Blood Feast

The Tongue Ones

Blood Feast
USA 1963
Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone A/B/C
As part of the Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast Blu Ray/DVD boxed edition.

Herschell Gordon Lewis is very well known to different groups of people for two very different, on the surface, specialties. His later, post-film career saw him as one of the most successful marketers in America. He was the 'go to guy' for consultation about direct-marketing and also wrote some books on the subject. He was as successful in this venture as he was in the latter part of his early film career, which is obviously what readers of this blog are going to be more interested in.

After a varied assortment of jobs and then following a stint in directing advertising films, he turned his hand to directing movies, specifically nudie cuties and films dealing with exploitational aspects of sexuality (I think I have a few of these to watch on an early Vinegar Syndrome release at some point). And then, for the drive-in market in America in the early to late 1960s (and just into the early 1970s), he came up with a then unique angle for his films which nobody had really done before.... ultra violence with the camera lingering on the goriness of the on screen deaths. Films like this one along with Two Thousand Maniacs, Colour Me Blood Red, The Gruesome Twosome, The Gore Gore Girls and a whole host of others were what earned him the name and reputation of being, The Godfather Of Gore. I doubt if they even showed in Great Britain at the time or, if they were, they would have surely have been heavily cut.

And it all started with this one, the now classic Blood Feast, in 1963. In the 1980s, when Britain had the huge 'video nasties' scare aka ‘low life government propaganda outrage’, this was the oldest of the films to be put on the list and banned in this country (for a while anyway). Even when the DVDs were issued at a certain stage in the UK, the films were censored... which is why, although I’ve been hearing about them for years from film fans over the world (Jonathan Ross even devoted an episode of his TV show documentary series The Incredibly Strange Film Show to these movies), I’d never actually seen any of them myself. I try to stay clear of censored art. Also, while I enjoy a bit of violence and gore thrown into my movies from time to time (there are very few movies made which don’t deal with aspects of violence and confrontation in some ways... even romantic comedies), I’m not particularly impressed with goriness just for the sake of it so, I wasn’t sure if he was my cup of tea.

On the other hand, fifty million French men can’t be wrong, as the saying goes so, when Arrow issued a restored and , more importantly, uncut box set collecting many of Mr. Lewis’ films in one place as a dual Blu Ray/DVD edition (and a truly handsome package it is too), I decided enough was enough and, after a year or two of humming and hawing at the price, I finally tracked down what, in the end, I’m convinced was the last copy in London for the normal retail price (thanks, ironically, to the British Film Institute shop)... and have now watched my first film by this director, the one that started it all in terms of any movie having any gory content in its DNA at all. Never mind all those arguments in the late 1960s about the 'shocking' display of violence in movies like Bonnie And Clyde in 1967 and whether they should be allowed in the public view... those detractors would have been aghast if they’d so much as glanced at the kind of product that Herschell Gordon Lewis (HGL) was churning out just four years before, which makes pale by comparison most depictions of on screen violence for a good while.

All that being said, I really wasn’t expecting to be that ‘bowled over’ by my first HGL movie, Blood Feast but, here I am, impressed and, yeah, consider me ‘bowled over’ by the film. It’s bad but it’s definitely in the ‘so bad its good’ camp and it has it’s own unique quality which, when you see just how gory it was on such a cheap budget (and, from what I can tell, it got millions back... a very successful movie, perhaps helped on by HGL’s marketing ploy of giving out Barf Bags to paying customers), makes for a really interesting juxtaposition of flavours.

The film starts off with an opening scene of a girl who goes home, listens to a radio broadcast warning her and the general public about the strange, mutilating killer being on the loose still (the camera stays fixed on the static shot of the radio for quite a while, for some reason), takes off her clothes and has a nice bath. Her bath is disturbed by actor Mal Arnold playing the film's notorious and, surprisingly, solo villain, the Egyptian Goddess worshipping Fuad Ramses. We knew something bad was going to happen because of the slow beating and truly sinister and creepy, drums on the soundtrack. A soundtrack composed, it would seem, by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself (who also gives himself a production and direction title on the credits too). The maniac stabs up the young lady good and, for what would be the first time in commercial cinema history, I believe, the camera lingers on the mutilated corpse of the girl... the empty eye socket juxtaposed with her naked breast rising from the bubble bath as our crazed antagonist plays with her internal organs and then cuts her leg off (we see him cooking this leg in his oven in a much later part of the film.

And it’s a really interesting film because, the acting from everybody, including the lead police inspector protagonist played by William Kerwin, is truly dire. The strange marks and stuff he writes in his police notebook half the time looks crazy and completely fake... a witness will say something and he’ll tick things off randomly on different part of the notebook. The make-up on certain characters, such as Ramses, is hilarious too. Over the top as his eyebrows are enhanced by thick greasepaint (presumably) and everyone looks like they stepped out of the 1950s. When I say the acting is bad, perhaps I mean just too stagy.

Stage and film acting are two very different beasts. I once saw Daryl Hannah play in The Seven Year Itch on stage and she was the least interesting one in it because she was acting for camera, expecting every little gesture to be picked up by the audience when, really, what you need to do is exaggerate things just a little for theatre. Similarly, the acting in Blood Feast looks like its being handled by people who were, at that point in their career, more used to acting for the stage, perhaps... every performance just seems a little bit ‘more’ of what you need rather than seeming in any way natural. Some of the line readings are, frankly, downright hilarious.

Rather than detract from the film, however, this gives it an element of 1950s/60s wholesomeness to it which, may have been lacking to contemporary audiences but, looking back through rose tinted glasses today, injects the film with just the right thing because, when you see some really gory scenes and it’s supported by this kind of ‘Golly, gee’ acting, not to mention some lovely bright coloured sets and costumes, it really makes those cheaply and obviously produced but still very strong graphic sequences (even by today’s standards... I don’t think many film makers would try to get away with this stuff today, even), then it really makes them stand out. And, as the years have gone by it’s quite obvious that these films have had a lasting effect on cinema.

There’s also a smidgeon of me that thinks, looking at the way it was written and performed, that the material really wasn’t being taken that seriously by the actors or the writer/director and... I don’t think Lewis would have minded that. It is funny too and, every now and again, you’ll find the odd joke slipped in. For example, the main headline to a newspaper which says something along the lines of GIRL’S LEGS CUT OFF are joined on the page by a number of smaller articles including such gems as the column title, BEER SIPPING HORSE.

All of these factors... the humour, the comical wringing of Ramses hands, the wholesomeness of the cops, the traumatised male partner of a girl who just had her head caved in and her brains stolen... together with the vivid colours and the stylised, clean looking, budget conscious sets give the hole thing the feel of having jumped right out of a 1950s EC horror comic. Similarly, if you take away the gore, the whole atmosphere is very similar, in my opinion, to what you get in Herk Hervey’s monochrome masterpiece, Carnival Of Souls, made just one year before on a similarly cheap budget. Especially when the beating of those drums on the soundtrack is replaced by a church organ (the whole score of Carnival Of Souls is done on this instrument).

This is the film which features, of course, the infamous ‘tongue ripping’ scene... in which a young lady is, somehow, overpowered by Ramses who then proceeds to rip her tongue from her mouth. Oddly, I found this the least interesting piece of goriness in the movie but the aftermath shot, where something like red jelly is dribbling out of the still living woman’s mouth, is oddly much more disconcerting... or at least a little more effective. It’s like the scene in Tenebrae which, up until not so long ago, was sliced out by the censors in this country. The scene involved a woman’s arm being cut off but it was not so much that as the bloody aftermath of her painting her clinically white walls with the arterial spray which was the interesting part of the shot. In typical, bungling BBFC fashion, they cut the arm chop but left in the much more ostentatious and disturbing aftermath. The tongue ripping scene reminded me of this more than anything else in that it’s the post violent act which is the more unsettling aspect of this kind of physical horror.

Another thing I love about this movie is the cobbled together, simplicity of the plot. The police can’t find a motive for the killer but Mr. Ramses, the owner and sole proprietor of a local delicatessen, has promised one of his ladies a special recreation of an Egyptian feast. Unknown to her is that this feast is made of different  body parts collected  from various female victims (most of whom are on his address list for ordering a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites) and also the head of, in this case, the daughter of the lady who has asked for something unusual for her daughter’s party. However, coincidentally, the young lady in question goes to a lecture on Ancient Egyptian Cults which pretty much spells out what Mr. Ramses is doing in this film. Also in attendance is the main police inspector character from earlier, who also has an interest in Egyptology and, by a further strange coincidence, is invited to the party because he also happens to be dating the young lady in question.

There’s are some good and inventive things in the movie. Such as a close up of the gore soaked head of the girl on the beach transitioning into a shot of a red police siren/light on top of a cop car. Mostly though, it’s the charming nature of the sheer and overt cheapness of the production which I’m sure lots of people find appealing in this movie. For instance, look the wrong way and you might see the shadows of the film crew lurking in the corners of a frame. Or lets talk about the climactic foot chase where Ramses ends up accidentally being crushed to death in a trash compactor in a lorry... a police car, which presumably Lewis only had for a day maybe, pulls in and soon the two police inspectors plus two uniformed cops start chasing Ramses. That’s the last we see of the police car and, halfway through the chase, the cops in uniform completely disappear too. It’s no good the other actors pretending they’re there and talking to them off of shot because, you know, they were completely absent in the finale of the chase.

However, even moments like this cannot detract from the awesome potpourri of ingredients which come together to make what was to me, a unique viewing experience. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the other notorious classics in this set at some point. Arrow have done their usual amazing job with the transfers and the packaging... boxed in a giant slipcase as two books filled with the discs and a silly but much appreciated Herschell Gordon Lewis annual, just like the ones kids would get of their favourite TV shows at Christmas and with similarly silly games and activities based on these gory, sleazy movies within the set. There’s even, if you really want to indulge in your own act of stupid vandalism (which seems to be all the rage in the streets of Britain and America at the moment), a cut-out cardboard mask of the director on the back of the gorgeous looking slipcase.

As for Blood Feast, what can I say? I didn’t expect to be taking this stance but it’s highly recommended by me if you like the idea of a film with the same kind of atmosphere as Carnival Of Souls or Night Of The Living Dead but with the goriness levels ratcheted up to 11. Definitely a slice of cinematic cake that I’ve been missing out on over the years, partly due to the formerly tyrannical censorship imposed on this man’s movies in my home country. Thankfully this Arrow set is uncut and, well, it really is quite special. Grab a copy if you can.

Theatre of Fear And Horror

Gore Play

Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 
Expanded Edition by Mel Gordon
Feral House (revised edition)
ISBN: 978-1627310314

Grand Guignol is one of those terms which I’ve heard bandied about in various critical writings on literary and cinematic horror works for a long time. It’s almost  an overused cliché (although I am more than happy to use it myself when it gets the message across) and though most people understand it and the origins of the term, it’s nice to finally be able to have a book which takes you briefly through the 65 year history of the venue and all that it stood for. I, myself, first became acquainted with the term when some very small amount of information on it was available in either the first or second room of the Museum Of Moving Image (MOMI) on the Southbank when it opened in 1988 (a wonderful, if not always accurate, film museum in London which was, shamefully, ‘temporarily’ closed in 1999 and subsequently never re-opened).

Now, thanks to the kind Christmas gift giving of a very special friend, I have explored the story of the shows performed there in this great book, Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962, by Mel Gordon. The tome is split up into a few interesting sections and the first one details the entire saga of the venue with a few notes about what it was before it played host to the horror shows and then going on to detail important playwrights and the varying attitudes of their works, plus the reception of those works with the general public at large.

For those who don’t know, the Grand Guignol was a theatre in one of the raunchier, perhaps I should say sleazier, districts in Paris which would run programmes of short vignettes, usually involving themes based around sexuality but, most importantly, often incorporating lashings of gory violence with the, presumably very skilled, performers having to get their timing and sleight of hand as good as any stage magician to be able to pull off the trick of realistic eye gougings, acid burns, cuts, tears, limb lopping and the like to a fully expecting, but not always necessarily prepared, public.

Named after Guignol, the popular Punch and Judy character from Lyons, the theatre and its programme was so popular in France that it was listed in guide books and had audiences flocking from all around the world to take in the, mostly, unique and horror filled sketches, night after night. The real acid test for the actors and actresses, though, was the amount of faintings they had per night as a benchmark of their performance skills. As the writer says, “Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.”

A typical tale, as described by Mel Gordon, can be found in this brief synopsis to a seasonal play, for instance... A Christmas tale of a poverty stricken woman in the last stages of pregnancy, unable to find someone to take her in (as Mary and Joseph were able to in their day), murders her child and throws the remains to the pigs in the fields while carols sound from the neighbouring village.

And there are a lot worse, in some ways, than this kind of thing in here and that, I think, is why various writers and critics over the years have used the phrase to metaphorically describe the sheer visceral horror of certain scenarios in art.

Gordon traces the origins of this tradition and shows how the horror and sexual content escalated when new writers and owners were brought in. Originally the plays were conceived as being new, unflinching and naturalistic tales which, obviously, included these strong, graphic elements as part of their daily bread. He also mentions a particularly interesting performer called Paula Maxa who met with an unfortunate demise 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways on the stage of the theatre and was also the victim of a stage rapist attack at least 3,000 times. I would love to see a full biography of this lady emerge some day. As it is, the writer reprints, in a later section, a longish and autobiographical newspaper story of her early years from the time, although I can’t really hazard a guess as to the truth of the claims made by Maxa here. This amazing little article written in her own words certainly whets the appetite for more information about this sensationalist performer who seemed more than happy to play and wallow in the kind of unsavoury elements found in the plays in which she performed.

The book also tells of the complete failure, despite its quite unparallelled success in Paris, that the Grand Guignol met with when the plays and actors toured in other countries such as Canada, America and over here in England. It’s also implied that, in some cases, these failures were quite possibly brought about by the xenephobic critics who may have had something against the idea of the French coming to their country. It also cites various foreign censorship bodies watering down the content of the shows in their territories as another reason why the touring thespians were forced to close their doors due to poor turnouts before their full season had finished.

After the story behind the venue, its performers and plays, we then get a lengthy section of brief synopsis of around 100 of the plays... of which there seem to have been many thousands. The summaries are rarely more than one or two short paragraphs each but they do serve to give some flavour of the breadth of grotesque pleasures which were on offer on a nightly basis. It also makes one wonder why nobody has tried to bring back a modern version in various theatre districts around the world... I would love to go and see one of these disturbing evenings myself. Ah, well... burlesque seemed to be making a comeback a few years ago so, perhaps, someone will get around to Grand Guignol.

After this section we get an archival essay on the nature of fear and the way in which people lap up horror and death by one of the vignette writers of the time. Reading it, the justifications could have been written by anybody working for the old Universal horror movies in the 1930s and their direct cinematic descendents. Actually, the cinematic legacy is briefly mentioned in the book, in a chapter discussing the influences on films like Robert Weine’s The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari (one of my favourites), which, it argues, owes as much, if not more, to Grand Guignol than it does to German Expressionism.

The book also has a number of attractively reproduced colour plates of posters advertising the theatre over the years and there are also a fair number of monochrome photos throughout, showing details of some of the acts (so if you want to see grainy pictures of actresses having their eyeballs seemingly pierced by knitting needles, then you will find that kind of stuff in here). This is all followed up, at the end of the book, by the reproduction of the scripts of two popular Grand Guignol plays, both of which feature some nasty deaths to various protagonists and antagonists. I’m reliably informed that the scripts are from different plays depending on whether or not you get this new, revised edition of Gordon’s book or an earlier version.

And the book then ends, quite abruptly, on the final grim moments of the last reprinted play.
A common problem when I read books on an aspect of cinema or some other topic in which I am, fairly, well versed is that I usually find lots of incorrect things passed off as facts and it mostly really annoys me. I found none of this in Mel Gordon’s tome and the writing style was quite accessible throughout. Of course, my unfamiliarity with the subject matter in the first place leaves me in the position of not being able to recognise any bloopers within the pages even if they were there but, heck, it’s just nice to be able to read a book and not worry about that stuff for a while.

Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 is a truly brilliant book and I count myself lucky to have received this splendid tome for Christmas. If anyone is already interested in this kind of horror theatre or has heard the term ‘Grand Guignolesque’ used to the point of insanity in various writings on the genre, then I would urge those of a sound mind to take a look at this volume. It’s an easy, uncomplicated read and it’s full of knowledge... just what a good book should be.

The Grapes Of Death (Les Raisins De La Mort)

Raisin The Dead

The Grapes Of Death 
(Les Raisins De La Mort)
1978 France
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Region A

Warning: Occasional spoilers washing over your palette.

Hmmmm. This is another Rollin film I’d not seen before and I can’t say it’s up there with my favourites by this extraordinary director. It’s often labelled as a zombie movie, one of Rollin’s rare forays into the genre which would also include a film I’ve not yet seen, his nazi zombie movie Zombie Lake. Personally, the zombie tag is about as broad as pegging that genre to a film like 28 Days Later, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a movie which makes use of the unofficial zombie rule book which has developed from the version started by George A. Romero’s Living Dead films and, in that way at least, it’s an homage to those movies.

While the mechanics of wine grapes poisoned with new pesticides is certainly similar to another famous zombie movie, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (aka The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue), the film is more a close cousin of the “almost a zombie” genre which has flourished in the 28 Days/Weeks Later movies and, arguably, the REC movies, but which bears much more resemblance to George A. Romero’s own “almost a zombie” movie, The Crazies (and presumably its recent remake, which I didn’t get to see since I didn’t like the original all that much). That is to say, the shambling, zombie-like humans in this movie are just that... they are not actually dead, they have been infected and this is making them kill, usually quite gorily, anybody who is free from infection. A caveat to that, or should that be cadaver, is that the infection does give some of the infected a kind of rotting, zombie-like similarity in the case of a few “lead crazy people” as it were.

The film follows a young girl, Elisabeth (played by Marie-Georges Pascal), whose companion is killed in their deserted train by a pseudo-zombie. She is trying to get to the vinyard where her fiance works but she pulls the emergency brake to stop the train while she is still on the way as she is being chased by a “zombie” who we know, from the opening sequence, must have got on at the vinyard in question. Since this film is somewhat akin to a road movie, at a certain level, it makes no sense geographically since the girl spends the entire film heading towards the vinyard, and finally arriving there, when directionally it makes more sense that she’s been heading away from it.

Now, I certainly know the folly of trying to apply actual narrative logic to a Jean Rollin movie as he clearly demonstrated, on a regular basis, that he just wasn’t interested in such stuff. It did kind of grate in this one, though, because I kept trying to get the logic of a guy that worked at the main protagonist's destination getting on the train a stop before the girl, who had not yet arrived there, get off and then continuing forward to arrive where the original guy got on, straight in my head as the film played out.

Mostly, I found this movie a little more pedestrian than I would expect from a great surrealist like Rollin and although the shots of the characters walking through the French country landscape were, indeed, perfectly composed and beautiful, there were a lot less of the startling shot set ups that I would normally expect from him and the film did feel a bit rough and ready in places.

There is gore and nudity (most memorably supplied by frequent Rollin collaborator Brigitte Lahaie) throughout the film but there seems to be less of this on offer here than I would expect from this director’s films. Although there is a sequence where a naked blind girl is crucified and then beheaded, followed by shots of her now murderous guardian kissing the lips of her decapitated noggin, the film has far less of the surrealistic flourishes that allow Rollins genius to shine through and this left me wanting in terms of what I would like to get from this man’s, often underrated, cinematic landscape.

The score was interesting in that it seems to succeed and fail during various scenes in about equal measure, at least as a support for the on screen images. It also sounds like it was banged out by just one person on an old Cassio synthesiser for a lot of it and, the score, I would have to conclude, doesn’t really do the film any favours. This is something I feel a lot of Jean Rollin’s fantastical cinema excursions have in common, I’m afraid.

Ultimately, fans of post-Romero modern zombie horror will probably find The Grapes Of Death severely lacking in the style of filmmaking they would want to see and, even Rollin fans like myself may find this a less flavoursome dish than many of his others. I wasn’t completely disappointed by it, however, and I found the last 20 minutes to be much more coherent (not necessarily a good thing with Rollin) and entertaining than the rest of the film. Certainly something horror enthusiasts should at least try once, I think. I’ve never been much of an appreciative audience for the aforementioned The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue, either, if truth be told, but I know there’s a large number of supporters for that movie so maybe this one will appeal to people too. As far as I’m concerned, though, I’m much more a lover of his vampire films, so far, than his brief dabbling with the zombie and, in this case, pseudo-zombie film genres.

Polypore

A Fungi To Be With

Polypore 
2013 USA/Japan/France/Spain
Directed by Jesse Barack
Films Royale
Vimeo rental

Polypore is one of those movies that creeps up on you with its stealth powers, courts you for a while and then takes you completely by surprise.

When director Jesse Barack contacted me on Twitter via DM and asked if I’d take a look at it for him, I must admit I was just a little cynical about the quality of the product... not his fault, I’ve just developed a kind of negative assumption about the majority of films shot low budget without any major cinema and DVD release these days so my natural response to these movies is to keep very much in the distance unless specifically asked. But I was asked and I really don’t like to turn down somebody when they’ve gone to the trouble of actually asking me to take a look at something.

There are so many independent directors starting out on their first few movies these days on twitter and the majority of them tend to approach you by following you and then, because they’ve clicked on follow, expect you to automatically give up your time to check out the links on their profile and watch their stuff. Nothing wrong with this approach but I tend to not be able to get around to things for a little while (this blog is not my 9 to 5 job people, it’s something I do because I’m passionate about the subject matter). Usually the people in question have unfollowed me again after a week and I don’t get to know whether they wanted me to check out their stuff or not.

However, like I said, well done to Barack for actually asking me to watch his stuff... and also a grateful thank you too, I think, because, quite frankly, although the film is obviously low budget, it’s also absolutely riveting and just looks great. I was pretty surprised at just how much I enjoyed it, to be honest with you. Put it this way, I watched the first episode of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D when it aired the night before I watched Polypore and, seriously, Polypore blew it out of the water.

So, okay. First question first. What is a polypore?

Well I didn’t know either but it’s made clear in the film its a medicinal fungi with, in the case of this movie, the power to give its “users” supernatural abilities. I was wondering if the writer/director was basing this on anything specific and a quick trip to Wikipedia afterwards gave me the following information... “Polypores are a group of fungi that form fruiting bodies with pores or tubes on the underside...” and “Polypores are used in traditional medicine, and they are actively studied for their medicinal value and various industrial applications. Several polypore species are serious pathogens of plantation trees and major causes of timber spoilage.”

So okay... it’s “medicinal” mushrooms then.

Now this is a great set up for a movie as it happens. The particular brand of polypore used in this film becomes the impetus for the plot, not as a thing which everybody is after but because of the fallout from the polypore and the knowledge of this particular “strain” of them.

Polypore starts out with an absolutely brilliant opening credits piece which immediately shows you how the world of the film is going to be.  A hard hitting sequence of mixed textures opening on a photographic still of a man picked out in a black and white shot. He is already tied up and in the next shot, which is in colour, he is dragged out of a room. There’s something almost “Soviet Propaganda” in the way this guy is singled out from the action in this manner on the opening close up, in that it’s very similar to the technique Sergei Eisenstein used to use to pick people out in isolation from a crowd or a group in a scene. Highlighting details when a zoom lens was not something he had at his disposal. I noticed that Barack does not use moving camera that much, nor various zoom lens style techniques in this movie, so I’m not sure if he was particularly aware he was doing this in this manner as anything other than a standard solution to a commitment not to go with dollying in or panning, but it’s certainly there. The rest of the opening is a mixture of colour footage of such things as an Asian actor finding a book and some gruesome, mostly off camera at this stage in the film, violence which culminates just below the periphery in the sawing off of someone’s head and a look from a pretty girl. And I don’t think we’re even 2 minutes into the movie yet.

But all of this rich textural palette is already pushing the “pseudo-typage” technique I’m talking about and this continues at various points during the movie... as does the continued use of multiple ways of shooting and presenting a static image (static in camera movement that is, not in terms of movement within a shot). It’s also unconsciously telling us, the audience, that we may be in for a bit of a ride and have something unsettling to look forward to for the next 68 minutes. Which we do.

The scene changes and we meet the middle aged father and mother of the film’s main protagonist, Paul (played by Jeffrey Bielat and, also, by Chen Tang... look, don’t ask and I won’t tell, okay?). For the first 10 minutes or so we see the relationship between the unemployed Paul and his (get up and get a job) father and also get flashes of his friends, Trent (played by the writer/director Jesse Barack) and Sebastian (played by Kyle Barry). They both come back later in the narrative in pretty important ways but right now they are just here, it seems to me, to highlight them as friends of Paul and also to continue the frenetic, unsettling pacing which the film does so well.

Also intercut into this part of the film and further scattered about in other sections of the running time, are sections of news footage and fake advertisements used to set the scene of the movie so we can understand the way people behave. Going by the footage it’s a pretty sound guess to say we are somewhere in the near future where huge corporations are running the planet even more overtly than they are already now and the whole mix of styles in what I shall call the “TV eye” parts of the movie are very much the visual equivalent of the experimental chapter openings of John Dos Passos celebrated novels forming his USA Trilogy back in the 1930s. Setting the tone and informing the viewers by throwing mixed chunks of relevant data at them... perhaps more modern analogies of what Barack is doing here can be found in the similar sequences in the original Robocop movie or the original comic book of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

He even goes so far as to run the little newsfeed sections of text at the bottom of the screen, not all of which you will be able to concentrate on and catch on the first viewing but which are both chilling and absurd in equal measure... and sometimes just downright funny. Although, some of the feeds certainly aren’t what I would consider “news of the future”. For example, its been known for a very long time that pineapples are known to improve the taste of semen... at least that’s how I’ve been reliably informed by various lady friends over the years. But this and other little factoids will probably bring a smile to your face if you happen to glance down and catch one.

It’s through these news items that it’s intimated by association that Paul’s mother has been taking pharmaceuticals put out by a specific big company and when the side effects cause her to vomit into a plant, Paul rescues the plant from where it’s been taken out of the house and it’s here that the Polypore of the title grows and sets the chain of events moving. It also quickly sums up the kind of marriage Paul’s mother is living in that she feels the need to take happy pills and although we don’t see her character again, it’s little details like this kind of shorthand, entering through the subconscious of the audience, that really makes Polypore stand out above many other low budget films competing with it for your time. And it’s exactly this kind of follow through of an internal logic to the world created by the writer that a lot of Hollywood science fiction movies these days seem to be forgetting to do. This shows a certain amount of respect for the audience and its things like this which are a credit to the director.

Anyhow, a quick search of the internet sets Paul on the trail of the knowledge contained in a book which was never published. A book written by three ghost writers (one of whom has vanished but is pretty obviously one of the poor victims in the opening credits sequence) who are now in hiding and have kept even the publishing house of this book a secret. So says Sebastian, who writes a letter to Paul before... something else happens. I think that’s as much of the opening plot as I really want to tell you because Polypore is a movie which needs to surprise you in the right ways and at its own pace.

What I will say is that the attention to detail in the film is more than I expected. Cans of drink with no label, for example, is perhaps another nod to the nature of the government in this near future (and although I suspect there was a practical reason for this... well don’t shun serendipity as an important part of the creative process is all I’m saying).

The nature of the photography and treatment of the footage is, for the most part, very clean and uncluttered in well composed, static frames which let the power of the editing push to the forefront. Having said that, the team of film-makers involved still manage to give the set design the feeling that you are living in a real environment... and although the shots feel uncluttered in most places, they are certainly not operating with under-dressed sets. The whole tone may, I admit, sound like it’s fairly uneven. Perhaps it is... but the director does an absolutely superb job of pulling everything together here and making it so you won’t feel like anything is really out of place. It just works.

He also does this at a content level too, as the film ranges from sinister, to intriguing, to violent, to bleak but hilariously funny comedy and then cycles back through to something else, without giving you any pause for thought and making sure you can still enjoy all this stuff fairly smoothly, and be engaged by it, without getting pulled out of the experience too much in a Godardian way.  There’s even a wonderful sequence done as a cartoon which is fantastic and doesn’t feel in any way like a false note within the tone of the piece, even when he recuts pieces of this animated footage in again as visual reminders back amongst the live action stuff later in the movie. It all just works so well and, honestly, I’m not too sure why we havent heard more of this guy and why an expanded version of this hasn’t been commissioned for a cinema release. I know if I’d had seen this exact thing at a cinema, I would have definitely bought the DVD too, on that kind of release cycle.

The director doesn’t so much wear his influences on his sleeve as tap into a collective psyche of science fiction and horror writers who have gone before him. Certainly fans of the oeuvre of David Cronenberg or the novels of Philip K. Dick won’t feel out of place looking at this kind of material. There’s also a very big homage to one of the films of David Lynch, I suspect, but I don’t want to spoil that particular revelation for potential viewers either... so I’ll just leave it at “it’s fairly Lynchian and not just in its surrealistic tone and lighting” and leave it at that, I think. I genuinely feel this is a film that you should watch going in knowing as little as possible so... it can sneak up on you from behind and hit you with its full aesthetic weight and range.

And then Troma Studios' Lloyd Kaufman shows up.

And don’t let that put you off... he’s always been a supporter of the arts in a way and, whether you like the kind of movies he puts out or not, this doesn’t share the same universe as the Troma pictures. But Kaufman is very funny and expertly placed in the movie when things have already started getting a bit absurd. I was amazed that Barack could handle the many shifts in emotional response throughout so well and, not just the director either...

The score by Patrick Watson and Dominick Gray shifts tonally from various dark and broody tracks to more inspirational and even, in a few sequences, a little bit Hermannesque when it comes to the “comedy writing”. Think of a smaller version of Bernard Herrman’s score for Hitchcock’s comedy The Trouble With Harry... it kind of goes into that territory at some point... although it’s the broody and inspirational stuff which made it on to the downloadable soundtrack album. It works really well though and is an effective support and a not bad stand alone listen (yeah, I already bought a copy before even sitting down to write this review, thanks).

I was really happy with this film and, as I said in my possibly overlong intro, very glad the director of this work of art brought this to my attention. If you like micro-budget features which bravely delve into territory usually reserved for big budget movie making, then I think you’ll find Polypore one of the more surprising movies you’ll see this year. It’s available for rental at Vimeo here and I strongly recommend you give this one a chance if you like hard edged science fiction. I was, as you can probably tell, very taken with this movie.

The soundtrack is available for download at Amazon here and at the itunes store on all good computers.

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D

Every Witchery Way

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D
Germany/USA 2013
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
Playing at cinemas now.

Alrighty.

So now we have the big gingerbread house of a movie that is Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. It’s an intriguing concept, in that it’s something I’ve not expected to see in terms of using a source material to inspire a gung-ho action flick and the writer/director’s certainly taken a good stab at doing something which is almost as irresistible as the succulent confection of a witches abode that features so heavily in the source fairy tale (and also at certain points in the movie). It’s certainly a lot of fun, that’s for sure.

There are also a few problems with it which I’ll also highlight a little as I go through my personal witch hunting experience.

If you don’t already know, this film is a kick-ass action movie in much the same camp as the badly received Stephen Sommers movie Van Helsing, from almost a decade ago. This may be, I suppose why a lot of people don't seem to be that turned on about going to see it... which is a shame because it’s got some nice things to offer. Now, I happen to have really loved the Van Helsing movie so, when I saw the trailers for this film featuring crossbows, gatling guns, flying witchery, Famke Jannsen, Jeremy Renner (who I like a lot as an action hero, ever since I first became aware of him in 28 Weeks Later) and, as the lovely icing on an already rich cake, the fantastic UK actress/glamour puss phenomenon who is Gemma Arterton... I was already kinda full on gagging to see this particular movie.

The film starts off with a pre-credits recap of the fairy tale version of the story (or “a” version of the story) for people who don’t know it, which neatly leads onto an ultimately expected but still nice little revelation about the main protagonists later on in the movie. It’s a pretty cool sequence and, the young girl in particular, looks very much like Gemma Arterton, who she grows up to be while the opening credits sequence plays out. This particular title sequence is a real masterpiece in itself (especially in 3D) with “newspaper” articles which trace the path of the two witch hunters as they grow up and make a name for themselves in the... ahem... “Witch Hunters For Hire” business. The nature of the illustrative drawings used and the way they are presented in 3D make them almost look like those old, Victorian, Pollock’s Toy Theatre cutouts (black and white for a penny, colour for tuppence) and this helps lend a certain sense of larger than life theatricality to the proceedings as we then plunge into a “witch trial” which is stopped by the title characters in their grown up form.

These characters are quick and easy to be established through some verbal and physical shorthand and then the basic plot (and it is pretty basic, it has to be said, though there’s nothing wrong with that) is out of the way and everyone can get on with the witch hunting and general “beating-upness” of the movie in some set pieces which are half way between dazzling and, unfortunately, bewildering. Yes, this movie suffers from some confusing editing during the action sequences, it’s true, but I’m hoping when (and that is a when, not an if) I watch this movie again, on DVD, some of the - fight/chase/run/fight a bit more - sequences will make more sense. To be fair, it might have been that my brain was trying to cope with all the 3D effects and, in tight juxtaposition with a fast action sequence, I was just not processing the information fast enough.

There are some nice supporting characters in the shape of Hansel’s red headed love interest played by the very beautiful Pihla Viitala and also “Hansel & Gretel’s biggest fan”, played by Thomas Mann (who turns in a really likeable performance and who is not to be confused with the German geezah who wrote Death In Venice). The film also features Peter Stormare in a minor villain role but, although he is more than worthy of the character, he never really gets the chance to let rip with his particular kind of craziness and I think this is a case of the specific casting choice raising this viewers expectations of the character via the baggage of his previous roles... which is a shame but, hey, he’s still excellent and credible in it, so I need to temper my expectations a little, maybe.

There’s some nice business with a troll character that I really liked and he really drives home one of the things that I’d kind of subconsciously noticed right from the outset but which was then pushed to the front of my mind when I watched the first big sequence with this character... this film is not for little kids. It’s violent, for sure, but I was kind of expecting it to be the Marvel comic book style of turning violence into a bloodless ballet, which the majority of large budget films over the last decade or so have been guilty of, primarily because of censorship issues and the fears said censorship would have on the box office. This, however, is quite gory all the way through, with loads of decapitation, head pulping, bodies torn apart, bodies exploding and, you know, all the gory stuff. It wasn’t until after I’d seen the movie, when I looked up the director to write this review, that I realised it was written and directed by the same guy who wrote and directed Dead Snow (aka Dod Sno), the excellent, tongue in cheek nazi-zombie movie which was on everyone’s radar a few years ago. This explains a lot. I certainly can’t say I prefer Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters over Dead Snow (which I loved) but now i understand why this movie was refreshingly, for the kind of movie it is, blessed with a penchant for gory bloodletting when it could so easily have bypassed that aspect of the production.

I also think there may have been script issues along the way too... which is a shame. There are some nice details and little character props put in the film and one of these is the fact that, due to Hansel’s childhood experience at the original witch’s gingerbread lair, he has to inject himself with a substance every couple of hours or die... which could have made for a suspenseful scene towards the end of the picture but, alas, all references to this facet of the character seem to fly out of the window by the end of the movie and he goes for long stretches of time without even once “pulling out his plunger” after a certain point. There’s one scene which may explain the reasons for this in terms of story logic, except if that is what was going on, it wasn’t made implicit enough, for me at least, to register. What I think, is more likely, is that the film was originally a much longer cut and the sequences explaining just what is going on in relation to this story element were lost in the edit somewhere along the line. Personally I’d like to see a longer version of this movie where stuff like this is addressed at some point in my near future. Oh well... maybe with the blu-ray.

Another script issue might be the language, which seemed a bit too modern in a lot of places... specifically when it came to the use of swear words in whatever the time period of this film is supposed to be covering. I remember reading an article when I was a kid about “controlled anachronism” in the context of fantasy fiction but, frankly, there’s a lot of reference to “those f*cking witches” throughout the film and this did seem to lessen the credibility of the central characters somewhat... I would have personally gone with a more antiquated set of swear words to run through the film but, all in all, it doesn’t really spoil the movie too much and the pacing is such that you never really have too much time to think about it before being yanked into the next set piece.

So, in essence, what we have here is a movie which is a rollicking action fest, if that’s your thing, and has some pretty cool actors playing some characters with a fair bit of heart and depth (although, it is a shorthand sketchy kind of depth, to be sure) tearing through an adult fairy tale at a fairly fast pace with a good amount of gore thrown into the mix. Some nice scoring, too, in the few places you can actually hear it properly (it does tend to get buried in the mix in places) which I’m looking forward to grabbing for a “stand alone” listen when it gets released towards the end of next month.

This is not the best action movie going, by a long shot, but it is trying something new and it is, by and large, a fairly enjoyable romp in the cinema if you’ve got nothing else to do one night. I’d recommend it to most people but don't go into it with really high expectations... this director is in better form with nazi zombies than he is with twisted fairy tales.