Funny how it’s turned out, but zombie horror has been with us so long and appeared so often now, that it all feels oddly comforting. For the most part, tropes which are maddening from other genres seem more than acceptable when there are zombies in tow: it doesn’t even really seem to matter that much anymore whether they are fast, slow or anywhere in-between. Are characters switching off TVs and radios mid-way through what is clearly an important bulletin about what is unfolding? No matter! Are the same characters going through troubled relationships with their offspring, which will no doubt be solved by the issue of surviving a heaving mass of mindless killers? Cool! Is someone, at some point, going to conceal a bite wound? Oh, we can’t stay mad at you. This brings us to Virus: 32, a film which makes some attempt to challenge a trope or two but embraces far more of them, and does a reasonable job in doing so. It’s a solid, workaday film with a bundle of neat elements and minor frustrations, tantalising a key twist which – in the grand scheme of things – doesn’t change things all that much. And it doesn’t really matter, either.
Things start in a fairly unassuming way – elderly resident does something shocking and violent – before we pan out/across to a different apartment and meet our key character, a young woman called Iris (Paula Silva) who seems to have not a care in the world, until her estranged husband turns up with their young daughter. It seems Iris had forgotten she was due to look after her, so she’d arranged to do a night shift at the dilapidated fitness club where she’s on night watch duties (and honestly, this looks like the kind of place no one would really need to break into under ordinary circumstances, but a wage is a wage). There’s nothing for it; Tata will have to accompany her mother to work, so off they go. A nicely-composed aerial shot shows us the comforting fact that something sinister is going on around them unnoticed: it’s the tale as old as time, or not far off. Still, it’s not long before Iris has to take notice of the facts: dangerous, oddly mindless people are finding their way into the building. This fact splits up mother and daughter, who have to spend a period of time seen to one another only on the building’s CCTV or heard via the old landline phones, as small children don’t seem to have iPhones in Montevideo. But, as she witnesses a gruesome attack (animal lovers beware), Iris notices that, post attack, the perpetrators go into a brief kind of trance: about thirty-two seconds of trance, to be exact.
Why does this happen? Funnily enough, seeing as it’s almost-certainly one of the film’s big ideas and its new, small but notable contribution to the genre – enough to be foregrounded in all the press material – there’s no indication. Virus: 32 is pretty low on the whats and the whys, to be honest, and just presents things as they unfold, leaving the audience to ponder anything more. Still, zombie lore is embedded and used in a series of fairly engaging ways, with some clear nods to classic zombie cinema which still look good in their own right. There truly are some great set-ups here, with great uses of light, framing and timing: the zombies themselves, again, are not explained away but they seem part-way between the newly-sentient zombies of Land of the Dead (2005) and, even more so, the high-speed angry bastards of 28 Days Later (2002). This gives you some indication of what kinds of action you are going to see. The film works as a microcosm – this isn’t a horror on the scale of something like Land of the Dead, of course – but its action sequences are decent enough.
There are some issues with pacing, but these don’t really creep in until the middle act: at first, Virus: 32 is a quite light touch, deftly-moving film which manages to create characters out of very little, including a very small cast. It’s some time before the camera even alights on Iris and stays there, for example, and this isn’t a script-heavy film at any point, but enough lands to make the main characters sympathetic and likeable. There are also some neat tricks used in shooting and editing which maintain interest, too, with some innovative shots and long sequences which must have took some skill to put together. The film is a little dingy – it’s pretty much all shot in a large, dark building at night, after all – but it’s not so dark that it becomes impenetrable, and it sets up some accomplished scenes which work rather well. As stated, things falter at the mid-way point when the plot and the level of action begin to scan less well, but the film holds a few things in reserve, including a welcome slab of cynicism for patient viewers.
All in all, and despite the new-idea promise inherent in the title, you can’t really call Virus: 32 a ground-breaking film. As such, it shares many of the issues of other perfectly enjoyable zombie horrors, with some of the same unanswered questions, tolerable frustrations and budgetary constraints. But the budgetary constraints here were pretty punitive, and yet director Gustavo Hernández has managed a decent movie with some good composition, an intriguing, if underplayed idea, a likeable set of leads and a reasonable balance between homage and development. It’ll take up its place in the genre and work perfectly for many genre fans, I’m sure.
Zombie: 32 (2022) premiers on Shudder on April 21st, 2022.
Based on a Japanese novel, partly produced by a Japanese team, you’d be forgiven for expecting Room 203 to contain a fair amount of J-horror elements – but that’s not how it primarily comes across. It’s far more rooted in the Western tradition of haunted houses, though it balances its use of tropes with its other aspirations altogether. It’s a film more interested in relationship-building than generic scares, though perhaps leaning rather heavily on the former; for the most part, the supernatural aspects here are kept rather low key.
The opening scenes say anything but that, however: Room 203 feels like it starts already at ten minutes in, with a very quick glimpse at some sepia-page occult goings-on before cutting straight to a young man refurbishing an apartment – yep, it’s Room 203. As he works, he catches his hand on something in a hole in the wall, dislodging a necklace that had been stashed in there. When his girlfriend arrives to see his progress, he gives her the found necklace; presumably neither of them can hear the significant, ominous sighs emanating from it which we can hear, else things wouldn’t have gone South quite so fast for her. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the film hoped to sell itself solely on the vivid calling card of its opening few minutes, but be assured: things slow down a lot at this point, the point where the opening credits actually roll.
We meet the next incoming tenants of the apartment: Kim (Francesca Xuereb), who is flying the nest to start her life at college, living with old friend Izzy (Viktoria Vinyarska), much to the chagrin of Kim’s parents. The girls’ giggly house move is cut a little short by their first encounter with the landlord Ronan (Scott Gremillion), but they like the ‘vintage vibes’ of the place, and decide to definitely take it. Renters/former renters be warned: the first horror here is that Kim hands over a substantial amount of money to the landlord without requesting a receipt. Uh-oh.
It gets worse; not rapidly worse, but worse. The hole in the wall/necklace soon reappear, and as life goes on for both girls (starting college, nights out, auditions, love interests) glimpsed shadows, nightmares and odd aromas weave their way into their lives. As with most cinema of this kind there’s a mystery to unpick: Kim and her new beau Ian (Eric Wiegand), both budding journalists, get cracking, turning up some unexpected and interesting, if not always explicable plot elements.
The film settles into a very slow burn mode. It’s as much about two damaged people and their friendship as it is anything else, with the supernatural aspects in the plot drawing off these damaged people, waiting for a suitable weakness in one or both of them. Xuereb, as Kim, turns in a good performance here, particularly given that she is frequently seen reacting to her own misgivings and dreams and isn’t necessarily being propped up by ghosts, demons or similar. She also dominates the screen time too, doing a decent turn throughout. Vinyarska warms up a bit more slowly, but then this is pretty much in keeping with her character. However, this shift in focus to the back stories of both girls does get baggy in places. The film is never exactly a conventional ghost story anyway, remaining quite conservative in what it actually shows to us. The crashing incidental music, when it does veer into more supernatural fare, feels like it belongs elsewhere – even when the jump scares start to appear, and appear they do.
Room 203 is a curiosity in a few ways, though not one which lacks ambition. Human dramas will overshadow the horror to too great an extent for some viewers, and the lack of a neat conclusion has its frustrations, though its big, mythological twist helps to distinguish it and it’s certainly a well-made, often thoughtful, muted take on the genre.
Room 203 receives a limited theatrical run, as well as getting a VOD release, on April 15th 2022.
Now here’s a risky idea: returning to a short film, around seventeen years or so after making it, hoping to expand the universe of that film into a feature-length. A big ask at the best of times, no? Whilst it’s certainly not the first time this has been done, The Cellar (2022) was always going to have a hard road ahead; this is because The Ten Steps (2004), the short film in question, is an absolute masterclass in that format. Whenever I want to make the case that short films are criminally underappreciated by audiences, I show people The Ten Steps. The film’s so effective because it does just enough of everything you need in good storytelling – establishing character, building a narrative – and only tantalises at something bigger, something terrifying, coming as it does via a terrific punchline. If you haven’t seen it and you have ten minutes spare, click the above link and enjoy.
This brings us, then, to The Cellar – same writer and director, Brendan Muldowney – and how to maintain that same careful handling across ninety minutes, whilst simultaneously building in detail. If anything, The Cellar is a lesson in just how difficult that process is; it feels somehow like this wasn’t quite the film intended, or at least not quite like this. In any case, aspects which work brilliantly across ten minutes struggle across another eighty, and unfortunately, several issues are writ large across the newer film – some understandable, some rather more baffling.
We begin with a familiar-seeming family moving into a gloomy old house somewhere in Ireland; mother and daughter Keira and Ellie (Elisha Cuthbert and Abby Fitz) sound American; father Brian (Eoin Macken) seems to lurch between sounding American and Irish, and younger son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) sounds clearly Irish. Accommodation Theory in action? Anyway, the move is an unwelcome one to teenager Ellie, a girl so immediately, unnecessarily surly that you find yourself feeling sorry for whatever supernatural force may end up with her. It turns out, by the by, that the move has been prompted by the parental business, a social media management company – and this is our new set-up for both parents being out of the house when the fuses in the gloomy old house blow…
This situation has seemingly already been exacerbated as brother and sister have found – and played – an old record which seems to consist not of Sumerian, but mathematical equations. In fact, the house seems full of mathematical equations and ominous lettering, carved above doors and into floors; as Ellie descends into the cellar to throw the fuse switch and the storyline of The Ten Steps ends, it’s clear that the symbols are going to be a plot key, and it’s not a bad idea at all. There’s a dash of Thirteen Ghosts (2001) here, and more than a few nods to Fulci’s best horror movies too. Now newly aware of the strange nature of the house and its mysterious previous owner, Keira takes charge of investigating Ellie’s disappearance: she knows she has to solve these puzzles somehow if she is to get her daughter back.
But by god, it’s slow going: where some of the most potentially interesting hooks are barely explored (how did that creepy phonecall actually end?) a fairly aimless pondering of the house’s secrets takes up far too much time, harming the film’s plot and yet doing little to counterbalance this with adequate characterisation, despite Elisha Cuthbert’s best efforts. There are some scares, but as the best of these were already well-established, the others struggle to match up to it – or else repeat it. Sure, the film holds onto some far more interesting world-building for its final act, but after such a wait this feels like it needs closure which we could happily do without in the short film; this isn’t forthcoming, sadly, the demonic maths angle remaining frustratingly underdeveloped, simply another means of talking about demonic entities in the end.
Supernatural storyline aside, there are some additions in the script which only help to further fracture basic plot coherence: it always feels like, in order to accept the fantastical, you need to believe in the humdrum first. You need a firm foundation.
Whilst the family set-up in The Cellar is by no means completely implausible, a few choices stand out as odd. Firstly, making the family business into social media managing feels like an attempt to modernise the storyline that will ultimately age far more quickly than a works dinner (as shown in the earlier film) and seems rather thin. Would an expert in social media really have no concept of her own daughter’s social media presence, not any of it? Would an expert in social media really think Hebrew is a ‘font’, and also be unable to Google this for herself, needing an assistant to do it for her? The other expert we briefly encounter in the film maybe had it tougher: he was a regular Joe, he explains, until a head injury turned him into a maths genius. Why this needs to be added to the storyline is unclear. To reiterate, these things are not entirely unbelievable, but they represent script choices which beg many questions, in a film which has enough questions on the go.
The Cellar was always going to be a difficult proposition then, and unfortunately it cannot match up to the bold exercise in economy which audiences got with The Ten Steps. The film looks good and sounds great, but ultimately The Cellar fails to furnish us either with a compelling expansion of the original universe, or with anything new enough to excite. It does, however, serve as a hearty reminder of the brilliance and potential of short film, perhaps particularly in horror, where a mere hint at causation can be more than enough to scare. Feature-length films need something more, and we need more from them.
The Cellar (2022) premieres on Shudder on April 15th, 2022.
Director and writer George Popov’s low-key but effective supernatural horror The Droving (2020) is an excellent example of the use of folklore in cinema – and though the folklore in the film is original, it feels linked to pre-existing storytelling, particular through the importance of the English landscape. Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022) is a different kind of look at British folklore, this time a documentary film examining several English forests, their myths, rumours and witness testimonies. The resulting film is a meandering one, but interesting, with evocative footage of each site blended with descriptions of apparitions, legends and personal accounts. Those interested in history as well as those with more fortean tastes will find much to enjoy here.
First impressions of the film are – how incredibly beautiful these locations are. That on its own makes the film worth a look. Well shot and edited, Popov, alongside cinematographer Richard Suckling and the film’s editor, Jonathan Russell, have definitely captured something very special here. The focus on haunted forests is also particularly welcome, because forests themselves are so integral to folklore. Primal, seemingly timeless, forests are an oddly liminal location: abundant in resources on one hand, they are also dangerous, remote and hostile places, archetypally associated with risk. They crop up in a wealth of stories; many fairy stories, whilst sanitised over the years as tastes have changed, feature a dark and dangerous forest, brimming with hostile animals and malevolent outcasts. Not for nothing has horror cinema latched onto this, with a whole gamut of films taking place in the woods. The specific places covered in the film are: Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor, Cannock Chase in the Midlands, and Epping Forest in the South-East. Each of these places has a very rich history, with that history straying into ghost stories and other fantastical tales, some of which are selected for discussion here.
To add variety – Popov narrates the lion’s share of the film – eyewitness testimonies are included, and these, for me, are some of the most compelling inclusions. Hearing completely ordinary people (albeit voiced by actors here) describe phenomena which they have experienced is fascinating; more of this would have been equally welcome. Historical sources are also included – these are engaging, and mostly not well-known – as well as on-screen text, artwork (original and historical) and a subtle, but effective soundtrack. These things add a bit of texture to the film, which although feeling leisurely in pace, covers a great deal of ground and allows itself to go off in different directions, considering other interesting details which are broadly linked to each specific site.
There are lots of documentaries available out there, and the format has proliferated as affordable kit has become more and more readily available. You Tube is full of documentaries, some very good, some indifferent and some preposterously bad. How to cut through these swathes? Sideworld comes to us from a talented team who are not just reputable and experienced, but passionate about film. George Popov’s clear interest in history and mythmaking keeps a balance between focus and that kind of affection for the subject matter which can draw upon a lot of other material. Somehow the film has a very ‘fireside’ feel to it, and part of me recommends waiting until the nights draw in again to watch it. It would be certain to act as a great starting point for further storytelling, and who doesn’t love that? It’s an impulse as old as the hills. But if you have an hour – or just over – and want that experience now, you can see the film here.
Also recently released, the second Sideworld chapter, Terrors of the Sea, continues in much the same vein as Haunted Forests of England. Again narrated by George Popov – with some other speakers along the way – the film does just what you would expect, focusing this time on phenomena associated specifically with the sea: ghost ships, sea creatures, ghostly sailors and that peculiar subset of sea lore, mermaids/mermen. During his introduction, Popov makes the interesting point that as a narrative filmmaker he is involved with “finding truth by telling lies”. This prepares us for the stories themselves – somewhere between verifiable truth and storytelling – which again come with a variety of beautifully-shot images of the sea and coast, some still images (sympathetically selected and showing evidence of research) and careful use of sound design. There are only a few stories here – at times the pace is rather slow – but the stories told are treated in a detailed manner. Again, if you enjoy this kind of deliberate storytelling and perhaps if you are a fan of likeminded podcasts (the main outlet for folklore and supernatural accounts these days) then you would be very likely to enjoy this film. You can find more details on how to watch here.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the pervasive world of social media is finding its way into more and more horror cinema: as for the new breed of influencers which inhabit this world, their pursuit of ‘likes’, the drive for more and more content, the fight for revenue generation – of course this is going to lead to horrifying scenarios and set-ups. It’d be weird if it didn’t.
Joining the ranks, step up Z director Brandon Christiansen with his latest film Superhost, a tale of travel vloggers Teddy and Clare (Osric Chau, Sara Canning) who are desperate to avoid oblivion, i.e. a dwindling series of returns on their ventures/adventures. There’s a lot riding on their upcoming stay at the super-modern des res Sugar House; their relationship is as fragile as their brand, in its own way. Things look good at Sugar House initially, despite some, shall we say ‘oddities’ in the house – but after a few hiccups, Teddy and Clare decide to try and make the best out of their situation, including playing on their apparently unhinged hostess, Rebecca (Gracie Gillam), who is sure to be good for the channel – right?
Warped Perspective has a Blu-ray copy of Superhost, a Shudder Original release, to give away to one of the site’s UK-based readers. What do you say? All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to email the site (keri AT warped-perspective.com) with ‘Superhost’ as your title. The competition will be drawn on Friday, 8th April.
Good luck!
GDPR: all personal information is securely stored and will be deleted at the close of the competition.
From its very earliest moments, as the camera oh-so slowly approaches a baby’s buggy parked in the middle of a street – it’s clear that You Are Not My Mother is a film which will allow itself ample time, not rushing through anything it wants to show. And, as it segues almost straight away into more strangeness, laced with peril which is yet to become clear to us, it seems there is a hideous something underpinning this world, even if it’s a recognisable-seeming world – actually a modern housing estate in North Dublin.
Here, Char (The Green Sea‘s Hazel Doupe) lives with her mother and grandmother. Each of these women have issues which are keeping them at a distance from Char: granny Rita has physical ailments, whilst mother Angela has more complex reasons for wanting to hide from the world. She struggles to be out of doors and seems on the verge of a(nother) crisis when Char asks her to drive her to school one morning; some simple demands from her daughter prove too much. Char takes herself the rest of the way and school, were it not for the presence of her classmates, would be a much-needed bit of security. She’s progressing well, academically-speaking, and so far there are hints only at a darkness in her own life, ticking patiently along in the background. That is all to change.
At the end of the school day, Char is alarmed to find her mother’s car – abandoned, though with the bag of groceries that her mam had seemed so unlikely to actually go and buy left on the passenger seat. The family reports her missing, their worry increasing as it becomes clear the police can do little at this stage. But, that night, late that night Angela comes home: she’s different somehow, even if she was always distant (or had been for long enough for it to become the norm). Angela’s sudden interest in the household, and her daughter is…nice, at first, but it’s oddly out of character, and the cracks soon start to show. Angela’s behaviour becomes disturbing. Who is she?
You Are Not My Mother is immediately immersive; its performances, script and pacing do everything right to subtly establish that there is a lot of hurt, a lot of anxiety brewing here – and that’s before the storyline proper really kicks in. One of the ways it works brilliantly is in its exploration of how precarious the teenage years can be – here we have a teenager who is bright, active, fairly independent with a list of responsibilities, but still financially and emotionally very vulnerable. Hazel Doupe is fantastic at this, all the while never once seeming like she’s been abandoned by anyone in her family. This is a loving family unit, but the hinterland which Char finds herself in is explored deftly, particularly as the unease she feels outside the home, follows her back there. And, whilst her uncle (Paul Reid) tries to keep order as a kind of proxy head of the household, he’s soon shunted aside: this is a very female-led film, with the relationships between mothers and daughters becoming claustrophobic, uncanny and intimidating. The role of grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) is incredibly well-written whilst retaining that subtle, no-need-to-provide-every-detail approach which runs throughout. It’s enough that she’s the matriarch, the lynchpin of the family and the keeper of secrets, only sharing knowledge when she must. It’s also entirely in keeping with the mythology referenced here that we have a bean feasa of sorts, a woman ‘in the know’ who also lives in the here and now, juggling her roles.
If any pre-existing film comes to mind as having similarities with You Are Not My Mother, it would be Honeymoon (2014): this earlier film shares some of the same careful exploration of personhood. However, You Are Not My Mother takes for its basis Celtic mythology – still a criminally-underexplored seam of stories in film – and watching it thread its way into Char’s life is extraordinary. It seems that the normality of modern Dublin is as vulnerable to the old ways as ever and, significantly, not retaining that folk knowledge worsens the risks. Seeing how the film uses fire as a symbol and part of the plot, given how it continues to occupy an important, often contentious role in modern Ireland, shows how it successfully forges a link between past and present. And, if some aspects of this folklore have been diluted and sanitised over the years, it’s worth remembering that what our ancestors were afraid of – malign strangers, the breaking of family bonds – is still a key driver in stories, particularly in horror cinema. If some aspects of old beliefs have been Disneyfied over time, horror has always adapted the same fears and kept them going; the means to explore the same old anxieties have morphed and developed. It’s just wonderful to see old folklore and new medium brought together so effectively, just as it is here.
Magic and folklore, first taking place on the edge of the narrative, eventually weave jarringly into everyday life, amplifying very modern, but timeless preoccupations: isolation, mental illness (by whatever name), friendships, family. An intensely character-driven story, You Are Not My Mother balances its poignancy against genuine, profound unease. Its pacing and attention to detail are remarkable, and it’s an incredible achievement from first-time feature director Kate Dolan.
Signature Entertainment and FrightFest Presents You Are Not My Mother (2021) on 8th April 2022 (UK cinemas/digital).
A piece of vertical ordeal horror, if you will, The Ledge certainly hops around between ordeal and a couple of other genres too – though it remains resolutely two-dimensional. That being said, there is enough here – enough tension, enough clout – to just about hold it together, and it does enough overall to keep things entertaining. Funnily, the main plot driver here is the film’s greatest sticking point, and whilst this is not an issue which ever really goes away, you have to look past it to enjoy the more successful aspects.
We begin with two young women at the start of an expedition in the Dolemites: Sophie (Anaïs Parello) and Kelly (Brittany Ashworth) are experienced climbers, checking their packs and getting ready to head off the following morning. They’re there so late in the season to mark a special occasion. The arrival of another group of Americans – as misfortune would have it, some guys who want to ‘party’ – creates a short diversion, and the girls join them for a drink, despite the fact that Josh (Ben Lamb) wears his misogyny on his sleeve so clearly that even his friends baulk at his company. Sophie makes the onerous decision to stick around; Kelly heads back to their digs early. For Sophie, this turns seemingly inevitably into some sexualised bluster which gives way rapidly to sexual assault (yes, by Josh) from which the terrified girl flees into the night. She therefore doesn’t realise that the other guys initially have good intentions and seem to want to help her. In the pursuit, she falls. Things get even worse.
This, and ensuing events wake Kelly, who quickly begins to gather evidence of what is happening using her camera – but she’s spotted. To escape, she makes off with as much of her climbing gear as she can grab. The only way is up, at least when in a panicked situation like this, and so begins a chase up the mountain which is soon taking place at a dizzying height from the ground. Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but if – like this reviewer – you get vertigo at the top of a household ladder, approach this film with caution. Long shots are economically used, but they do the job. Otherwise, the film can feel surprisingly claustrophobic, which is an interesting thing.
The initial set up in The Ledge – the process of meeting our characters and finding out their motivations – is the weakest element in the film, from which it struggles to recover for a lot of its run time afterwards. Crude sexual politics and comments are written through and through it from the very top of the script, like Blackpool rock. In particular, in its high-speed race to represent Josh as a very, very bad guy, the dialogue and characterisation feel very jagged and the almost casual later hints at past misdemeanours amongst the group raises many more questions about the guys’ relationships. These questions are never really answered, but are used as a springboard to drop in some equally unexplored racism. All in all, the script doesn’t always serve the film well; the male characters in particular are somewhere between foul and fodder.
However, after the film gets underway – all of this being a justification for a sadistic pursuit up a rock face, after all – the main act sustains itself well enough, even though the way in which things veer from realistic (effort levels, physical injuries) to cartoonish (think Race with the Devil levels of exposition) can feel like an odd fit at times. Still, because the film retains some more realistic horror elements and a real time feel, it can add in some shifting pace and some more gruelling scenes; her rose-tinted flashbacks aside, you do find yourself rooting for Kelly by the end, which shows that one of The Ledge‘s central planks works just fine. The action largely fits the run time, too, meaning just the right amount of content and a decent momentum which doesn’t stick around long enough to become dull. Some deft touches at the end also bring things together satisfactorily, and although it was a surprise to find out that this was directed by Howard. J. Ford, his eye for filling the screen with rugged, dangerous landscapes is certainly still intact since his work on The Dead well over a decade ago.
Signature Entertainment presents The Ledge on Digital Platforms 14th March and DVD 21st March.
Time flies, and it certainly doesn’t seem like three decades since I scored the poster for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth from the local video shop, back when you could ask nicely for posters at the end of their release run and – if the member of staff took mercy on you – you could furnish yourself with a diverse array of wall art, to the detriment of the video store’s commercial waste (this was some time before widespread recycling). The poster was displayed proudly in my pre-teenage and teenage bedroom for years. Pinhead’s snarl sat tight through many of the milestones which followed – like exams. He even lasted as long as it took for me to move out – staying behind to snarl at nothing much, before finally being ousted years later.
The funny thing is that I liked the aesthetics of the poster just fine, but even to a kid, it was plain to see that Hellraiser III was a significant gear shift (and I didn’t get to see the film until some time after the poster was up, if it matters). It was and is an enjoyable enough film with some great scenes and interesting plot developments. It doesn’t feel, however, like one which has much in common with either of the Hellraiser films which preceded it, and as more and more time has elapsed – as more and more sequels of varying pedigree have emerged – it seems ever clearer that this was a parting of the ways. Rather than chancing a continuation of the dour, grimy, murky and very British nightmares of Hellraiser and Hellbound, Hellraiser III instead offered a slick, savvy, modern spin on the mythos, one which sits quite uncomfortably with its forebears; all of the subsequent films, each reaching for different arenas, themes and focuses, seem to have offered a series of diminishing returns. The Hellraiser rights now pass from hopeful team to hopeful team, each of whom has presumably had utterly earnest ambitions for this now classic array of cinematic monsters, but since Hellraiser III lifted the veil on the Cenobites for good, it’s never quite worked – certainly never as well, or in the same way, as it worked in the 80s. Perhaps audiences would inevitably have reconfigured their relationship with Pinhead and friends eventually, as familiarity always develops over time. That’s simply not something we can go much further with, though; we can’t say with certainty. As it stands, Hellraiser III was the film which brought us the sea shift.
The Pillar of Souls: Pinhead as Art(efact)
Things start interestingly enough, tantalising at some back story which becomes clearer as the film progresses but, at least based on what we see at first, Pinhead is front and centre here, something which remains the case. After the cataclysm which ends the Cenobites’ attempts to establish dominion in Hellbound, their de facto leader – running with the old idea that even demons have a hierarchy, and presumably middle managers – finds himself enmeshed and alone in what can best be described as a piece of modern art. There were previously some ideas to write a sequel where blueprints for the Lament Configuration puzzle box were used to map a proposed architectural structure, so links between the Hellraiser mythos and jinxed physical structures had been there in the background for some time; a similar idea would be used again in the following film, 1996’s Bloodline. In Hellraiser III, Pinhead – and the puzzle box itself – are now part of a sculpture, a pillar which seems to channel some of the body-and-blood obsessed outsider artists who were in the ascendant at the time – performance artists like Orlan, Ron Athey, artists and photographers like Stephen De Staebler, Andres Serrano and a Modern Primitives-inspired host of consumers who now saw bodies as canvases, art as having new possibilities to provoke. Against all of this, the somewhat-caricatured bad boy club owner, J. P. Monroe (a spirited performance by Kevin Bernhardt) decides to purchase the pillar, and at a steal: there’s possibly some buried subtext here about wealthypeople who have no idea about art, in much the same way Patrick Bateman in the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho hangs a David Onica painting upside down, to the great amusement of one of his victims. But the sculpture now belongs to Monroe: fitting right in with the aesthetics of his nightclub, The Boiler Room, it suits him down to the ground.
Monroe takes the sculpture home, and what’s notable here is that – through all the different forms he takes during Hellraiser III – Pinhead is actually on screen a great deal more than we’ve ever seen previously. The first two Hellraiser films are extraordinary in the way that the demons who preside over the deals humans strike with them, only occupy a couple of minutes of screen time. They are all the more menacing for that, too – lowering over what unfolds, supplying the rules and meting out the punishments: they don’t need to be there all the time. Their existence is equal to their presence. Come the event where Pinhead has got himself stuck in a pillar, separated from the other Cenobites, he can’t rely on people simply opening the puzzle box out of blind curiosity – at least, not yet. His ‘arena of influence’ is limited to a few feet around the pillar itself, making him temporarily a little more like a vampire than a soul-sapping demon, taking the chance to consume a girl who wanders too near, feeding on her to regain some of his former strength and presence. For anything further, he still needs some help. So he talks. And he talks, and he talks, and he talks. This isn’t necessarily a bad fit with the age-old idea that demons are good at tormenting humans via what they say to them; most exorcism horror films contain a sequence where a demon interrogates and/or humiliates the cleric at the bedside. It’s just strange to hear it from Pinhead here, who by the way really is a little wasted against poor old J.P., a man who doesn’t need much in the way of clever persuasion. Pinhead secures his assistance by making a few vague promises, and convincing J. P. that they are both hedonists, just of a slightly different kind. It works a treat.
This is the second encounter with the box and its tendency to fling chains into people, too: reporter Joey (Terry Farrell) is already hunting down a story after witnessing a Boiler Room clubgoer being yanked apart by these chains; she questions Terri, J. P.’s ex-girlfriend, who had accompanied the victim to the hospital. As Joey investigates, J. P. is getting drawn in to Pinhead’s bargain: bring me more girls, he says, and reap the rewards. Now reduced to something akin to Frank’s fate in Hellraiser – requiring flesh and blood to piece him back together again – Pinhead needs to feed, and his word seems good enough for J. P.
Once freed, Pinhead sees no reason to shut his yap, either, delivering line after line of dialogue about his favourite fleshly preoccupations, soon walking the streets of America with a whole new array of Cenobites (more anon). This gives us some fun scenes, if ‘fun’ isn’t an adjective you’d usually have placed too near to Pinhead in a sentence up until this point: the church scene, for example, where Pinhead flaunts his religious know-how by mocking both the Crucifixion and Communion, is very watchable – even if swapping quiet gloom for a massive stained glass window explosion. However, with hindsight, the overall impact of all this flimflam is to render Pinhead and his pals a little…overfamiliar. Once you film a conflab between timeless demons and modern cops, something of the mystery is inevitably removed – and removed for good. It’s impossible to put the genie back in the box once it’s out; Pinhead in particular becomes a household name and a very different character from this film onwards, but at the expense of his laconic best. It’s perhaps fitting that a character coming into the film as part of a hip art installation spends so much of the film in the company of equally up-to-date companions, wandering the streets and even rocking up in a nightclub. But then, this was always the plan. Hellraiser III was always about expanding the franchise, expanding the audience.
Pinhead for the Masses
After some uncertainty, Hellraiser III was directed by Anthony Hickox who, at that time, was fresh from the Waxwork movies, two films which had realised a modest profile and secured a place in the hearts of a fair few fans. A young director at the time, Hickox was tasked with what seemed to be the impossible: to make Hellraiser into a mainstream franchise, bringing Pinhead and the others more into line with sequel-friendly cinematic monsters like Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees, each at the time on six and eight films respectively. Although Hickox is British by birth, Hellraiser III has an American setting and a majority American cast (whilst the team which had worked on previous films was also different in some respects, though retained some continuity). As well as a new, American production company, it is interesting to note that Clive Barker was essentially paid off the project at first; then as now, it’s an incredibly strange (and some may say wrongheaded) thing to try and divorce a unique creative work so utterly from the person who created it. Eventually, the new rights owners came to agree, and then paid Barker another fee, this time to come back on board.
This lack of foresight arguably speaks to a misunderstanding of the subject matter. Another issue came with the insolvency of New World Entertainment at around this time; this created a lull and Peter Atkins’ screenplay sat on the shelf for a while before the project was up and running again. In the meantime, Barker’s attention was more fully on Candyman, a film which more successfully wedded the grimy, dour British style of Hellraiser horror – it was originally intended to be set in Liverpool, UK – with an American setting.
Lots of factors behind the scenes, then, had an impact on the filming of Hellraiser III, and it’s fair to say that the priorities of the production company led to some quite jarring changes to the subject matter along the way, too. Hellraiser III was shaping up to look and feel drastically different to the two preceding films, as an altogether glossier, louder affair, self-consciously tailored towards a young audience; even the poster was unusually colourful when held up against the cold blues and greys of the earlier promotional art. The very presence of a nightclub or a live band seems not to fit into the worlds of Hellraiser and Hellbound; you could easily believe that none of the main characters in those films (well, maybe except Frank) had even been near such a place in their lives. Hellraiser III doesn’t only show us a version of what was then an up-to-date, edgy-looking club, but also new themes: Joey Summerskill is a journalist struggling with the glass ceiling; Monroe is a representation of new, indolent money; poor old Terri is an itinerant hopeful looking to belong, and furthermore we pause to look at war trauma and psychology as well. There’s a lot more to get into here. Whilst Dr. Channard (Kevin Cranham) has a certain level of ambition in Hellbound, it’s not the plausible, relatable, wholesome ambition we see in Joey. The first two films feel much more localised somehow, and much more introspective, only offering up expansive places to explore only from within the box and its machinations. Hellraiser III definitely moves into the wider world, a world which suggests some interesting challenges and developments for the Cenobites. But it’s the new Cenobites themselves which speak most of all to this desire to modernise the franchise, broadening its appeal and speaking to the mainstream…
Hellraiser III: The New Breed
Whilst Pinhead has always been front and centre, the other Cenobites from the first two films are just as well known and beloved of fans, with their own nicknames and followings. And, perhaps part of their appeal was that nothing was really known about them. In the films, very little back story was hinted at – none at all was forthcoming in the first film – and certainly the Cenobites retained a sense of timelessness alongside Pinhead, having only the briefest of epilogues which hinted at anything more. They felt somehow like they could have been around forever, ambiguous figures who abide by certain rules in order to access their quarry for reasons we can’t quite grasp, and their lack of humanity helped emphasise the desperate situations of those who encountered them. Even Frank, himself transformed into an undead being, couldn’t escape his fate, even if he apparently took it all rather well at the end…
Well, even had the original Cenobites been a part of the new script, none of the actors had US work visas at the time Hellraiser III was about to film. And it seems that the production company had other ideas, anyway. Eschewing the rather more timeless Cenobites of the first two films – even if we accept the fact that they do seem to be wearing an extreme version of something you could have happily worn to Torture Garden at around the same time – Hellraiser III introduces several new Cenobites who, if we’re honest, seem to have been brought on board out of sheer necessity (Pinhead doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy being on his own, plus it looks like launching Hell on Earth can’t be done solo). Gone is the sense that the Cenobites have somehow ‘always been there’. Gone also is the feeling that, in order to be transformed into a being of this kind, some centuries-long process has to occur. After all, wasn’t it the Cenobites themselves who talk about things like eternity, heaven, hell, demons, angels? All of these things have a pretty long shelf life, and you’d maybe expect its operatives to have a similarly long pedigree.
Instead, Hellraiser III makes Cenobites out of whoever happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time; the recruitment process here is very much a fast-track one. Plucking a few of the film’s supporting characters from the streets, Pinhead transmogrifies a bar manager (Atkins), Joey’s media team, J.P. himself and Terri, who is sick enough of sofa-surfing to be talked into getting scalped and modified – an extreme reaction, by anyone’s standards. She also has the ignominious reputation of being history’s softest Cenobite: handed the ability to torment Joey into an exalted state of being, she opts instead to burn her a few times with a cigarette, a heinous torture indeed – which usually happened several times per night before the smoking ban. The rest of the new Cenobites are melded with the technology or other props which mattered to them in life and to be fair, there’s some potential here: it reminds me of Alien³, and how the xenomorph takes on some of the physical attributes of the dog it uses as a host.
The issue is that we always tend to imagine that whatever technology is current in a given moment will be cutting edge for a hell of a lot longer than it ever turns out to be. Equipping these Cenobites with video camera or compact disc add-ons damns them to something far worse than hell – it curses them to look a little daft after relatively few years have elapsed. Sure, they’re part of an interesting time capsule, and as certainly as filmmakers now electively fill their shots with tape players and analogue TVs, in a couple of years we’ll be watching films which ironically fixate on Discmans and first-generation Playstations. It’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. But can Cenobites go on through history terrorising the curious, when they look like they belong to a very narrow window of time? That seems more doubtful. This was, in any case, a decision taken to make the film appeal to its greatly-desired younger, hipper audience, people who bought into this kind of tech at the time. It was reasonably successful, if we go by initial reviews and box office takings; the new breed are also reasonably entertaining and the physical SFX are good (another ultra-modern calling card is the use of some digital effects, which have aged every day as hard as Mr CD has). The film also deserves some credit for getting creative in how the new crew dispatched their victims, even if we have to skip the logic that the Cenobites tended to torment those who tormented themselves, rather than any old unfortunate. In hindsight, these characters remain divisive, too much of a break from the complex mythos for some, perfectly acceptable, grisly set-piece fodder for others. As an addendum, we can only hope that the Hellraiser ‘reimagining’ which is currently in production doesn’t elect to add current technology to its own monsters, else the Cenobites might end up appearing in dog face filters, and just think how all of that is going to look in a few years. Progress is never a straight road.
The Art of War and final thoughts…
Hellraiser III‘s most surprising, and genuinely ambitious new direction was to interrogate the mental impact of modern warfare, which it does by separating Pinhead from his human originator, a WWI soldier, Elliot Spencer (also Doug Bradley) whose mind broke under the strain of the atrocities he’d witnessed. This extends the brief clues which feature at the end of the previous film. Joey, who has some kinship with all of this because she dreams of her own father’s fate in Vietnam, forms a strange bond with the pre-Pinhead Elliot, who seems to want to protect her, and helps her to fight back against Pinhead, who essentially has to fight for his own existence as a separate entity. Again, whilst this plot point could be seen to dissipate the notion of Cenobite omnipotence (or as near as damnit), it is at least an interesting idea, which also provides the film with its heftiest share of substance. Without it, the film is little more than an array of nightclub scenes and a few bad murders which would have divided fans/detractors even more unevenly.
It is, at least, some evidence that writer Atkins had more in mind than the most basic crowd-pleasing scenes, and worked to add something more complex here. That being said, the notion of a squaddie getting his hands on the Lament Configuration box is a little thinly plotted and bizarre; it scatters in some more context for the box itself (the next film would layer this on altogether more thickly) but ultimately, and not dissimilarly to the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels which usually offer a similar amount of closure, whilst not entirely ruling out that there could be more to come, it brings us back to a familiar point. The box is dispatched into some wet cement this time, and order seems to be restored, but – knowing the tenacity of that thing, it’s not beyond belief that it could make its way back out somehow, is it? The other option, of course, is to simply ignore the ending of the last film and go again in a new location with a new cast; this would be the selected way forward as the franchise moved on down through the years, each time with a shrinking budget and diminished set of ideas. It’s a shame, although it’s equally important to note that none of this takes anything away from the strongest films in the now long list of Hellraiser movies which we have.
So how do we characterise Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth now, at a distance of three decades of new films, franchises and ideas, a wave of torture porn, a slew of found footage and a steadily-growing subgenre of technological horror? I suppose, if anything, it all feels a little innocent now – despite the gory tableaux and intentionally graphic scenes which punctuate the film throughout. Clearly aimed at a new audience, and intended to diversify a ‘cult’ mythos which in the eyes of some needed to move away from its cult status, it has a surprising amount of optimism mixed in with equal amounts of cynicism. Someone – perhaps a few people – on the production company team could certainly dream, and there was a hope of a new direction, with more films and a bigger budget should Hellraiser III suffice. Some of this was rewarded when Hellraiser: Bloodline was optioned, but the Hellraiser mythos has had a very troubled run since…the fourth film? Or the third film?
Essentially, this sudden trip through American streets established too great a distance between old and new for many fans, and for these people, Hellraiser III has never quite felt like part of Clive Barker’s vision. Never will. For others, the Cenobites and their world was easily able to withstand a new setting and a few modern touches, and these people appreciate the film for what it is: an altogether more showy affair, with different levels of explication than seen previously. And, at the end of it all, it’s nice to look back and remember how damn excited I was when someone rented the film for me, and I got to finally see how the poster matched up: whilst any film should be able to withstand a fair appraisal, we can tend to be more sceptical these days, something which is worth bearing in mind as we reassess older films. All in all, Hellraiser III may be schismatic, but at least we’re still discussing it, and it does still have its place in the history of what – as the production company rightly pointed out – is now a timeless movie mythos, however we might feel about this film, and whatever followed.
A film which the site covered after its screening at Celluloid Screams in Sheffield, UK last year, Offeason (2021) is about to land on VOD and digital release on Monday 11th, 2022 thanks to the folks at Shudder and RLJE Films. Is it worth checking out? Well, to help make up your minds, you could always check out our full review here, but in summary, this is a visually slick, creepy dose of outsider horror with a distinctly Lovecraftian spin. It comes off as a love letter to certain established filming styles and gives a couple of nods to directors you may already know and love (see below) – so if any of that sounds appealing, then congrats! You have a new film in your watch queue.
Ahead of its wider release, we were fortunate enough to grab director Mickey Keating for a quick chat about his aims and experiences with making the film. Whilst he’s remaining quiet about future plans for now, I’d definitely recommend his work to date, and we hope to be able to bring details of upcoming projects as soon as these are available. In the meantime, over to Mickey…
WP: Firstly, thank you very much for talking to Warped Perspective! It’s much appreciated. To start, I’d like to ask about your filmography to date: you made your first run of feature-length films in quite rapid succession, then you took a four-year hiatus before Offseason came along. In that time, did anything change about the kinds or styles of film you wanted to make?
MK: Nothing really changed, but I definitely had the luxury of being able to take the time and to really storyboard Offseason (and a few other films I haven’t made yet). I’ve always mapped out my films, but this was really the first time I was able to actually pre-edit an entire film with storyboards, and see it before we shot a frame. It’s very surprising how much that helped, and how much the story grew. Then, on set, we were able to be very precise about what we were shooting each day.
WP: You both wrote and directed Offseason: can you tell us how the idea for the film came about? It’s been compared visually and thematically to some great horror directors’ work, notably Carpenter and Fulci – certainly City of the Living Dead jumped out for me. Was an element of homage intentional, and if so, how tricky was it, if at all, to balance with your own style?
MK: I definitely hear a lot of Fulci references for this, but honestly that wasn’t as much of a conscious effort! I suppose when you lean into heavy fog, atmosphere and a seventies inspired production design the comparison’s inevitable. We use some of the same songs that play on the radio in The Fog, so that was a little more intentional. I’ve been very open about my influences in the past, and so I think people just assume that everything I do is an homage to this film or that film.
WP: One of the film’s greatest calling cards is in its remote location, and the contrast between ‘tourist season’ and the real lives of the full-time inhabitants lends the film a lot of its sense of foreboding. What attracted you to this as a setting, or a theme?
MK: I just love the idea of fading Americana, failing tourist traps, and the disconnect of a place that both relies on, but hates, outsiders. A beach town devoid of life is inherently just very uncanny and bizarre, especially when the weather is stormy and foggy!
WP: Tell us a little about how you came to cast Jeremy Gardner[Gardner has a very, shall we say, memorable role in Offseason]. Warped Perspective has been championing his work for a long time, around a decade in fact – and since before the site was even Warped Perspective, but still known by Brutal as Hell.
MK: Jeremy is a brilliant, brilliant actor. He’s just got such an incredible presence, and is so captivating to watch. I didn’t have any other options in mind for this role, because I knew he’d be so perfect for it. He was also a good sport about all the prosthetics he had to wear, which were super uncomfortable and sucked to have on. He’s a great director and writer too!
WP: Offseason seems unashamedly a horror film; on occasion, directors and writers seem to want to distance themselves from that particular genre, or at least to re-brand their work as something other than horror. What keeps you interested in the genre, and what do you make of the current state of play in horror cinema?
MK: I genuinely love horror movies and find the genre to be such a wonderful vehicle to explore endless themes and stories. Horror goes great with so many other genres too: crime, romance, whatever! I think we’re in a great time for horror movies, and that on a much larger scale, they are being recognized for their artistic value and impact on cinema history. It’s been long overdue.
WP: Absolute agreement with that! Finally, do you have any current or future projects that you could tell us about?
MK: I have a lot of things in the works, some great surprises, so you won’t have to wait another four years for my next feature!
With its sunlit, rural Laotian setting, a series of enigmatic ghosts and intimations of alternate realities, The Long Walk already has a lot of elements and, dare we say, a stockpile of kudos made to draw many viewers to its flame. Add to this that it’s directed by Mattie Do, the much-feted first Laotian female horror director, and it becomes increasingly tough to call any of this into question. But – for all its quiet visual flair and consistently taciturn performances – narrative substance here is increasingly hard to glean, even debatable. If you’re happy to turn your gaze to the muzzy Laotian sun and ruminate on the film’s sadness and symbolism, then fine; this will be more than satisfactory. Other audience members will perhaps struggle, because the narrative strands intended to convey, or at least accompany the more atmospheric aspects of the film begin to knot and fray to the extent that they’re barely there at all. And, at two hours’ duration, this is a distinct problem.
Beginning on the outskirts of a Laos village, an older man – only ever referred to as such in the credits – is digging an old bicycle out of the jungle undergrowth, seemingly to break it up for parts; poverty is one of the clearest and most consistent themes here. It seems that this man is what we’d probably call a medium, but there’s a bit more to it than that; he has another calling, assisting the spirits of unhappy young women to ‘move on’ (which with different handling could have made Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy’s character very sinister indeed). When an old woman goes missing, government officials take the unusual step of asking him directly if he can help them in their enquiries; he demurs, but when her young daughter returns from the city to keep up the search, he begrudgingly says he’ll help. Add to this that a spectral young woman has, apparently, been mutely accompanying him for the past fifty years, and it’s clear that the supernatural is a fact of life for this man.
In parallel, we meet other characters – namely a poor farming family, where one day the young son (Por Silatsa) is sent from his mother’s stall to help his father work their land. En route, the boy encounters a dying young woman – the same young woman who walks with the older man – and they strike up an equally-mute friendship. It appears that the young boy and the old man are, if not precisely one and the same, occupying a close enough set of timelines that they are soon able to interact with one another, and that their experiences significantly overlap. Observing the boy’s plight as his mother becomes progressively more ill triggers unhappy memories in the older man, these being frequently conveyed to the audience by a close focus on specific items, things which exist in both times and, by-the-by, offer information on the characters themselves. But any expectation that all the secrets will eventually bob to the surface? That isn’t a priority here. Writer and Mattie Do frequent collaborator Christopher Larsen has very deliberately set his jaw against any of that.
At its best, The Long Walk has some gently, deliberately uneasy moments. It’s beautifully shot, lit, and peopled with actors who do their very best to flesh out a careful, minimal script, often very successfully, even if this hinges heavily on multiple brooding, taciturn moments of silence. Where it is less successful, it all feels achingly protracted. As an example of this, the film has elected for an oddly disjointed style where its edits break the plot into disparate chunks. This happens from the very earliest scenes, so it isn’t far into the film before the viewing experience is a disjointed one. Where any story tries to take in aspects of folkloric belief, this is even more challenging; you are held at a double distance from events on screen, or else numbed by the almost imperceptible tread forwards, accompanied by flashbacks (maybe), ghosts and visions. It all feels both busy, and diffuse.
Bafflingly, at least to this reviewer, the film also offers that very fashionable kind of low-key sci-fi which is a) almost negligible, and b) a visual tic at best, which doesn’t seemingly offer a great deal to the plot except to signpost a deliberate loosening of conventional sense. The man has an apparently archaic ‘chip’ under his skin, which essentially means that what he’d use his mobile for, he uses his forearm for. Aside from a couple of other characters peering momentarily at a better version of this tech embedded in their own forearms, and some hints at a technological world beyond the village limits, that’s it. Interesting, vital, valid? Or another spasm-inducing nod to a fashionable visual motif? It’s everywhere these days, and so, so rarely contributes anything much. Likewise, the film’s repeated use of a ghostly ‘sigh’ to signpost that something paranormal, or heavy, or both is around the corner begins to feel awfully formulaic. And yet, even with the use of this little hook, characters, places and events meld together, with things becoming so languid that even its beloved human suffering becomes flat. This may indeed be a tantalising and heartfelt tale to some, but all in all, The Long Walk ultimately feels like just that, a long trudge somewhere, and not much more.
The Long Walk (2019) will be released on 28th February 2022.
Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more early ‘80s slasher movies for Arrow Video to exhume and give their customary polish to, they bring another lesser-known title to the party, this one being 1982’s Deadly Games. A fairly generic title that doesn’t give much away, Deadly Games is a slightly different beast from your run-of-the-mill teen slashers such as Friday the 13th and The Burning as there are more ‘adult’ themes at play beyond the black-gloved/ski-masked killer creeping about.
‘Adult’ in this case means that the cast are not the usual bunch of horny teens dressing up for a school prom, a trip to summer camp or going on a road trip; oh no, the cast here are definitely of the more mature variety (i.e. in their 30s but not pretending to be in high school) though are just as horny as teens, seeing as most of them are in relationships and are either sleeping with someone else, thinking about sleeping with someone else or are at least open to the idea of sleeping with someone else, which, when you consider the morality play element of your average slasher – the virginal ‘good’ character usually survives – then that casts a different perspective on things, as we are supposed to be rooting for flawed characters.
However, being flawed makes them more realistic and relatable and, in principle at least, lifts the material away from being a gory slasher and into dramatic thriller territory, which is pretty much what Deadly Games is. The movie begins in familiar territory for seasoned slasher fans by having a woman arrive home and strip naked in order to go for a moonlit walk, whilst unknowingly being watched by a masked killer wearing black gloves. The thing is, before the killer can get her, she falls to her death through a glass window next to a long drop and so the following investigation initially gets marked up as a suicide, but the victim’s sister Keegan (Jo Ann Harris) and detective Roger Lane (Sam Groom) know it isn’t suicide, as people committing suicide don’t tend to throw themselves through glass windows first; you see, it’s the little details that make this a more grown-up thriller.
Anyway, Keegan and Lane make eyes at each other and do a bit of flirting, but Lane is already married. Nevertheless, they persist and we discover that Lane is not a particularly nice man as he is nasty to his wife – who doesn’t seem to have done anything to deserve the bile aimed at her – and he does sleep around with other women. Doesn’t seem to put Keegan off, though, and as the investigation goes on it turns out that Lane has an ex-Vietnam vet friend called Billy (Steve Railsback) with whom he plays a horror movie-themed board game in an abandoned theatre, because why not? We also see via cut scenes that people seem to get killed whenever the dice in this board game is rolled, and so as Lane, Keegan and Billy become a bit of a threesome, the bodies start piling up – but who is the killer?
So yes, there is more of a focus on the relationships between the characters than you would usually get, which does mean quite a bit of nudity as people strip off and get romantic with each other so you can tick that off your ‘Is it a slasher?’ checklist, and Deadly Games does have a couple of decent kills – but it is only a couple. Jo Ann Harris is the standout here as she makes Keegan a very likeable character to follow (even if her grief for her dead sister is very short lived) and her bubbly presence makes the running time between kill/sex scenes a little more bearable, because if it was left up to just following the extremely horrible Roger Lane and his various conquests, then the sluggish pace would be a lot more problematic than it already is.
That said, the movie is very well shot and looks a lot more polished than some of the second-tier slashers of the era – Madman, Blood Rage, etc. – but at the end of it all (and the end is also a bit of a problem) Deadly Games is nothing more than a very average murder mystery with slasher leanings, elevated slightly by an older cast who seem to be taking it seriously but have been let down by clumsy writing and inconsistent pacing. For collectors, though, it will sit nicely on their shelf with other Arrow Video slasher movies as the artwork is excellent, and initial pressings come with a booklet featuring writings and perspectives on the film by author/historian Amanda Reyes, alongside extras including interviews with actor Jere Rae-Mansfield and special effects and stunt co-ordinator John Eggett, an audio commentary from The Hysteria Continues Podcast (it must be a slasher film then) and BD-ROM content of the original script. A nice package for collectors, but the film itself is just too unexciting to be put alongside the gorier, more violent post-Friday the 13th masked killer movies.
Deadly Games (1982) will be released by Arrow Video on Monday, 21st February, 2022.
