Saturday 18 November 2017

Happy End (France/Austria/Germany 2017: Dir Michael Haneke)

Some critics have suggested that after the emotionally scarring tour de force offerings The White Ribbon and Amour, adulte terrible filmmaker Michael Haneke has let audiences off lightly with his latest, Happy End; I couldn't exactly agree with that; it's just that the trademark enormity of his usual narratives is slightly more occluded this time round.

Perhaps taking its name from Kurt Weill's 1929 opera of the same name about warring families, Happy End is an initially elegant chamber piece revolving around a dynastic group - the Laurent family - who have made their money in construction. Head of the family George has onset dementia and an all absorbing death wish, and the fortunes of the business are slowly transferring to his daughter Anne, who is herself grooming her feckless and self-hating alcoholic son Pierre for a greater role in the company; at the same time she is cementing a relationship with British business man Lawrence Bradshaw, one which has more of the boardroom than the bedroom about it. Anne's brother Thomas, who has remarried after splitting from his vulnerable former partner (who, as the film opens, has just overdosed and is in hospital), is also having a sexting relationship with a musician. Thomas's daughter from that relationship, Eve, is perhaps the centre of the story; she has been moved away from her mother's residence into the Laurent family home, after revealing to the audience a less than angelic disposition (feeding ma's anti-depressants to the family hamster with predictable results - and don't worry, it's a CGI hamster that karks it - at least I think it is).

Most of the drama takes place in the Laurent family home, a slightly out of time baroque manse that speaks of privilege and bourgeois entitlement. The Laurent family feel more like squatters than rightful occupants, and part of the intensity of this film is generated by the growing awareness of the moral corruptness of the family members. Haneke is a master of this technique; letting you put the pieces together very slowly, and when you eventually understand the extent of the rot in the Laurent dynasty, realising that on screen nobody is behaving any differently than when you first met them - there is no dramatic final scene, just more of the same, piled in front of the viewer to stifling effect.

Happy End is a statement about families, the corruption of the innocent, but also tellingly the state of France. Early in the film there is an accident at a Laurent construction site (a fabulous and almost balletic scene where a disaster - the slow collapse of part of the site - occurs slowly and quietly at the edge of the frame, perhaps symbolising the shaky foundations of the Laurent dynasty) which the family manage to overcome reputationally by paying meagre compensation to the accident victim's obviously down at heel family. The film is set in Calais, and the refugee crisis in the country is also referenced, in a typically awkward Haneke moment: Pierre, clearly exasperated to the point of madness by his family's rarefied existence, gatecrashes the wedding of Anne and Lawrence with a group of refugees, to add a degree of reality to the vapidly photographed wedding party. Anne's subsequent apologetic accommodation of the refugees at a spare table is, one assumes, a nod to that country's treatment of immigrants.

Haneke's control of his actors, and the glacially observed details of their lives revealed in often static camera shots, is nothing new for this director. Slightly unconvincingly he frames some of the movie through the lens of a camera phone, and uses a strange CG effect for the scenes where the family are eating on the terrace of the house with the sea as a backdrop. If these techniques, and lengthy scenes of texting taking place, are to add further distance to the already vacuous lives in front of us, well it wasn't necessary. The cast do their jobs well. Haneke regulars Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant play Anne and George respectively (the latter turning in a borderline comedic role which sours during his last reel confession). But the star of the piece is Fantine Harduin as the 12 year old Eve, delivering a deadpan performance with manipulative eyes staring out from under her fringe; her capacity for future evil reminded me of the young future dictator in Brady Corbet's 2015 film The Childhood of a Leader.

So while Happy End may not be vintage Haneke, it's nevertheless a well structured and absorbing two hours, and it's good to see this filmmaker still producing movies for adults that make no concessions to popularity or comfort.

Monday 13 November 2017

George A. Romero - Between Night and Dawn Box Set

George A. Romero, whose name needs no introduction to fans of fantastic films, died earlier this year at the age of 77. The producer, director, writer and occasional actor was best known for a series of films updating and repackaging the zombie movie for a post Vietnam generation, chronologically developing the themes of the films to offer changing societal interpretations both shocking and wryly amusing. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, his first major feature, was and remains arguably one of the most important horror films of the 20th Century. But his output was more diverse than generally given credit for, and the three movies that make up the somewhat erroneously titled 'Between Night and Dawn' box set (it's missing 1978's urban vampire movie Martin because of rights issues) summarise his career between his first feature and 1978's Dawn of the Dead.

There's Always Vanilla (1971). Romero's very much of the time drama with comedy touches is the story of two young Americans that literally bump into each other and begin a relationship which starts off rather sweetly but quickly descends into drudgery and mistrust. He is Chris (Raymond Laine), musician and aspiring writer with a child from a previous relationship whom he visits from time to time, and she is Lynn (Judith Ridley from Night of the Living Dead), disillusioned commercials model, working in an environment she is scornful of and hassled by creeps. The film does a good job of creating a soured free love atmosphere, and downtown Pittsburgh is a suitably dull location, but this is a curio rather than a movie to treasure. In an interview with Romero (one of the many extras in this box set) the director admits that he doesn't think highly of the film because his technical attachment to the movie was somewhat peripheral. But despite its rather scrappy narrative and 'new wave' touches (those quick edits) there's some trademark Romero in here. The film's disassociated characters and moody off kilter framing would become hallmarks of his later movies, and it remains a spiky alternative to some of the films it was influenced by like The Graduate (1967).

Season of the Witch aka Jack's Wife aka Hungry Wives (1972). A previously little seen addition to the suburban witchcraft sub genre, ignited by Rosemary's Baby (1968) and most recently honoured (or sent up, depending on your point of view) in Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), Season of the Witch is a slow paced curio with a pronounced feminist agenda (as one imdb wag puts it, women's lib horror). Bored housewife Joan Mitchell leads a life of isolation, her work absorbed husband and fast growing up daughter having little time for her. Joan's female friends are suburban bores, but a visit to local witch Marion reveals to her the possibility of gaining strength, individuality and the attentions of the her daughter's boyfriend via witchcraft.

Romero's not-quite-a-horror movie is told entirely from Joan's perspective, documenting her decline and subsequent rise after discovering the power of witchcraft, but he doesn't quite give her the depth of character for us to identify or sympathise with her. Even the scenes of her husband being violent to her (edited out of the finished film) don't elicit much response in the viewer, aside from noting their casually exploitative nature. But Romero was less interested in characterisation than in putting his characters together and seeing what happens. Season of the Witch's violent finale is ambiguous. Are Joan's murderous actions the ultimate gesture of a woman's new found power, or the inevitable result of the deep psychosis that surrounds her? Whatever else, it's an intriguing watch.

The Crazies (1973) The nihilistic spectre of the Vietnam War looms large in Romero's film about the effects of a biological weapon - a virus called Trixie - released into a small Pennsylvania town. The director gives us no lead in to the events; the first scene, of two young children watching their father in the grip of toxic madness, smashing up their house, and their mother slain in her bed, is all the introduction we're given to the effects of the virus on those contaminated. But anyone expecting the post infection mayhem that Romero would give us in 1978's Dawn of the Dead may be disappointed; The Crazies devotes most of its time to depicting the chaos reigning among authority figures, the inability to strategise faced with the problem, and the rise of self appointed hunters of the infected, good ol' boys in white hazmat suits.

Romero's central point, that the veneer of civilised society is wafer thin, masking a climate of chaos, is relentlessly made, the bleakness of the story enhanced by the mix of amateur and professional actors and lack of narrative drive. It's an angry film - the scenes of people being picked off by rifle in an almost random fashion rekindles memories of the Kent State shootings a few years previously, and the self immolation of a priest, a shocking scene, directly references the same fate of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in his 1963 protest. Yet Romero, shooting here on 35mm, also manages to serve up some pastoral images to complement the viral madness.

The Crazies is a film that has actually improved with age and Arrow's restoration of this and the other two films, together with a host of extras, makes 'Between Night and Dawn' a great box set.

Thursday 9 November 2017

"We have such sights to show you!" A look back at the Hellraiser film series

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the UK cinema release of Hellraiser. With the tenth film in the series, Judgment, still showing no signs of seeing the light of day, I've been looking back over the previous nine films.

Hellraiser (1987) - being slightly long in the tooth I did in fact attend a screening of this film on the first day of its UK theatrical release. It’s perhaps difficult to recapture in writing the impact of the movie on British cinema-going audiences at the time, particularly when it has since attracted a fair amount of criticism for its supposedly dated effects and overall clunkiness of direction. But at the time there was simply nothing like it being produced in western cinema in terms of gore, and indeed it was one of only a small handful of UK genre films brought out that year.

Unlike some other horror films of the period, this one didn’t focus on a group of teenagers being menaced by an audience friendly wisecracking supernatural villain. There are some gag lines in Hellraiser, but because of the relentlessly dark content they kind of hang in the air like a bad smell.

For those of you who don’t know the storyline, welcome back from Mars. Kirsty, a young girl, reunites with her father Larry and her stepmother Julia who have just moved into a house previously occupied by ultra thrill seeker Frank, Larry’s brother, with whom Julia had a torrid affair. Frank has gone missing but actually he’s trapped under the floorboards in the top floor of the house, a weird shrivelled corpse whose return to human form is triggered by receiving some of Larry’s blood in an accident. Partly revived Frank uses still besotted Julia to supply him with victims to bring him back to rude health, but it’s not long before four Cenobites (explorers from another dimension with a keen awareness of pain and suffering) who have been after Kirsty’s reconstituted uncle, arrive back on the scene keen to drag Frank, Kirsty, and anyone else they can get their talons on, back to their own dimension.

It’s been well documented how this still essentially British production was fiddled with by the US money men, who Americanised the feel (if not the locations) of the film to make it attractive for export. And yes there’s always going to be a ‘what if’ feeling as to the version audiences might have seen if first time feature director (and author of the story on which the film was based) Clive Barker was allowed, and given the spondoolicks to bring the intensity of his original vision to the screen. But there’s still enough low budget depravity going on (despite Christopher Young's stirring string score trying to convince us otherwise) to give us a strong whiff of the original intent.

Overpoweringly this is a film with little or no moral compass at all, where the viewer is given the choice of bad or badder for antagonist. I personally love the scene where the glamorous Julia – brilliantly played by stage and TV actress Clare Higgins - ‘seduces’ a lone, trouserless salesman in the house, with bloody Frank waiting on the sidelines for his human fix. It’s comic and frightening at the same time, and yes some of the rest of the film can stretch credibility as well as narrative coherence, but scenes like this show it to be a milestone in horror film making, far too good to simply laugh off.          

Hellraiser II: Hellbound (1989) - like the original film I saw this on first release at the cinema. In fact I attended the movie’s premiere at the National Film Theatre in London, which included a display of Bob Keen’s dead body dummies which feature in the film. Seeing the not particularly convincing effigies in close up immediately prior to observing them on celluloid wasn’t such a great idea. I remember coming away from the the Tony Randel directed sequel rather unconvinced and decidedly underwhelmed. Whereas the first movie had contained the mayhem in one location and kept things quite tight, Hellbound opened the story out and included elements that seemed to have strayed in from a science fantasy flick.

Time has been kind to Hellbound though. Some of the more extreme footage which was originally excised from the film has been put back (if you’ve seen it, most of the restored scenes are from the self-cutting patient scene) and it all moves at a fair lick, not leaving you much time to wonder what the dickens is going on. Hellbound takes places not long after the end of the first movie. Kirsty is being treated in hospital and her account of Cenobites and strange boxes is treated as hysteria. However Dr Channard (a game performance by Kenneth Cranham) is somewhat of an expert on the box, or the Lament Configuration as it’s formally known. He’s another of these seekers after pleasure and pain, rescuing the mattress on which Julia died at the end of Hellraiser and resurrecting her. Of course the newly reanimated Julia (Higgins again, clearly a glutton for punishment) is the same old double crosser she always was, and before you know it the gates of hell have opened and Dr Channard becomes a Cenobite.

Hellbound also gives us a little backstory on, and more dialogue for Pinhead (something the next sequels were to exploit, with diminishing results) as well as some budget-limited but still inspiring hellscapes, Burton-esque stop-frame animation and a massive Lament Configuration which gives off black light, rising up from an Escher like maze. It's all a bit silly but this time Christopher Young's score matches the action, and most of the actors deliver great performances. There were only 11 horror movies made in 1988, and it may be damning by faint praise, but I think Hellbound is one of the best.   

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) - never was a title more apt. Four years had passed since Hellbound and those of us hoping the Hellraiser franchise had dried up were in for a big disappointment. This was the last of the Hellraiser movies that I saw at the cinema and I forgot about it immediately after viewing. Watching it again all these years later I know why. Hellbound director Tony Randel was originally scheduled to direct it but was taken off the project shortly before shooting began, replaced by Anthony Hickox (who sandwiched this between Waxwork 2: Lost in Time and Warlock: Armageddon which tells you all you need to know).

Hell on Earth opens with JP, an art collecting nightclub owner who acquires a rather grotesque pillar like statue, containing the fused bodies of Pinhead and other unfortunates who got mushed up at the end of the second movie. Oh, and the Lament Configuration. Enter on the spot reporter Joey Summerskill searching for her big scoop. She knows she’s on to a hot story when she sees a guy in hospital get pulled apart by mysterious chains. Taking in homeless Terri (who also witnessed the guy exploding) she gets access to Terri’s boyfriend, the very same JP. Fast forward a bit and Pinhead gets resurrected – well initially only partly, delivering most of his Krueger-esque mocking lines while still stuck in the statue. Mr Head eventually makes it all the way out and stops off at the nightclub, bizarrely converting several of the denizens into Cenobites – CD the DJ becomes a lethal CD dispenser, and another has a bulky VHS camera fused to his bonce. No, me neither.

If all this isn’t dumb enough, Pinhead splits from his inner human (before his conversion he was Captain Eliot Spencer, a soldier seeking pleasure and etc etc) and the two of them have a dramatic last reel tussle. Ashley Lawrence very briefly reprises her role as Kirsty but Doug Bradley as Pinhead is the only other actor from the first two movies in this. Some of the effects are pretty decent but the script doesn’t so much come alive as crawl out of people’s mouths.

I’ll leave the summary of Hell on Earth to film guru Kev Lyons, who wrote of the movie: “the film itself is full of unlikeable people doing obscure things for no discernible reason.”

Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) - the fourth film in the Hellraiser franchise, the last to get a theatrical release, was made four years after Hell on Earth. But most of it’s set in 2127 on the Space Station Minos. Yep, that’s right – Pinhead’s in space!

This one was directed by makeup wizard Kevin Yagher - his first feature directing credit - whose company Kevin Yagher Productions must have cleaned up nicely as they provide the bulk of the personnel in the credits. Actually, the on screen credit is one Alan Smithee, which as anyone knows is the name given when the real director either doesn’t want his/her name on the credits or has been removed by the production company. Apparently Yagher took his name off the production when Miramax recut the movie and asked for new scenes to be added which he couldn't commit to contractually. So it was actually finished by an uncredited Joe (Phantoms) Chappelle.

So we’re in space, and some guy has hijacked a space station, keen to complete an experiment the nature of which the audience only gets to understand towards the end of the movie. This guy is the last in line of the family who made the first Lament Configuration, back in, well that bit of the past where they still pomaded their hair. The maker of the box, Lemarchand, is an innocent toymaker working to a commission. The commissioner is not innocent, and he’s the one who uses the box in an arcane ritual summoning the first of the demons, Angelique. From that point on we follow the Lemarchand family through history as they remain linked to the box. The last of the clan (whose name has now changed to Merchant) is the hi-jacker and he feels that he can entomb the Cenobites and the box in the space station while the rest of the crew make a hasty retreat. But to do that he must release them first, which inspires about 25 minutes of that good old B movie standby, walking around in darkness looking for things.

If you’re reading this thinking this sounds like cobblers you’d be right, but in its incredibly cheap way it’s still better than Hell on Earth. The ‘historical’ scenes are as accurate as one of those episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but despite the ludicrous storyline and some pitiful performances, the effects work is way better than average (I noticed that Yagher had effects wunderkind Ed French on his team – a mark of quality) and there is at least an attempt to tell a story. Although apparently Yagher's version majored on the period scenes which Dimension didn't approve of, and Pete Atkins's original script, again changed by Miramax, favoured an anthology style approach, lost in the studio re-edit.

Cast wise Doug Bradley’s back as Pinhead, looking slightly jowlier than his 1987 incarnation – when Pinhead tells Lemarchand that he can’t die, he doesn’t comment that he can, and does, get older. Clive Barker was still directly attached to the franchise at this point (he was filming Lord of Illusions nearby and appeared on set a few times) but this film is mainly about the special effects, and barely passes the 80 minute mark. Very slightly better than expected given its troubled production history.

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) - the new millennium saw the Hellraiser franchise effectively rebooting itself. After the rights were purchased by Miramax for its Dimension company, and because of the nightmare of the previous instalment, the studio decided to go in a very different direction, and actively walk away from the established Hellraiser ideas. Pinhead and the Lament Configuration remain, but pretty much all the other elements are brand new. And to be honest after Bloodline that was probably very sensible, although Clive Barker hated the film. There was also the need to be economical with the production with only a $2 million budget.

In Inferno the publicly Christian director (and scriptwriter) Scott Derrickson has essentially made a modern morality tale, introducing us to Detective Joseph Thorne (played by David Boreanaz-alike Craig Sheffer). Thorne is sort of a dirty cop, thinking nothing of pocketing the contents of a dead man’s wallet and hoovering up the nose candy on those late-night shifts. He’s also a bit of a sex addict, leaving his perfectly nice wife and child in the middle of the night to pick up hookers, whom he pays from the contents of that filched wallet – classy.

But when we first meet him Thorne’s investigating the scene of an apparent ritual murder, and what should be discovered in evidence but a certain box? Puzzling over it the box does its Lament Configuration thing of opening and re-arranging itself, but on this occasion the walls don’t come tumbling down and no army of Cenobites appear. Thorne seems to have had a lucky escape. Except that when he’s back at his desk after his night of sordid passion, he receives a phone call from the prostitute he just left, in the throes of being murdered. And we quickly understand that on Derrickson’s watch the impact of the open box is much more subtle, disturbing and long lasting, with Thorne discovering that a journey to hell can come in many forms.

Provided that you can cope with its deviation in tone (and with Pinhead’s inexplicable conversion to being a kind of moral guardian - although arguably the Cenobites held the moral high ground in the first film as well) Inferno is an interesting movie, although if it feels like a myth-based paranoia  thriller with tacked on Hellraiser bits, that’s because it was – Dimension had the script lying around and decided to make a Hellraiser movie out of it. The Inferno of the title is clearly a nod to Dante.

We spend most of our time with Thorne and his deteriorating mental state, and he’s pretty convincing. The Detective's visions borrow heavily from Adrian Lyne’s woozy Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and are on occasion quite nightmarish. The movie is a little slow at times and the ending rather trite, and the whole thing feels like a big moral slap in the face. But it’s good to see the Cenobites restored to be more threatening and a finale which doesn’t end with ‘good’ triumphing over ‘evil’ and this sets the series up for a very different future.   

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) - continuing with the rebooted approach adopted by Dimension films in the previous entry into the franchise Hellraiser: Inferno (wherein the Hellraiser themes are more hinted at than made explicit) Hellseeker also marks the first director credit for Rick Bota. Bota went on to helm the next two entries as well, Deader and Hellworld, with decreasing success, although apparently he originally favoured a more arthouse direction for the movies, so one wonders how much compromise was involved. A Director of Photography whose work before and since has largely been confined to TV, Bota’s skills are well suited to this shot on video movie which often looks better than its $3 million budget. It’s also a pretty good entry in the series - despite script rewrites on Carl Dupre's original draft - although I would disagree with many critics and fans that reckon this to be as fine as the second movie Hellbound, although I can understand the comparisons, in that both films centre on Pinhead as a flawed character operating under a complex set of rules.

The other thing that won fans over was the return of Ashley Laurence as Kirsty, who was a last minute inclusion on the cast list. Now married, Kirsty and her husband are involved in a car accident at the start of the film, their vehicle plunging into a river. Trevor, her husband, manages to escape, but his wife dies trapped in the car. Investigating police scratch their heads after an investigation of the crash site shows no signs of Kirsty. Trevor increasingly falls under suspicion, particularly when it turns out that both Kirsty’s father and uncle Frank owned considerable fortunes that passed to her on their deaths, and would pass on to Trevor in the event of hers. Worse still, Trevor seems stuck in a world of terrifying visions full of Cenobite-type characters, and seduced at every turn both by strange forms and the more corporeal bodies of his female work manager and a neighbour. Trevor is unable to decipher what’s real and what’s a waking nightmare. Did he really conspire to kill Kirsty, and how real is the vision where he sees himself giving a distraught Kirsty a Lament Configuration box?

Hellseeker is a passable entry in the franchise, very much picking up on the paranoid themes of Inferno, and the end twist, with Kirsty returning to the film, is a welcome return to story strands of the first two movies in the franchise - it's a great revenge movie. Although the script was not originally conceived as a Hellraiser film, those elements feel less shoe-horned into the story than in Inferno. Dean Winters as Trevor is a good small screen actor and his talents are well utilised within the narrow confines of the movie’s production. And yes Doug Bradley does return to Hellseeker (as does the Chatterer Cenobite), his lines significantly more dignified than in previous outings - he even rewrote some in the final confrontation with Lawrence. I’m still not convinced that she is that great an actress, but that’s of little consequence as after this she disappears from the franchise completely. Although as we know from Bloodline Pinhead isn’t finally vanquished until 2127, so never say never!

Hellraiser: Deader (2005) - ok, up to now in my reviews of the Hellraiser franchise I’ve been broadly supportive of the various takes on the basic setup. But my patience is wearing thin with the ghastly Deader, the sixth sequel to the original movie. Doug Bradley was once quoted as saying that the Hellraiser movies were "very much an ideas series...The ideas...bubble under the surface. They rise to the top here and there, but they remain largely subtext." Now if that isn't a quality control get-out-of-jail-free card I don't know what is.

Filmed in Romania, where life (and camera crews) are cheap - it was a popular Dimension location - Deader features intrepid journalist Amy Klein who is sent on an assignment to Bucharest to investigate the cult of the ‘Deader,’ a kind of sex cult that seem to be able to raise people from the dead.  It’s not long before she discovers the Lament Configuration in the hands of a dead girl, and from then on in we’re treated to the now familiar scenes of Klein hallucinating various tableaux of death and depravity. Telling the story in this way only really works if you’re not sure what’s real and what isn’t, but because we’ve witnessed the same setup in both Inferno and Hellseeker all the guesswork is taken away from us.

As Amy Kari Wuhrer is a competent lead, who must have been paid in fags judging by the amount she smokes in the movie. But everyone else is just grumpy window dressing, and Doug Bradley, who finally makes his appearance as Pinhead over two thirds into the movie, looks bored rigid.

Like the previous Dimension Hellraiser films, Deader was based on an existing script which had fright flick elements added to it, but with much less success than either of its two predecessors – it makes no sense and the individual elements are really uninteresting.  Admittedly Bota’s direction makes the best out of some very flimsy material but it’s the first in the series to evoke boredom.

Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005) - the third and final of the Rick Bota directed Hellraiser movies, this uses the director's by now trademark 'oh so it was all a dream' storytelling techniques in extremis, ad nauseam, and generally way too much. Filmed in Romania back to back with Deader, this one introduces us to an annoying group of, ahem, teenagers, who we first meet at the funeral of one of their group. It seems that this lot have all been playing an on line game called 'Hellworld.com' (in a rather self reflexive Blair Witch 2 style move, the game opens with some music from the original film and a line of Pinhead dialogue). Even though it has resulted in a death by suicide, the group eagerly respond to an invitation to a Hellworld player party in an abandoned mansion on the edge of town. Cue endless scenes of supposedly debauched goings on with the cast shouting "Alriiiight!" a lot, until they're gradually offed, Saw sequel style, by someone who might be a Cenobite but actually turns out to be the dead kid's dad, eager for revenge. And it turns out there was no party after all, it was all a collective dream induced by the dad who has drugged them all and buried them alive as punishment. Cordonniers, n'est pas? 

Hellworld once again was based on an existing script, but this time the 'Hellraiser' elements are so tenuous as to be totally superfluous (Pinhead drifts in and out looking even more cheesed off than in Deader) and the original story is so poor it retains absolutely no interest for the viewer. One or two inventive deaths and the presence of Lance Henriksen as avenging dad cannot make up for the paucity of ideas and generally tired air of the whole thing.  While it is admittedly impressive to look at, belying its obviously slender budget, it's a poor swansong for Doug Bradley who wisely chose not to return for any of the future films in the series - to date anyhow. After completing all three of his Hellraiser movies, director Bota would subsequently sensibly confine himself to TV work

Hellraiser: Revelations (2011) - a further six years elapsed before someone had the cojones to resurrect the franchise, and the honour went to Victor Garcia, director of the lamentable Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007), a sequel of sorts to the already unwanted 1999 remake of the original 1959 movie. Ghastly as that film was, it's a minor classic next to Revelations. An additional fact tells us that the story for this one was written by Gary J. Tunnicliffe, best known as make up supervisor on all the Hellraiser movies since Hell on Earth. Nice career change Gary! To be fair he had also written the stories for several of the Hellraiser spin off short films, but space and my mental health forbids their coverage in this article.

So what's this one all about? Two male friends, Steven and Nico, venture out into Mexico, one seeking extreme thrills, the other tagging along in order to get laid. Nico is the dangerous one (he kills a prostitute 'by accident' in a toilet) and in the course of his pleasure seeking acquires 'the box.' Before you know it, he's been stripped of his skin by Pinhead, requiring supplies of fresh girls, supplied by Steven, to help him regain his human form. All this of course directly references the events in the first and second films, but without any of the motivation or logic. Fed up with the time it takes to do this, he kills Steven and borrows his skin, walking back into the bosom of his family. Having been missing for some years they are initially pleased to see him home, but then start to smell a rat as 'Steven' goes all home invasion on their asses. This is of course the first of the Hellraiser movies not to feature Doug Bradley - his stand in/replacement looks a bit like Andy Bell of Erasure fame, only with more nails in his face. Apparently the film was made by Dimension in order contractually to retain the rights to the characters, which is why it feels lazily made, poorly acted and barely 75 minutes long.

So thirty years later, what will become of the tenth entry in the series, Hellraiser: Judgment? Written and directed by Gary J Tunnicliffe, the film has apparently been completed, but has not to date seen the light of day. Apparently Dimension were originally considering a complete reboot, but decided on a sequel instead. Form an orderly queue horror hounds.

Friday 3 November 2017

Hellriser (UK 2017: Dir Steve Lawson)

Think that only the big movie companies are entitled to develop lucrative 'universe' concepts to rake in the moolah? Think again - arguably Hellriser has the distinction of being the second film in the cheapest franchise ever, with the promise of more to come courtesy of its ghostly pre-end credit lament. You have to admire the sheer pluck of director, writer, producer and caterer Steve Lawson in bringing back the lead character from his last movie The Haunting of Annie Dyer for his latest romp.

But let's go back a bit. In 2014 Lawson made a film called Nocturnal Activity. An interesting title, with nods to both soft porn and of course the Paranormal Activity films, it was his third feature, following on from the equally micro budget martial arts thriller Insiders (2002) and the distinctly Robocop sounding The Silencer (2007). Nocturnal Activity was the story of Annie, a woman who becomes possessed after moving into a new flat, her nightly visitations monitored by a psychic researcher; Dyer ends up held by the police on a murder charge. Released for the American market in 2015, Nocturnal Activity didn't fare very well. Keen to recoup some money Lawson recut and repackaged the movie as The Haunting of Annie Dyer and it got a straight to DVD release in the UK in 2016, leaving in the American accented ADR voices of lead actresses Raven Lee (of which more later) and Evie Nightingale, as originally intended for the US market.

On a budget of about £1,200 Lawson, who gives himself a number of pseudonyms in the credits to suggest a bigger technical cast, does pretty much everything in this film, except act. With the exception of a girl on girl dream sequence it is clear that no two actors share the same space when interacting with each other - a filming technique Lawson prefers for editing purposes. Most of it's filmed in a very cramped flat, and such effects as exist are fairly shonky post production CGI. And yet strangely it works. Another critic has suggested that Lawson is a Fred Olen Ray for these shores, but while there's truth in that there's also something rather George Kuchar-like in the campy acting, domestic settings and the overall loucheness of the production. A lot of that comparison is down to the character of Annie, played by former model Raven Lee; she's kind of fascinating. With her real voice overdubbed by someone who sounds half American, half Serbo Croat, her natural plus sized figure (a nice two fingers up to the parade of pneumatic clones who normally populate movies like this) and her insane eyebrows, she's a voluptuous enigma.

Following this film Lawson made Killer/Saurus (a cut price Jurassic Park but with a proper non CGI puppet T. Rex like what they used to have) and the excellent Survival Instinct, which I was lucky to see on one of its rare big screen outings at the 2015 Derby Film Festival.

But for his latest movie Annie's back in Hellriser, a slightly more ambitious film than The Haunting of Annie Dyer. Also returning from the first film is the character of hard bitten Detective Locke, played effectively by Steve Dolton, a Lawson regular and a bonus for any low budget film, his performance rising above Hellriser's economic constraints. Locke is introduced to a new partner, career pursuing Detective Keyes (Keyes, Locke, geddit?) played by Charlie Bond. Keyes is IT savvy whereas Locke is a dinosaur - they make a watchable pair. Locke is investigating a potential serial killer (seven bodies and counting), the trail leading to an abandoned asylum recently acquired by Dr Unnseine, who has been conducting some rather distasteful medical research. His latest patient is one Annie Dyer, incarcerated following events in the first film, Dyer it seems is the key to Unnseine's real purpose, to unlock the gates of hell. Locke works out that all roads lead to Dyer, but he still refuses to believe, much as he did in the first film, that there's any demonic explanation for what's happening. But yes readers, he's about to be proved wrong.

Hellriser probably didn't cost that much more than Annie Dyer, but it's a lot more ambitious - admittedly this is a relative term. The lighting concept is pretty good (especially the final scenes) and the classic 80s B movie elements (shower scene, dismembered limbs, gag script etc) are all to the fore. Dolton is reliable as ever, there's a laconic performance from Nathan Head as a morgue technician, and Raven Lee is, shall we say, a rather game girl (Lawson must be quite a persuasive director, which is probably a rather loaded comment to make in these post Weinstein times - I'm sure he's a lovely man).

As opposed to Andrew Jones, the other UK film maker whose output eclipses Lawson's but whose pieces tend to be more thoughtful and slow moving, Lawson's films are fun, unpretentious and worth catching. Hellriser is no classic but it's been made with passion, and if you listen to the director's commentary on the DVD, why it just make you feel that it's worth trying to make a movie of your own. And if you do, send it to me why don'cha?