Hank Boyd is Dead (US 2015: Dir Sean Melia) plus short interview with the director

One of my favourite films of the year so far, Sean Melia’s whip-smart acidly funny 2015 comedy about a dysfunctional family of killers seems to have sprung out of nowhere but definitely deserves your attention.

Sarah is a newbie catering assistant on her first job, serving up the food and drinks at a wake for Hank Boyd. The dead guy’s not so popular, what with being a convicted killer and everything, and so the guests at the wake are mainly family. But what a family! Hank’s brother David, a policeman with some, shall we say, control issues, presides over the proceedings. Then there’s grandma, the seemingly-in-shock Beverly, and wackiest of all is David’s sister Aubrey, who seems to have stepped straight out of Jack Hill’s 1964 demented family saga Spider Baby. Sarah starts to smell a rat when she realises that she had gone to school with Hank and is pretty convinced he isn’t, or wasn’t killer material. An overheard conversation between David and his cop partner Ray leads her to think that the wrong person may have been convicted of murder, but before she can do anything about it, she’s imprisoned in the basement while the whole family show their true colours.

Sean Melia’s short films – including the excellent 2008 movie You Don’t Know Me – suggested the producer, writer and director was capable of a decent feature length movie, but he’s surpassed expectations with HBID. Comedy thrillers can be really problematic, but Melia has his cast – Stephanie Frame as waspish but feisty Sarah, David Christopher Wells as on and over the edge cop David, and the brilliant Carole Monferdini and Liv Rooth as, respectively, Beverly and Aubrey – downplay their roles even when things on screen are ratcheted up to 11, which works so effectively. The script is also a winner, all sotto voce comments and hilarious back chat.

Stephanie Frame as caterer in danger Sarah in HBID

This is small budget stuff, but it doesn’t matter – the events in the house are interspersed with old Super 8mm family footage and interviews, which opens the film out and prevents it feeling too claustrophobic (most of the action happens in one location).  A great film that I can’t recommend highly enough. I can’t wait to see more from Sean Melia.

(This review was written for www.bloody-flicks.co.uk - Hank Boyd is Dead is on UK's Amazon Prime now).

I managed to snatch a few words with Sean Melia, director of Hank Boyd is Dead, via the magic of the internet:

DEoL: Where did the idea for HBID come from?

SM: I grew up loving all things horror and wanted to do something that was within the genre but also poked fun a bit at classic tropes like the psycho family, last girl standing, monster in the attic, that sort of thing.  I fell in love with the idea of a bickering clan of sociopaths with the same dysfunctions as a typical American family and how that could play against the horror of what was happening, sort of an Arrested Development meets the Sawyers or the Firefly brood.  Thankfully my cast got the joke and was able to stride the line between farce and terror.

DeoL: Tell me a little about the shoot – budget, locations etc.

Sean Melia

SM:  This is my first feature, self-financed by me with some help from family and friends.  Total budget was just under $50K, but everyone got paid for their work and it was a fun shoot.  I wrote the script with the idea of making a movie in a week since that was all the time I could afford to take off and we shot it in just under eight days. The location is my home town of Edison, New Jersey and the house is the house I grew up in. The cast is largely made up of actor friends that worked with me on my short films, but it wasn't just a matter of convenience, I thought they were all really great at what they did and would add tremendous production value to the project.  I'm looking forward to working with them again. 

DEoL: This was your first feature. Your previous short films (What Goes Bump in the Night?, The Administrator, You Don’t Know Me) have all dealt with seemingly innocent looking people showing a capacity for or being exposed to violence, and HBID builds on this. What attracts you to this theme?

SM: I think the key to all great horror or suspense movies is abnormal happenings in a seemingly normal day.  You Don't Know Me turns the tables on a prank, The Administrator is along similar comic lines of HBID where a hit man is asked to make a slasher styled snuff film starring an unsuspecting "client". My feature scripts all seem to deal with horrible versions of the American Family that I destroy in the most entertaining ways possible.  I'm a very empathetic person with a overdeveloped sense of right and wrong to the point where I feel guilty about dropping a gum wrapper on the ground. I guess I like to explore whatever is the opposite of that. 

DEoL: You seem to do a lot in your movies – writing, producing – even music. Do you have a preference?

SM: I enjoy all of it, although I'm looking forward to collaborating more on future projects and just sticking to the writing / directing gig.  Editing, producing, sound design, composing, web design, artwork and the like were all done by me out of necessity more than anything else. 

DEoL: What’s next – any future projects? 

SM: I have two other low budget scripts that I'd love to make in the near future, both of which were written before HBID but were a little too expensive to produce on our own.  One is a more serious thriller called I See A Darkness that deals with a family man who's contacted by an old roommate from a decade earlier who tells him that the house they used to live in is about to be torn down and he needs help moving the body buried in the basement. Welcome To The Johnsons is very much like HBID in tone and tells the story of a family of siblings and their significant others who gather at a lake house to stage an intervention, only to have the interventionist be replaced by a serial killer who specializes in writing first person obituaries.  If I can scrape up about $100K to do either of those I'm ready to go. In the meantime I'm writing a dark comedy about a yard sale gone wrong that I think is also going to be a lot of fun.  

DEoL: Sean, thanks a lot - we'll look out for them!

Unspoken (Canada 2015: Dir Sheldon Wilson)

It makes a refreshing change to see a low budget spook movie that isn't the output of a director working on his (or her) first film. Indeed Unspoken's Sheldon Wilson has a reasonable CV of small scale horror quickies under his belt, albeit mostly shot for TV.

Unspoken was made in 2014 under the original and far more descriptive title The Haunting of Briar House. By the time it played at the UK's FrightFest Halloween all dayer last year the title had been changed to The Unspoken. For the 2016 DVD release the definite article has been dropped and it's just Unspoken. Huh?

Unspoken focuses on a house in the woods that, in an effective and quite frightening prologue, is shown to be the scene of a mass murder and a family abduction by unknown forces - afterwards the place gets a reputation as 'the Briar House' which no-one will go near. Seventeen years later a young woman, Ruby, and her strange mute son Adrian move into the house, knowing nothing about its history and seeking a secluded country retreat to help get over the death of Adrian's father.

Local teenager Angela, who works in a children's nursery, learns of Ruby's need for someone to help with Adrian and offers her services - she is motherless and the extra cash will come in handy as her father is unemployed. Adrian is a strange and haunted little boy (well played by Sunny Suljic, all furrowed brow and pinched face) and it's not long before Angela experiences weird things in the house; rattling doors and marbles moving of their own accord. Angela's friend Pandy, who seems more than just a friend to our childminder, also runs with the local tearaways, who give her a tough time about her sexual leanings. They rope her in to breaking into the Briar House to take back the stash of drugs and 'other things' they've stored there while the house was empty, using its reputation as a safe hideaway. The break-in unleashes a force within the house which threatens anyone in it - starting with Angela's friend - and when Pandey's wrong-side-of-the-tracks cohorts, realising that she has gone missing, follow her in to recover their booty, the house takes its revenge.

Spooky Adrian (played by Sunny Suljic)

Unspoken seems to throw pretty much everything into the mix in the hope of creating an effective haunted house movie. There's a creepy handyman, strange visions, flying objects and a million jump scares. It also delivers a final reel twist that left me almost speechless - which anyone who knows me will understand is a rare phenomenon. I'll give nothing away except to mention that if you saw, and thought the denouement of Alistair Legrand's The Diabolical hard to swallow (a film which offers an equally off the wall explanation for a haunting), you won't know where to start with this one. It's that odd.

More positively I really liked the first half of this film. It's a pleasing slow burner with a promising atmospheric prologue. The camera creeps around uneasily and the cast are genuinely backwoods in look and behaviour. Things go off the rails with some random gore, which upsets the tone and remains unexplained. After which, and before that payoff, Unspoken turns into a spook movie farce, with various characters running in and out of the seemingly endless numbers of cabin doors. Thankfully trousers stay up.

Wilson's CV shows that he's not about making Oscar nominated movies, which is fine by me. However quite how this one will be remembered when the Canadian director's work is reviewed in the future I'm not so sure. A step forward from his twin 2011 disaster-movies-on-a-dollar offerings Killer Mountain and Snowmageddon? Or a step back from his 2004 movie Shallow Ground which at least made sense, and secured enough interest to manage a UK and US theatrical release, a fate unlikely to befall Unspoken.

Dark Signal (UK 2015: Dir Edward Evers-Swindell)

They say that God loves a trier, so He must be absolutely delighted with Edward Evers-Swindell's debut feature, a smorgasbord of horror themes packed into one straining-at-the-sides but still enjoyable movie. Dark Signal's genre spread manages to include EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon), stalk 'n' slash, crime, torture porn, domestic drama, ghost story and comedy. It's a giddy mix which doesn't all work but it's a lot of fun watching it have a go.

Laurie is a radio DJ whose show is about to be cancelled - she and her producer Ben are gearing up for one last evening of broadcasting, and he's lined up a psychic to make the final night go with a bang. Elsewhere Ben's on line friend, down-on-her-luck Kate, is being roped in to a robbery by her boyfriend - it's easy cash and all she has to do is drive the getaway car. The location of the robbery is a remote farmhouse which just happens to be the site of a recent killing, and the spirit of the murdered girl within is restless, a fact picked up when her disembodied voice comes through during the radio broadcast, summoned by the psychic. Who is the girl? Who is the killer? What is Laurie's dark secret? Is Ben as nice as he seems?

Obviously I'm not going to answer any of those questions, but despite the mixed critical reception this film has received, I rather like it  - it's far better than some have given it credit for.

Much has been made of the fact that Dark Signal was (executive) produced by Neil Marshall, and certainly the overall look of the film - it's very effectively shot mostly at night - recalls some of his early work like Dog Soldiers (2002) and The Descent (2005), although as usual with an 'executive' status, it's not clear how much or little direct involvement he had. Dark Signal was filmed in Snowdonia and the North Wales setting is suitably isolated (fact for location spotters: the hilltop radio station - surely a nod to John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) - is in reality a tourist attraction at the summit of the Great Orme in Llandudno).

Evers-Swindell has chosen his cast well. Siwan Morris as Laurie is  world-weary, all rolled eyes and one liners, and her on screen relationship with Ben (Gareth David-Lloyd) is often funny and touching. Elsewhere James Cosmo turns in another vaguely bonkers performance, but perhaps the biggest surprise is the first UK film appearance of veteran actor Cinzia Monreale as Carla Zaza the medium: fans of Italian horror will recall her from roles in, among others, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981) and Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) - she even gets a line where she gets to say the words 'the beyond'.

Either the budget or directorial choice (or a combination of the two) means that the final reel doesn't descend to over-the-topness as is so often the case with films of this type, and there's a good last section twist which is well timed and caught this reviewer off guard. I could have done without the obligatory torture porn scene - although necessary to the story - and the EVP stuff is just plain silly. But in a film where if you don't like one element another will be along in a minute there isn't time to worry about this, and anyway the whole thing's pretty daft, which is part of its charm.  

Poltergeist (1982) vs Poltergeist (2015)

When the original Poltergeist hit UK cinemas in 1982, it was quite a big deal. Back then big budget haunted house movies at the cinema were, if not non-existent, then few and far between - 1979’s The Amityville Horror, The Changeling and The Shining from the following year being other notable exceptions.

Watching the original Poltergeist now it all seems rather quaint, with some very dated effects which were obviously state of the art at the time. Arguably it was a movie that hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be, a fright flick or a family movie. This may have been attributable to the dual directorship, with Tobe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper’s reportedly rather laid back role in the chair gradually being supplanted by Steven Spielberg’s more hands on and family-friendly approach. The resultant X certificate from the BBFC (since downgraded to a 15) showed that the censor considered it a movie for adults – it was given a PG in the US on appeal. But the homeliness of the opening scenes, and the overall sense of wonder and wide-eyed awe suggested by the movie’s grand special effects set pieces, point to it being at heart a family film, albeit one with some grotesque touches.

For the two of you unfamiliar with the plot, the story involves the Freeling family and their three perky kids who live in the newly built suburb of Cuesta Verde. Dad Steve is employed by the real estate company who built the homes and stay at home mum Diane completes the wholesome American family. Youngest child Carol Anne starts hearing voices in the TV set, the beginning of a series of supernatural happenings which culminate in Carol Anne being snatched away into a kind of spiritual ether – she’s not dead but we can’t see her, only hear her voice.

A team of largely winging it parapsychologists are called in, but they have to resort to the heavy duty if minutely packaged talents of psychic Tangina, who understands what the spirits want and is finally successful in getting Carol Anne back. But the spooks are angered further by the little girl’s return, for they are the souls of the dead on whom the Freeling’s house is built (parts of the estate were constructed on the site of a cemetery), and who, in return for having their real life plaything taken from them and their resting place disturbed, exact a housebuilding in reverse revenge.

1982 Poltergeist hasn’t aged that well, but the acting is solid and the tone light and very family focused. The arrival of Zelda Rubenstein as Tangina is still a surprise, an awkward almost freakish woman invading the cookie cutter world of the Freelings. It may be mawkish but there are some great scenes - Diane discovering the supernatural powers in the kitchen, and Tangina’s other-worldly speech about spectral forces, for example - all underscored by Jerry Goldsmith’s heart-tugging music. But this film is all about parents protecting their children, allowing them to remain as kids unsullied by the events that happen to them.

No such fuss greeted the arrival of the 2014 remake of Poltergeist. Well, except for the armies of critics who queued up to bemoan the need for a remake at all and exercise high dudgeon at the injustice of it all. Most of these critics were probably too young to have seen the 1982 version at the cinemas and were busy defending their VHS memories. And let’s pause for a moment – there’s something in that. The original was made 33 years before the remake, so consider this:  if the 1982 movie had been a remake following the same time pattern that would make it an update of a 1949 movie – would critics have baulked at this? No, but because with the availability of film via an increasing variety of formats time has sped up, so thirty years now seems like just a remote click away – also the spread of ‘geekdom’ (and I’m not using that word pejoratively) means that there are a lot more people around who have an opinion on remakes these days, particularly on the potential bastardisation of one of their sacred cows.

Gil Kenan, director of the 2015 remake, was five when the 1982 Poltergeist was released. So he was probably one of the legion who saw the movie for the first time at home. His 2006 animated flick Monster House caught a little of the frenetic activity and childish wonder of the film he was about to remake, and 2008’s City of Ember cemented his reputation as a young person’s movie director. Which is exactly where the remake of Poltergeist establishes itself – it’s a young adult film, granted a 15 certificate in the UK (but a more accessible PG-13 in the US – once again showing that the American certification system understood the target audience, and was alive to the additional dollars that a wider certificate would bring). So it’s likely that the UK target audience for this film wouldn’t get to see it until it arrived, in whatever form, on their home TV set.

The most important difference between the 1982 and 2015 movies is tone. The Kenan version is very dark whereas 1982’s was quite the opposite. The remake also uses a lot of the 21st century horror movie clichés  – brooding chords on the soundtrack, a restless camera patrolling the house, and a lot of jump scares. The other thematic change is that the children are no longer the simpering offspring of the original, clinging to their parents. The kids in the remake are resourceful, plucky and smart. They are kids of the 21st century, and they make the 33 year difference between movies feel like a generational divide – which it is. Although the story and some key scenes are the same as the original, there are some important changes: the family, now the Bowens, have an aspiring writer mum and an out of work dad – far from being a successful household, they’ve suffered from the country’s recent economic downturn; the Tangina role is there but has been replaced by a TV ghost detective, Carrigan Burke - no room for strange little Zelda Rubenstein here (she died in 2010 anyway); the spirits are far more visible, shown as clutching hands behind the TV screen and then in more threatening form on the other side of the closet (yep, that rather hokey location is re-used in the remake – surely the basement would have been more in keeping with the modern feel?).

It’s perhaps the inclusion of key images from the original that weigh the remake down – the gnarled tree attack, the rope used to retrieve the daughter, the scary toy clown, event the haunted TV set itself – these were all effective in the 1982 version but appear clunky in Kenan’s film. The 2015 Poltergeist isn’t a bad film, just a bad idea. It would have been better to let the director free to make a film of his own – or maybe a live action remake of 2006’s Monster House would have been preferable – rather than restricting his talent by forcing him to remake a movie that, in my opinion, didn’t need to be re-made.