Blink Twice

Me Two

Blink Twice
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
USA/Mexico 2024
MGM/Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Wow.

Blink Twice is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz (daughter of pop star Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet), who also co-write the screenplay under the original working title Pussy Island... a name which she was intending to be the release title until it was eventually shot down... not a bad thing actually because that title might have been a bit of a spoiler. And talking of spoilers, I am going to do my best here to write this review without spoilers as best I can because, you should really go in blind to the plot details, as I did. But one spoiler about this specific review however is... when I say wow it’s because, well, this is one impressive directorial debut, for sure. And I don’t remember the director as an actress in the many films she’s appeared in other than, she played an impressive Catwoman in The Batman (reviewed here) and also voiced the same character in The Lego Batman Movie ( reviewed here).

Okay, so Kravitz does not star in the film herself. The main protagonist, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, is having a hard time to pay the rent but she is obsessed with famous billionaire Slater King (played by Channing Tatum, who also is one of the producers of the movie) , who has publicly apologised for some unspecified abusive behaviour and has been out of the public eye for a while, going to an island he has bought to relax with his friends while one of his pals looks after the successful King Foundation. Frida and her roommate Jess, played by Alia Shawkat, accidentally hook up with King and are invited to go with him and his entourage to his private island for some decadent partying.

They agree and meet various other guests like Sarah (played magnificently by Adria Arjona) and, frankly, among the rest of the cast it’s a veritable who’s who, with no offence intended, of stars of yesteryear who somehow seem to have disappeared from the cinema goers radar for a while, it seems to me. These include an adult Haley Joel Osment (remember him... he sees dead people), Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan and the great Geena Davis. And, over the course of the endless partying, fuelled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol, things start getting a bit deja vu for Frida and some of the other guests. Put it this way, the audience will notice that one of the guests has gone missing before Frida does. And... that’s really as much as I want to say about the plot of the film... continuing my attempt to write this thing with no spoilers (because it’s the kind of film that really deserves no spoilers, if doable).

Okay, let’s talk about the impressive debut of Zoë Kravitz then. Now, I may be talking out of turn here but, the approach to filming this is not, I think, something which might be taught at a film school, I suspect. In some ways I might be justified in saying you can tell this is someone’s first film because of what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. But in this case, I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Here’s what I mean...

Okay, so in my previous review on the blog for a new film called Starve Acre (reviewed by me here) I noted that, sometimes, the director would start off a scene focusing on a detail rather than give the audience the expected establishing shot that ninety nine out of ten directors would go for. Well Zoë Kravitz does that in spades in this movie, starting out with people in their headspace and then sometimes withholding any kind of establishing shot for a while.

The opening shot, for instance, of some kind of reptile (possibly a snake, actually, in hindsight) is held for a long time for no apparent reason... except you’ll find out exactly why we got that particular shot near the end of the movie. The film is bright, colourful and, when it breaks the accepted rules of film (or should that be expectations) by doing this kind of thing... it absolutely gets away with it and it all works well. Nothing here is done by accident and it makes me feel that Zoë Kravitz must be, already, a master of her craft. I remember when my best friend (sadly no longer with us) and I got out of a screening of Woody Allen’s masterpiece (of his many masterpieces) Shadows And Fog at the Lumiere cinema in London (also no longer with us) back in the early 1990s... he basically said, “... that’s just Woody Allen flexing his muscles. He walks all over the other directors out there...” and, at the time, I had to agree with him. Well, the way Kravitz and her crew pull you in with the shot design, cinematography and editing here to make, not only a great piece of art but also a very relevant and still timely film about a serious issue, makes me think the same of her. She’s just flexing her artistic muscles here... except it’s her debut as a director, people!

And not only that, although a lot of the elements of the story come as absolutely no surprise... for instance, the arc of Geena Davis’ character panned out exactly as I thought it would... it genuinely doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do in a lot of other ways... often technically with the way it’s shot, as discussed above but, also with the paths Kravitz chooses to reach her final destination. And that includes a crazy ending which, I have to admit, I totally didn’t think she’d go with and, while it’s not quite what I would have expected, it’s a bold choice so... power to her.

Not only that but the effective score by Chanda Dancy (sadly not available on CD) and even the various needle drop songs, work really well with the film and lift the visuals they are accompanying. As does the sound design, which really focuses on the state of mind of the lead protagonist as much as anything else, it seems to me.

And that’s me just about done on the very cool Blink Twice. No idea in the film is really that original... she even steals a nice visual gag from an early scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in an early moment here (review coming soon) but, that specific gag aside, Kravitz goes up to eleven on everything in the movie and, quite surprisingly, it all works very well. Hopefully this one will get a Blu Ray release soon so I can study it a little better. Worth seeing at the cinema if you can catch it at your local, for sure.

Starve Acre

Bunroaming

Starve Acre
UK 2023 (2024 releaase)
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo
BFI/BBC Film

Warning: Tried to talk around the spoilers but they may have crept in regardless.

Starve Acre is a new folk horror movie from director Daniel Kokotajlo. Now, I’m not as enamoured of the folk horror sub-genre as I perhaps should be, mainly because it’s often quite clumsily rendered. I think what a good folk horror film should do is bring in a slow, haunting strangeness for the first half of the movie, steeped in locale specific folklore, before stepping up the pacing and leaning into the fantasy element, which would then start building for the last half of the movie. And so I’m very pleased to say this is exactly what Kokotajlo does with this tale and it works really well, conjuring up a nicely unsettling film with a couple of worrisome beats near the start which set up the strangeness of the rest of the story as it unfolds.

Now, I have to be honest here... I didn’t realise this was set in the 1970s (I had to look it up, too) until I finally twigged nobody was using a mobile phone in the picture so it might be set in the past. I think I’m kinda period blind to anything taking place after about 1930 because fashion styles all look pretty much what I’d be wearing after that date, to be honest. It’s also set in Yorkshire which, I also had to look up to find out what accent the main lead and many other characters are speaking in. I’m also assuming Starve Acre is the place where they all live because, no real mention is made of the title in the dialogue anywhere, that I heard.

Anyway, the film concerns Richard (played by the great Matt Smith with said Yorkshire accent) and his wife Juliette (played by the brilliant Morfydd Clark from Saint Maud, reviewed by me here) who have, two years prior to events portrayed here, moved back into the area where Richard’s father raised him (in somewhat unusual and traumatising ways, it transpires). They have a young son and, you can tell right from the opening that he’s not quite right because, at a local gathering/activity, he pokes out a donkey’s eye. This obviously worries the parents who want to put him into psychological evaluation but, it’s not long after this that something else significant happens and a few seconds of just a black frame denotes a timescale shift of... some months after this specific incident.

Juliette’s sister Harrie, played by Erin Richards, comes to stay with them for a bit as Juliette is suffering from depression... as is Richard, who buries himself in his archeological work revolving around the people who used to live in the area years ago and their use/worship of a once powerful oak tree which had some significance to them, the roots of which Richard thinks he may have found in he earth near to where they live (he has been given a year’s leave from the local university at which he teaches, due to an earlier incident). When a non-human skeleton of... some description (spoilers, I suspect) which he has dug up begins to regenerate organs, things start to take a turn for the strange and uncanny, leaning into the folk horror more as Richard and Juliette come under the spell of whatever is going on and Harrie is discovering that not all the locals who live in the neighbourhood are necessarily what they seem (another important ingredient of folk horror, I reckon).

And it’s an absolutely fine film. It’s suitably creepy and there are some nice shots of the landscape, which is often filmed in ways you wouldn’t expect, with close ups of details (on the interior shots as well, such as concentrating on the hand of an actress first, before giving any kind of establishing shot). The camerawork does feel like it’s very voyeuristic a lot of the time. Like a lurking, perhaps menacing presence is watching all that transpires in a fly on the wall kind of way.  

The actors are all terrific, of course. Matt Smith seems to be playing it very differently from many of his signature roles and somehow manages to nullify any baggage from other movies or TV performances he might have been carrying... you totally believe in this man drowning in his own despair. Ditto for the brilliant Morfydd Clark, who goes from giving up on the world to the confident, feminine Earth power she needs to be for the sinister enchantment of the film to be able to work effectively. And as for Erin Richards, well, she doesn’t have quite as much chance to shine in the spotlight as the other two but she certainly does a great job... in particular and without giving anything away, the last ten seconds or so you see of her character is absolutely unsettling and a brilliant physical performance. I can’t say anymore for fear of spoiling the ending of the movie.

And all this, coupled with Matthew Herbert’s folksy terror scoring means that Starve Acre is a wonderful viewing experience and absolutely something that the great Severin Films in the US should be considering including when they get around to putting together the inevitable All The Haunts Be Ours Volume 3 box set in a couple of years time (I suspect). This one is up there with the best of these kinds of movies and it’s always great to see something made by film-makers who absolutely understand the power of the sub genre and know how to deliver. Also... and excuse me for being cryptic but spoilers need to be jumped on here... it doesn’t quite go the full Monty Python And The Holy Grail, but it comes pretty close. I absolutely loved this one.

Bootlace Cinema

Lace With The Devil

Bootlace Cinema
by Mark Williams
Treefrog publications
ISBN 9798333275219

Subtitled Collecting Horror, Science Fiction & Exploitation Movies on Super 8, Mark Williams’ new book Bootlace Cinema starts off giving an overview of the phenomenon of buying and collecting Super 8 cut down/condensed versions of movies on the format in the UK, before the home video boom ushered in by VHS (and technically also by Betamax, I guess), effectively killed the phenomenon almost overnight. That is, as I learned from this tome, except in Germany, where home video Super 8 cut downs were an ongoing thing right up until 2003, with the last release in the format over there apparently being Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The book starts off with a few essays detailing the rise and fall of the format and highlights the main players, such as they were, in terms of the companies putting out this stuff. So the likes of Castle Films/Universal 8, DVR Films, Derann Film Services, Fletcher Films, Mountain Films, Perry’s Movies, PM Films Limited, Ritz Films and Walton Films are all given their own mini section, giving some information about them, with some of them detailing the history of each company and, of course, a lot of the information throughout the book relies on the memory and expertise of the author... as this new tome appears to be the first of its kind in terms of covering this once popular secondary market for what were, in a way (and due to their mostly incomplete nature of the product into very condensed, short run time highlight reels), a high end piece of cinematic merchandise. This stuff is not forgotten by the people who used to buy this kind of thing though and, relatively recently, the art form of editing these things down into these bite sized (for the most part) reels has come back into vogue with Blu Ray purveyors such as British boutique label Indicator including these cut down versions in their extras on some of their releases.

After these opening sections the book starts proper with an alphabetical list of many of the films falling under the auspices of the book’s subtitle, each having their own entry comprising of (for the most part) a short summation of the movie, some interesting history of the film in question and the details of the various cut down versions of the film released into the ‘bootlace market’ at the time.

Now I’ve never gotten into this particular hobby myself (although I believe my dad has some old Hal Roach shorts in the loft) so I found this mostly fascinating in terms of the various versions of the films on offer and what shape they were in. I also found a parallel to the early days of DVD purchasing in that the US imports I used to get before a film even hit UK cinemas is similar to many of these cut down films being released before the film was even shown in the cinemas here... and in some cases with footage which was censored out in the UK by the BBFC as part of those condensed reels.

I also, as it happens, picked up some interesting information about some films in general which had somehow managed to escape me before now (don’t ask me how). Such as the UK theatrical release of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century being cut for violence. Or the fact that, when he starred in The Omen, Gregory Peck took a huge cut in salary but opted instead for 10% of the film’s profits. The Omen was, of course, very successful indeed and so it actually ended up as being Peck’s highest paid role. I also didn’t know that, while David Cronenberg’s Shivers was passed as an uncut X certificate in the UK, it was actually banned in Hampshire, where the town’s council decided it was too much for the sensibilities of the locals.

I also found it interesting in terms of the extra work the UK collector would have to do if they wanted to get their product in a more palatable shape. Sometimes a few different condensed reels of a film would be released into the market and some of the companies had a rule in their contract with the films’ original distributors that each reel would be able to make sense as a self contained story... which meant some repeat footage to contextualise the rest of the contents. Which meant that many collectors would go to the trouble of splicing and re-editing their purchases together, to get a presentation closer to the original version of the film (even if a couple of reels combined would only come to about a half an hour).

And that’s me pretty much done on this, pretty much invaluable tome on the subject of Bootlace Cinema. With the annoying caveat that the writer seems to not know the difference between there, their and they’re... using the first spelling for all the many instances of the other two in the book also. Which, I confess, irritated me no end but certainly not enough to fail to recognise the hard work and the enlightening information which has gone into this feature presentation, so to speak. And if you’re on the fence about it, please know that the book is chock full of colour representations of the original Super 8 box artwork (including many of the German releases), along with various print adverts for these items so, for that reason alone, the book is more than worth the price of admission.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Every Which
Way But Juice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Warning: Spoilers about the fate of Jeffrey Jones’ character from the first movie here.

Well this was a pleasant surprise.

Back in 1988 I went to my local cinema (which was two minutes around the corner at the time... it’s now a Tesco) and saw Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (kinda fuming then that it wasn’t spelled Betelgeuse as in real life). It was the first movie I saw by Burton and I liked it fine. When Michael Keaton, who starred as Beetlejuice, was announced to be cast as Batman in Burton’s next film and there was a huge backlash against that decision, I was pretty sure both he and Burton could pull it off and, yeah, they really did.

The next time I saw Beetlejuice would have been a couple of years later when it came out as a sell through VHS cassette tape (yeah, sell thru, as it was known back in the day) and, yeah, I think that was about it for me and that film... I saw it only twice and not again, since I kinda stopped being enamoured with the cinematic mystique of Tim Burton. He’s made some fantastic films... Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet Of The Apes etc but, as creative as he is, I do find him a bit hit and miss these days. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t relish the idea of, 36 years later, seeing his new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (a title destined to give computer grammar checkers an annoying wake up call the world over). I thought it would be kinda dull and I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I thought it would be a good one to review for the blog though so, yeah, I figured I could get it out of the way for good in the first weekend. So I dragged myself along to it, and...

I’m happy to say that, well, Tim Burton really is on form with this movie. As are the returning actors/characters Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz (all of whom are really impressive here and look almost as young as they were the first time around). Along with some nice visual and musical references to the first movie, we also have a bunch of actors who are new to the franchise, who are all also excellent, including Jenny Ortega as Lydia’s daughter Astrid, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti and even Danny DeVito in a small role.

And it’s wonderful. Once again Danny Elfman gives us a score reminiscent of the old one and utilising some of the same themes (although, alas, my favourite piece of leitmotif from the first film is, for some reason, sadly absent from the score this time around). However, once again the people at Watertower Records have not made the score available on CD at time of release (because why should they give people the actual music in proper physical form rather than just a garbage sounding streaming experience instead, eh?).

And, just like most of Burton’s work, it’s wonderfully inventive both on a visual and conceptual level. Lighting the fuse of a chalk drawing bomb to open a portal to the afterlife was a nicely executed idea. And I think people are going to like the Soul Train sequences too.

There’s also a treat for Italian genre fans because, when we get to see the back story of the person who turned into Beetlejuice, it goes full on Black and White, subtitles and does its best to resemble an early Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda movie. And Bava also gets a nice name check here too, since Lydia mentions she saw a Bava all nighter at the cinema when she was nine months pregnant with Astrid, including her father’s favourite Bava Kill, Baby Kill (review eventually coming when I revisit that one on Blu Ray).

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Lydia’s father is in this but, Burton’s regular actor Jeffrey Jones doesn’t play him, now that he’s a registered sex offender (young boys apparently) and has been somewhat cancelled. Instead, although he’s in this all the way through, his photo appears and he gets half eaten by a shark early on in the film... his plane crash and adventures at sea depicted as an animated story. For the rest of the film, as he wanders through the afterlife, the top half of his body is missing (when he speaks, blood spurts from his windpipe), the rest presumably still in the shark. I’m thinking he maybe got paid something for the use of his likeness here, though.

But, look, I wasn’t expecting much from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and was so surprised by just how good a movie it is. As I said earlier, Burton is back on form for sure and it’s a really impressive return from him and the cast in this one. I absolutely will be buying this when it comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully before Christmas) and I’ll probably reacquaint myself with the original around the same time. This one’s definitely worth seeing at the cinema so, if you liked the first one, make sure you don’t miss out on it.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter

Please Demeter

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter
USA/UK/Canada/India/Germany/
Italy/Sweden/Switzerland/Malta 2023
Directed by André Øvredal
Universal/Amblin

Warning: Slight spoilers nipping at your neck.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, directed by André Øvredal who gave us Troll Hunter (reviewed by me here) and The Autopsy Of Jane Doe (reviewed here), is a film I’ve been wanting to see on these shores for a while now. It was due for a cinema release in the UK last year (as it got everywhere else, it would seem) but Lionsgate, who were to be the distributors over here, suddenly pulled it and themselves out of the UK market altogether at that time (is what I’ve read but I’m sure I’ve seen their logo on stuff since then). So it never got a general release over here... not at the cinema nor on physical media (and I suspect not on streaming yet, either). So I just got fed up waiting and took a route to see it which, to be fair, was available to me even a month or so before the film was originally due to be released... I just wanted to see it at a cinema at the time. But, don’t worry, I will be giving some money back to the company at some point soon because I will definitely be shipping over a US Blu Ray of this one pretty sharpish (when I can afford the exorbitant postage that country charges these days).

Okay, so if you don’t recognise the reference in the title... well it’s more than spelled out in the opening of the film but, basically, this is a take on the events that happened from the captain’s log of the Demeter, on its journey taking 50 boxes of soil from Transylvania to where it washed up as a wreck at Whitby in Yorkshire. As told via a brief section of logs in Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Now, the film is well made and well acted by the likes of Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi and genre star Liam Cunningham as the Captain of the Demeter. That being said, if you’re a Dracula purist, then you should be forewarned that, although the start and end point are pretty much the same... the film does take some liberties with the events as described in Stoker’s original novel. So, yeah... don’t expect a verbatim adaptation of those paragraphs within the chapter. They... sort of match up.

That out of the way... when did a screen version of the Dracula story (even a small part of it such as this) ever match up to the original Stoker very well anyway (not very often, truth be told)? So, it’s a good addition to the body of cinematic Dracula tales over the years and, as it happens, one of the more competent and entertaining ones. The writers on this one have managed to populate the story with some likeable characters you will absolutely care about when confronted with peril and, it’s a quite likeable horror romp, to be sure. There are even a few jump scares thrown into the mix.

And let’s not forget the look of the Dracula ‘creature’ in this. He’s quite obviously based on the Count Orlock variant version as seen in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror in 1922 and various other iterations of the character taking that classic look over the years. Indeed there’s a remake of Nosferatu hitting screens again at the end of this year. And the creature here is realised very well. I was a little worried about how they were going to marry up the beast here with what Dracula was going on to do when he got to England but the epilogue of the story, so to speak, shows him blending into things quite nicely. However, unlike the original version of Nosferatu and the 1931 version of Dracula, there is no Renfield character in this iteration.

Now there are a few clichés thrown into the mix. For instance, as soon as you see there’s a ship’s dog, you just know he’s going to be one of the vampire’s first snacks. And sure enough, the dog along with all the livestock are slaughtered fairly early on in the picture (thus destroying the crew’s meat rations in the process). But, there is also a young kid in this too and, a big round of applause to the film makers for not doing the usual and having him spared the horror of the voyage. He actually comes to a very gruesome end at some point (yeah, that’s the spoiler folks... you were warned). To be fair, though, if you’ve read the novel you’ll know there are no survivors (even though there’s a big ‘well actually’ moment for the film... perhaps the producers wanted a sequel but... hmm... they’ll need to do a prequel too, to do it properly).

But, lots of nice shots, with a nice colour palette and lots of creaking sound effects, as the ship goes on its journey and various, diminishing crewmen are picked off one by one as they stand watch each night. Unfortunately, not all the laws of vampire mythology seem to hold sway here. Yes, sunlight burns and kills those poor souls that Dracula has started drinking and so he and the majority of his prey (those who are not having regular blood transfusions... it gets complicated, okay?) only come out when the sun is down. Having said that, though, cruciforms/crosses seem to have absolutely no effect on the creature at all. Similarly, the crew underestimate it all the way through by not being familiar with the various vampire laws and traditions, such as a modern cinematic audience is... so pretty much all of their time they believe shooting this creature will be their salvation.

But, any inconsistencies with the source material aside... I had a really good time with The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, it has to be said. I’m going up to the first day of the 2024 Frigthfest later today (at time of writing), where there is actually a lone, subtitled for hard of hearing print being shown as a ‘one off’ over the course of the five days (although I’ve not got a ticket to that one myself) so I’m hoping some nice stall holder has got a US Blu Ray of it in his merchandise stall, if I’m lucky.* Either way, this is one of the better of the current crop of vampire films being made these days and I’d thoroughly recommend this one to fans of that subgenre. Much fangs for this one.

*No such luck but a postage free copy from WOW HD arrived through my door a few days ago.

Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres

 

Blithe Spirits

Stage Ghosts and
Haunted Theatres
by Nick Bromley
LNP Books
ISBN: 9780957268319

One of my short but by no means bitter reviews of a lovely book I found while visiting one of my favourite ‘come and have a look’ shops. Now it has to be said that I rarely spend a penny when in Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden (not even two pennies for a ‘coloured’ sheet*) but I am always interested in the kinds of little things they have in there, not to mention their famous toy theatres (which I loved as a kid... still have my one from the early 1970s hanging around somewhere, flat packed back up since its days of use). On my last visit there, though, in early January, I was charmed to discover, as a signed edition no less, Nick Bromley’s tome on Stage Ghosts And Haunted Theatres, which also includes a rocky, horrorly foreword by one Richard O’ Brien.

Now, I’ve always been a sucker for ghost stories and, though my days of attending the theatre are mostly behind me (I rarely go these days because of the utterly devastating price tag of even a single ticket), I used to go a lot as a kid in the 1970s (well, a couple or three times a year at any rate) and so, I have actually been, I believe, to pretty much all the theatres listed in the first half of this book, being as that section is mostly concerned with theatres found in the West End Of London. Whether I’ve seen ghosts while there is unknown to me but, since I do staunchly believe in ghosts (for reasons I won’t go into here) I’ve always assumed that most people, when they do see a ghost, do not even recognise one as such and so are usually none the wiser.

Now, the book is written in a much humorous and pacey manner by a man who, it turns out, has worked in many (perhaps even all) of the theatres listed in the book...even the many far astray from the confines of London and even England (Scotland, Ireland and Wales also get a look in)... as a stage manager or assistant stage manager or what have you. And as he’s worked in these establishments in various capacities over the years going back to the 1960s (and of course, the research behind the rogue spirits highlighted here go back many hundreds of years more) he has collected various tales, many of them first hand, from people who have had spectral encounters at these particular establishments.

Not only that, being as theatres are often haunted (whether you choose to believe that or not), there are also a fair few stories in here also which are first hand accounts of his own experiences at various venues too... so if anybody could claim to be an expert in such matters then it’s definitely Nick Bromley.

Now, it has to be said, the book is not all that scary in itself (although one or two tales actually were genuinely creepy in the first section of the book) but it’s never less than informative, always entertaining and, for the most part as histories are dug into and encounters described, often carrying the feeling of authenticity between its spectral clad pages. That being said, the story of the ghost pointing and running through a man left me feeling a little more cautious, for sure.

So, yeah, the book covers such famous venues as the Adelphi theatre, the Savoy, the Criterion, the Gielgud, the Lyceum, the Garrick, the Old Vic and, well, way more many theatres than you would care to shake an EMF meter at, I am sure. And in addition to the many tales of sightings and interactions with those passed on, benign or malevolent, I also learned of things which were of great interest, such as a striptease act conducted nightly in a transparent tank of water where two dolphins would assist a young lady in her aquatic disrobing.

Also, the writer has a nice way with words. For example... “But the veneer of sophistication as found on Shaftsbury Avenue was not quite so glossy in Gloucestershire.” And the occasional poke at the reader too, my favourite being, “Time to jump on a bus (or a cab if you bought the hardback edition)…”. And I am certainly grateful to be educated in such matters as the fact that the act of murdering one’s wife is called ‘uxoricide’, a word I’d not encountered before (but will do my best to remember, should the opportunity present itself, to use this term in writing of my own).

So, yeah, if you are a fan of those who tread the boards (or behind them) and, especially, of those who continue to tread the boards after they have met their final fate, then Nick Bromley’s Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres is certainly worth the price of admission and reminded me, lest I forget, that there are definitely, at the very least lingering shades of days gone by who, sometimes, when you’re not on guard, might turn up to haunt you... whether you realise it or not. 

*If you know what I'm talking about there then you must be as old as me.

The McPherson Tape

A Grey In The Life

The McPherson Tape
aka UFO Abduction
USA 1989 Directed by Dean Alioto
AGFA/101 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

I’m not sure how I feel about The McPherson Tape, which started off life as UFO Abduction... I’m still trying to figure out whether I actually liked it or not. Maybe by the end of writing this review I’ll have figured that out (although I’m not holding my breath on that count).

Very simply, it’s a found footage movie, allegedly the first ever (if you knock Cannibal Holocaust out of the running for, apparently, not really sticking with the found footage idea). So, yeah, this technically predates The Last Broadcast mockumentary by nine years and The Blair Witch Project by ten so, until some other movie comes to light, this is the first one and I guess it should be respected for that. Although, alas, it never really got a proper release at the time. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Okay, so the film is found footage and, depending on your definition of horror, it possibly falls into that category too. It’s all shot in one take (although some deliberate jump cuts to slight time shifts were edited in later, by the looks of it) and concerns various members of the Van Heese family (or Van Hesse because, the end credits are really inconsistent with how the last names of all the characters are spelled) and it all takes place in a few hours one night as the family have a small, intimate 5th birthday party for the youngest daughter. The mothers of various couples are also present so we have three generations represented in this small gathering.

And then the power goes off (goodbye to anything but candle and torch light for the rest of the movie’s short running time... of just over an hour). When three of the guys, including a cameraman, go to investigate outside, they see a red flash in the sky and follow it over to a spaceship where they see three aliens (the grey, Zeta Reticulan kind most abductees describe). They are observed and so the guys make a run for it and return home but, they were followed and the rest of the evening becomes a waiting game of, mostly hysteria, as the family get divided and ‘taken’ by the three greys.

It’s kind of uneven. It starts off with a bit of text about Project Blue Book and then relies on a skeleton of a structure which the main actors can improvise around. And, the actors were very good and all very natural although, I have to say, some of the improvised dialogue didn’t really make it for me. However, the one advantage of this technique is that everything seems very real because of that improvisations and so, although I decided I didn’t really like most of the family, it does start to get unsettling as the film wears on. At which point I should probably qualify what I mean by that because the film really didn’t work in one specific way for me...

That way being... I didn’t find it scary but I really should have. Long term readers of this blog may remember I spent a good few years researching UFO encounters and alien abductions in my spare time, sifting through enough written ‘evidence’ and logical deduction to the point where I had to stop looking at the stuff... too many sleepless nights. Consequently, films dealing with this subject matter, especially when they feature the common ‘greys’, really tend to push my buttons hard and terrify me. Which is where this film let me down quite a bit. It just wasn’t in any way scary to me. That being said, because the acting is very naturalistic, I did find it a little disturbing... mostly because the family dynamic, where everyone is just acting hysterically and shouting at each other rather than rationally deciding on the most logical course, was winding me up quite a bit as various people had the worst ideas possible for trying to get through the situation. So, yeah, there’s that.

Now, the film cost something like $6,500 to bankroll... real microbudget stuff but, as I looked at the movie, I couldn’t even figure out where that money went, to be honest. But the air of realism in the actors improvising, well, almost against each other, is where the tension and interest in the film begins and ends for me. I guess, I did get something out of it... I just didn’t get any kind of terrifying experience out of this one.

Now, the film is fairly blurry and there’s a reason behind that. The film has been restored by the director from missing elements and brought to light by the team from The Bleeding Skull books and AGFA (American Genre Film Archives) and the Q&A session included as an extra on the Blu Ray is really kind of interesting and worth the price of the movie, in the end, to my mind.

Okay, so Dean Alioto made the film, UFO Abduction but couldn’t get it distributed. Then finally he got someone interested in putting it out but, before the film got a release, a warehouse fire destroyed the original master tape. So it never got a release (for almost thirty years). However, though the director didn’t realise this for around ten years after the fact, bootleg tapes of it started showing up on documentaries and so on about UFOs. A version without the front and end credits was being used and various ‘experts’ from the military and what have you were pretty convinced by the movie, thinking it was genuinely real ‘found footage’ of an abduction incident. And things started to snowball from there, with the director being accused of deliberately trying to hoax people at one point. Things continued from there and here we are today, able to see this thing on the best format possible. A format which really wasn’t designed to convey fuzzy, VHS quality playback but, hey, I’m still just grateful to have stuff like this rescued from slipping between the cracks.

The title, The McPherson Tape, is what it’s come to be known as from those UFO days... there are no McPhersons in this, although the director did do a bigger budget remake in 1998 entitled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County which, is also sometimes known as The McPherson Tape to some and is often (including on the IMDB, if I’m not mistaken) confused with the original version of the film. But then again, UFO Abduction is also probably not the best title for the film since, you know, no UFOs are actually abducted either (Ha! I’m totes hilar!).

And that’s me kinda done on The McPherson Tape. I found it interesting rather than totally entertaining, it has to be said. The improv actors are all good and, if I was revisiting the genre of ‘found footage’ for anything then I would probably take another look at it. It’s certainly not nearly as interesting as a lot of the found footage phenomenon post-Blair Witch though... although it certainly sticks to its guns on what it is more than a couple I’ve seen in the last 6 months, which seemed to forget they were found footage at all in the occasional shot (thus invalidating their entire movie).

As for AGFA? Well, they’re a partner label to the US label Vinegar Syndrome and I’m sure they’re doing well in the US. I never took a punt on them before because of the crippling cost of postage for a film I might not like but, very recently, 101 FIlms in the UK have picked up some of their titles for release over here and this is one of the first four they released. I can’t see them doing that well in terms of sales on a small island like this but, fingers crossed for them because it means I can afford to pick up one or two of their releases on occasion, at far less expense. So I’m very much hoping that the relationship between the two distributors lasts for a while.