Apocalypse Later Film Reviews

Director: Kris McManus
Stars: Celia Muir, Darren Bransford, Lee Cheney, Kate Loustau, Brian Levine and James Privett

I had a great time watching Dead in France, though I'm not sure precisely what Brian Levine and Kris McManus really wanted it to be. Levine produced, took the lead role and co-wrote, under the pseudonym of Jack Hillgate, with director McManus, who also shot and edited the picture. A quote on the poster suggests it's 'Tarantino meets Ritchie', but that's misleading as the similarities are superficial: sure, it's a story about hitmen, which introduces its disparate characters through title cards and spins them gradually together, but the tone is utterly different. Any Tarantino reference is limited to profanity and gore, as without bad language this would feel like an old Ealing comedy, underlined by the choice to shoot in black and white. There's also a lot of quiet here that suggests a Jacques Tati influence, emphasised by the opening credits, slow pace and its setting on the Côte d'Azur. Perhaps I'm impressed because these influences aren't remotely compatible but it works.

Levine plays Charles, a quiet and polite gentleman who wouldn't even kill a wasp. Except that he's a talented and experienced hitman, who's about to retire after his hundredth job. He's methodical, partly through clearly having OCD, and he looks the part, wearing the requisite Jason Statham lack of hair. For all his skills, though, none of them appear to be social. His superb first scene with Lisa, half confident experience and half social nerves, underlines that. We can't initially tell if he's hiring a prostitute or a mail order bride, but she turns out to be a cleaner, an outspoken Essex girl in a bikini to contrast her boss's relentless calm and traditional suit. Both of them contrast madly with her boyfriend, Denny, a wiry party animal with tattoos and a mohawk but no manners who shows up to do her in every conceivable position in every conceivable location in Charles's house and grounds. Some of these scenes are a little long, but they are at least shot imaginatively.

Gradually a number of stories come together. Charles is one, as he aims to follow up his century of hits with retirement, a large yacht and a girl with which to sail off into the sunset. Lisa and Denny are another, as they begin to spin scams of increasing idiocy while they have Charles's place to themselves. Burgess, a retired hitman whose wife is Charles's final job, becomes the third. This introduces a couple of million pounds into the equation to become the MacGuffin of the piece. A further hitman, or hitwoman, whatever the technical term is for a foul mouthed crazy bitch of a professional killer, makes four. She's Clancy, and she's unlike Charles in every way, except for her job, though she's as relentlessly as wild as he's in control. To make it a half dozen subplots we're gifted with Simon and Raymond, a con man and a thief respectively. They're a pair of brothers, small time crooks looking for that one big time score, and they might just have found it.

Naturally, all these characters intersect in inventive ways that keep us guessing as to where it's all going to end up, which turns out to be both believable and appropriate, yet not precisely what we might expect. That might sound like praise for a complex plot, but this film isn't really about plot, as steady and reliable as its storyline is. While Levine and McManus certainly borrowed from early Guy Ritchie movies, they only took the framework, that sort of jigsaw puzzle approach to scripting, but either couldn't or wouldn't cast the quantity of characters needed to obfuscate it substantially enough to keep us truly on our toes. There are a few smaller parts here and there and some of the actors who play them even have key reasons to be in the movie, but for the most part, it's the key folk from those six subplots interacting with each other through plot convenience. Going just from what you see in this film, you might be forgiven for believing that the Côte d'Azur is 95% British.

I get the impression that it started with the characters, and while a vaguely complicated plot was spun around them, it ended with the characters too. It's not that they're particularly deep, though a few have their depths, it's that they're all connected by being Brits abroad, while otherwise not having much in common at all. They're a very diverse and well delineated set of principals and all the actors cast got plenty of opportunity to flesh them out. Levine keeps the deepest character for himself, with the most screen time, but his quiet man routine ensures that most of his scenes are easily stolen out from under him. He gets few great lines and his deliberately subdued portrayal is so underdone that after his introductory scenes, he quickly becomes something of a background, not a background character but a background set, against which everyone else gets to strut their respective stuff. He's the straight man who everyone else bounces off.

If Charles, who we surely care about more than anyone else, for all that he's murdered a hundred people for money, is the most underacted character, his opposite is clearly Denny. Darren Bransford is so completely obnoxious as Denny that most audience members are likely to care about him the least, but he goes hog wild with the character so that we never want to ignore him. Certainly most of the magic little moments in the movie are focused around him: Denny and the door, Denny and the pool, Denny and the cat... It would be hilarious to find that he's really a mild mannered gentleman in real life, because it feels like the advice he was given here was to shove a six pack of Duracell up his jacksie and never stop moving, never stop swearing and never stop pissing off his girlfriend in every way possible. He's like the Energizer Bunny, if the Energizer Bunny grew up in the slums of Liverpool acutely allergic to social graces.

In between is everyone else. Celia Muir, who is technically top billed, is a delight as Lisa. She was one of many actors to return from Kris McManus's previous feature, 2011's Travellers, and it's not surprising to see a director want to keep her. She manages to play Lisa as a slapper of little brain, but somehow enough charm and substance to escape her Essex girl stereotype. Lee Cheney and James Privett are solid as the small time hucksters, utterly out of their depth throughout but blind to the possibility that they won't win out in the end. Only Simon's first scene with Charles is taken to absurd heights, so overdone that it feels like a comedy sketch. Kate Loustau finishes up the major cast as Clancy, an outrageously over the top portrayal almost as obnoxious as Bransford's Denny. However, Clancy has a talent underneath her foul mouthed exterior, one she's more than willing to use. For all her many faults, she's rarely a fool, while Denny is rarely anything else.

With all these colourful characters competiting for our attention, with Charles grounding them all, it can't have been rocket science to throw them memorable moments and lines to work with. Not all of them go to Bransford, including perhaps my favourite, which is gifted to a bit part character, played by Chris Manns, in a flashback. 'You got problems, Big Chris?' he's asked on an intercom, only to answer, 'Yeah, Ian's head just exploded.' While it's not important in the grand scheme of things, this scene ably highlights the very British black comedy which underpins the entire script, as well as the capable and extremely gory effects work, which would have given any horror movie a run for its money if only it hadn't been shot in black and white. Much of it is clearly gratuitous, not that I'm complaining, and the eventual death count would have the antagonist in any slasher movie reeling in envy.

I have no idea how well Dead in France is going to do, but I'm guessing that it won't do as well as it should. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I've watched it twice, but I tried it out with a couple of lads from the next generation and they didn't even finish it. I'm sure the pace is part of it, much slower than they would expect for an action movie. The odd mixture of subtle character building and dark comedy with outrageous profanity, violence and gore may not have sat well with them either. The many easy comparisons like the quote on the poster are valid but none of them give a fair idea of what the feature as a whole really feels like. Sure, there's a lot taken from Guy Ritchie, but it's far from a Guy Ritchie film. It's just as far from a Tarantino movie, an Ealing comedy or a Jacques Tati picture, but there are just as many elements from those here. Maybe: written by Tati from a story by Ritchie, directed by Charles Crichton and produced by Eli Roth. Yeah, it's that unconventional.

Director: Brian Skiba
Stars: Laurie Love, Neal Trout, Kent Wolborn, Jose Rosete and Aaron Ginn-Forsberg

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Just in case we didn't figure it out from either the film's title or poster, Blood Moon Rising throws the word 'GRINDHOUSE' onto the screen in such large letters that we can't fail to pay attention. It really is the most important word in the film, because this would be a truly painful experience if you attempted to take any of it seriously. However if you watch it with grindhouse in mind, it's a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, watching it afresh at home, I found that it's a heck of a lot more fun than I remember it being on the big screen, when it premiered at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival back in 2009. That may be partly because I know how outrageous it is now and partly because I know even more people on the screen than I did last time through. I might just have to sit down and watch the director's cut in a couple of weeks time at the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival. Maybe then I'll be able to locate the last few elusive zombie friends in the film.

If the reminder that this is grindhouse inspired helps us deal with the outrageous plot, which may well include more grindhouse genre elements than any other modern homage, it helps to prepare us for the faux 35mm look too. Brian Skiba, who wrote, edited, produced and directed, clearly had the feel of the grindhouses themselves in mind as much as the feel of the films that they showed. If he could have sprayed theatre seats with puke and urine and deposited a bunch of bums at the entrance to sleep off their drunks, you just know he'd have done it. Beyond some well done aging effects that artifact the screen, he goes as far as skipping a few frames here and there, removing some lines entirely so that lips move silently, overdubbing others ever so slightly out of sync, even including a missing reel so that we can only wonder what might have got left out of such a crazily busy picture. In reality, it never got shot, of course.

The opening scenes before the title are the most believable from an aging perspective. If I didn't recognise local actors like Davina Joy, I could have bought it as an early seventies movie I merely hadn't seen until now. It's set outdoors at a lively party, with all the elements you might expect: cars, drugs, tie dyed shirts, live surf music, enthusiastic tongue swapping. And fast zombies. Joy does pick the right moment to find somewhere to pee, but she doesn't make it out. Only a trio of characters make it out and only one of them alive: Sadie, our heroine, played by Laurie Love. One of the others was a vampire to begin with and the other becomes one by the time it's over. This is that sort of film. You know, the sort that starts out with zombies, only for us to realise that most of them are vampires and werewolves. It's the sort where you start to wonder what you've seen in a grindhouse movie that isn't in here somewhere too and can't quite come up with anything.

So here I need to explain how that's all possible. A few generations back, Tristran was married to Lucy, but he cheated on her with Rachel. Unfortunately for him, while Rachel was the daughter of the preacher, Lucy was the daughter of the Devil himself and she really isn't too happy when she finds out what's been going on behind her back. So she ties them up and curses them as she kills them. Tristan will live on as a vampire and Rachel as a werewolf. The locals of the town of Despair take down Lucy and bury her in the forest, but she'll return if the blood of a family member drips on the earth, she'll reopen the gate to Hell through a lost book that's written in blood and bound in human flesh and she can be stopped only by the willing sacrifice of a virgin. Now, Lucy and Sadie are both played by Laurie Love and Sadie teams up with a comic book nerd and soda jerk called Darrell, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that will all work out.

If this story sounds a little cramped, trust me when I emphasise that it is. It's often tough to figure out which faction is which and who's really on whose side. Are the vampire bikers with the Devil's daughter or her great-great-granddaughter double? What about the werewolves? Presumably the zombies don't care. The knights are with Lucy. Yes, we have knights. We have aliens as well. I did mention that there's everything but the supernatural kitchen sink in this picture, right? And I may have missed that during a disbelieving blink. I did catch the army of demonic orcs, the dude in a skeleton mask and metal battle armour, and the swordfighting, Schwinn riding Mexican granddad. I caught Ron Jeremy too and he caught a particularly bloody facial from an exploding head that I don't even dare to riff on; you can make up your own jokes there. There's even a severed hand like Thing that scurries about and steals scenes to down home banjo pickin' accompaniment.

Darrell, the virgin of the story, puts down his comic books when this apocalypse arrives to proudly explain to Sadie that, 'I've been waiting for this all my life!' Now, I want to know what sort of comic books he's been reading to set himself up for this sort of manic monster mash. This one even has a meta level where the various characters in this film locate the town of Despair, only to discover that it's now Despair Studios, authentic western film set, where a crew is shooting a zombie flick only a hop, skip and jump ahead of the real zombie invasion. The script is less a story and more a PCP laced smörgåsbord of influences and it's that constant insanity immersion that makes it such a trip. Certainly there are so many characters to keep an eye on that it's truly impossible to keep up with all of them and we have to give up and let it wash over us like a theme park ride through Grindhouseland. The film works so much better that way when we stop trying to fathom it.

Laurie Love is most obvious by far because she plays both the leading ladies. She knew the movie well, having debuted with the 2007 short from which this was expanded. She only played one role there but, with Brian Skiba, she also wrote, produced and directed the film. In this feature length expansion, she also wrote and produced, alongside others, and even added wardrobe supervision to her list of roles. She must have really liked the idea. She clearly had a lot of fun with her double role, Sadie being a hippie chick next door who progresses from damsel in distress to take charge heroine and Lucy being a dominant demonic succubus. Her filmography looks so similar to Skiba's that it's no surprise to find that they married in 2012. Her latest picture is Crushed Velvet, which is about to receive its world premiere at the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival in mid-June. It isn't just another Skiba movie, it brings back many of the cast members from Blood Moon Rising too.

While Neal Trout clearly did precisely what was asked of him as Darrell, a nerdy Robin to back up Sadie's Batman, I found his acting overdone even for this deliberately overdone homage. I enjoyed Kent Welborn more as Sam, the biker with outstanding mutton chops who made out with Sadie's friend Becky at the party before being turned into a vampire and getting a new lease on undeath in the process. Trout knows how to pose just right for the camera but Welborn does it even better. The rest of the cast are like a who's who of local Arizona actors. Aaron Ginn-Forsberg gets a long flashback scene as Tristan, the cursed vampire. He provides some needed grounding early on but fades away as the film progresses. By comparison, Rick Dyer is acutely painful in his early scenes as Ruddy, the old Mexican, but he becomes rather endearing. Jose Rosete, the most prolific actor in Arizona, is good fun as Sanchez, wandering around with a mini-cleaver stuck in his forehead.

Mostly though, this belongs to the creators of this sprawling mess of grindhouse influences, Skiba and Love. Perhaps the cheesiest line in the film, 'You'll never get away with this!' serves to sum up their approach. The script resembles one of the many exploding heads we're gifted with, because it feels like a bunch of outrageous ideas were splattered onto a page and then blood was poured on in liberal quantities until any connections between those ideas were lost in the grue. And you know what? That's its charm. Try to analyse this and you'll hurt your brain, but sit back and let it wash over you like a deluge and you might just have a blast. There are great gore effects, good make up work, bad greenscreen and terrible CGI, but it's surely all deliberate. Love calls it 'The Evil Dead meets Dazed and Confused' and that sounds fair. If you like grindhouse, this will be a lot of fun even without a beer but it'll be even better at a drive in with a six pack and a pizza.

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Coleman, Jessica Bishop and Amy Serafin

After last month's Travis Mills review, a cute, bouncy and infectious 48 hour film challenge piece called Itty Bitty Bang Bang, here's one that reflects the darker, more experimental side of Running Wild Films. Therapist has garnered quite a bit of attention for its edgy final scene and clearly there are some deep questions being raised, but I'm not sure if they're really asked or answered. Mills is clearly drawn to film noir ambiguity, where he sets the stage for a story and then lets us figure out exactly what he meant by it. The most enjoyable Mills movies for me are the ones where we can't help but continue the story on in our minds after the credits roll, such as The Ruffians, Night Train to Phoenix or the online version of The Memory Ride. Sometimes though, as with The French Spy or this film, he goes a little further and abstracts the story so far that we don't have enough building blocks to go on and we have trouble phrasing our questions, let alone finding answers.

Therapist opens roughly, with a highly voyeuristic scene of a young couple in a small space more like a corridor than a room. They kiss, but don't progress any further, even though he's apparently quit smoking to appease her. She tells him that this will be the last time that she sleeps with him, as her female therapist of six years has suggested. He's stunned, not just because he's no longer going to get any but because he didn't even know she was in therapy. So he leaves, rather than allow her to have that control over him. This scene is interesting, especially when reading up on the odd way Mills set it up. The two actors, Michael Coleman and Jessica Bishop, were given brief ideas of the scene and told to answer their own questions about it. Mills gave them films to watch as prep work. He then treated the shoot as therapy, doing a take, discussing how it went, then repeating until they got what he wanted. 'I want it to look ugly,' he said and it does.

When the title arrives five and a half minutes in, we realise the film doesn't end with its opening scene. Now we're outside, in what appears to be a different picture entirely. Gone is the hiss, the background noise and the handheld camera that's so up close and personal that we see nothing but two heads, a wall and the invisible cloud hanging over them. Smoothness replaces roughness in a beautifully shot scene that has our frustrated male lead track down the therapist who stopped his fun. The sound problems are gone, replaced by Schubert on the soundtrack. Instead of grainy redness, we get impressive camerawork, neat editing and lots of character. He sticks to his choice to stop smoking, though it's clearly tough work, but the draw of following this therapist wins out. She drives to FilmBar, which means I like her, but this was clearly shot some time ago as the sign isn't up. Inside, the camera emphasises him as small and weak but her as strong and dominant.

With a deliberately rough first act and a deliberately smooth second act, I was certainly engaged to discover where Mills was taking his characters and viewers in the final act. Unfortunately I still haven't figured it out and I'm not sure I ever will. Just like The French Spy, this is more of a puzzle for us to attempt to fathom than a traditional plot based picture, so the concept of spoilers doesn't really apply. Certainly the thumbnail image which greets anyone visiting the film's Vimeo page to watch is far more of a spoiler than anything I could provide here, given that it shows the therapist and the large strap on dildo she's wearing looking down at a motel room bed on which our worried looking young man sits. I kept waiting for a twist, but no twist came and there's very little detail to ground us. All I can be sure of is that the linear story that unfolds is clearly not sufficient to tell us what's actually going on. When I tried to figure this out, I realised that I had nothing to go on.

I'm not even sure which characters are therapists and which patients. The two halves of the short share only one character: our male lead. Could he really be sleeping with both a therapist and her patient? Are he and his girlfriend both seeing the same therapist? Or is he really the therapist all along, and we're merely seeing him interact with two of his patients? I really have no clue. I don't really buy the latter as a viable reading but it still seems more likely than the story as presented. Maybe not all this is real. Maybe it's real up to the moment he watches the therapist in the mirror of his car and the rest all unfolds in his mind. Maybe that moment is when she walks up to him in FilmBar. Who knows? It's fair to explore the subconscious in a movie about therapy, but what does that last scene tell us? Perhaps it's a metaphor; when his girlfriend stops having sex with him, he feels that her therapist is violating him. Maybe he's the Dude possessed by Walter. I have no idea.

Therapist is available to view for free on Vimeo and YouTube.

Director: Paul C Hemmes
Stars: Christie Collins, Seth Gandrud, Juan Marquez, Michelle Pentecost, Joaquin 'Jack' Martelli, Keith R Wilson, David Galaviz, Jimmy Flowers, Damon Foster and Matthew Ellingsen

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Dead Enders is hamstrung from moment one. with errors in the opening quote and on the back cover of the DVD, the front of which hawks the soundtrack over the film itself. The resolution isn't particularly strong either, though that may be the R Squared disc rather than the film itself, given that the trailers look as bad and I've seen and loved one of those features. Fortunately what we actually see is a lot better, packed full of enticing imagery that invites speculation as to how it will all connect: a workshop full of torture devices, a shackled man kissing a scorpion, a woman taking off her wig in front of a boarded up door. The man is confined underground, in some sort of hidden dungeon, surrounded by mud, stone and fire, not that he notices any of that; he's clearly there in body only. 'You could have kissed me like that when you had the chance,' the woman suggests; he only reacts when she smothers him to death with a plastic bag. Upstairs, she rocks a cradle.

This footage that precedes the opening credits is a fair pointer to the film as a whole. The budget is clearly somewhere between low and nonexistent, the setups aren't entirely believable and the sound could easily be better. However the visuals are interesting and continually inventive, so we keep paying attention, if only to see what writer/director Paul C Hemmes will conjure up next. This sort of approach is not going to be for everyone and it doesn't surprise me that the two reviews at IMDb are precise opposites: out of ten, these reviewers gave it a one and a ten respectively. I can easily see people giving up during the second scene, as our leading lady, back in her blonde wig, comes on to a couple of guys in a bar. Jack thinks she's hot, while Robert thinks she's creepy and she quickly turns out to be both, as she chloroforms them and whisks Robert back to her lair. The logic here is stretched, to say the least, but it does set up the off kilter oddness well.

And that's where this movie goes with a vengeance. Robert wakes up in a barred wooden cage inside her dungeon, gagged and manacled, his fellow prisoner a baby clown doll. His captor, now in a red wig, kinky latex and huge boots, acts more like his host than his tormentor, apparently less interested in the torture porn we half expect and more interested in introducing him to Max, a mummified corpse in a frilled violet shirt. 'I don't understand,' he tells her, which is something of an understatement, but she obviously works with her own laws of logic. 'You're one of us now,' she explains to him, not asking his name but dubbing him Larry because she apparently thinks he looks like one. Talk about disconcerting! Yet the only actual violence he faces is when she fondles a saw that's hanging from the ceiling and then licks the blood off her hand. It must be difficult to experience. At least pain is something palpable, but Robert has no clue what this is.

Thus far, we have a cute but creepy chick who seems to inhabit a world of her own, a befuddled prisoner who remains surprisingly calm and controlled, a few varied but usually silent co-stars and a jumbo sized basket of freaky weirdness. It's odd to find a microbudget movie which appears to be style over substance, but that's the tone that this quickly establishes and it builds on it as the film runs on. The camera dances in and out of Robert's cage and, because it can't move too much inside it, rotates instead to mirror his ample confusion. The costumes are cool, the sets are cool, the props are cool. The freakiness factor is high and continues to ratchet upwards. The editing varies in quality, but always aids the bizarre feel. The story is clearly wondering if it should show up at any point and the acting talent is waiting for it to arrive. We're not sure exactly what we're watching at this point, to the degree that we're can't even tell if it's dream or nightmare.

Christie Collins is note perfect as Sydney, a chick with more than a few screws loose. While the opening credits list a whole slew of actors, many of whom I know, most of them have little to do. This film belongs to Collins, absolutely, and it's hard to imagine anyone stealing it away from her. She's half Siouxsie Sioux and half Bonnie Tyler, which is something of an enticing combination, especially as her look changes as often as the wind (or her personality). As if she's truly dream rather than flesh, she doesn't even appear to have a consistent age, looking older in some scenes than others. Her character is a great big question mark, as she's quite clearly off her rocker but somehow able to approach rationality consistently enough to apparently hold down a day job, returning home each night to inhabit this realm of her broken mind. At least that's the impression that we're given. Who knows if that's real or just another manifestation of her craziness?

The question here is really about how much substance is going to turn up and we're never quite sure. The freakiness builds well for twenty minutes, but then drags for ten as Sydney makes way for Robert. Perhaps that's entirely appropriate, as we have no idea how long he's been imprisoned or whether his sanity remains in place throughout the experience. It's apparently long enough for him to start hallucinating but short enough for him to not need bathroom breaks. Generally, he's as rational as she's completely batshit insane, though I'm not sure if his trying to reason with this crazy woman really suggests sanity. Robert's grounding provides a strong reflection of Sydney's delusions, but it inevitably makes Seth Gandrud less interesting to us than Christie Collins. After that creepy build, his attempts to escape end up dragging because he's the only character in the scenes. They spark up only when Sydney returns to the screen with a sledgehammer.

For every point Dead Enders loses for its lack of coherent plot progression, infuriatingly slow pace and frequent absence of conventional elements like dialogue and sense of time and place, it gains one back for its dreamlike insanity. Sydney doesn't keep prisoners to torture, torment or ransom; she keeps them out of bizarre romantic notions. Dead Enders are apparently people who believe that they can be together in eternity. 'That's love,' she says. 'Can you imagine it?' Perhaps if you have multiple personalities who come together only to obsess over Romeo and Juliet or you hang out with gothic Japanese schoolgirls with romantic suicide fetishes, you might be able to imagine it, but I think most of us would have problems. The greatest achievement of Collins and Hemmes here is to make us almost get there. They submerge us in their world, prisoners like Robert, so all we know is one room, one woman and her craziness. We almost contract Stockholm Syndrome.

I really can't praise Dead Enders on many traditional fronts: it's a slow, confusing and constrictive experience. It's a gimme that many people will hate it and most of them won't get too far into it. However, those who persevere will end up experiencing something utterly different from anything they're likely to have seen before. It's less of a story based picture and more of a tone poem that achieves on feel rather than plot. The hero isn't remotely like a traditional hero; he spends almost the entire film as a failure, not only as a prisoner but a victim of his own compassion, consistently failing to do what he needs to in order to survive. The villain is even less like a traditional villain, a lunatic who elicits more sympathy from us than should ever have been possible. It's rather telling that we feel more for the villain than the hero; even her necrophilia scene turns out to be romantic and she does at least appear to have a purpose, however twisted.

This is such a visual film that, even while watching the first time, I wondered how it would all play out without side. It wouldn't seem to be a hardship to lose the plot, as there's so little of it, but all the quirky weirdness should remain intact: the odd camera angles, the frequent costume changes, the freaky interplay between characters. So I tried it out and found that the experience was just as hallucinatory. With very little in the way of sex and violence to raise parental concern, it ought to work as the silent backing to a Hallowe'en party. Christie Collins, who owns the film and is rarely off screen, does well with her dialogue, but she submerges herself so far into her character that she speaks to us through visuals alone. Add in the bare chested Seth Gandrud in a cage and the assorted weirdness that unfolds around them and I'd expect eyeballs to find themselves drawn to her and her creepy tone poem. It may not be what Hemmes aimed for, but it's what he achieved.

Director: David Mun
Stars: Rachel Marie Lewis, Christian Oliver, Jordan Rhodes and Marietta March

I've never been to Dances with Films, a highly regarded indie film festival in Hollywood now in its 16th year, but this year's line up is enough to add it to my list for 2014. No less than three of my favourite features from this year's Phoenix Film Festival were selected for that festival too (Down and Dangerous, Favor and Waking), along with an excellent and award winning local short film, Parallax. Purely by coincidence, I was also recently sent House of Good and Evil for review, which is screening at Dances with Films next Sunday, meaning that I can personally recommend five selections with no commonality between them beyond all being quality indie pictures. I can't ignore the suggestion that if the five I know about are great films, what about the other hundred or so that I don't know about yet? With a quick note that this festival runs at the historic Chinese Theatres in Hollywood, I'm starting to sound like a advert for something I've not yet attended.

While it's a current film, working the festival circuit before an October 2013 release date, House of Good and Evil is a throwback to the psychological horror thrillers of the seventies. The title is the first hint in that direction, as every other movie back then seemed to centre around an ominous house, with the neo-gothic suggestion that the house is a character in itself. The next hint is the pace, which is a slow but sure burn, concentrating on character development over cheap shocks. There's also the feeling that Chris and Maggie Conley, who buy the house of the title sight unseen after a lot of phone calls, have no idea what they're getting into. They choose to move out to the country, because their marriage is deteriorating after a miscarriage and the big city is becoming claustrophobic, but they have a naive innocence that suggests that they believe a change in setting is all they need. As you can imagine, their problems run deeper than that.

We can see from the opening scenes what they're running away from. These are beautifully shot and very deliberately constructed, not showing us much but ensuring that what we do see speaks volumes. We watch the Conleys in silhouette in their apartment, voyeuristically from outside in the street. Their argument escalates and ends violently. Then we see the worried couple stuck in traffic and realise that Maggie is losing her baby right there in the car. The guilt that hangs above the scene as she screams out her loss is palpable, courtesy of carefully sparse writing from Blu de Golyer and simple, thoughtful composition of frame and camera movement from cinematographer Jared Noe. The constriction felt in the city is very deliberate and it's countered well as the opening credits end and we follow the Conleys almost thirty miles out into the wide open countryside to begin the healing process in their new house. It feels like a breath of fresh air.

Of course, if it was that simple, we wouldn't have a movie, and it's far from that simple. What we see really deserves two viewings. The first allows us to experience the movie as it's presented to us, with the house slowly morphing from a beacon of hope into just another prison, because the problems Maggie and Chris have are rooted in their relationship and a change of scenery doesn't change that. De Golyer's script builds by carefully peeling away layers of civility and appearance to show the fundamental incompatibilities between them and the hidden frustrations that those incompatibilities generate. After ratcheting up the suspense and tension far enough, we arrive at a full understanding of what's really going on, realising in the process that a host of what appear to be minor goofs or plot conveniences are really cues to help us get there. Watching afresh, the cues are far more obvious and we wonder why we didn't understand them to begin with.

Much of the credit here deserves to go to de Golyer, who is not only a scriptwriter but apparently an experienced script doctor in Hollywood, having fixed more scripts by others than he's produced of his own. This would appear to be a project dear to his heart, having financed it with his wife. It was in motion as far back as 2008 when he wrote a short film called The House to use to pitch to potential financers. The cinematography on that short was by David Mun, who was involved with this production so deeply that he took the director's chair after Clint Howard left it. Another major name had also been attached for years, but had to drop out just before production due to illness. That's Tippi Hedren, who presumably would have played the role of Mrs Anderson, the elderly lady who rents the other half of the Conley's new house. Her role was taken instead by Marietta Marich, who has made two Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels and one to Children of the Corn.

The other name that screams out for praise is that of Rachel Marie Lewis, who plays the lead role of Maggie Conley. If the film off screen belongs to de Golyer, on screen it belongs to her. She's a constant presence and the story clearly revolves around her and the way she copes with the loss of her child and her deteriorating relationship with her husband. De Golyer has raised the 'hunger in her eyes' that 'studios dream of finding' in interviews and I can totally see it. Going far deeper than just playing another woman with problems, she really gets over to us that Maggie is broken fundamentally but has become practiced in the art of hiding it. That's a fine distinction but a very important one; it underlines why Lewis gives a truly great performance rather than merely a good one. Late in the film, Maggie tells Chris that the wall that separates the two halves of their house should remain up. 'Some things are better kept apart,' she says and that thought resonates.

Lewis is American and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but has a European feel to her. She reminded me very much of Isabelle Adjani, both in looks and the way she throws herself so substantially into a dark role. The biggest mistake that any potential viewer can make is to expect the sort of horror movie that adds a new shock every fifteen minutes. This is a nuanced piece, reminding of times when stories began with characters and built around settings. It's initially reminiscent of American psychological thrillers of the seventies, from an old school soundtrack through a prominent house to the character of Mrs Anderson, the sort of role that golden age stars often took then, late on in their careers. In turn, those films had their roots in the gothic romances of the thirties and forties, when those stars started out. Lewis's dedicated performance adds a European feel, adding layers to an already layered script and suggesting a depth that Hollywood rarely hinted at.

Lewis is so strong here that I wonder how House of Good and Evil would have fared had she not been cast, but it has quality written all over it. Its superlative script benefits from good direction, gently leading camerawork and a highly appropriate score. The house, really a boarding school built in 1914, looks just right. The supporting cast are solid, especially Marich, who surely would be far better known had she come to the screen earlier in life. She feels like one of those old stars, but surprisingly she didn't make a movie until 1987, even though she was highly experienced in the business that is show: as far back as the fifties, she'd performed on stage, hosted a chat show on television and sung with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra. Rob Neukirch and Jordan Rhodes are able in support too, but they get less to do, the growing connection between Maggie and Mrs Anderson ensuring that the latter gets most of our attention that doesn't go to the former.

That leaves Christian Oliver, who plays Chris. He's solid too, as you might expect from an actor of his experience, having moved on from Saved by the Bell: The New Class into an interesting set of American movies and German TV shows. He's been doing big movies lately, like Valkyrie, Speed Racer and the 2011 version of The Three Musketeers, but I know him from lower budget fare such as the intriguing title role he played in Subject Two. The catch is that this film so quintessentially revolves around his screen wife, he becomes something of a prop for her to work off. That's not to say that Chris isn't well written, as in any other film he'd be a deep character, but he doesn't have anywhere near the opportunities that Lewis has as Maggie. In fact, looking back after a couple of viewings, it's surprising to find that this film was written by a man, as it delves deeply into issues that are by definition oriented around women: control, domestic abuse and the loss of a child.

I always try to highlight both the good and the bad in movies I review and it's always a joy when I find that there's very little bad to say. House of Good and Evil is an excellent film enhanced by an outstanding lead performance by Rachel Marie Lewis and it has very few flaws. The most obvious is the lighting, which gets a little too dark on occasion, but like another indie gem, Absentia, the depth of the material saves it. The tunnel scenes in Absentia became appropriately otherworldly because the filmmakers didn't have the budget for cameras that would see past the entrances. Similarly, scenes here that appear to have been shot in natural light and which get darker as the movie runs on, perhaps due to the budget or just the time of day, may serve to unintentionally mirror the changes in tone, thus turning a flaw into a boon. Depth is never a bad thing and sometimes it can feed itself, adding nuances that were never even intended by the filmmakers.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on what Blu de Golyer does next. With work on over forty scripts behind him, I'm pretty sure he has more than one personal piece in him and I'm eager to see what the next one will be. I'm interested in what David Mun will do next too. He has a huge amount of experience behind the camera, both in film and on television, but this was his first picture both as an editor and a director. His next directorial effort is Berlin Express, currently in preproduction. Of all the names involved in this film though, I'm keen to follow up on the work of Rachel Marie Lewis. She made two features released in 2012, Transatlantic Coffee and Lie with Me, both of which look like great opportunities for her to explore her characters with as much depth as she did here. She clearly has a great future ahead of her and I can only hope that she isn't distracted from this sort of quality picture by being snapped up for big budget fluff. Only time will tell.

Director: Armen Evrensel
Stars: Robin Dunne, Billy Boyd, Kristin Kreuk, George Takei and Amanda Tapping

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

More than ever before, this is sci-fi television turned into a comedy feature film. You might think immediately of Galaxy Quest, but that mostly spoofed one show and was cast chiefly with movie actors. As befits its title, Space Milkshake spoofs so many sci-fi shows that you'll count them and it's cast directly from some of them. Of a cast of seven, three of whom only provide voices, we're given two lead actors from Sanctuary and one from each of Smallville, Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural. Amanda Tapping turns out to be most of these on her own, as she was Maj Samantha Carter in both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, Dr Helen Magnus on Sanctuary (both the web series and the TV show), and is now recurring on Supernatural as Naomi. Her Sanctuary co-star is Robin Dunne, who played Dr Will Zimmerman; Smallville is represented by Kristin Kreuk, who played Lana Lang; and George Takei's voice is here from Star Trek.

There's also Billy Boyd from The Lord of the Rings movies, which breaks the whole alliterative S motif, but he's clearly trying to be Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead, just as a Scotsman, so perhaps it all works out in the end. He's Anton Balvenie, the captain of the Regina, not a galaxy exploring spaceship but an Orbital Sanitation Station, number 8518. His crew aren't astronauts, they're garbage collectors because, in the 22nd century, space debris is a serious problem, as is clear from the ring of rubbish we see around the planet Earth. One collision is enough to prompt space travel to be halted for months, so clearly it's important to make sure that doesn't happen. Tasked with keeping the spacelanes clear, busy and moving are crews like the Regina's, who are entry level techs, one of them seeing orbit for the first time. As you can easily imagine, this is a dysfunctional crew in a barely functional station with an unorthodox set of priorities.

What sparks the plot is a cargo shuttle which takes off from the Quantum Transportation Research Station in Antartica, disappears, reappears and collides with a orbiting screw. Balvenie plays it by the book and refuses to clear the way, but leaps at the chance to salvage the vessel afterwards, even against direct orders. They pick up a power source from the rubble, which you won't be too surprised causes the Regina to travel in ways it doesn't expect. Next thing they know, they're out of touch with everything and the orbiting trash that they know so well has vanished. Now the crew of four, along with a computer that they haven't even fixed yet, need to figure out where they are and how they can get home. Given that it's often a stretch for them to even talk to each other, it's hardly going to be an easy ride. The bizarre events that start to unfold under their very noses only serve to render that outcome even more unlikely.

And so, as we wait to see how the story will pan out, we watch the characters. The first obvious comparison is Red Dwarf, a British show built on characters and wild sci-fi shenanigans. This film and that TV show have much in common: both of them follow a tiny crew of menial workers in a huge spacecraft who have been cut off from the rest of humanity and may well be all that's left. Boyd, looking utterly unlike Pippin from The Lord of the Rings, is nominally in charge and he has the same sort of officious, by the book nature as Rimmer in Red Dwarf, but his idea of leadership is sticking to a schedule. Everything happens when it's scheduled: from breakfast to bedtime and from callisthenics to Scrabble. He's also perpetually in the middle of whatever is going on, because he finds it difficult to preserve any form of relationship, whether official or personal, as proved by the broken one he has with his second in command, Valentina, played by Amanda Tapping.

Valentina would appear to have precisely nothing in common with Balvenie except the Regina and she's happily trying to leave both. Fortunately she doesn't, because she's the key to getting back home again, through the plot convenience that she used to work at the Quantum Transportation Research Station under Prof Gary Pinback, who theorised about interdimensional travel to parallel realities. As luck would have it, Gary is on board too, having been thrust into a transdimensional rift and brought on board in the form of a rubber duck that collides with the Regina after it shifts. Here's where the Douglas Adams influences come in. Like the B Ark's captain in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Valentina spends a lot of time in the bath. That show explained that 'you're never alone with a rubber duck'; this film applies that to a form of Alien, right down to the moves of Dr Pinback's face hugger phase, before he becomes Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors.

Here to battle Gary is Tilda, initially the blasé operations officer who doesn't speak much but soon the parallel universe robot version trying to save infinite universes from being destroyed. She still doesn't speak much, at least initially, but she looks like Kristin Kreuk, so it's hardly surprising that the Everyman of the bunch, Jimmy Anderson, falls for her anyway. He's the new guy, a tech who's on board with faked paperwork to fix Wendi, the ship's computer, another Red Dwarf parallel, as it changes sex but not name partway through. 'It's not as exciting as I thought it'd be,' says Jimmy at one point, talking about life on an orbital station, but needless to say he's soon proved wrong. Robin Dunne has a lot of fun as Jimmy, playing him as loosely as Kreuk is precise as Tilda. There's another Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy nod when the two find a way to communicate with each other, through a Scrabble board, an appropriate parallel to their situation in many ways.

Surprisingly, given all the British sci-fi references during the build, Space Milkshake is a Canadian film, shot in Saskatchewan, whose capital city gave its name to the story's setting, the Regina. Its biggest successes are in channelling those diverse British influences into something new, which is a tough balancing act to keep and one that isn't consistently successful. Almost everything here is derivative, but for maybe two thirds of the film it's kept interesting with fresh characters and neat, quirky situations. The brokedown machinery, so reminiscent of Ron Goulart novels but more likely sourced from Douglas Adams, provides nice touches throughout too, like the food outlet that only dishes out sandwiches, a close cousin to the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation's Nutrimatic drinks dispenser. I loved the door to the control room which looks like it ought to retract but never does, thus serving mostly to trip up Jimmy on a regular basis, a recurring gag that grounds him for us.

Unfortunately, while the final act is just as derivative, it's far more clichéd. Instead of enjoying the homages and acknowledging their sources with a smile, the later scenes frequently contain less targeted references and more generic sci-fi moments that are unworthy of inclusion. I didn't find myself cringing for the first hour, however recognisable much of the material was, but that wasn't a rare reaction later on in the film, where Armen Evrensel, who wrote and directed, may well have just run out of influences to nod at. Just like the film as a whole, each of the characters build well but once they reach a certain point, they stagnate into cliché and all of them deserved more. Tilda should have been more than a Galaxina clone. Valentina should have had a better crisis of choice. Anton shouldn't have been sidelined. Jimmy, especially, deserved much more of a focus given that Robin Dunne is technically top billed and he's who we identify with.

In fact, the crew take a backseat once Gary the tentacled rubber duck shows up, not because he's a classic screen villain but because George Takei's voicework utterly steals the show. I remember Takei well from the original series of Star Trek and even more from the movies, but he was merely a good part of a good ensemble cast. Since his reinvention in the internet age, he's become a real star, thus far resisting becoming a caricature of himself like William Shatner. He just has fun here, as he apparently does in everything he puts his name to. Since his last Star Trek feature in 1991, I've enjoyed him having a blast in Bug Buster and two Oblivion movies and I totally want to watch him play the sensei being rescued by the title characters in Ninja Cheerleaders. Unfortunately, he doesn't always pick the best movies to have fun in. This one is certainly better than Bug Buster, but it needed to raise its game to match his contribution and unfortunately it fell apart instead.

Director: J C Schroder
Stars: Charity Farrell, Lili Reinhart, Warren Bryson and David Wetzel

This week, I've often felt like I was at the Dances with Films festival in Hollywood, even though I haven't left Phoenix once. Three features which I thoroughly enjoyed at this year's Phoenix Film Festival (and said so here in reviews) screened there, along with a local short that showed here last year. Coincidentally, I reviewed a fourth film, House of Good and Evil, as a submission, within the week before it closes Dances with Films. Now, uncoincidentally, here's a fifth feature, through the magic of connections. It's a good feeling to know that filmmakers appreciate my wriiting and let other filmmakers know at festivals that they might submit their work to me too. Thanks, Paul! Of course, now I'll find whether those other filmmakers are as happy with what I have to say. Not all films are made equal, after all. The good news is that Forever's End is a good one too, worthy of checking it out as it premieres tonight at Dances with Films, or whenever you get a chance.

Like House of Good and Evil, it's a thought provoking ride through the psyche of the lead female character, framed as a psychological thriller that's so sparsely cast that we can't help but focus on the little details of the few characters we see. If that film's cast list was condensed down to a bare minimum, this one goes far beyond it. Only four actors grace the screen in just over an hour and a half and one of those has almost nothing to do. As you might imagine, however good the script, its success lies primarily in the hands of its leading lady, Charity Farrell. If she wasn't up to the task, this picture would be in dire straits. Fortunately, she does a capable, sympathetic job that keeps us engaged throughout, even if she doesn't bring that extra something to the mix that Rachel Marie Lewis did in House of Good and Evil. It's a good job because for quite a while, she is the only person we see. The film begins, we watch her establish the grounding for the story and that's it.

It begins with a science fiction sort of feel. A woman staggers, alternately in a dark cityscape and a bright pastoral setting. She appears to have been stabbed in the side and she's losing blood. She also has a gun, though we don't know if those two facts are connected. The camera staggers with her a little, perhaps in sympathy because there's nobody else around. 'Sometimes I wonder where the time went,' she narrates. All she ever wanted was to be left alone, in a world without a structure, without any rules. Now she has her wish, because six years ago the world ended. She hasn't seen anyone since. Beyond missing a lot of things, she looks remarkably good. If I take a couple of days off to write, I'll probably forget to shower, but six years after the apocalypse and Sarah is still taking care of herself and her farm, dusting and cleaning and washing the floor. She keeps busy to stay sane, she tells us. Being alone means nobody to talk to, after all.

Clearly this isn't going to be a busy film. There's a great deal of quiet here, highlighting that the real story is going on as much between the dialogue as in it, if you can call Sarah bitching at her flaky generator dialogue. For the most part, she doesn't make a lot of noise. Unless she's playing the piano, we hear the sounds of nature and her somewhat soothing narration. The only voice we hear other than hers is one in her dreams, a man reciting to her, 'Don't. Look. Away.' I rather liked this approach. It's certainly refreshing in 2013 to see a post-apocalyptic movie that utterly avoids showing us an apocalypse. We get no nuclear explosions, no zombies, no collapse of civilisation, just Sarah White escaping to the countryside with knife wounds in her side. What surprised me more was the rather active editing. For a film with so much room, the editor clearly didn't intend us to sit back and relax, so he kept the cuts coming, even in the most wide open scenes.

Perhaps this is to remind us that this is a thriller rather than a deep relaxation course. Certainly, Sarah jumps when a storm builds and her front door starts banging. You'd think that six years of utter solitude as the last woman on Earth would be enough to get past fearing a home invasion, but when she investigates, she finds a young lady about to collapse outside her door: her sister, Lily. Now, this appears to be the key moment. For Sarah, those six years alone are over and she can begin to share her life again with someone close to her. For us, we wonder the odds of some catastrophic event causing the extinction of our entire race, except for two people, who turn out to be sisters. Quite obviously something is going on, and the real key moment was five minutes earlier, as Sarah kicked her generator back into action, slipped on the floor and cracked her head. That may not be the beginning of the film, but it's the real beginning of its story.

There are a few hints here about what we might be looking at, but writer/director J C Schroder is happy to keep us guessing for a long while. Any film that begins with the end of the world has to involve survival as a key element. Casting not one but two leading ladies to populate this world suggests another angle to survival, especially as these two sisters appear to have matching knife wounds. 'It's not over,' Lily tells Sarah. 'It's never over.' By this time, we're only thirteen minutes into the story, which continues to throw out questions but resists any attempt to answer them as yet, so we can be sure it isn't over. How can only two sisters survive an apocalypse? Why did Lily take six years to come home? What's with the matching scars? Do mentions of Daddy, who was always right and prompts reactions in nightmares, hint at abuse? What importance does Sarah's necklace hold? That's what seems to conjure up the most emotion.

While these questions are initially mostly rational ones, they soon start to slip. Sarah knocks down a set of wind chimes outside because they're annoying her, only for them to promptly reappear in her front room hanging from a chandelier. One night, Lily tells Sarah not to go outside, and doing so prompts her to shoot an intruder dead at her front door. The end of the world is getting really busy all of a sudden. All these moments are far too deliberate to be cinematic goofs on the part of the filmmakers, so they have to carry meaning. This is a psychological thriller, not a supernatural horror story, so it's not too difficult to get onto the right lines. The bad news is that it's slower and less suspenseful than House of Good and Evil; the good news is that it's clear earlier that we should figure out what's really going on so we're more directly caught up in the puzzle of the script, even before a third character knocks on the farmhouse door to explain that the world is still there.

To be brutally honest, if I hadn't watched this very soon after House of Good and Evil, I'd probably have been more impressed. That's not to say that I didn't like it a lot, as I did and I'd recommend it highly, but the two films carry a lot of similarities and this one comes off second best. Even as we're actively engaged in fitting intriguing pieces together into a big picture that's strong the first time through but adds nuances on further viewings, some scenes drag and don't seem to fit. The story is a worthy and subtle one, but during the second act it's often elusive and rather passive. On the other hand, the editing is far too lively, enough to make us very aware of it, which isn't a good thing unless it's trying to tell us something, which it doesn't appear to do. Also, while it's far from a handheld movie that won't cause anyone to get motion sickness, the camera is a floating thing that moves a lot more than it should.

And as I write this, I feel overly critical. I liked House of Good and Evil on a first viewing and really liked it on a second, but while I'll happily come back to it again in the future, it's an open book to me now. A couple of times through Forever's End and I'm still asking questions and not in a bad way. I believe I know how to read the story, which I can't explain here without spoilers, and I know what it leads up to in the end, but I'm still interpreting some of the details that crop up on our way there. There are layers upon layers here and I'm very open to the possibility that some of those elusive plot points in the middle part of the film will suddenly leap out and make their meanings clear at last. Of course, I'm also open to the possibility that they won't and I've got what I'm going to get out of the story because that's all that there is. Even if so, it screams out for discussion. Is it fundamentally impressionistic or do the details really matter?

I have to be careful here with my words, but the nature of the story is such that each of the four actors we see are tasked less with playing traditional characters and more with playing readings of characters. That means it's much harder than usual to rate how they all did. The toughest job absolutely went to Charity Farrell and she grounds the film well, delving very deeply indeed into Sarah's mind but deliberately underplaying as she did so. It's easier for an actor to do something than to hint that they're thinking something, after all. Lili Reinhart is capable as Lily, but is best when bouncing off Sarah. Again, that's less her fault and more the nature of what she's in the film to do. I was less impressed with Warren Bryson as Ryan, the third character with a decent amount of screen time, but he's the least traditional of the three. There are points when he does good work, especially late on, but there are others where he just stands there like a male model.

It's Farrell's acting and Schroder's script that are staying with me thus far, with a shoutout for the score by Douglas Edward and Douglas Romayne, which is as beautifully subtle an underpinning as the editing is overly obvious. Their names are actually the biggest in the film, as their credits are exemplary. There's a song to accompany the end credits that's also haunting; it's by the ethereal and prolific singer/songwriter, Mimi Page, but sung as a duet by the two lead actresses in the film, whose good voices carry agreeable emotion in their imperfections. I found that I appreciated the camerawork and editing of this section, really a music video rather than any extension of the story, more than I did that in the film itself. It adds visual style and soars rather than floats. While Schroder is highly experienced in the industry, this is his feature length debut as a director and it invites viewers to watch it again and again while they wait for his next film. I'll be waiting too.

Director: Brian Thompson
Stars: Elizabeth Schmidt and Ian Alda

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Purely by coincidence, I commented on a forum today about the quality of short films at festivals generally being frequently inconsistent. That was timely because I first saw Incident on Highway 73 after it was submitted to a festival but, while it thoroughly impressed me, it surprisingly didn't make the cut. Now I'm reviewing it ahead of its selection by a different festival, the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival, at which it screens next Saturday night as part of their Holy Moly Horror Shorts set. I'm really looking forward to seeing this on the big screen, especially as late as it will play. The second half unfolds at night, with deliberately slight lighting, and if the schedule goes according to plan, the tension that riddles this section through should be reaching its height as the hour of midnight strikes. Given that it's screening at Spook Hall in 'the world's largest ghost town', the atmosphere ought to be rather special.

It's one of the few films selected for Jerome that isn't sourced from Arizona, being a California film through and through. That's the stark natural beauty of the California desert that we see as the movie begins; shooting took place in a location called Desert Hot Springs, CA. The impression is clearly that we're in the middle of nowhere, as young couple Jeff and Kelly prepare to turn off the main highway for a side trip. 'That doesn't look like much of a road,' says Jeff, and it doesn't. Its surface is consistently cracked, desert vegetation is blurring the boundary between nature and civilisation and it doesn't even appear to go anywhere. It just aims straight at a set of mountain ranges, nested around unseen passes. Kelly tells him that it's 'a cool, beautiful old highway' and the guidebook backs her up: historic Highway 73 is one of the original Pony Express routes. She wants to use the extra five hours it'll cost them to take photos for her portfolio.

Actors Elizabeth Schmidt and Ian Alda (yes, he's related to who you think) bounce off each other well, aided by director Brian Thompson having them really spend a day together to aid them to feel natural when shooting. They get plenty of opportunity, as this runs 27 minutes, a long time for a short film, but they're the only two actors who we see throughout. They both do good work, especially Schmidt, who neatly highlights her priorities when they watch an electrical storm roll towards them. 'Do you see that?' her fiancé asks. 'Yeah, give me my camera,' she replies. She seems blissfully unconcerned about what to us is clearly a horror movie moment, a harbinger of doom. There are a few such moments early on to remind us that this is a horror movie, mild shock moments and odd nods to convention. Mostly it's a character piece, spending time to establish Kelly and Jeff as people we care about, before doing to them what horror movies tend to do.

If the road and the storm weren't enough to start building a freaky feel, the child's car seat they find in the middle of Highway 73 cements it. Up ahead is an apparently abandoned vehicle with its lights flashing. They pass slowly without seeing anyone, but shortly afterwards stutter to a stop. That's an electrical storm, remember? From here it builds roughly as you might expect, but with superb technique. The tension ratchets up as night falls and then escalates. We know something bad is going to happen, as this is a horror movie, but we're never really quite sure what it will be. Those mild shock moments vanish, lulling us into a false sense of security while never suggesting that it's over and whatever bad things are coming are gone. Perhaps this is cued from the storm, as the gaps between rumbling thunder are exquisitely quiet but we never believe that there isn't another rumble about to burst over the scene. That's a precise mirror of the tone.

Most of director Brian Thompson's credits are music videos, for bands like Killswitch Engage and As I Lay Dying; this is the first short he's credited at IMDb for directing since 2005's Premonition. Yet it's utterly his film, the story conjured up by writer Michael Kirk around a real experience that Thompson and his wife had on a trip to the Grand Canyon. In an interview with Dread Central, he remembers how he felt with words like 'vulnerable', 'spooked' and 'uneasy'; all those are neatly evoked here. I didn't blink much during the last ten minutes; I didn't want to miss anything. Once night falls, the film becomes notably dark but we're never unsure of what's happening. While we don't see much under the shroud of night, Thompson and cinematographer Jason Hafer cleverly ensure that we see what we need to. And when we really need light, flashes of lightning work as well as anything as a highlighter. The best monsters are only hinted at, after all.

Echoing Thompson's surprisingly sparse filmography, Kirk's isn't much busier. I'd have expected a lot more credits for someone who was Sam Raimi's assistant on Spider-Man and went on to three features where he co-produced with Raimi and others. Surely they've been busy on projects that aren't listed at IMDb, as the subtle power wielded on this film has to be sourced from experience. While Alda is excellent and Schmidt is even better, it's what Kirk has them do and what he does to them that nails this. It avoids what most films would have cued up from inception; it demonstrates what can be done in the gaps between those moments. Add to that the subtle but superb effects, suitably creepy sound and, above all, vast open desert crowded in with darkness, location and the use of anamorphic lenses. No wonder it won a Festival Trophy for Best Short Film for its premiere at Screamfest in 2012. That won't be its last win. I'd put money on that.

Director: Chris McDaniel

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Selected to screen at both the Phoenix Film Festival and the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival and with a solid selection of country stars old and new interviewed on screen (one glance down the IMDb credits is enough to impress), Music City USA ought to have been a decent documentary. I even like the poster. However, while there are certainly interesting moments here and there, it can only be viewed as a disappointment. For a start it only runs a scant 62 minutes, including the end credits, which would have been short for a B movie at a drive in back in the sixties, let alone a feature film nowadays. The impressive set of interviewees cycle through quickly, so we discover a few very familiar faces who tell most of the stories on offer. Quite a bit of the footage is reused at odd points too, so we often feel like we're in trapped a loop. Worst of all, it proclaims its goals at the beginning of the film, but then promptly ignores them for the most part.

The title of the film comes from a common nickname for Nashville, Tennessee, famous worldwide as the home of country music. For a while, the film lives up to its title but not its goals, because it explores for twenty minutes the history of the city and its connection to country music and music generally. Some of this is worthwhile material, especially to someone who might have an interest but not a grounding in the subject, but it's hardly going to tell a country fan anything they don't already know. Ricky Skaggs tells us quickly that the roots of Music City date back to 1925 when a Nashville radio station, WSM, began broadcasting a show called the Grand Ole Opry, an hour long barn dance that's still running today. For ten minutes, everyone else agrees with him, not adding a heck of a lot to the story in the meantime. The Mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean, does bring up the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University who sang for Queen Victoria, but that's about it.

The rest is pretty obvious. Once the show was in place, musicians came to play on it. Then came the songwriters and the studios and the publishers and more musicans and the whole thing began to feed itself. There are odd nuggets here from people who matter and it's good to see key visuals like shots outside the Ryman Auditorium, 'the mother church', in and amongst the talking heads, but mostly it's the same thing repeated in different voices from different mouths for ten minutes at a time. Also, there's music behind those voices that's often too high in the mix, meaning that it's hard to hear some of the commentary. It's like trying to follow a conversation in a noisy bar; we strain to hear what's being said, but sometimes our toes tap too much and we lose focus. It's fair to say that this is less of a problem later in the film but it's annoying early for a while, surely enough to turn some viewers away, especially as the film isn't doing what it says it would.

The thing is that this isn't a film about Music City, USA, at least not specifically. It's a film about a disastrous two days of torrential rain that caused massive devastation across a number of states in June 2010, and the work that was done to clean up the city afterwards. Two days of rain isn't much, you might say. Well, it was a lot of rain. Some areas received more than nineteen inches in just two days and the Cumberland River overflowed the flood control barriers the US Army Corps of Engineers put in place in 1937, deluging Nashville in what has been described as a 'thousand year flood'. It's sad to say that I had to look a lot of this up later, as director Chris McDaniel didn't get to it until twenty minutes in, a third of the running time gone, then skipped over much of the factual detail. To be fair, at the beginning, he narrates that, 'I made this film to document the role the entertainment community held throughout this tragedy,' but that comes even later.

The film is broken up into six chapters, averaging about ten minutes each. The point of the film, in McDaniel's own words, is chapter four. By that point, we're halfway through and we've been told why Nashville attracted musicians, how diverse its music is and a little about the flood. Sadly it's the flood footage that's most interesting and it suggests that if only McDaniel had obtained a lot more of it, he'd have had a more substantial movie. Shots of a prefab school building floating down I-24 are truly surreal and certainly grab our attention. As most of the audience won't know what a lot of the iconic Nashville buildings are, the commentary that accompanies this disaster footage is illuminating. Even when there aren't images, it remains fascinating. I'd never heard of Soundcheck Studios, but every story about it adds impact: Peter Frampton lost his entire stage set, Lorrie Morgan lost her entire wardrobe, historic guitars and equipment were destroyed.

And eventually we get to the part that the film has been building up to: the response the floods brought from the people of Nashville and, in particular, from the many musicians who pound out its heartbeat. Taylor Swift donated half a million bucks. Garth Brooks donated the proceeds from nine or ten sold out arena shows. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill hosted benefit gigs, which were a regular feature of the Nashville scene for a while. Others hosted telethons. Everyone pitched in, from the little guys to the big guys. Larry Gatlin highlights 'the community coming together and helping one another.' Well, this is what McDaniel felt warranted a feature film and I'm not going to disagree. I'd like to see a documentary on this and I say that having already watched this one. Sadly, this section is the weakest of them all, with none of those big stars on camera talking about what they did and why and those we do see simply agreeing with each other. It's anti-climactic.

Surely I'm not the only viewer who wondered for a full twenty minutes when the flood was going to show up, then once it did, wondered why it disappeared so quickly. If what hit Nashville was a thousand year flood, what we get here is a thousand seconds of talking about it, surrounded by a lot of filler material that has nothing to do with floods at all. Had the film focused itself around the city of Nashville, it would have been more successful because it wouldn't have disappointed. It would still have been weak, as we may have focused on meaningless little details, like why one of the Lunabelles and two of the Oak Ridge Boys seem happy to stand in front of the camera with their bandmates but never open their mouths, why Julie Roberts looks like a deer trapped in the headlights or why there's so much push to highlight the diversity of music in Nashville when 99% of the musicians interviewed are country artists.

Given that it is focused on the flood, it's notably disappointing. I learned a lot about this disaster not by watching the movie but by reading up on it afterwards. Music City USA mentions that lives were lost but it doesn't point out that there were 31 of them across three states, 21 of them in Tennessee and 10 in Davidson County which includes Nashville. It doesn't mention that the rain was accompanied by instability that helped generate a number of tornadoes that followed in its wake, killing another five people in Mississippi and Arkansas. It pushes the meme that Nashville is up and running again, cleaned up in a month by the community that banded together after the event, but doesn't point out that 52 counties asked to be declared as major disaster areas by the federal government and at least 30 were so acknowledged, accounting for 31% of the state. Tens of millions of dollars were raised in relief by the community but $1.5b of damage was done.

If what I learned about the flood wasn't learned from this film, what did it teach me? Not a heck of a lot, to be honest. I learned a little about the diversity of styles in the home of country music, but I'd have liked to have seen a lot more of Hank Williams III or Familyman Barrett from the Wailers. I was suitably impressed by the flowing white beard of William Lee Golden from the Oak Ridge Boys and even more stunned by the outrageous sideburns of Fred Young of the Kentucky Headhunters. I discovered that Pam Tillis obviously has a painting of herself in the attic that's growing young in her place, as she doesn't look a day older than she did twenty years ago. I learned that I'd like to see a lot more of Larry Gatlin, who provided a healthy and enjoyable sense of humour to this film. It was drummed home that everyone in Nashville agrees with each other, down to an apparently honest mayor. Most of all though, I learned that you shouldn't bother watching it.

Director: Stephen Joel Root
Stars: Eric Schultz, Matt Wilson, Sydney Tolchinsky, Laura Burt, Kenlynn Shields, Kriss Victor, Tony Sutera, Will McDonald and Donovan Wood

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

When Stephen Joel Root introduced Unconscious at the Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival, he felt the need to apologise in advance for his lack of budget. He wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, scored it and shot it, and surely took care of anything else it needed too, so it's undeniably his movie. He shot it on weekends over three years and there's nothing in it that screams money, but there's little that leaps out as cheap either. I can see and hear everything I need to, for a start, which alone ranks this above at least 75% of microbudget movies. There are odd moments where cash would have been beneficial, such as to brace static cameras on wobbly theatre floors, but none are annoying. Well, maybe Hop's beard. What Root ended up with is a characterful piece full of local charm, which he wisely played up on the film's DVD cover. 'Shot in Flagstaff,' it proudly proclaims. 'Starring actors from Flagstaff. Written and directed by a guy from Flagstaff.'

As you can imagine, not all those actors from Flagstaff are particularly great, but there's much to praise here that sits above such concerns. For instance, as the film began, I wasn't concentrating on the slight graininess in the picture quality, I was being impressed by how sharp editing tied the sound to the visuals from the very first frame, the cuts matching the sound cues. I quickly enjoyed the neat idea of having a pair of burglars communicate in sign language to keep quiet, prompting some subtitling that ventures hilariously into the surreal as one finds a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce and highlights its literary merits through hand gestures. Having them search a room whose tenant is passed out on the bed in a Jim Beam-induced stupor is a clever nod to the film's title, while what they find fleshes out his character while he's still unconscious: by his bed is a stack of self help guides for writers, while in his typewriter is a page reading 'Chapter 1. I've got nothing.'

As you can imagine, he's our lead, Raymond Hopajoki by name, though generally known as Hop, and he would dearly love to be a writer. Unfortunately he's having a hard time of it. 'I can't write,' he tells Andy, his younger, cruder friend, in the first of a pair of cruel ironies that make this script work so well. The second is no spoiler, given that it's outlined on the back of the DVD cover, and it's that this wannabe writer who can't write proceeds to write a bestselling novel that he doesn't remember, because he wrote it while suffering from a brain injury caused by a typewriter falling on his head. That key scene is handled pretty well. He falls off his chair, cracks his back and pulls the table to get up. Root telegraphs what is clearly about to happen with both suspense and dark humour. Hop wakes up in a restaurant with a glass of orange juice, a bad beard and a bestseller under his belt called Sucker Punched that he doesn't remember in the slightest.

I really like this starting concept, spawned from the realisation that drugs kill rock stars but make the music better, and I like the way that Root brings it to life. The film is a primarily a comedy, but it's also a drama and a romance, even when reading it straight. An alternative reading goes a lot deeper psychologically into the writing process itself, but I'd need to watch again to see how well that take plays out. Let's just say that Bobby Ewing is not in the shower during the final scene to point out that everything that happened after Hop got hit by the typewriter is a dream, a fantasy, imagination, an alternate reality, or a potential future, so let's leave such speculation to the brief black and white interludes that clearly unfold while Hop is unconscious. That happens more than you might expect. After all, this is a film with dialogue like, 'I'm your best friend. I know what's good for you. Let me hit you in the head with a baseball bat.' You'll have fun figuring out why.

The comedy works well, especially as much of it builds cleverly through recurring gags that keep our eyes open. Even the very last lingering shot, which I won't spoil, ties to to a couple of these. I was kept consistently amused, even if Andy's sense of humour doesn't ever make it past the level of 'your mom' jokes, and at times I laughed out loud. What's more, the humour builds through the characters and the situations they're placed in. Perhaps because he didn't have much money to brighten up the screen with flash, Root had to make his characters interesting to us and he found mixed success with that. Hop is particularly well written; he's the sort of everyman that we surely all know but don't even think about. There's nothing interesting about him at all, at least on the surface. Getting to know him in this film, discovering what really makes him tick, makes him very interesting indeed and, while Eric Schultz is fine in the role, it's the writing that stands out.

The supporting characters are less consistent. Matt Wilson does well as Andy but he's the opposite of Hop, obvious and memorable but without any substance or depth. We probably all have a friend like Andy and they'll probably come immediately to mind when we see him. Similarly, Bobbi Jo, the girlfriend Hop lost two years earlier but can't get over, is a one note character who we'll recognise from our own lives. She's the epitome of the annoying hanger on who somehow never goes away even though we can't believe that any friend of ours would put up with her. Laura Burt is capable in the role but it really doesn't call for her to do much. The other two ladies we meet are far more interesting and substantial: Sharon and Maria. Sharon is a film critic so naturally interesting (like I'd say otherwise), who happens to be in the next seat at a movie theatre when Hop is confronted with Bobbi Jo and tries to pretend he isn't still stuck on her. Maria is Andy's girlfriend.

That's how we meet them, anyway. Relationships are flexible things in this film. We find out about Hop and Bobbi Jo in the very first scene after the opening credits and meet Sharon in the next one after that. You'd think we're being set up for a love triangle, but Bobbi Jo arrives with the General, Hop and Andy's boss in snow shovelling and softball and who knows what else, and things become much more complex from there. I actually tried to map this out, because I had a vague impression in my brain while watching of this being a love pentagram or a love star of David, but it's not quite that mathematically precise. It's more like the sort of web that a spider spins when it's on caffeine. Anyway, Sharon has a lot of character and she's introduced right before the typewriter incident as someone with potential to shape the story, so Kenlynn Shields has a lot more than Burt to explore. Sydney Tolchinsky has even more depth to play with as Maria, but we take longer to find that out.

I don't know if Root wrote the script after being hit on the head with a typewriter but, if he did, I'd recommend the process to everyone. Clearly this isn't going to become the Great American Novel or top the New York Times bestsellers list, like Hop's novel in the film, but it's written better and with far more thought than I expected it to be. After all, this is a feature written by someone who practically served as a one man crew and it quickly becomes obvious that it's anchored so deeply in Flagstaff that it's unlikely to ever escape it. None of the actors have other IMDb credits, though many have stage experience, so neither the lack of Oscar winning performances nor the reliable quality of their work are surprising. Occasionally, a nuance here or a burst of emotion there show that some have potential beyond simply meeting the need at hand. Perhaps Root's next feature will give them the opportunity to grow on film.

Like the acting, the technical side is capable and does what it needs to, rarely becoming flash. It's the script that stands out above all that, perhaps appropriately given that it's rooted firmly in the process of writing. Beyond the long nights, driven focus and varied response ringing very true, the little details are worthy of mention. The best stand up comedians often pepper their routines with little moments that by the end provide emphasis for the final punchline; Root does that a lot here, with Hop running into cars, Sharon dishing out slaps, Andy answering the door in outrageous attire and Maria being unable to finish a book, though she's always reading. The surreal black and white interludes shot at a local theatre are wild, especially the full blown Mexican dance number. There is also enough for a repeat viewing. Hop sees mystery movies in Flagstaff by asking for a number six. If I asked for a number six and got Unconscious again, I wouldn't be disappointed.

Director: Steve Dorssom
Stars: Brian Taylor, Eric Mulvaine, Micha Kite and Steve Dorssom

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Here's something of an oddity: a documentary which I enjoyed a lot but can't really recommend to anyone else. Ripsaw is the name of a band, an obscure power/thrash metal band who played in and around McPherson, Kansas during the late eighties. They're so obscure that not only have I never heard of them (and through gigs, zines and demos, I was active in the underground thrash scene at the time), but they're not even listed at the thorough Metal Archives website. Therefore all I have to go on is this documentary, which suggests that Ripsaw achieved some local success playing alongside name bands like Manilla Road, but split up around the time they recorded their debut album, which may or may not ever have been released. Why would we get a documentary on Ripsaw, you might ask? Well, I wondered the same thing throughout the scant 62 minutes it runs and I'm still wondering that long after it finished.

The obvious answer is that Steve Dorssom, Ripsaw's drummer, felt like a trip down memory lane after all four bandmates met up at a Death Angel show in 2012. He also caught the acting bug from his son relatively recently, racking up credits over the last couple of years in films like Brian Skiba's .357: Six Bullets for Revenge, so presumably felt the urge to debut as a writer/director on a very personal project. I wonder how much catharsis it provided for these former bandmates, who split up for the usual sort of reason: they were simply too young at the time to cope with the strain of living and working with each other 24/7. Egos clashed, words were said and everything that had been achieved up to that point went down the toilet. It's always a sad reason for music fans who want more out of a particular band, but it's still more sad for the musicians themselves, who get to look back at what could have been and can't really put a finger on why it didn't happen.

Any success that Ripsaw has is generic, because the band aren't well known enough for anyone to follow them into the film and they aren't substantial enough to carry it. Unless you were one of the girls who kept the Ripsaw house well stocked with groceries back in 1988, you won't find nostalgia in the band itself, and that restricts the potential audience to a massive degree. While there are some cool photos and live footage from back in the day, there's absolutely no input from anyone outside the guys in the band: no family, friends or fans, not even any musicians who were part of the same scene and played with them. Any such names that come up are restricted to mentions in interview footage with the band members and even this is explored through only two sets of interviews, both apparently shot in a day at the Sheraton 4 Points in Tempe: one set of individual interviews in the bar, then a collective interview out by the pool as the sun goes down.

What I found was that, without attempting to denigrate this particular band, who I'd happily have gone to see live then or now, their personal reminiscences and stories are so relentlessly generic that they could easily be transplanted to a thousand other bands who were doing the same thing at the same time. While that sounds utterly negative, it ended up being the saving grace for me: Ripsaw became Everyband and a lot of nostalgia was sparked as my memory translated personal stories of this particular band into similar stories of similar bands I knew in the second generation thrash scene on the other side of the pond. After all, with very little attempt made to bolster the core interviews with supporting material, this is nothing more than a recorded reminiscence: four guys who once meant the world to each other getting together way down the road to talk about old times over a copious quantity of alcohol. It's a school reunion for a band.

While the opening narration ends with the inevitable words, 'This is their story,' it really isn't. We never really learn that much about Ripsaw, perhaps because there isn't that much to learn. They were a thrash band made up of friends from high school who had all moved on to different cities, but connected again through old school technology to become a band. It might seem impossible to younger viewers, for whom the entire world is immediately available via smartphones and the internet, but these musicians wrote and recorded songs individually on audiocassettes, and sent them to each other through the mail. That's snail mail, not e-mail, as this was 1986, back in the technological dark ages. After spending a year as 'a penpal band', a great description I've never heard before, these four friends finally got together in one place in the summer of 1987 to jam and Ripsaw was effectively born.

For the record, in addition to Dorssom, the guys in the band were Brian Taylor, Eric Mulvaine and Micha Kite. Taylor was the vocalist and rhythm guitarist, Mulvaine played bass, Kite handled lead guitar duties and Dorssom backed them all up on the drums. They played live whenever possible, they hosted epic parties at the Ripsaw house and in time, they even recorded an album, courtesy of Kite's grandma, who had been saving up to buy him a used car but was persuaded into paying for studio time instead. And that's about it, as there's nothing to back up the stories they tell. One image is an article on the band, but I couldn't tell if it was published in a fanzine or a local paper, but that's it for press. Lots of old photos are strongly reminiscent of the era but there's no context to build from. All we really have of Ripsaw to take away from the film are a few live numbers from old gigs, obviously recorded on VHS for posterity.

They sound pretty good, to my ears something of a mix of Testament and Death Angel, but there are many influences in play. Taylor and Kite cite the expected thrash groups, Mulvaine adds old school bands like Rush and Led Zeppelin, while Dorssom includes Guns n' Roses, Whitesnake and Tesla. I should add here that this sort of content was interesting to me, but left my better half dry. The same went for the scene stories, because she wasn't part of that scene. While I was at thrash gigs diving off stages, she was seeing hair bands and local stars like Stevie Nicks. Every live song played was a song I hadn't heard back in the day and happily caught up on, comparing it to bands I knew and fitting it mentally into a bigger picture, but to her it was just material she didn't listen to back then and doesn't listen to now, especially during the extended instrumental breaks which I was particularly happy to hear, such things rarely making it into documentaries.

Bizarrely, the recording quality of those old VHS recordings is better than some of the brand new interview footage. There's background noise both inside and outside the hotel, occasionally more than I'd have liked. The light is fine to begin with outdoors, but it deteriorates rapidly until we're almost watching four talking silhouettes. The only footage with decent sound is where Dorssom presumably filled a few gaps in the story later on by his fireplace. He does make an effort to piece this together into something substantial, but there's so little here to work with that it's a thankless task. Mostly he just adds in chapter headings in the form of questions that were answered during recorded conversation. It's capably done but, perhaps inevitably given the amount, much of it is unsubstantial. Who really cares what they drank in 1987? Well, Kite might. He does seem a little worse for wear here, but then maybe he was; the interviews were all shot in a day, after all.

Unfortunately the question I'd have liked answered most is the one answered least, namely what they all went on to after Ripsaw fell apart. Only Mulvaine really answers it, as he joined the army. Taylor is still playing, as is Kite, but I'm not sure what or with whom. It's easy to imagine that Kite is playing blues guitar on street corners, based on this footage alone, but research tells me that he recorded albums with other bands like Psychic Pawn and Born of Fire. We don't even know if these four hooked back up and played together after this. I'd certainly like to have seen that and it would have been a great way to end this reunion. Without it, it feels like it's missing an ending, a personal touch that would have made it more about Ripsaw specifically than a generic band from a particular era. At the end of the day, this was a trip down memory lane for me, but a bigger one for the band, who are the real audience. This film was really made for the four people in it.

Director: Brandon Nazari
Stars: Serenity Starr Foreman, Miah Gonzales and Melissa Masters-Foreman

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

I first saw Mission Control at the IFP Breakout Challenge screenings in February, where it won four awards including Best Picture. I liked it but with major reservations, as it felt like an overdose of cute. Even during my first time through, I had flashes of it on NHK or some Japanese TV channel with a cartoon logo over the bottom right hand corner featuring a sailor suited schoolgirl flashing a V sign with her fingers and a speech bubble reading, 'Kawaii!' Since then, it seems to follow me around, selected by what seems like every local festival, along with the eight it won a submission to for winning this challenge. It played twice at the Phoenix Film Festival, as part of the Arizona Shorts selection, then in the IFP finals where it won third place of all the year's challenges, after The Duel and Screaming in Silence. Last week, it also played at Jerome and each time I see it, it gets better, but without ever losing that cuteness factor.

I think what I missed the first time is a single line of dialogue, which grounds the entire story, but I noticed it second or third time through and it played differently because of it. We start out in the bedroom of a young girl with an infectious grin, who's engrossed in the Apollo 11 launch playing on her TV. Of course she's not going to stay there when her mum tucks her in, she's going to get up and surreptitiously start drawing up plans for a mission to the moon of her own. The rest of the film outlines the three days it takes her to get ready to go. The theme that writer/director Brandon Nazari picked for the IFP challenge was, 'If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.' That line of dialogue I missed, while Astronaut Serenity Dexter is building a cardboard rocket and inviting people to show up to her launch party, is, 'I know it's a lie, but mum told me that to do the impossible you have to believe the impossible.' That's a crucial line to keep things real.

Nazari keeps things moving well, with an appropriately uplifting score and use of Apollo mission commentary. The technical side of things is so good that we simply don't notice it, caught up in the grin that young Serenity Starr Foreman maintains throughout. I don't how old she is, though I'm sure it wouldn't take too many fingers to count her age, yet she's the standout on screen. It doesn't hurt that she's the focus for almost the entire six minute running time, but the camera certainly likes her and her enthusiasm is infectious. It's no surprise that mum and dad play along with her plans and make sure there are plenty of people to see her launch. The biggest flaw to me was that her fancy dress audience is conspicuously not her age. Surely a girl with this amount of charisma would have many friends, but I do understand that wrangling them on set would be a nightmare. Then again, if that's the biggest flaw, Nazari doesn't have too much to worry about.

Director: James Politano
Stars: Tony Bafaloukos, Tara McCord, James Politano and Emily Bolduc

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Anyone with a bone to pick with political correctness can't fail to enjoy Jim Politano's glorious dips into the pool of offensive comedy. They clearly can't be rated highly on technical merit, on acting talent or on most things that critics tend to rate, and he'll be the first to agree with me there, but he knows how to write a script that gets a response from his audience. That's not a skill that any filmmaker should underestimate, especially after it won Politano the audience favourite award at last year's Beat the Clock Challenge, the IFP competition for films shot in 48 hours. Love Sucks, a cheap looking black and white short film, was up against films as strong as Screaming in Silence and The Memory Ride, so it took the audience's recognition to land it a slot in the IFP finals at the Phoenix Film Festival. It looked notably out of place next to quality pictures from local production companies of note, but yet again Politano had the audience eating out of his hand.

Love Sucks really is a wake up call to filmmakers. I've talked a lot on this site about how Running Wild can crank out quality product in the time it takes most of us to blink and how UAT should be hiring their students out to big studios because they do better work for less money. Over the next week or so I'll be highlighting how Jump Ship Productions leapt into life in 2012 and targetted all those established names; they provided three of the seven films up against Love Sucks in the IFP finals. This year's films were all serious, except this one. Love Sucks was there to shake them all up and it did exactly that. Politano sets up his film in only two shots, then sets up his audience in an extended scene that leads us all down the road of false assumptions and ends up by pissing off every woman watching. Tony Bafaloukos, one of the best ad libbers in the business, needs to not tour with this film or a female audience somewhere will surely lynch him.

It's hard to imagine anyone more contagious than Bafaloukos when being crude. He's an absolute riot, both in this film and its thematic sequel, The Sisters of St Mary's, which does to religion what this does to the equality of the sexes. Here, he's a slob of a husband, who we first see crashed out on the bed on his wedding anniversary like a beached whale. His wife isn't pleased, given that she shows up to celebrate seven years of marriage with booze and Viagra, so, sure enough, the scene following finds them in front of a marriage therapist, played by Politano himself. Tara outlines her romantic first date with Tony, then he blisters into her with an outpouring of chauvinist invective that makes us wonder if Bafaloukos ever needs to breathe. It's almost impossible for an audience member not to react to one or both of these characters and it's absolutely impossible for them to keep quiet when Politano promptly ratchets it up a notch.

This is a textbook comedy script which surpasses the lack of technical quality otherwise. The film is shot in low res black and white, with crude titles, crude music and crude editing. You're not going to hire Jim to shoot your wedding video, trust me. But the script is so engaging that you're likely to find yourself paraphrasing it at work the next day to whoever happens to be hanging out at the water cooler. Politano has fun playing with our expectations and he has no restraint at all when it comes to slaying sacred cows. He doesn't just slay them, he rends them limb from limb. However cheap it all looks, this is the most fun you'll have with stereotypes all year, guaranteed. When you're done with this one, follow it up with The Sisters of St Mary's, which sees the return of both Tony Bafaloukos and Tara McCord, along with my dear sweet wife as a misbehaving nun. If only we had part three of what must surely become a sacred cow slaying trilogy to finish it all off.

Love Sucks can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Director: Robert Garcia
Stars: J P Frydrych, Jonathan Levy Maiuri and Desiree Srinivas

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This was my second exposure to Jump Ship Productions, local upstarts supreme. Talk about trying to shake up things in a big way: competitions like the IFP film challenges tend to be dominated by a few local production companies who know absolutely what they're doing because they've been doing it for quite some time now and have a whole slew of movies under their belts. Then, out of nowhere, comes Jump Ship, so named because the various members of the team all jumped ship from other local companies to become this new one. Each of their first three shorts was made for an IFP challenge, where it won multiple awards and did well enough to move on to the year's final where Jump Ship dominated the programme with three films out of eight. The Phoenix Film Critics Society voted The Duel the second best IFP film of the year, but Titus is more daring and The Face of Innocence is probably their most accomplished piece.

It's far more ambitious than any of their other films, including the new one, Mr Wallace the Great, because it really plays like a feature film with all the filler cut out and all the emotional outpouring of the most engaging scenes left in. We watch our protagonist, Jacob Szczpynski visibly suffer as he attempts to track down a serial killer called the Cradle Robber to less than no support from the local police department. He has major emotional attachment to the case, given that his sister was the killer's first victim, but the cop in charge, Det DeAngelo, tells him that he's alienating the task force and should quit visiting the station. Needless to say, he continues to investigate, harnessing his skills as a photojournalist to find that crucial clue that everyone else has overlooked. He finds it too, but that just leads to the toughest, most emotional scenes of all, because every scene here aims to outdo the previous one until the inevitably explosive finale.

I found The Face of Innocence accomplished but a little overblown on my first viewing, but after a few further times through, it's sitting very well with me. There are a few flaws in the internal logic, but they're not enough to get too upset about. The acting is certainly overdone at points, but that works when you watch it as the distillation of a feature and mentally fill in all the scenes that were never shot that build up to those moments. The timeframe the film plays out to could be a day or a year as the imaginary feature could easily contain many scenes in which Szczpynski tirelessly pursues his goal and endears himself to us in the process. He needs to own our sympathy, given where he's going as an anti-hero, and I can totally see that happening, especially as his opponent turns into a caricature of Al Pacino. Surely, J P Frydrych's finest moment thus far is the last shot of this film, which is aided by a perfect bit of lighting.

One of the most annoying things that is said far too often about short films is that they should be made into features. Most short films are fine as short films and should stay that way; what fleshes out six minutes isn't likely to expand well to ninety. This one is the epitome of the exception, the short that wouldn't just work at feature length but feels like it's the key moments of a feature cut down to fit the running time needed for a short challenge film. There's more detail, more emotion and more opportunity here than in almost any short I can think of. What's more, the ending would stand up to a longer build. The more I see Titus, the more the ending disappoints; but the more I see The Face of Innocence, the more the ending stands out as a memorable piece of cinema. It's certainly my favourite Jump Ship production thus far, but the way they're going, there ought to be a bunch of new films to challenge it over the next year.

Director: Neil Sparks
Stars: Gabriel Cervantez, Caleb Evans and Jeff Lamar

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

I've not made it to as many IFP challenge events as I'd have liked, but I've seen a lot of good films and, well, a lot of not so good films at them. This last year, I saw a lot of great films too, certainly more than I've seen from previous years. A few established production companies raised the ante and a few new kids on the block met their challenge. The unfortunate result was that some of the best local films I've seen thus far lost out on prizes and a few others that have won awards in later festivals didn't even make it to the finals. I didn't envy the Phoenix Film Critics Society at all, but they picked this one from the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe to win as this year's cream of the crop. Personally I'd have gone for La Lucha, which made me tear up yet again when it played as part of the IFP finals set at the Phoenix Film Festival, and it doesn't take much for me to rave about The Memory Ride yet again, but I'm a huge fan of UAT and this is a real peach too.

I can rationalise the judges' decision easily. La Lucha was made by filmmakers who joined IFP as staff members between the time they submitted their short and the time the finals played, so if that film won it could be seen as a conflict of interest. The Memory Ride screened with its original ending, which I hadn't seen before and which notably diminishes the power of the film. But I don't mean to excuse this win. While Mission Control gets better with every viewing, Screaming with Silence hit hard the first time and remains that way however often I see it and whatever it screens alongside. The script by Paul DeNigris, professor of digital video at UAT, is deceptively simple but notably powerful: short on detail but long on depth, if that makes any sense at all before you get to see the film and understand what I mean. I can't really say much about the script, or I'll end up in spoiler territory and, frankly, you deserve to be rooked between the eyes by the twist.

Let's just say that it all has to do with the process of creation, as depicted by an artist struggling with a painting that seems hell bent on fighting him every inch of the way. It knows what it wants to be and that isn't what he wants it to be and I'm sure every creative soul reading this knows what that feels like, whether they paint, write, compose or do anything else cobbled together from sweat, heart and imagination. The deceptive simplicity extends to the technical side; never mind the digital layering of the painting at the heart of the film, which is the most obvious part, notice the foreboding score that bookends the piece, and the white of the canvas moving to the black of the artist's shirt as the film goes literally dark and he fights his demons. Gabriel Cervantez is not flawless but he is excellent and he has some superb moments. Caleb Evans, director of Red Sand, hovers over his painting like a harbinger of doom. The unveiling of the twist is momentous.

At the end of the day, it isn't what this film does that makes it so successful, it's what it doesn't do. Many of the other shorts in competition were about tangibles and there's something about the intangibles, when done right, that always trumps that. Writing about something as abstract as the creative urge is either going to nail something special or fail out of hand, depending on how well it connects to the audience. Adding detail tends to move away from the highs and lows towards the majority of everything in the middle; to adopt the painting metaphor, this is a very impressionistic piece, not a photorealistic image. It's focused enough that we understand thoroughly what's going on but broad enough that the details don't matter, well all but the one that we can't ignore. Maybe what led the judges to vote this above its competition is that it does manage to capture lightning in a bottle, that certain je ne se quoi that takes a foreign language to describe. That's art.

Director: Robert Garcia
Stars: J P Frydrych, Herbert Steve Hernandez, Craig MacDonald, Chelsea Samuelson, Jonathan Levy Maiuri, Mike Diaz, Nicki Legge and Devon Garcia

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This week, Jump Ship Productions celebrates its first birthday. It's been a rather successful year for them, however you want to count it. They made four short films, three for IFP film challenges. Each of those three won multiple awards and automatic inclusion in the IFP finals at the Phoenix Film Festival. In August, at the Beat the Clock challenge for 48 hour films, The Duel ranked third out of eighteen submissions; in November, Titus won Best Film at the Masterpiece Challenge and swept a number of other awards in the process; and at February's Breakout challenge, The Face of Innocence was the audience favourite, again amongst a slew of awards. That meant that Jump Ship provided no less than three out of eight IFP finalists, which is an astounding achievement period, but an especially notable one in their debut year. The Phoenix Film Critics Society voted The Duel the second best IFP film of the year, but I can't help but wonder why.

That's not because this is a bad film, because it isn't. It's a capable piece which I enjoyed and which still makes me smile even after a few viewings. In fact, Jump Ship's lead actor, J P Frydrych, was kind enough to allow me to screen it as part of a film festival I hosted at this year's LepreCon, where it got a lot of positive feedback. It's just that it feels like the least of their opening trio, and apparently their fans agree. To celebrate their birthday, Jump Ship has set up a poll on Facebook and right now, Titus is leading the way as the fan's favourite over The Face of Innocence, with The Duel in third and the new one, Mr Wallace the Great, languishing in last. Titus is certainly the most obvious, a carefully constructed science fiction story that looks great and carries a great sense of isolation. It would be my favourite too, but the ending has grated on me and tarnished its memory somewhat. In comparison, The Face of Innocence gets better with time and familiarity.

And that leaves The Duel, which isn't about what you think, even during the opening scene. It's a geek movie and it's proud of it. The duel isn't between the unnamed hero, inevitably portrayed by Frydrych, and the similarly unnamed villain, played with relish by Herbert Steve Hernandez. They are merely the pawns in the game, or perhaps to extend the metaphor of the title in a particularly geeky fashion, the pokémon hurled into play. The duellists are a couple of patrons of a comic book store, debating what went down when the hero and villain met, whenever and wherever that was. Both Craig MacDonald and Chelsea Samuelson are note perfect, even though neither has another acting credit to their name yet. MacDonald produced and Samuelson was the script supervisor, so they both had a stake in the success of the film and they do a great job. They ground proceedings wonderfully, especially as Frydrych and Hernandez are suitably over the top.

There's a subtle twist and a not-so-subtle twist on top of that, which both play very well, without necessarily making any sense. I can't really argue about it without spoiling those twists, so I need to hush. Really it would be much more appropriate for me to meet you at a comic book store over a box of Detective Comics and argue about it there; would that be meta enough as a critical note? The other flaw is that it feels rushed, as if there ought to have been twice as much footage, but it was a 48 hour film with a time limitation, so that one's understandable. The rest I like: the cast of characters and the way they were played; the sound, lighting and camera movements, even the font used for the credits, though it doesn't scroll well. I love the dialogue, which sparkles, but the connections and twists don't sit right with me from the standpoint of internal consistency. All the Jump Ship films so far have been enjoyable, but I think their signature piece hasn't arrived yet.

Director: Christopher Bradley
Stars: Slade Pearce, Elaine Hendrix, Shayne Topp, Chelsea Ricketts and Beth Grant

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

The Arizona Shorts selection at the Phoenix Film Festival is usually an interesting affair. This year's standout for me was The Violation, an edgy movie written and directed by Hollywood actor turned ASU lecturer, Christopher Bradley. It grabs our attention from moment one, as we realise that we are indeed looking at what we think we're looking at, and progresses on from there, disturbing us while simultaneously asking us why we're disturbed. Given that it was clearly the best film shown, it's surprising to discover that it only made it into the festival on its second attempt and only after some concerted lobbying. Another fan of The Violation is Bill Pierce, who has covered local film for The Examiner since 2010. He championed it at the Phoenix Film Festival and selected it himself to be part of a set of short films he programmed for the Jerome Indie Film and Music Festival, that he called AZ Forbidden Films and which was the highlight of that festival for me and others.

I find myself torn as to which set fit it best. It felt far more at home in Pierce's AZ Forbidden Films because everything he selected had an edge and the whole set had a sharper edge because of it. However, the varied but generally polite films in the Arizona Shorts selection really didn't prepare us for what Bradley had in mind and so The Violation stood out from the crowd all the more. Shot in four days as a response to the US military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, around the time of the discussions about potential repealment, it constructs a believable, if carefully contrived, scenario where we voyeuristically bear witness to a pair of perverse acts. What's important is that they're really the same act, but society, in its infinite wisdom, has traditionally applauded one but vilified the other. The film leaves us at a point where one character asks why the two are seen differently and another simply cannot answer. The punchline to this film is silence and it's utterly perfect.

What Bradley gives us is a love triangle, albeit not the usual sort of love triangle. Oscar Heim is a seventeen year old from a wealthy family, who looks good in both a pair of swimming trunks and a tux. He 'has a thing' for his sixteen year old neighbour, Tina Dougherty. Pretty standard, you may feel, but then he spends the opening scene of the film feeling up a pillow with her stolen bikini on it. This is the sort of thing that's joked about in every frat house movie ever made, but watching it feels a little more freaky. That's aided by the fact that we watch it through a telescope pointed at his bedroom window by Tina's younger brother, fifteen year old Mickey. He has a crush on Oscar and he soon gets the chance to act out a similar fantasy when the Heims have a wedding to go to and need someone to babysit their house. In only ten minutes, Bradley raises gay prejudice, class differences and sexual coming of age, yet all in such a way that the complex seems simple.

Slade Pearce is top billed as Mickey Dougherty and he does a solid job in the presence of far more experienced co-stars who get an agreeable amount to do even without being the focus. His white trash mother is played by Elaine Hendrix, one of those memorable actors you've seen and enjoyed in at least a dozen movies but can't quite place what she's best known for. That may be Romy and Michele's High School Reunion or The Parent Trap, in each of which she played major support. The other mother in the film, Oscar's mum, is played by Beth Grant, about whom everything I just said about Hendrix goes double. She alternates Oscar fare like Crazy Heart, No Country for Old Men or The Artist with odd films like this, but may still be most remembered for Donnie Darko or Speed. Yet with experience like theirs to compete with, Pearce holds his own and makes this his picture, literally getting the last word, exactly the right one, and letting it float in the air to stay with us.

I first met Christopher Bradley in a coffee shop, of all things, and I hadn't a clue who he was, even after being introduced. He was Chris who teaches scriptwriting and I was Hal who writes reviews of movies, so we ought to know each other. Only partway into the conversation did I realise that this was Christopher Bradley, who I'd never got to meet at the Royale in Mesa, at which we both saw many movies and at which he presented a screening of Waxwork, in which he appeared at a much younger age. Since then, he's proved to be a gentleman as well as an actor, allowing me to screen Black Gulch, a short film he appeared in back in 2003, at the film festival I programmed at LepreCon 39, and coming out in person to support me and do a Q&A. The Violation underlines that he's also a writer and a director of note, this being easily as important a film as it is a good one. It deserves to be seen widely, and more importantly, discussed. If it plays a festival near you, see it.

Director: Brian Kiefling
Stars: Christina Campion, Kelly Leeth and Kim Huenecke

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Here's another film that played two recent Arizona festivals that I've covered. The Muse screened in the Arizona Shorts set at the Phoenix Film Festival and the Holy Moly Horror Shorts selection at Jerome. It's a capable film, but one that clearly grew out of a location and could have done with growing a little more. The location is, admittedly, very cool indeed. The heart of the story is spent inside the basement of the Community Services building at ASU, where the producer and director are both film students. This building used to be a children's hospital and it didn't change much for the film, where it plays an office that used to be a children's hospital. The difference is that, in the story, the very popular, award winning nurse who ruled its roost turned out to have a dark secret. During the excellent opening credits, we follow the newspaper clippings to discover that she was indicted for Munchausen by Proxy, pleaded guilty and committed suicide while on trial.

That's the sort of story that emerges from a location like this, which retains many of its darker fittings, such as its furnace and crematorium. Brian Kiefling, who wrote and directed, gave a tour of the building to some people from a music charity and two of them freaked out. That very night, he wrote the bare bones of the script with 'the hairs on his arm standing up'. Naturally, this solid location for inspiration soon became the location for shooting this short ghost story, which gives a traditional haunting a neat edge and combines it with more modern characters. The premise is a good one and it unfolds in a fair fashion, but it didn't progress far enough from those bare bones to really warrant returning to. It feels a little rushed and could have done with more substance to ground it. We never really find out anything about any of the characters on show, except maybe Margaret Broman, the wicked nurse whose story is outlined in all those clippings.

The film was shot in two days, like many of the IFP films I've been reviewing lately, but it shows. The first scene after the credits has poor sound and isn't promising, but it brightens up when we move out of Katie Johnson's house and follow her to the Muse, where she's interviewing for a job. The interview seems to comprise of showing up, as the first thing her potential future co-workers do is show her the 'haunted house', the morgue of the old children's hospital. Christina Campion does well here as Katie, a lot more believable than the actors supporting her. I particularly liked the little wave she gives as they slide her into a cold chamber, one of those locked drawers they store corpses in. She's just trying to impress them, of course, daring to stay locked inside for five minutes for a bet. The problem is that it soon becomes more because the fire alarm goes off and everyone else leaves. Cue the ghost story part of proceedings, neatly hinted at earlier.

Kiefling isn't your average film student. He's a former cop, who spent fifteen years at ASU in the campus police, but he caught the filmmaking bug when asked to make training videos, promptly enrolling in the university's film school to take it a step further. It certainly wouldn't surprise me to find that the most natural actor in the film, the cop who gets to explain the reason behind the fire alarm to the evacuees, is a real cop. Most of the actors do have capable moments but they often feel like actors otherwise, putting on a show rather than being the characters. The standouts are Campion as Katie, Kim Huenecke as a particularly evil Nurse Broman (though how a nurse who acts like this could get away with years of abuse without raising any suspicion, I have no idea) and Kelly Leeth as a little girl ghost called Celia. We hear her more than we see her but her voice is the haunting bit, however many iconic horror shots Kiefling sets up.

He does that well too, especially as technically dubious scenes like the first one condition us not to expect scenes like the one with the first special effect. It's done admirably, but I firmly believe it carries more of a punch because we totally aren't expecting a well done special effect in a short that starts out with bad sound. Clearly Kiefling has watched a lot of horror movies, because the whole second half is full of the sort of well chosen camera angles, careful composition of frame and solid editing that makes so many horror movie shots iconic, not to mention the freaky score by Andrey Alekseyev. The technique on screen isn't particularly original but it's effective anyway. It all bodes well for what Kiefling might do once he graduates from ASU. A twenty minute version of this would be welcome for a start. Beyond the odd sound issues and some inconsistent acting, it's the length that jumps up and complains. It's a good story but it needs to be given more depth.

Director: Alejandro Alberola

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This was a subtle choice by programmer Mike Stackpole to kick off the first Sci-Fi Shorts set at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival. Not only is it an animated film, it's one without a single word of dialogue, the only vocal sound we expect to hear being a scream that escapes its owner's throat in the form of searing guitar. It even starts slowly, but the stunning visual design on display was certain to grab everyone's eyeballs and turn them to the screen. The films that populated two sets of sci-fi shorts this year were of unparalleled quality, perhaps because filmmakers are starting to realise that science fiction doesn't have to equal special effects, and those still playing with CGI are finding it easier to look good. Selections during the past few years have been inconsistent, as the quality of submissions has varied so much, but this year's pleasant surprise of consistency is outweighed perhaps only by the pleasant surprise of variety, this being its epitome.

It's a Mexican film, which is quintessentially science fiction and quintessentially western all at the same time. We're in Chiseler's Burg, which the film's IMDb synopsis calls 'an old town on a dying planet in a long forgotten region of space'. It's quite clearly influenced by the movie Heavy Metal and in turn by the organic work of artists like Jean Giraud aka Mœbius, who had co-created Métal Hurlant, the French comic book whose legacy led to it. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Mœbius, who is still mostly known for fantasy and science fiction work, had started out in westerns with a series called Blueberry. He worked occasionally in film, including concept designs for Alien, which grew out of the legendary failed adaptation of Dune by Alejandro Jodorowsky, with whom he'd created comic books in France, such as L'Incal. The reason I mention all this is that Dry Gulch is clearly so influenced by titles like L'Incal that they could almost be seen as part of the same universe.

If you've ever seen anything drawn by Mœbius, you'll be instantly intrigued by that. Dry Gulch was brought to life by six animators, who share twenty names between them, so I'm not going to list them here, but they channel his vision into a striking world. While we follow a silent story from murder and hanging to revenge, we can't help but bathe in the highly organic visuals: a spaceship that reminds of a giant flying centipede, snow that makes it seem like the stars are dancing, huge mushrooms that serve as bridges. While this is clearly a western, it's fully translated to this alien world. In place of horses there are giant spiked warthogs or huge birds. Instead of carriages, there are hovercars with neatly retracting steps. The sniper rifle looks like a dieselpunk antique. Yet the archetypes are still here and eerily familiar: the wanted poster, the windswept duster and the fire to keep people warm out in the middle of nowhere in the desert.

The music is another archetype, but less traditionally American and more like an Italian prog rock improvisation on spaghetti western themes by Ennio Morricone. The choice to to make this rather universal by eschewing spoken words in favour of themes is a good one, the English words on the wanted poster really as much art as the images they accompany. The lack of words highlights the prominence and importance of the music, by Javier and Francisco Diaz Pinelo, and also underlines that connection to Heavy Metal. I really enjoyed the score, which accentuates the visuals but also survives them, as it would be much easier to listen to this outside the framework of the film than most soundtracks. If I'm navigating Spanish websites appropriately, it would seem that both play for a Mexican hard rock band called Ravenscar, who I will now need to explore. Now all these guys need to do is make more films like Dry Gulch and we'll have a Mexican Heavy Metal to enjoy.

Dry Gulch is available to view for free on Vimeo.

Director: Joanna Ellenbeck
Stars: Joanna Ellenbeck and Patrick Kilpatrick

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Perhaps the best way to highlight how consistently good the selections for the Sci-Fi Shorts A set at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival were this year is to point out that Ontogenesis is probably the worst of them. It's far from a bad film; in fact I've seen sets of sci-fi short films where this would have been the best, but it just didn't spark for me, playing a little on the wrong side of the simple vs deep conflict. Otherwise it's a promising piece, with decent actors in front of the camera, competent crew behind it and a thoughtful idea underpinning it all. It isn't as pretentious as the title would suggest, though it neglects, perhaps deliberately, to tell us what ontogenesis actually means. The dictionary says that ontogeny or ontogenesis is 'the origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult.' The poster puts it more simply: 'There is no end. Only a new beginning.' The broad sweep of the film applies this to our entire species.

Within that stunningly broad framework, we get little pictures to focus on. Joanna Ellenback, who also wrote, produced and directed, plays Aria, who has survived the end of the world by the time the film begins. What apocalyptic event triggered it is never mentioned, but she's part of a small band of survivors eking out their existence as best they can given the circumstances, struggling against similarly wary bands of survivors in the process. When Aria returns alone from a vaguely outlined mission, perhaps to parlay with one of these bands, she's confronted angrily by Nathan, the apparent leader of hers. What happened to everyone else, he asks? How come she survived? And when she tells him what really happened, he doesn't believe her in the slightest. If what she says is true, why was the she the one let in on the secret? Why not him, the powerful leader who does so much to keep his people alive?

I like the way that Ontogenesis attempts to explore such a broad concept with such a small story, clearly one of many such stories ongoing on this world at this time. Ellenbeck proves capable as Aria, really the leading lady though she's lost in the noise as the picture starts to incorporate wild and beautiful footage from NASA's Hubble telescope website, directed by Oli Usher. Contrasted with the majesty of creation in the form of an exoplanet orbiting Fomalhaut and a space artist's impressions of a vampire star, people we've just met fade from our memories as if they weren't ever there to begin with. Patrick Kilpatrick, a massively experienced actor who has appeared on what might just be every dramatic TV show of the last decade and a bit, makes more of his brief appearance as Nathan, endowing his character with a surprising amount of depth given how long he doesn't get to do it, but similarly, once the space footage takes over, he's lost too.

I'd like to have liked this film more, but while it has a great story wanting to come out, Ellenbeck and her co-writer Joseph Ruggieri can't seem to find a way to phrase it. Instead we're given some good scenes but little to tie them together. The impressionistic bundling of realistic scenes is not particularly successful, though the impressionistic bundling of impressionistic scenes is far better, in a sort of intergalactic Koyaanisqatsi sort of way. Perhaps appropriately, given where the story takes us, it felt like the film had two completely different approaches that were pulling each other apart. Had Ellenbeck chosen either of those, the result would probably have worked better than choosing both of them within a mere nine minute running time. That was only fitting if her goal was to demonstrate how jarring the events she recounts would be, but that isn't the best way to entertain an audience. Ontogenesis is a capable film but it should have been much more.

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