at the age of twenty-two deprived Australian cinema of one of its most promising talents. It’s hard not to think of that loss when watching this movie, but nonetheless to feel grateful for such a brilliant characterisation, particularly how the interplay works with the two other lead actors.

His fine work alongside Crowe and the rest of the cast made for a gang movie where we’re really taken into the heart of a gang: whatever we think, we know the characters we sit alongside. It is in this that I personally feel that Romper Stomper surpasses the decent, but perhaps less carefully-crafted later movies of similar subject matter, such as Made in England, which to me just has less ambiguity, lower believability, less multi-layering. That we are encouraged to relate to the deeply flawed individuals in Romper Stomper without ever sentimentalising is disconcerting, but it’s memorable and it’s powerful. And, as long as we admire cinema which is brutal as hell, we must learn to accept the journey on which it takes us, wherever it takes us.

Perhaps ultimately, whatever violence we are confronted with here, however ugly the principles which drive it, it’s coming from a root source which is all too familiar. Maybe the most unpalatable truism in this film is that it reminds us of the drive towards wanting to belong – something which we all have within us – and how it can be one of the most destructive human instincts there is. Happy twentieth then, Romper Stomper. You’ve taught your lessons well.

Thinking Outside The Box, Part 2: Female Filmmakers and ‘Underrepresentation’

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea and Annie Riordan

Keri: Happy Valentine’s Day. Is February still with us? It is? Jeez…

Anyway, so far we’ve talked about our experiences as horror fans and misconceptions relating to that – but there’s no fandom without the films themselves after all, so it’s high time we talked about life on the other side of the lens. And – wouldn’t you know? – it seems like we can’t discuss female filmmakers either, without falling foul of yet another array of received wisdom and entering into a discussion which frequently falls over itself in order to crow the loudest about under-representation. In this, the second part of our feature on women and horror, we talk about the idea that horror as a genre is not open for business for women and that it’s unfair to the women it portrays. We’ll start with something we’ve heard a great deal of over the past few years…

“Women are sidelined in the horror industry and prevented from achieving.”

Keri: actually, although Hollywood seems a tough nut to crack, independent film – which, let’s face it, is more often than not where we’re looking as horror fans – boasts a significant proportion of female directors. Recent data shows that in the last ten years of Sundance, around 1 in 3 directors were women. The picture isn’t all doom and gloom. Still, the cry often goes up that women are ‘under-represented’ in filmmaking, and ergo, that women are being prevented from reaching equality.

Okay, so let’s think along those lines for a moment. Rightly speaking then, as women make up 51% of the population, slightly more than half of all directors should have their chromosomes laid out in an XX pattern. Somehow we need to rectify this situation, or face an unfair, corrupt industry stretching away forever into the future. But if we continue along this path – and if we’re concerned for equality and representation, then we shouldn’t simply stop at gender – what about securing proportionality for people of different ethnic backgrounds? Or gay people? Or bisexual people? Or Muslims? Or transgendered people? or those with a disability? Once you begin to refract everything through this kind of lens, it has the potential to go on forever. There will always be some minority which isn’t fulfilling some quota or other. The search for a completely representative demographic is endless, and as such provides an endless, easy supply of grievances. And, if we reached this utopia of perfect and fair representation in the arts, what exactly would it mean?

Let’s get back to women in the horror industry. How would the genre benefit by a more proportionate number of women directors? Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s School of Theatre, Television and Film says that women are far less likely to work in the horror genre at all, and that the lack of women working in film generally ‘impoverishes our culture’: by extension, more women directors would make for more women on screen, and more believable characterisation of women.

Let’s take a moment here to apologise to the male horror directors who have been more than capable of creating and directing a wealth of legendary female characters over the years, even whilst impeded by having a different gender to them: Carrie White, Rosemary Woodhouse, Ellen Ripley, Uxía Cambarro, May Canady, Baby Firefly and Lola Stone, to name but a few. Does it necessarily follow that men are unable to write, or empathise with female characters? It seems a very disparaging thing to assume. In fact, if you call yourself a horror fan, chances are you are a fan of creative works which have been almost exclusively created by men – and presumably you’ve enjoyed them just fine. Nor does being a woman director automatically make you more inclined to craft well-delineated female characters on screen: some of you might have heard of Doris Wishman…a facetious example maybe, but one worth making nonetheless.

Anyway, according to Lauzen’s beliefs, a lack of female horror directors should mean we have a lack of women in horror movies. Is this the case? Using our 2012 Top 10 lists on Brutal As Hell (which at present lists nine women writers and only four men – we really should strive for better representation), alongside a straw poll on Twitter, I looked at the horror films of last year which people rated the best. Without a shadow of a doubt, the most votes were for American Mary, a film directed by two women with a female protagonist; other films which figured highly were The Cabin in the Woods and Berberian Sound Studio, each directed by men. Were they therefore lacking in female characters? Well, Berberian Sound Studio stars a man, but lists twenty-three female cast members to fourteen men; The Cabin in the Woods contained three guys and two girls…so far, it isn’t looking as though we are lacking for women in horror movies. I found a similar story wherever I looked. It simply isn’t the case that horror is female character-deficient. As stated in the last article on this topic and supported by Dr Brigid Cherry’s research, horror is far more all-encompassing than many other genres of film.

Annie: The horror film industry has proven itself time and again to be an excellent springboard too, launching the career of many an actress and director (directoress?) alike. Don’t believe me? Go to IMDb and scroll through the credits of Rene Zellweger, Jennifer Aniston, Naomi Watts, Meg Ryan, Sissy Spacek, Drew Barrymore, Sharon Stone, Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver. And those are just the actresses. Once upon a time, Kathryn Bigelow – acclaimed director of The Hurt Locker and the currently controversial Zero Dark Thirty – shot a little vampire film called Near Dark back in 1987, which was considered an instant gem of the genre. Not much was made of the fact that the director was a female. Nobody cared, because the movie was so fucking amazing, it didn’t make a single shit-worth of difference. Oh, and then there’s Mary Harron, who shot a film called American Psycho. Ever hear of it? You’d better say yes if you want to be taken seriously as a horror film fan. Everyone’s seen it, everyone loves to quote it, who remembers that the director was female? And more importantly, who gives a fuck? It was an excellent film, therefore the gender of the director matters about as much as the gender of the person who brewed the coffee I had at Dunkin Donuts the other day. The end result was good, so who cares?

Keri: Ah, but what about what happens to women in horror movies?

“Women are always the victims in horror movies. We need to combat that misogyny by giving the world strong, empowered female characters in films.”

Keri: look, women certainly are not always the victims, nowhere near, but even if they were, horror is horror because it’s unfair and it’s nasty. End of story. It has no obligation whatsoever to satisfy whatever notions of equality are current in a culture. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite: horror is where our worst fears and preoccupations are toyed with. That of course includes situations where people are victimised, and women of course get victimised.

Annie: Yes, women are quite often the victims in horror films. I’m not going to debate that fact. But is this necessarily misogynistic? I think not. The most basic rule of writing fiction is this: you must have a protagonist and an antagonist. You must make the antagonist ultimately despicable, someone you want to see fall, whether that fall is metaphorical or literal. And really, what is more cowardly and despicable than someone who victimizes those who are smaller, weaker and/or defenceless? This is why horror films often offer the catalyst of a slain pet to start the ball rolling. “That bastard killed Fluffy! I want to see him die!”

But we must also remember that the term “Final Girl” exists for a reason too. Girls are victimized in horror, yes. But they’re also usually the ones who triumph, overcome their fears, discover the reserve of strength within themselves they never knew existed and tap it, unleashing the proverbial “can of whoopass” on the one who has, so far, assumed them to be an easy target.

Sidney Prescott (Scream) not only lived to the end, but taunted her attacker with emasculating insults before blowing his head off. Marti Gaines (Hell Night) fixed her own fucking car before using it as a murder weapon. Meg Penny (The Blob, remake) the town cheerleader, grabbed a machine gun and went Rambo. And then there’s films like Teeth and Hostel 2, both of which feature the thus far victimized girl castrating their male tormentors and feeding their dicks to their own dogs, turning Man’s Best Friend into the garbage disposal, the most vaginal appliance in the woman’s heretofore accepted domain: the kitchen.

Would horror movies be as palatable if all of the victims were men? No, because it’s generally considered an even match which inspires no true sense of conflict. If you want to watch men fight to the death, watch UFC. If you want empowerment, watch a slasher. It’s no coincidence that horror film fans are, for the most part, a non-violent bunch. Our viewing experiences are cathartic, and our frustrations worked out in watching the repeated story of David and Goliath, especially when David turns out to be Daisy.

Keri: This perception that horror is in some way misogynistic invariably leads onto discussions of the ‘male gaze’, neatly entrenching the idea that the default audience for horror is male along the way – but we already debunked that bullshit last time. Anyway, this ‘male gaze’ notion basically insinuates that people watching these awful situations unfold in films enjoy partaking in them. It is deeply insulting to everyone involved. Find me one person who ‘gets off’ on scenes of rape and violence in horror and I’ll find you five hundred who don’t. If you see films in these terms and wonder about the titillating aspects of rape and murder, perhaps you’re the one with the problem…it is an attitude which also ignores a massive swathe of horrors which contain nothing of the sort.

The idea that horror is going to be subject to redress by a vocal minority who don’t understand what the genre is fills me with foreboding. Horror is not an equal opportunities arena. Its dissection by feminist film studies and people who want to engineer ‘strong, empowered female characters’ whilst seeing more ‘female directors’ who they presumably feel would give a fairer voice to women seems to miss the entire fucking point of the genre.

I hate even talking in these terms. It’s not how I see the world.

Funnily enough, though, even in a sub-genre like slashers, which is renowned for predominantly carving up girls, the picture is more complex than you might expect. In his book Teenage Wasteland: the Slasher Movie Uncut, author Justin Kerswell discovered that during what he calls ‘the golden age’ of slasher movies between 1978 – 1984, there were more male victims on screen than women.

“Female filmmakers need extra support to get noticed.”

Keri: How? We all know it’s tough out there. Getting off the ground, getting funding, getting your product known…these issues affect everyone in the horror genre, not just women. The indie movie market is always going to be fucking brutal because times are hard and cash is scarce. But how do you say outright that women are being prevented from success purely because they’re women? The focus is all off. Why don’t we concentrate on promoting films which are good, rather than concerning ourselves with quotas?

Annie: female filmmakers need support to get noticed? Ida Lupino didn’t think so.

In 1953, Lupino directed the film noir/psycho-thriller “The Hitch-Hiker” which she also wrote, based on the true story of serial killer Billy Cook. She made no big deal out of the fact that she was female. True, she was already established as an actress, but she made films because she wanted to, not because she was told that she couldn’t because she was a girl.

Director Audrey Ewell spent two years immersed in the primarily male dominated black metal scene of Norway with her co-director/life partner Aaron Aites to make the documentary “Until The Light Takes Us.” Her sex was, and remains, a non-issue, both among the films fans and the musicians themselves. This despite the fact that the metal music community is also considered to be an exclusively male scene, closed to girls who cannot possibly appreciate the ferocity and nihilism of metal. Apparently, both Keri and myself missed that memo…

There have always been female directors in the film industry, stretching back to 1896 (Alice Guy Blache – The Cabbage Fairy). The fact that not much has been made of their sex should be viewed as an attribute, in that the director wants to be seen as artists, storytellers, and filmmakers first and foremost.

Ultimately, and in my usual and crude manner, I don’t think that the sex of the director is an issue, unless the female director in question is filming said movie with a camera held in her labia.

Keri:…and lest we get told we don’t know what we’re talking about because we’re not filmmakers ourselves, let’s hear from some female directors, shall we? Director Devi Snively told me, “I think it sets us all back when we limit ourselves according to sex stereotypes. Nonetheless, I mostly just ignore it all. I’m not one to pigeon-hole myself. If others feel the need to, that’s their issue. I believe the work should speak for itself and the work isn’t just me. I’ve got a team that includes men and women of varying ages. Our stories have laughs and romance, suspense and the macabre. We can throw labels around, or we can make movies. I prefer to make movies personally.”

Back in 2010 when I spoke to the Soska sisters – long before American Mary was a going concern – they corroborated this viewpoint. Jen Soska told me, “simply because a film is made by a woman we shouldn’t think it’s wonderful or crap. We should let the work speak for itself. If a man makes a movie and it’s shit, everyone jumps on him. I’ve seen women make crap and have their work protected because it was apparently some great accomplishment that the poor dear even tried. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have a great deal of respect for any man or woman who has the balls to go out and make a film. It’s rough and you deserve a lot of credit for pulling it off. However, I’m a feminist who believes women shouldn’t be cut breaks because of their gender. Even if it’s positive, it’s still sexist.”

From a personal point of view, I don’t give a damn about the gender of the person who directs any film I review – I’d rather they all listed themselves first initial + last name, if it comes down to it, so that I can concentrate on whether the film is any good, nothing else. That would be genuine equality. What we get instead is an assemblage of people who will promote the hell out of anything directed by a woman, screeching from the rooftops about ’empowerment’ with seemingly no concept that they’re actually being sexist and skewing quality control by focusing on gender politics at the cost of all else.

Furthermore, people need to be honest about the level of interest which can be generated, simply because a filmmaker is a woman. I’ve mentioned Jen and Sylvia Soska; as much as I am inclined to agree with Jen’s take on gender bias, I am absolutely certain that the fact we have twin sisters directing has granted them exposure which would otherwise be impossible to come by. Everyone knows who they are in the horror genre. Does everyone know Jon and Howard Ford? They’re insanely talented filmmakers, but then they’re brothers, not sisters…

If you persist in asserting that films made by women are being overlooked or if you’re saying that films made by women need to divided from all the other films out there because they aren’t competing on the same terms, what you’re doing is entrenching difference, selecting films simply on the basis of the gender of the people who worked on them. Why? It suggests they aren’t equal. It suggests women’s films need special help. If they’re as good as anything else out there, they don’t need to be considered separately or differently. If you push it just because it suits your agenda, aren’t you then in danger of overlooking better films? Aren’t you creating a false positive?

But then, a lot of people out there (often the ones who crow loudest about unfairness and discrimination) seem to have a schizophrenic attitude to their gender. They claim mistreatment and demand equality, but can’t seem to help making their appearance an important part of their online identities. They don’t want people to judge them on their looks, but they invite it. It’s one reason that I’m very careful to avoid doing the same thing – I don’t think my face is really relevant to what I do or how I do it. I have no interest in concealing my gender, my age or my appearance, but no interest in pushing these to the fore when what I’m actually doing is writing about horror. I would never like to think that I was one of these champions of feminism who absolutely requires a bikini/soaked in blood avatar or topic-irrelevant cleavage shots to get noticed. I actually have no issue with any of these things, not at all. But let’s be honest about them, eh? Shit or get off the pot. However you dress it up, you’re seeking attention based on your looks, so accept this openly, or don’t fucking do it. Hypocrisy is such an ugly thing…

Essentially, myself, Annie, and many others don’t feel that we benefit at all by sequestering ourselves into little huddles of conformity. Rather than feeling that horror is an unfair arena, one closed to female fans and filmmakers alike, we call bullshit. It isn’t what we’ve experienced, it isn’t what we know, and any suggestion that the genre needs an overhaul because it is inherently sexist smacks of opportunism, as well as missing the point. You can play divide and conquer if you want to, and you can band together to bewail unfairness if you must, but do it well away from us, and don’t be surprised by the backlash, because you do not speak for us.

State of the Indie Address: An Interview with Director Dom Portalla

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It’s always a pleasure for us at Brutal as Hell to get to talk to indie directors about their work; it’s important too, because as often as we deal with the finished product here at the site, it pays to dig a little deeper sometimes and think about the motivations of the good folk who put the films together. With that in mind, after reviewing the short film Nicky late last year I was keen to speak to its director – Dom Portalla – about his experiences in the business so far.

BAH: Your short film, Nicky, came into being thanks to a chance viewing of a photograph…can you tell us more about this?

Ken Flott, who wrote the original short story and plays the lead character in the film, came across a photo on foundmagazine.com back in 2006. Pictured in it was a little boy in a white tuxedo standing in front of a women’s restroom, likely taken during the 70s if you were to gage by the condition of the photo or all of the gnarly wood paneling that’s behind him. For whatever reason, Ken felt compelled to start writing a short story in the first person that described the picture, the boy and his relationship to him, which ended up being a very dense 45 pages when all was said and done. The two of us were shooting our first feature film, “Duality”, at the time and Ken was posting the story as he went, chapter by chapter online. I was enamoured with the material from the jump and when Ken finally finished it, I suggested that it might make for a really amazing film some day. He agreed and it took us about six years to finally get around to it, but here we are…

BAH: How pleased are you with Nicky, and what has the feedback been like so far? Where next for the film?

I love the flick and am really proud of what we were able to accomplish with it in such a short time span. We’d originally talked about possibly adapting it into a feature length movie, but opted to go with a short subject instead for two major reasons: firstly, we wanted to experiment with crowdfunding (Indiegogo, specifically) in order to learn the dos and don’ts of that platform with DSLR cameras, and secondly, we wanted to have the flexibility of working within a very limited budget and time-frame. Based on the overall positive feedback we’ve been getting, I feel like we were successful on both accounts.

As far as what’s next for the film, we’ve completed our first wave of festival submissions, so we are hoping to take the film around the country over the course of the next few months. We are also holding our Boston Premiere on February 7th at the Kendall Square Cinema, which is probably my favorite independent film theater in the state of Massachusetts.

BAH: I gather that it was always your ambition to be a filmmaker: how does the reality of your chosen career match up with the expectations you had?

I think that in order to be successful in this business you have to put aside all expectations, be that of fame, fortune or accolade, and really just love the process of making films. If you’re not a person who absolutely needs to be making films from deep down in your bones, than it’s probably not something that you should be doing. Early on, I was a bit naïve in that I thought all I had to do was tell stories that were really personal to me, try my absolute hardest, and the rest of the story would write itself. The world of indie cinema has changed exponentially since some of my heroes made their way into the industry and since the time that I began seriously pursuing this as a career, I’ve learned how difficult it is to stand out amongst all of the white noise that’s out there. Ultimately, I continue to make movies because otherwise, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. In continuing to write, work with actors, and explore all aspects of my craft, my expectations of how gratifying this all is has been met and exceeded tenfold. And in going through this process time and again, the rest of the story is writing itself.

BAH: Are there any films or filmmakers that have had a significant influence on your own work?

Early on, it was definitely Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. In as much as their work inspired me, I was maybe even more influenced by their stories of breaking into the business. I identified with those guys immensely having been a video store clerk (a job that basically doesn’t really even exist anymore) who had seen everything, had a lot of opinions on movies and wanted to create something they could identify with themselves. I especially loved their specific attention to detail of language and dialogue, which when done wrong can be incredibly pretentious, but when done right is fucking poetry. Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick have also been filmmakers who helped shape my view of the power of cinema, as a medium which can transcend entertainment and really become art.

BAH: What do you think of the state of play of indie cinema today, and how do you think the scene could be improved?

I think at a time where technology has reached the point where anyone empowered to pick up a camera and make a movie can do so, you should be seeing a lot more truly independent films out in the market. The powers that be seem to play it safe these days though, when they should be taking more risks. Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Ed Burns, those guys were risks. If you’ve got a 12 million dollar budget and a cast of A-list celebrities and you’re calling your film “independent”, it sort of seems like you’re hedging your bets. There are a lot of very interesting filmmakers out there putting their work together with spit and glue who have audiences that are waiting to find them.

BAH: Finally, what’s next for you? What are your plans for 2013?

We’ll be finding “Nicky” a home on the festival circuit and we’ll finish developing our third feature film, “Saint Joey”, which is another project we’ve had in the works for years now and is easily the most ambitious script I’ve ever put to paper. If everything goes according to plan, you may even see the wheels turning with that before the end of the year!

Thanks to Dom Portalla

http://doorelevenproductions.com/

Horror in Short: Unlocking Charlie (2011)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to suffer from anxiety, there’s a fair chance that it’s also involved a degree of agoraphobia: after all, if people and unfamiliar situations fuck you up, then going out into the world where these things exist in spades is not likely to be a fun experience. With that in mind, meet Charlie (Tom Maguire). Charlie finds it next to impossible to get outside his own front door, and the attentions of his friendly, pretty neighbour Molly (Grace Kelley) might be tempting, but agoraphobia is as agoraphobia does. It’s only when he finds out that Molly is moving on that he feels a real impetus to do something, even despite himself. Part of this is out of a genuine, warm interest in her, but there’s a level of expediency to it too. After all, if he never gets out, how is he ever going to meet anyone? Even when she asks him out, he can’t shake his hesitancy.

Things are about to get worse for him though…

Just like Nicky, the last short film we featured here at the site (which is reviewed here), Unlocking Charlie focuses very much upon the plight of one man. It’s never easy to translate the experience of anxiety onto the screen – because it is such a personal, such an internalised state – but director Stephen Crilly manages to communicate something of it here without reverting to simply filming someone obviously hyperventilating for five minutes. He does this with the help of a decent performance by Maguire (who is, incidentally, easy on the eye, which never hurts) and the generation of genuine characters in there too, as you do feel for Charlie – and for Molly, who is only halfway to understanding what is going on with her neighbour and as such, feels hurt by the rejection neither of them can help.

So far then so good – but thus far, horror hasn’t figured too highly in proceedings. Unlocking Charlie does throw a curveball in there, though, utilising the tried-and-tested horror trope of the doppelgänger in an understated way, but one which adds an extra dimension to what’s evidently a crisis point in Charlie’s life. Light-touch it might be, but making Charlie the literal embodiment of the ‘own worst enemy’ idea is a nice touch and adds a new dimension to what would otherwise be a snippet of human drama.

Whilst Unlocking Charlie isn’t reinventing the format of the short film here, what it does do it does rather well in the as-ever limited time and budgetary constraints it has.

You can find the Facebook page for Unlocking Charlie here.