Doctor Mordrid

Drid-fully Delightful

Doctor Mordrid
USA 1992 Directed by Albert Band, Charles Band
Full Moon/88 FIlms Blu Ray Zone B

Oh wow. This is a film and a half.

I only have two scores by B-movie composer Richard Band on CD. One is Trancers III (a film I’ve not seen) and the other is to one of the great 1980s attempts to revive the 3D format in theatres, Metalstorm - The Destruction of Jared-Syn. However, I was sitting reading my Twitter timeline one morning and there was an excerpt from an interview with the composer and he mentioned Doctor Mordrid, a film co-directed by his father and brother and of which he seemed to make no bones about being a rip off of the Marvel comics character Doctor Strange (who is currently being played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the second on-screen iteration of the character). It seemed the production company did, at some point, have the rights to make a movie about the character but, by the time the production came together, they didn’t have enough money to renew the rights so... they didn’t and just changed the names of various characters and shaved off Doctor Strange’s moustache, leaving the rest of his costume pretty much as it is in the early comics, to get around copyright (allegedly... and it does seem to be the case if you read between the lines as well as use the evidence of your own eyes when you let this amazing little movie burn its delightful path onto your retinas).

I was interested in seeing this straight away, of course, but... well I highly doubted there would ever have been an official, commercial release of this movie in the UK. Cut to two or three hours later and there I was standing in Fopp records looking at a fairly new, cleaned up Blu Ray transfer of Doctor Mordrid for the less than princely sum of £6. This was too good to be true and, when I finally got around to watching the movie a couple of weeks later... I found that, not only was it too good to be true... it was also too bad to be true but, in the best way ever.

Seriously, Doctor Mordrid is a amazing and wonderous film and a bit of a strange conundrum of a picture in the sense that... it’s both one of the best ‘so hilariously bad it’s good’ movie’s I’ve seen in a good long time but, also, it’s actually got a bizarre kind of coolness to it. This last element is provided quite definitively by Jeffrey Combs in the title role, who absolutely plays all of the unfolding nonsense with, not just a sense of seriousness and gravitas which this kind of character needs to thrive but also with a lot of charm and on screen presence, it has to be said. Of course, he’s not Doctor Strange, Master Of The Mystic Arts he’s... Doctor Mordrid, Master Of The Unknown which would, I dunno, imply that if he’s a master of unknown things then he must know about them and thus negate the veracity of this contradiction of a title but... well, you get the picture.

And I don’t know if my words can fully do justice to the sheer brilliance of the stupidity of the film but... I’ll give it my best shot.

The film opens with a credit sequence which is a slow pan around Doctor Mordrid’s inner sanctum, the mysterious books and artefacts he has in his collection very slowly examined by the camera as... Richard Band’s opening title music goes completely over the top in a full on gallop of a heroic march which is both completely inappropriate to the style and pacing of the visuals while still being a great melody and piece of music in its own right and which would ably support some of the most heroic title sequences in the history of cinema... just not this one (although I am pleased to say that I did manage to find a reasonably priced second hand CD of the score which arrived in the post a week later). Amongst the credits we also have the legendary caption which says the film is ‘Based on an original idea by Charles Band’ so... yeah, you know what? Let’s not even go there. Unless you want to get into an argument about the meaning of the word ‘original’.

We then get the first scene which gave me pause for thought and made me think straight away of the mighty Marvel artist Jack Kirby... Doctor Mordrid consulting with ‘The Monitor’ (maybe that’s a non-Marvel version of The Watcher) who appears to him as a pair of giant, floating eyeballs in space. Oh yeah, this is something which seems just like Jack Kirby would have been doing in the late 1960s and mid 1970s and it all just felt somehow familiar. As it turns out, what I didn’t know until I looked it up after, is that Jack Kirby actually had been on board with the project at some point in the early stages of the film (presumably, before the money ran out) and so I’m guessing this was one of his contributions.

Anyway, The Monitor warns Mordrid that things are happening and elements are coming together towards the final showdown between Doctor Mordrid and his childhood enemy, a dark sorcerer called Kabal, who Mordrid has locked away in his castle dungeon which is a bit like his own personal Arkham Asylum for demonic villains, watched over by a big prison warden, Gunner. Oh... and another possible Kirbyism is that this castle is solitary in that it’s floating on a big rock in space.

But, back on planet Earth, we find ourselves in Rio De Janeiro... I know it must be there because the establishing shot is a still photograph of that big Christ The Redeemer statue and, should we be suspicious that they are just going to cut back to some footage taken nearer to the studio, it also tells us that in big letters to re-enforce that idea. Now then, wherever we are, we have a truly great moment in the film... perhaps greater than some of the sorcery we shall see later in the way it truly defies the physics of the situation. A guy with a truck load of... can’t remember, maybe diamonds... shoots the guy in front who is driving. So... where you might be correct in thinking this would cause the van to veer around the road in an ‘out of control’ manner and hurtle to destruction, this film tells us this is just not would happen in this situation. Instead, after he is shot dead, the driver would slump over the steering wheel and the van would suddenly slow down and stop because... um... what the heck? What are we being asked to believe here? This is completely ludicrous.

However, this complete lack of a coherent adherence to the laws of physics is soon forgotten as the villain of the piece, Kabal, makes his first appearance. And, it has to be said, he looks like an elaborately comical, long haired, blonde viking with sunglasses trying to find the nearest surf board. Wow. This guy is certainly striking and, a closer look reveals that he is... in fact... Brian Thompson, the lead villain of the Sylvester Stallone movie Cobra. Except here, instead of quite literally spitting the word ‘Pig’ at all and sundry, he says a lot of mystical things, fondles a naked woman, enslaves willing servants to do his every bidding and casts some really cool but probably silly spells.

We then get a proper introduction to Jeffrey Combs and also to his pet raven called Edgar. And, just in case you really didn’t get that comical allusion... he later refers to him as Edgar Allan, just to be sure the audience can appreciate the level of referencing on display here. What this raven can’t explain, though, is why several books catch on fire when Doctor Mordrid crosses through his handy portal to visit his castle. When he gets there, he meets up with Gunner, who walks around with two big holes where his eyes would normally be. Turns out Kabal has escaped, melting out Gunner’s eyes in the process (although, to be fair, this doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any). Mordrid restores Gunner’s eyeballs and goes back to Earth to make friends with a lady lawyer with a passion for mystical and spiritual phenomena, who happens to be his next door neighbour and who will help him out later in the film (charmingly played by Yvette Nipar).

Now, when I started watching this movie I’d figured it was made for a TV audience because the obvious cut away shot of blood spraying onto a statue was done without actually having any blood after someone was shot... therefore I just assumed it was being made to get around certain potential censorship problems. So I was pretty surprised when various characters actually start swearing and, on top of that, we have female nudity on screen. Not complaining, mind you but... it did manifest a certain tonal shift which doesn’t, in all honesty, do much harm to the movie.

After a while, the battle between the forces of good and evil is on and things are kinda predictable but always pretty fun and, not once, do the actors suggest that there’s anything wrong with the preposterous dialogue they are having to recite... which can be a lot of the battle on the credibility of these things, to be honest. Not that I’m suggesting the movie has any credibility but, you know, at least people aren’t laughing at themselves here. Even when either Mordrid or Kabal are walking around in their astral forms.

Now then, about the astral projection in this movie. When either Mordrid or Kabal appear before the other in their 'astral form', the budget of this movie does nothing to help portray this fact. They don’t in any way appear to shimmer or change colour and... it’s just the actors walking around like normal, proclaiming their status as such. Luckily, one or the other will usually either throw something or shoot bullets at the ‘astral person’ which will pass through them and then this will be followed with a handy piece of revealing dialogue which is not entirely dissimilar to one or other of them saying... “Ha! Your rocks/bullets/throwy object cannot hurt me, as I am in my astral form.” So there you have it.

And then everything stacks up and we get to the finale of the movie and... it’s a bit of a quick denouement, to be honest. Kabal and the astral form of Doctor Mordrid go toe to toe in some kind of American equivalent of the natural history museum and, to my delight, Kabal brings to life the skeleton of a dinosaur which then rampages around menacing people. And, considering this film was made in the 1990s, it’s actually proper old school Ray Harryhausen style stop motion animation as said dinosaur skeleton, not to mention the woolly mammoth skeleton Doctor Mordrid reanimates to fight the dinosaur, picks up a museum guard and proceeds to eat him. And it’s brilliantly naive and charming because, just like those old Harryhausen adventures, the guard suddenly turns into a stop motion puppet of the guard waving his arms and legs about. Of course, logically I couldn’t work out where this skeleton’s digestive system is supposed to be found or what good masticating on a guard would do it but, hey, I’m no palaeontologist. What do I know?

As Kabal gets quickly defeated by means so alarmingly underwhelming that after only a week since viewing this I have forgotten what they are, Gunner is using some kind of bizarre, laser shotgun to ensure no demons in the castle prison place can escape, as was Kabal’s plan. And then that’s it, the end... apart from fulfilling some romantic obligations between Mordrid and his lawyer friend.

As soon as the film had finished, I realised I could quite easily watch it over again and for multiple viewings. Doctor Mordrid is the perfect ‘night in with drunken friends’ kind of movie that can be enjoyed on all kinds of levels and which owns a certain sense of coolness at odds with the silliness of the story, the banality of the dialogue and the cheapness of its budget. A mini masterpiece of, possibly, inadvertent comedy which still maintains a certain gravitas and commands a certain amount of respect in spite of this. One of my new ‘to be recommended to friends of a certain disposition’ movies to be sure.

Doctor Strange

Benedict In Monks

Doctor Strange
2016 USA  Directed by Scott Derrickson
UK cinema release print.

Doctor Strange is one of those comic book characters who I loved as a kid and I got quite excited when I’d heard Johnny Depp was in consideration for the role. I wasn’t too disappointed when he exited the scene because, frankly, Benedict Cumberbatch is one of those actors who you know will do a great job with any material he’s given and I could see how the arrogance his Sherlock character projected would be something which could really help bring the pre-magical version of Dr. Stephen V. Strange to life (the V stands for Vincent and that was who the original look of the character in those early 1960s appearances in Strange Tales, which I loved so much in reprint form, was based on... Vincent Price).

Now, I used to love these comics because Doctor Strange could jump out of his physical body and do battle on the astral planes, while somebody was hanging around and guarding his physical form so it was kept safe from harm. As a young 7 or 8 year old, of course, I was all about things like astral projection and ‘out of the body’ experiences so, when you had a Marvel superhero who could do all that stuff, it was a treat.

I went to the cinema on the first night of release in the UK, which was unusual enough in that it was a Tuesday, because I just couldn’t wait to see how this character fits into and pushes the boundaries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the answer, on both those counts, was... well, actually pretty well. Scott Derrickson, who directed this wonderful movie, has actually treated the material with the respect it deserves and you get a real feeling of those early short strips co-created by Stan Lee and, as importantly (perhaps more so), original Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko, who helped write and then drew the strips. They were pretty much a guide to the psychedelic world of the spirit in its hippiest, trippiest form but, a good few years before all that wave of counter culture hit (I’d personally say that certain sequences in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle of movies also foresaw and possibly ‘usher’ed in the birth of psychedelia... possibly as influenced by the colour work that Mario Bava brought to the cinema and which the people at AIP studios at the time were more than aware of).

The movie really does those early 1963 and 1964 tales justice and the origin is pretty much the same as the one depicted in the comics, although I believe The Ancient One was originally based in the Himalayas and, either way, he was most certainly an old man...not Tilda Swinton, who plays the role in the film. And that’s not a dig by the way... the casting of the always brilliant Tilda is a really shrewd one, especially since the wonderful Rachel McAdams plays the only other female character in this movie and she’s pretty much wasted in how little screen time she has for the majority of the story. We also have the amazing Chiwetel Ejiofor, a villainous Mads Mikkelsen and a very funny Benedict Wong in the cast. Along with Cumberbatch, absolutely nailing Strange as you would expect from him, they have a really great ensemble group of actors here... at least two or three of whom will definitely need to come back for further Marvel movies.

I do have a few disappointments in the film but they are really minor. I’ll just get them out of the way now.

Okay... so somewhere in The Avengers (aka Marvel’s Avengers Assemble and reviewed here), I’m pretty sure Doctor Strange is mentioned in the helicarrier (also in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, reviewed here... but that’s a different issue). Now the Stark Tower wasn’t rebuilt as The Avengers Tower until after the events that took place in that movie so... how can a ‘pre-heroed up’ version of the character be looking out on a New York skyline that includes The Avenger’s Tower? Surely the timeline here doesn’t make sense and is a bit of a... well, a huge continuity error? I may be wrong but that kind of hit me between the eyes when I was looking at this movie in cinemas.

The other thing is that the tone of the story seems a bit... hmmm... somehow a bit too ‘even’. The magical battles are really something special in that they’ve done it all superbly... well okay, the astral plane versions of the characters aren't totally white ghosts like they were in the comics but what they’ve done here gets the message across pretty well and probably appears a lot more acceptable on screen than taking the look straight from the page, is my guess. However, there doesn’t seem to be much contrast within the scenes... with the last third of the movie being a few battles at different locations following on in quick succession without any real contrast in the sequences. I felt it needed just a little more ‘oomph and rest’ between set pieces to give you time to breathe and pace things a little more... thus enhancing the action sequences when they come...  but that didn’t quite get that feel here so it almost threatens to become somewhat less than the sum of its parts on occasion.

A third thing is problematic purely because I knew the early comics. There’s a character in here and, as soon as I heard his name, I knew where the story arc was going to be taking him... I won’t reveal the character name here because if you know the comics you’ll know it already... and I don’t want to put in any spoilers here. I didn’t know if they were going to be saving a certain ‘turning point’ for that character for a later movie or maybe they were going to go the full Green Lantern movie route and have that character do his thing in an epilogue scene. Well, this movie has two post-movie scenes, as do a lot of MCU movies these days. One superb one in the middle of the credits with exactly the Marvel character I had suspected would turn up making an appearance and gluing it together with one of next year’s MCU movies... and a post credits scene where the character I mentioned before gets to live up to the character as portrayed in the comics. So, yeah, they went the full Green Lantern on this one... which is fine by me because I’m one of the few people who actually loved the Green Lantern movie and I believe the plot and structure of the new Doctor Strange movie shares a lot of DNA with it, actually. Anyway, my problem was that I knew something pretty basic about a certain character who is in the movie way before it happened and so... maybe that wasn’t the wisest move. Then again, there are probably a significantly less number of people who used to read Doctor Strange than most of the other Marvel comics so... it’s not such a big deal, I guess.

Everything else about the movie works really well. The acting, the look and design, the spectacular special effects are all absolutely brilliant... and the dialogue in this one is really great too. There’s definitely a lot of fun and humour about this movie and it’s certainly a sharp relief from the previous MCU movie, Captain America - Civil War (reviewed by me here). Another great thing about it is the music...

Now, I’m gutted that Brian Tyler didn’t get a chance to work on this because I like how he’s slowly been bringing the musical elements of the Marvel cinematic universe into some kind of coherent style (something the company seriously needs) but now they’ve pulled in Michael Giacchino on scoring duties. Now I quite like Giacchino anyway (although I don’t like his opening, Marvel company fanfare as much as Tyler’s) and he turns in a really great score here. Definitely loved the sitars used in the end titles and it all works really well with the movie. Cant wait to get the CD of this one... it’ll be on for quite a few spins, I can tell you.

This movie has all the usual tie ups that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is known for and I’m sure Doctor Strange will be playing a special role in the proceedings in the third of The Avengers films. There’s a special artefact he always had in the comics, apart from the famous red cloak (blue in those original stories... if memory serves me... it didn’t change to red until later) and I’m sure anyone familiar with the artefact I’m talking about from the strips will realise exactly how this factors in with some of the last few years’ Marvel movies... so I won’t say anything more on that subject here because one of the characters, Wong, makes the connection quite implicit by the end of the film. So, basically, if you’re trying to watch all the specific Marvel movies which link into each other at the cinema... definitely don’t miss this one.

And, really, you don’t want to miss Doctor Strange anyway. It’s a terrific, fun movie and, although it injects a certain gravitas into some of the subject matter, it’s a welcome antidote to some of those solemn, darker super hero movies which have been doing the rounds at the cinema lately... juggling a dark, frightening tone with a light, frothy window dressing. Great stuff and easily the best of the superhero movies I’ve seen this year. Watch it while it’s hot!

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind

Terror Firmer

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind
2013 Ireland
Directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi
Limited release at venues when announced.

Every now and then, the director Rouzbeh Rashidi contacts me and asks me if I want to see whichever film he’s been working on at the time. It’s always a double edged sword because I find Rashidi’s work (previously reviewed here, here, here and here) to be really great stuff but it’s also very challenging and I often question myself as to whether I can do artistic justice to his work in reviewing one of his pieces. But I always want to see what he’s been up to and I always bite the bullet and review it after... although I never know just where to start when trying to get down something which tries so hard to capture a glimpse of these specific works. Works which are both simple and vastly complex pieces all at the same time.

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a film which, at first glance, seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi in terms of image content and the way that content is treated within the context of the movie. However, as you start getting into it, you realise that, actually, yes it’s very much a part of the “Rashidi Universe” and the concerns and level of what is revealed and concealed is certainly keeping in spirit with the films I’ve seen by him before. It just took me a little longer to adjust because this one seems to have a much more accessible (at some levels) story arc in some ways than the director’s previous films. That is to say, in as much as parts of the plethora of connected images are easy to corral into a rough narrative framework than they maybe are in others of his works.

The film starts off with a sinister face mask in silhouette in varying shades of focus while seaside wurlitzer style organ music, that I most associate with David Lynch’s Eraserhead, washes over the soundtrack. The aspect ratio changes to something approximating 4:3 as the mask seemingly changes form until eventually vanishing from the screen to usher in the title of the movie.

After the title, a man paces backwards and forwards in front of a garishly lit neon cinema before we cut to a shot of a ceiling fan rotating at various speeds in rhythm, which strobes us back to the previous shot at increasing speed. We then cut to an arial shot of clouds in orange and then to a blue tinted cemetery where James Devereaux slowly walks towards the camera to a piece of Philippe D’ Aram’s score to Jean Rollin’s Fascination. And here is one of the few slightly negative criticisms I’m going to make about this movie. Excuse me here while I have a musical interlude...

Quentin Tarantino, amongst others, is the master of the needle-drop soundtrack. And when I say needle drop, I mean he uses bits of his favourite film scores and sews them altogether to create the soundtracks to his films. The problems with this, though, is that even half cine-literate audiences are going to pop right out of the movie experience and start playing guessing games as to what movie the music originally came from. And this is exactly what happened when I first saw this shot of Devereaux underscored to this specific cue. Instead of watching the film my mind drifted off into... “What is that? A violin and a musical saw maybe? I know that music. I have it somewhere... oh, hold up... it’s Fascination.”

Now this may not be a problem for the film maker in question, it’s true. Godard would often want to deliberately jump the audience out of his movies and musical approaches were just one of the ways he did this. Now this may be what Rashidi wanted, I can kind of see this modus operandi working with other scenes in this film and also in some of his other films... but I suspect that wasn’t what was required here, although the musical association is certainly a non-verbal indication which supports the films end credits, which include attribution to the work of the famous French lesbian-vampire-surrealist director Jean Rollin. Certainly the film could stand roughly on the same side of the coin as some of Rollin’s early work like Le Viol Du Vampire... and could probably cause similar riots as this early Rollin work created back in the 60s if this was shown to a packed house around my local too, I suspect (that’s a compliment, by the way, if you are in any doubt). So it’s quite possible that we are supposed to make that association with the famous French director’s work from early on and certainly the sight of James Devereaux wearing a mask like some Diabolik or Fantomas or SuperArgo in many of the scenes creates an equally sinister feel as the ones worn in something like, say, Rollin’s La Vampire Nue (reviewed here). So maybe that was Rashidi’s intention after all?

We then cut to James Devereaux sitting on a park bench in two angles, split screen with, again, heavy filtering as he goes into a monologue on the left hand of the screen while on the right hand side of the screen he experiments with the mask from the opening titles. He then wears the mask evoking, as I said before, a typical masked hero/villain/ vigilante style character from early 1900s to late 1960s cinema.

This is a leap for my experience of this director's work because the unreality is hitting you at all angles as both the sound design and shot design are stretched like a piece of fabric with the kind of artifice which is just not that present in the earlier works I've seen from Rashidi. And, at this stage of his career, I can only assume it’s a progressive leap or, if not, then something which will be useful to him in the pursuit of his, very well polished, approach to his art.

In the very next sequence, Devereaux does a startling thing, and you begin to understand the title of the movie a little more (which is probably also a first for me in regards to this director, actually). The Devereaux character is seen fighting invisible demons who may... or may not be... there. I’ll get back to that later.

Things get spookier as scenes and then clusters of shots are pitched against each other in terms of colour tint washed over a changeable level of saturation. This is all good stuff and, as the masked Devereaux goes about his business, mostly dialogue free, concepts are introduced to the viewer’s minds eye due to the introduction of weird props and landscapes which Devereaux interacts with… seemingly almost shamanistically in certain sequences.

Pretty soon, other elements and scenarios are presented in an abstract manner. A lady in blue. James at his apartment waiting the arrival of something, by the looks of his body language... perhaps awaiting a psychic attack if one wants to look at the movie on a purely material level. A guy sifting through objects in the sand. People clambering down perilous, rocky terrain… looking like a mountain expedition washed up on Mars.

More seemingly random elements are introduced.

A gentleman... walking through a deserted alley in the snow. We cut back to the girl… are we watching three parallel timelines or are we, as I suspect, meant to inform the picture with our own sense of time and story within the piece? Mixed up footage inhabiting the same space and treated in a way that gives a sense of the past is also included. Are these flashbacks to one of our characters memories and, if so... which character. The girl on the bridge who leads into the possible flashback or Devereaux’s sinister, masked cypher... who possibly leads us back out of them from a different “mind space”?

And this is where things get interesting and I’ll talk about those invisible demons now.

When I was a kid I had (and probably still do have, I am sure) a paperback sized reprint of the first 12 or so comic strip stories of the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange. Now this guy was interesting to me because in these stories, he often used to leave the physical plane of the earth (leaving his body slumbering) and fight his enemies, often Gods or demons, on a spiritual plane of existence of which mortal man is unaware. And this informs my response to this picture, in as much as I choose to take the “terrors of the mind” of the title as a specific attack on Devereaux from another character glimpsed in the movie. It’s not specifically spelled out and I really don’t think the director wants to lock us into a specific interpretation of the events and footage we see on screen. I do, however, think that Rashidi wants us to bring our own baggage into the screening room with us. These are not, I think, supposed to be passive movie experiences. I’ve said this and underlined it in magic marker before about this director’s work but, seriously, I think he rubs together little bits of incidents of something which he has the coda for, to give it the semblance of a linear structure in certain scenes, but I think he’s much more interested in stimulating the brain of the audience into bringing their own meaning and level to his work. I’m pretty dumb so I tend to take a lot of this at face value... which is why HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is very much an exercise in surrealist science fiction for me (the HSP stands for Homo Sapiens Project, by the way). At least... I hope they’re not supposed to be passive experiences, at any rate, otherwise I’ve missed the point completely.

As we watch some of the sequences, the images are filtered, interfered with and deteriorated so much that we begin to imagine our own shapes and visions within the cinematic canvass in front of us. Much like a person staring at a piece of wallpaper with a particular pattern might begin to imagine they can make out faces in the surface detail after a while (this phenomenon is, of course, brilliantly demonstrated in Robert Wise’s original 1963 version of The Haunting). Some bizarre goings on with a camel (behavioural mind control?) is added to the mix and pretty soon your brain is really beginning to look at a lot of the footage (if not all of it) as metaphor or symbolistic in essence. But, as I said, with a lot of that kind of stuff... it’s very much open to interpretation.

Like a lot of Rashidi’s films, this one seems to be, very much, a celebration of a character’s internal struggle... the thoughts and moods they have made manifest in a half dream state and then emblazoned across the screen and pumped directly into your cerebral cortex. This kind of basic human state is something that is apparently frowned upon in Hollywood these days, as being something un-showabble. It’s not true though... cinema is fantastic at this kind of mood work. But also, in this one, you get a sense of shared or combined contemplation. You get a sense from some of the imagery that some of the... again, I’ll call them characters, or possibly cyphers, are two different aspects of the same person existing in two different planes of existence and overlapping with each other... a spiritual realm and a more (or less) realistic dimension happening simultaneously... like two different aspects of the old Moorcockian multiverse concept... but also with a sense that there are spiritual invaders trying to take possession of a persons actions. It’s a very interesting, science fiction style concept... and it really begins to get under your skin after a while.

When director/actor Max Le Cain comes in towards the end of the film to meet with Devereaux’s character, you almost feel that he’s a kind of Van Helsing or Carnacki character, here to help rid Devereaux of what ails him and to arm him with the magic bullet he so obviously needs to help him rid himself of the... well.. the terrors of the mind.  The last five minutes or so of the movie are definitely climactic, noisy and certainly feel like an end game before the epilogue. An epilogue which could be interpreted a couple of ways and, again, helps give you a finish to the “story”... if one chooses to look at it this way.

Now, this movie is really good and, if you struggle with it in the way I think is intended, then you’ll be rewarded with a certain state of mind which bypasses clarification in favour of a sense of shared wisdom. It’s not going to be an easy film for someone unprepared for this directors work, I suspect, but it’s certainly a very good one. I can’t imagine it playing in any lengthy cinema runs but, and I know I’ve said this before, this should find a home at least in an art gallery (it’s certainly deserving of finding a good home) and I hope the director plans to submit it to any festivals and screening opportunities he can find. I’m pretty sure the unfortunate exclusivity of an art gallery venue would not be on the directors most ideal list of locations and if he can see a way of getting this into local communities and stimulating thought and discussion on the nature of film and exhibition then all the better for it.

It's interesting because, although it seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi… well, as I said before, once you're invested in the film, there's no way you could mistake this piece of work for anybody else's art but, also, I think that this is one of this directors most engaging and accessible works... even while stretching the boundaries of the way footage is treated (or should that be mistreated) and the way we decode the images and sounds we are presented with.

What I do know is that HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a considerably mature work from a confident director who seems to be progressing from one phase or period of his work and into something else altogether. That may be a wild claim to make, perhaps, and in 5 or 6 feature films time we’ll get a better sense of the truth or lack of truth of that, I think. But for now, the artist is very much on top of his game and I would urge you to give this movie a go if you get the opportunity to see it at some point. If not, it might track you down and come looking for your cinematic eye on its own terms.

There is no escape!