The Love Witch (USA 2016: Dir - and just about bloody everything else - Anna Biller)

Elaine is the titular 'Love Witch' in Anna Biller's visually captivating but rather vacuous follow up to her 2007 send up of the 1970s sexual revolution, Viva.

Feeling the need to make a new start, our Wiccan heroine has just left San Francisco following the death of her latest significant other, and arrived in California, where her friend and fellow coven member Barbara has a house. No sooner is Elaine settled into her new lodgings than she's up to her old tricks, enchanting and seducing the town's menfolk from under their girlfriends' noses in a quest to find 'the one.' For despite being a witch, Elaine is just the same as any other girl - she needs a man to make her life complete. But unlike other girls she uses magic to get her guys, often with disastrous results.

Samantha Robinson as Elaine in another understated outfit.

Like her last film, The Love Witch is a labour of, er, love for Anna Biller. She produced, wrote and directed it, provided some of the music, and even designed the soft furnishings and costumes. The resulting film creates a strange, unreal and timeless small town America - it could be set anywhere between the 1960s and the present day - and the confusion is deliberate on the director's part. The movie is a visual overload of stunning sets, over the top clothes and porn film acting, with the cast shot in luminous close up on 35mm stock. This is a film that looks far better than it has the right to, largely thanks to cinematographer M. David Mullen, a talented guy with a lot of credits behind him, but nothing that suggested he had the ability to create this melding of Hitchcock's 1964 movie Marnie, Douglas Sirk movies and episodes of 1970s TV show McMillan and Wife. The opening scene, for example, is a note perfect pastiche with Elaine driving an open top car, the coast road rear projected behind her, and blood red 'movie of the week' titles appearing on screen - it's a joy to behold.

Samantha Robinson slips into something more comfortable.

Unlike Viva Biller has chosen not to star in this film, which is a blessing, as the cast here do a great job of acting badly, which takes some talent. Relative newcomer Samantha Robinson plays man stealing witch Elaine, her first starring role, and one she carries off well. She's stunningly attractive and while the intention may be to channel classic screen femme fatales (Robinson reminded Biller of Liz Taylor when casting, apparently) her smoky allure, immobile face and sideways looks strongly reminded me of Anjelica Huston's take on Morticia Addams in the Barry Sonnenfield directed Addams Family movies of the early 1990s.

The problem with The Love Witch is that beyond the look of the thing there isn't much else going on. It's a camp one joke film, although Biller insists it isn't a comedy but instead a dissection of the objectification of women and the subjugation of their needs to those of men. Well that's fine, but the subtext fails to fight its way through the layers of chiffon and lace, and the whole thing at two hours is just too long. Biller as editor, perhaps understandably, is loath to sacrifice any of her labour of love, and so some scenes, like the magickal rituals and an extended medieval whimsy, just go on and on. This lack of a sense of pace and constant parade of artifice, although beautifully done, ultimately makes The Love Witch a film to admire more than like, which is a shame because Biller is a promising director, and she certainly has a great cinematic eye. But really sometimes less is definitely more.

New Films Round Up #7 - Reviews of The Snare (UK 2017), Shock (USA 2016), Incarnate (USA 2016), Arbor Demon aka Enclosure (USA 2016), Sadako V Kayako (Japan 2016) and The Eyes of My Mother (USA 2016)

The Snare (UK 2017: Dir C.A.Cooper) First time feature director C. A. Cooper's extraordinary three hander tells a strange and ultimately horrific story, focusing on Alice, Lizzy and Lizzy's boyfriend Carl, who decide to get away from it all and hole up in Lizzy's father's Brighton penthouse flat. Problem is that Lizzy's dad doesn't know that the keys have been taken and when the trio move in, they eventually find themselves stuck on their floor, with neither lift nor emergency exit staircase accessible. With the caretaking staff on holiday and no residents in any of the other flats, they are abandoned and isolated. Worse still, the flat appears to be haunted, or is it just Alice's precarious mental state conjuring up visions of strangers? With food supplies dwindling and primitive sexual urges awakening, how will the three stay alive?

A UK movie with a setup more likely to come from a film made on the other side of the Channel, Chris Cooper's The Snare is a completely bizarre piece of film making. All three of the lead characters are pretty unlikeable human beings, and combined with the outright incredulity with which the viewer initially greets the prospect of them actually being trapped in the flat, the movie shouldn't work at all. But The Snare gradually exudes a quiet but persuasive power as the apartment's occupants start to shrug off the things that make them civilised human beings (not that Carl was much of a gent to start with). The claustrophobia and potential for sexual violence reminded me of Polanski's 1965 movie Repulsion (a touch point for a number of modern urban horrors it would seem) and the breakdown of civilised society through the prism of the three flat dwellers has its roots in 'Lord of the Flies' but also recalls Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 movie Possession.

Accounts of making the film have suggested that the cast rather went through the wringer during production. Carl in particular, whose ingestion of maggots in some scenes is pretty stomach churning, is bravely acted by Dan Paton, but all three give it some acting welly. Strong stuff indeed but don't expect a happy ending.

Shock (USA 2016: Dir Moziko Wind, Markiss McFadden) Written by and starring the comprehensively untalented Mohammed Bardi as a washed up ex-cop privately investigating a series of deaths linked to a psychiatric facility, Shock is without doubt the crummiest film I've seen so far this year - and I don't want to see any film that could be worse than this.

Wind and McFadden both have very bitty directing careers and this one is not going to help their CVs. Aside from Bardi's atrocious turn as the most unconvincing ex-druggy/boozehound (how is it possible for an actor to verbally mangle his own script?) central character David Evans, all of the supporting cast, despite being universally attractive, are just so much dead meat. Everyone chews through their scenes, which go on forever, and there's no attempt to advance the plot or explain just why there exists a blue faced killer and someone else wearing tryout make up for a camp Evil Dead remake.

Shock comes in at just under 70 minutes - it's the visual equivalent of turning in written homework where you make the text spread to three sides of paper just so you have two sheets to staple together and make it look like a credible effort. Apparently this has been released on Amazon Prime and itunes in the US - pray it doesn't come to the UK. Really really fucking horrible.

Incarnate (USA 2016: Dir Brad Peyton) Brad Peyton's background in the director's chair has ranged from kids' movies featuring The Rock (2012's Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) to disaster movies featuring The Rock (2015's San Andreas). Incarnate is his first 'adult' film, and you'll forgive me if I spent the whole movie trying to work out which graphic novel it was adapted from. Well apparently it wasn't, which kind of gives you an impression of how the movie comes across.

Chiselled Aaron Eckart is Dr. Ember, a scientist who has discovered the ability to inhabit the minds of possessed people and the power to carry out mental exorcisms. With his trusty team he's wired up Inception style, jumps into the unfortunate victim's brain space and flushes the bad stuff out. Dr Ember of course has a backstory; we meet him confined to a wheelchair, the result of a car crash in which his wife and son died, killed by a demon, Maggie, driving the oncoming vehicle. To be clear Maggie isn't the demon's real name - that would be rubbish - but rather the woman driving the car whose body the demon takes over. So while his gifts are seemingly altruistic in nature, in reality Ember is searching the minds of others for the elusive 'Maggie'.

The graphic novel adaptation suspicions refuse to abate with subplots involving the Catholic church and the development of a serum which gives Ember a 10 second 'lucidity break' with which to help him end his life if the going gets too demonic. As you'd expect from an accomplished director like Peyton this is slickly done stuff, reasonably enjoyable but daft as a brush. Incarnate's end credits - a 2013 production but only released in 2016 - suggest a troubled production by a company not sure how to market their finished product. I would have had the same problem.

Arbor Demon aka Enclosure (USA 2016: Dir Patrick Rea) Young couple Dana and Howard go off into the woods to celebrate their second wedding anniversary. He's about to go on tour with his rock band, fulfilling what looks suspiciously like a mid life crisis, while Dana hides from him the fact that she's pregnant, even though Howard reminds her that they're not a couple who want kids. However the woods have secrets of their own, namely a group of folk horror type creatures that make a meal of a group of gun toting locals - the sole survivor of that gang, Sean, finding refuge in Dana and Howard's tent as the beasts of the woods stalk them.

Patrick Rea's extensive experience in making short films informs the stripped down structure of this rather odd creature feature, which like a lot of monster movies these days can't decide whether it's a proper adult drama or full on horror flick. This does neither particularly well (Rea should learn some lessons about not over exposing your monsters - they just look silly) and the three hander drama between Sean, Dana and Howard is well acted if inconsequential. Things liven up towards the end - no spoilers but it involves Dana's baby bump. This is a nicely photographed, well put together film which summoned not an iota of fear in this viewer until maybe the last fifteen minutes, a case of too little too late.

Sadako V Kayako (Japan 2016: Dir Kôji Shiraishi) While watching this baffling and totally unnecessary team up between two 'titans' of J-Horror (it says here), I was musing on the idea of creature playoffs in cinema history. In the 1940s Universal pitched their classic monsters together in a number of films, my favourite being the rather beautiful (in content if not title) Frankenstein vs the Wolfman (1943). Toho Studios cashed in on the immense popularity of Godzilla with a seemingly endless number of 'Godzilla Vs' films following his 1954 debut. And of course there have been franchise oddballs like Freddy Vs Jason (2003) and the gamer spinoff Alien Vs Predator movies. But Sadako V Kayako really takes the prawn cracker, featuring the supernatural creatures from respectively Ringu and The Grudge movies and pitting them together in what must be the slowest fight to the death ever filmed.

And worry not if you haven't seen either of the source movies: Shiraishi explains the genealogy of both over the course of the film's rather too long hour and forty minutes, although he spends far longer over Sadako than he does the rather less interesting Kayako. How the two come together is a rather convoluted setup. Two girls buy a VCR to transfer an old wedding tape to DVD, only to discover THAT tape left in the machine; a family with a young daughter move into the 'Grudge' house, instantly triggering the hauntings familiar to anyone who has seen the previous franchise outings. The three haunted girls are drawn together by a lively medium, complete with kung fu poses, who feels that by playing the summoning tape from Ringu in the house featured in The Grudge he will bring the two protagonists together to slug it out over the girls' souls. Don't get too excited if this sounds like fun - most of the good stuff only happens in the last ten minutes, in true B movie style - and the spirits are so slow that it's touch and go as to whether any slugging's going to take place at all. 

Sadako v Kayako could have been dafter, shorter, more bloody, less stupid, all manner of things. It's a chore to watch and serves neither of the original films well at all. So it fits right in with the pantheon of movie monster mash ups then.

The Eyes of My Mother (USA 2016: Dir Nicolas Pesce)  First time director Nicolas Pesce's sombre mood piece is nowhere near as portentous as he clearly hoped when making it. It IS pretentious though, and very hard to like.

Shot in black and white but failing to make best use of its mid-west USA locations, The Eyes of My Mother is the story of Francisca, a girl with a poor start in life - her surgeon mother is murdered by a stranger who enters their house - who grows up with strange murderous desires (and more than a whiff of mum's chosen profession) beginning to awaken in her. Her mother's killer is imprisoned in the barn, his eyes and tongue removed, while Francisca continues to care for him; she also solicits the the comfort of others, with predictably disastrous results.

Quite what this is all about is anyone's guess. As Francisca Kika Magalhaes is monosyllabic and waif like but almost entirely without charisma, which is quite a problem when you have to carry the film. Despite its tawdry subject matter - necrophilia, murder and dismemberment among its charms - The Eyes of My Mother is a very polite, not to mention soporific movie. The subtitling (Francisca is of Portuguese extraction) and monochromatic vision suggests it has its eyes on the arthouse circuit, but it's a poorly executed film offering neither pleasure nor edification.

Prevenge (UK 2016: Dir Alice Lowe)

Prevenge, Alice Lowe's directorial debut, is, and please forgive the pun, a real labour of love. Filmed while Lowe was actually pregnant, it develops from the actress's feelings - ones apparently shared by many expectant mums - that the baby growing inside her was somehow in charge of its host, leaving the nascent parent a mere puppet to its needs. In Prevenge Lowe, who also wrote and produced the film, takes this idea to extremes as lead character Ruth.

Ruth is heavily pregnant and seemingly homeless, living in a hotel room which is her base for the entire film. She is lost, both within herself and, possibly, geographically. Ruth is also a killer, as we see in the first scene where she savagely murders a sleazy pet shop owner - although Ruth seems oblivious to the salesman's creepy come on lines and his death appears random and unmotivated.

Ruth is directed to kill by her unborn child, who maintains a near constant monologue of chiding, cajoling and instruction from within the womb; what Lowe has described as 'the ventriloquist's puppet who whispers in her mother's ear.' Although as Prevenge unfolds, a different and more tragic story is revealed, and much of the film's complexity stems from trying to understand the true motivation for Ruth's anger and bloodlust.

Oh sorry. I forgot to mention that this is a comedy. As bone dry and caustic a one as you're likely to see all year, but a comedy nonetheless, although with few belly laughs (oh, there I go again) - Lowe admits that having written comedy for so long she kind of forgot she was writing a humorous script, and it certainly shows. Prevenge's characters emanate from the kind of 'comedy of embarrassment' archetypes popular with TV writers of tragi-humour these days. DJ Dan, for instance, an unjustifiably overconfident 1970s/80s mobile disco owner, who Ruth meets when she strolls into a sparsely populated basement disco, could have been created for a Edgar Wright movie or something from a Ricky Gervais TV series. And Jo Hartley's note perfect, professionally courteous but hideously condescending midwife could have strolled in from an episode of Green Wing.

Lowe, who made this film quickly, and almost spontaneously it seems, is as comfortable writing these characters as we are seeing them. There's an immediate shared understanding of what we're being shown - the downplayed performances, the flat, drab interiors (nearly all of the film is shot inside, in often very cramped locations) - that derive from 'modern' UK TV comedy, and maybe it's this that makes the intermittent but very credible violence easier to stomach. Happily (although that's perhaps not quite the right word) Lowe uses this is a basis for something far darker than anything you'd see on TV. She is able to indulge her cinematic obsessions freely; camera shots have a Kubrickian emptiness, the murder scenes are as callous and stylised as anything found in a Dario Argento flick, and Lowe's reality divorced performance reminded me of a home counties version of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965) or maybe Scarlett Johannsen's alien lost in Scotland in Jonathan Glazer's 2013 Under the Skin.There's also a literary subtext to Ruth's character; we see her identify with - and later facially re-enact - the dancing 'Furies' in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion which she watches on TV; the Furies of course being mythological goddesses of revenge who sprang from the blood of the castrated Uranus.

Despite the range of competent supports, this is Lowe's film, and not just behind the camera either. She gives herself all the best lines - her fellow players are little more than stooges setting up her payoff comments, delivered in her understated Coventry burr. And why shouldn't she? Lowe has the track record - 15 plus years as part of comedy writing teams, and previously impressive performances in anything from Dark Marenghi's Dark Place (2004) to Ben Wheatley's brilliant Sightseers (2012) which Lowe co-wrote.

Prevenge isn't perfect by any means - there are some pacing issues inherent in a piece devised and executed within a relatively short time span, and once the overall surprise of seeing a (real) heavily pregnant woman killing people has worn off, the movie becomes slightly repetitive. But the film is all about the performances and the unsettling mood; Ruth (short for ruthless?) is that rare thing, a killer with whom we can sympathise. Lowe perfectly captures the anxieties and fears of pregnancy, and of course turns them up to ten, while never resorting to a cross word. Ruth is a woman done to by the system - homeless, refused employment because of the bump in front of her, and treated icily by the authorities. Who wouldn't go a bit chicken oriental? Ruth's (and Lowe's) fear of the gore and horror of childbirth are inexorably wrapped up in the violence meted out to others. This is a film about creation and destruction - perhaps the first true account of pregnancy stripped of the bows and ribbons that cinema usually places on the 'condition.' Oh, and did I mention that it was a comedy? 

Life, Animated (USA 2016: Dir Roger Ross Williams)

The viewing remit of DEoL continues to expand in the new year with this stunning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, who previously made the Oscar winning Music by Prudence (2010).

Life, Animated is the extraordinary story of Owen Suskind. Until three years of age Owen was a healthy baby (if a little overdistracted by his surroundings) but in his third year he withdrew from life and gave up talking - he was subsequently diagnosed with autism. Owen's despairing parents Ron and Cornelia (whose presence in the film shows just how much they have lived and breathed the ups and downs of their son's development) feared the worst for their son, but a seemingly gibberish utterance by him turned out to be a line from one of the many Disney films which he watched obsessively. Quoting whole blocks of dialogue from these movies became his communication lifeline and way back from silence to language. By using characters and situations from Disney films to help illustrate his feelings, he was able to navigate through a sea of confusion in a world where he was previously unable to relate to those around him. It must have been an extraordinary revelation for his family, all desperate for Owen to regain his essential humanity.

The Owen Suskind we see for much of the film is a confident, articulate young man who runs a class at his school for other kids whose disabilities limit communication. At one point in the film he's even invited to guest speak at at Autism convention in France (one can only guess at the challenge involved in learning enough French to deliver his halting introduction, in that the task of putting his own thoughts together for the address seem insurmountable in their own right). Disney hasn't 'cured' him but it has helped, along with armies of largely unseen support teams, to give him a chance of an independent life and eventually even a job - in a cinema, natch.

As always with documentaries like this there's a thin line between exploiting Owen and simply setting up the camera to observe him (Williams seems to favour a non interventionist approach - for example when Owen, newly moved into his independent living space towards the end of the film, pleads with the film makers to help him access his mail box, they fail to act).

Aside from the Owen's parents, whose fear for their son's continued independence after their death is understandable, perhaps the most interesting relationship is with his older brother Walt. They have a solid bond but the spectre of what will happen to Owen in the long run, and how that will impact on Walt's life choices, is well defined and very poignant. Walt clearly wants a brother he can relate to as an equal - at one point he has a 'birds and bees' conversation with Owen which possibly fires up the younger sibling and results in him coming on too strongly to his girlfriend (who is very sweet but seemingly quite immature) and who subsequently finishes with him; the break up is carefully managed by care workers looking after either side like solicitors in a divorce settlement.

Telling a story of a quarter century of living in just an hour and a half inevitably leaves more questions than answers. We see how Owen uses Disney characters to voice his concerns, hopes and fears (and the extent of how much these characters mean to him is clearly shown when two of the Disney voice artists turn up at his school), but that angle is only surely part of his development - other assistance is skirted around because it doesn't serve the central conceit of the film. But this is a minor quibble in an outstanding documentary which resists over Disneyfying the idea of Owen as a Peter Pan figure but does go some way to suggesting a greater value to the Disney stories than the schmaltz they are often seen to be.

VooDoo (US 2016: Dir Tom Costabile) plus a short interview with the director

Like wow, as Scooby Doo’s Shaggy used to say. Tom Costabile’s debut feature is a low budget messed up gem.

New Orleans country hick Dani visits LA to stay with her slightly more streetwise cousin Stacy. Dani’s here to escape the car crash of her recent past – mother dying, split with an ex she found out was already married – but now she’s here in La La Land to party and forget. Over drinks Dani confesses that her ex’s wife Serafine was into voodoo (in a pre-credits sequence we've already seen what she's capable of), and when Serafine heard about hubby’s carrying on with Stacy’s cousin, put a curse on her. But that stuff’s a load of rubbish, right? And now she’s in sunny LA, all bikini lines and valley speak, where life is good!

Wrong. Seems that the curse has followed Dani to California, and Serafine’s about to up the ante on how miserable life can become for the girl from New Orleans.

What follows is a literal descent into hell; unspeakable acts, cackling demons, branding, sacrifice and all. The first half of the movie is filmed in traditional found footage style (Dani excitedly wants to document all of her west coast adventure) but in the last portion of the film, once Dani is taken prisoner and lined up for her own private room in eternal damnation, you really don’t want to know who’s behind the lens documenting the depravity in front of it.

VooDoo is truly nuts. It’s an audacious movie which knows it’s filmed on a shoestring but fails to give a toss. Costabile’s vision of Hades might only have cost a few thousand dollars, but it remains truly nightmarish. It may want to emulate Nobuo Nakagawa’s similarly themed 1960 movie Jigoku, or maybe the hell sequence from José Mojica Marins' 1967 'Coffin Joe' flick This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse, but it’s far closer to the zero budget chancer movies made by the late great Ray Dennis Steckler around the same time; films like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), where partying teens run into monsters on a California beach.

Well done to Samantha Stewart as Dani, who as a wide eyed country girl undergoes a convincing transformation into terrified victim, and spends a good half hour doing nothing but screaming her head off. Constance Strickland as the voodoo priestess Serafine is also truly scary. I'm sure Ms Strickland is a very nice lady in real life but here she's truly nightmarish. And well done too to the cast of ‘hell’ – straight faces all round, which can’t have been easy.

Serafine L'Amour (Constance Strickland)

VooDoo is a recommended slice of devil may care genre filmmaking, the like of which I’d long lost hope of ever seeing again. So, rather blown away by this extraordinary film, I tracked down the director Tommy Costabile and asked him a few questions:

DEoL: Firstly, congratulations on the movie. I was bowled over. Are you happy with it?

TC: Thank you very much! I'm so glad you liked it. I show your review to everybody, it's awesome!! I am happy with it. Like any film there's a few things I would've liked to have changed or see differently, but in the end you let things go that won't dramatically affect the overall audience reaction to the picture. I'll always cringe in certain parts but it's only a couple things so I'm very happy about that. I've been working on the film since 2013 so it's definitely become a labor of love. 

DEoL: So can you tell my readers how you got into the murky world of film making?

TC: I was always enthralled with film making - writing, directing, producing, etc. Since I was a little kid watching all the Spielberg/Lucas fantasy films of the 70's and 80's (and all the films of that time that have them to thank) I was just amazed at how incredible an impact a film could have on me. Then horror came a little later and I was hooked for life. My mother loved Halloween and horror films and she really instilled that into me at an early age. The Exorcist, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm, An American Werewolf in London, The Omen, The Amityville Horror, it was just a great time for horror, and horror is so fun to watch. You can literally jump out of your seat, scream, laugh, etc. When a horror film is done right, the audience can experience a whirlwind of emotions in a couple of hours, and to be able to create that is what we all strive for in any film.

DEoL: According to IMDB (not always the most accurate of reference sources, but hey...) VooDoo is your first feature - what shorts etc have you done before this?

TC: This is my first feature, IMDb was right! It took a long time to knock that out. I was very heavily into Real Estate when I was younger, in my 20's, and the financial crash of the late 2000's really put me behind schedule in getting my first feature done (I do Real Estate to fund my pictures). But there's a certain subjectivity to that as I don't think I had enough knowledge or patience back then to have pulled it off as I do now. Lo and behold, I'm very proud that VooDoo is my debut feature.

I did complete a few shorts in and out of film school that are on IMDb as well. One of my first ones got a lot of attention at my school which was called The First Time and was a music video to Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight' about a MySpace stalker who finds a date, kills her, and buries her. Black and White, pretty gruesome stuff. Dominic Matteucci, who's also in VooDoo, was actually the lead in that. Then I did a comedic take on the gay mafia with my friend Frankie called Al Cabone. That was hysterical. Very dirty and raunchy. We're actually trying to raise the money for this to be a feature.  If and when we accomplish that this may be one of my next pictures. The last short I did I served as Executive Producer on a project with Shia LaBeouf called The Smallest River in Almirante.  This was a story about a boy going back to his native country (Trinidad) after moving to the States and realizing Trinidad was his home. 

DEoL: To the movie itself. You've written, produced and directed it. How did VooDoo come about?

The nightmare begins in VooDoo

TC: VooDoo came about after the financial crash and me and some friends had nothing going on. We were essentially broke, unemployed, and I was able to focus on movies for the first time in my life. Something good always comes out of something bad. I wrote a script called 'SERE' which is a fast paced action film about aliens, kind of James Bond meets Close Encounters. I submitted that to the Nichol when it was finally finished and went right into VooDoo. 'SERE' I couldn't fund. It's way too big of a budget. So to be able to write, direct, and fund a film, it had to be a small budget. For the first time in my life I actually wrote the script with budget in mind and knocked out the script fairly quickly in just a few months. We were on set not much long after that. 

DEoL: How did you prepare your cast (particularly Samantha Stewart) for what was to come in the film? Did they know what they were letting themselves in for?

TC: We actually made a point of this.  The first person I cast to be Dani was actually from New Orleans. I really wanted someone from that city to play the part. I flew her out to LA so she could audition and it was apparent she didn't have it, and it became clear that Sam and Ruth (Reynolds, who plays Stacy) were perfect for it. We sat down with them after auditioning literally hundreds of girls and explained what happened in the story, namely in Hell. Sam was kind of taken back a little bit, I think. I don't think she ever did anything like this before. But in the end they were both down for everything and anything and we got the greatest leads we possibly could. The rest was history!

DEoL: Tell me how you created the 'hell' scenes in the movie. Also, how did you recruit the demon extras, considering what they had to do?

TC: Dominic (Matteucci) was working at a haunted house called 'Blackout' which is a very dark, intense experience. It isn't your standard haunted house by any means. While he was doing that it became apparent that the world was ready for the extreme kind of horror I always wanted to tell.  We began recruiting actors from 'Blackout' and 'Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights' (friends and co-workers of Dom) before the script was even done. So essentially almost every actor in Hell is a real life haunted house actor of some kind. It made a lot of sense to me for this to be our demon cast. 

When it came down to Hell in general, almost 100% of the budget was going to be spent there, and I didn't want to even shoot it if the first "half" of the film didn't come out ok. The first 6 days of shooting was essentially the entire movie but Hell. We wrapped the first 6 days and put everyone on stand by for Hell. We edited for a couple weeks and I loved it. Sam and Ruth were so incredible.  Their acting was natural, their improv. was great, I loved it. So we called everyone and told them Hell was on, including Adam Rettino who really was the architect for the whole thing. He was the Art Director, propmaster, set builder, you name it. Adam and his crew worked literally night and day for a month. They slept at the warehouse where we built the set. I was there everyday with them helping but without them, and especially without Adam, this never would've happened. Adam's been working in the business for years and he had all the connections and knowledge to pull it off and he did. He's a legend.

Ron Jeremy cameos in VooDoo with Dani (Samantha Stewart)

DEoL: Ron Jeremy. Nice walk on role - how did that happen and has he seen the finished movie? If so I wonder if it's given him any ideas for future, er 'action' movies of his own.

TC: Ron's an incredible guy.  He's a sweetheart. We were at the Rainbow on Sunset one night and I asked him to do it. It just made sense because he goes there almost as much as Lemmy did, and he had a reputation for being there. If the girls were going to run into a celeb at the Rainbow it really would've been him! He agreed and played the part.  He hasn't seen the film yet, he wasn't able to attend the cast and crew screening. Hopefully he'll be able to be at the Premiere...

DEoL: What are your plans for the film. Festivals, streaming etc. When might we see a UK release?

TC: So far we'll be in theaters and VOD on the same day - 24 February 2017. We may open in theaters a week prior, the theater booker is still working it. We'll be in at least 10 cities in the US, possibly more. For VOD it should be everywhere. ITunes, Vudu, Amazon, Cable Networks, Playstation, XBox, Youtube, etc. We don't have a foreign sales agency yet but we are wanting to take it to Cannes this May. Foreign Distribution should come right after that. Hopefully it'll be a theatrical release in the UK as well!

DEoL: And what's next for you. How do you top VooDoo?

TC: How do you top VooDoo, what an awesome question! I'm working diligently on a story called 'Killing Sam' about the Chicago Outfit in the 60's that centres around a gangster named Mad Sam Destefano. It's very unique. This man was like Hannibal Lecter, but in the mafia. It's a very interesting story and it ties into a lot of very famous historical events such as the death of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, as well as the Outift taking over casinos in Las Vegas, etc. I'm working with Frank Cullotta on the script who will also be co-producing. Frank was the story behind Scorcese's Casino and he personally knew a lot of the players in our story. I'm very excited about the project. 

I'm also working on another horror called 'Uninvited'. The protagonist is a filmmaker whose last picture opened a door to the supernatural. His house becomes haunted and his wife and child are in physical danger. The story centres around how his personal needs and wants attributed to this and it becomes more of It's a Wonderful Life but in a horror setting. I'm hoping to shoot 'Uninvited' this year as we wrap up the script and pre-production on 'Killing Sam', in addition to beginning shopping 'SERE' and 'Cabone'.

DEoL: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions - good luck with VooDoo and your other projects!  

(A version of the film review above appeared in www.bloody-flicks.co.uk)

New Films Round Up #6 - Reviews of Beyond the Gates (USA 2016), Carnage Park (USA 2016), Pet (USA 2016), SiREN (USA 2016), The Disappointments Room (USA 2016) and The Monster (USA 2016)

Beyond the Gates (USA 2016: Dir Jackson Stewart) It's 1992 and estranged brothers Gordon and John are back in their home town to clear out the video store owned by their missing presumed dead father. Together with Gordon's girlfriend Margot they slowly package up the cavernous shop's seemingly endless numbers of bulky video cassettes. Stumbling across one of those interactive VHS/Board games popular a few decades ago (this one's called 'Beyond the Gates') and with the video tape still in their dad's VCR, they decide to play. The trio are immediately plunged into a fight for their lives where successive playing levels must be unlocked - with deadly and bloody consequences - before they can make their escape out of the game and the nightmare world it has created.

Although Beyond the Gates doesn't fetishise the VHS phenomenon in the way that, for example, 2008's Be Kind Rewind or 2013's curio doc Rewind This! have done (or even aim for cassette accuracy - the inclusion of 1996 flick Fargo on the shelves is clearly a mistake), the movie is otherwise consciously in love with its era. From the opening neon titles and Wojciech Golczewski’s spot-on synth score, to the use of former scream queen Barbara Crampton as Evelyn, the video guide to the game, this is an affectionately mounted homage, rather than a send up of 1980s creature features (the title even evokes the 1987 kids-meddling-with-the-unknown movie The Gate). Cleverly Jackson Stewart's debut directorial feature takes its time getting to the good stuff - and the characterisation of Gordon, John and Margot shows a lot of film-making confidence. But the gore, when it arrives, is definitely of the non CGI type that used to feature in the pages of 'Fangoria' magazine back in the day - and there's plenty of it. Pretty entertaining stuff.

Carnage Park (USA 2016: Dir Mickey Keating) Apparently based on a true story, Mickey Keating's latest movie mixes Tarantinoesque botched robbery stylings, a killer with gas mask straight out of My Bloody Valentine, and a heroine that could have passed as Tina Fey's sister, although not nearly as funny.

'Scorpion' Joe and Lenny, a couple of washed up herb-heads, hold up a bank, whose only customer seems to be winsome Vivian (played by skinny scream queen Ashley (The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II) Bell), busy negotiating with the manager not to foreclose on her father's house. Joe and Lenny abduct Vivian but as they drive away from the scene of the crime, one of the robbers is picked off by a hidden sniper. Vivian makes her escape into a local mine where a cat and mouse game ensues between unwilling heroine and crazed gunman.

This is about as good as it sounds. The first half aims for a sub Tarantino merging of crazy camera angles, 'cool' music (including 'Big Bad John' - please) and narrative time shifts, although lacking any of the sizzling dialogue one might expect. Once Carnage Park becomes a chase movie, any stylistic pretensions are abandoned, and the focus moves to the overall bonkersness of the killer, one Wyatt Moss, and whether Vivian will get out alive. I don't know if the fact that the film was based on true events hampered the director's choices here, but this is a derivative, uninspiring film which can't settle on one style and just emerges, like a number of Moss's victims, as a bit of a mess.

Pet (Spain/USA 2016: Dir Carles Torrens) Judging by Pet's premise - twisted guy abducts woman and holds her captive in a secret room for pleasure rather than ransom - one would be forgiven for assuming that this was just another adaptation of John Fowles' 1963 novel 'The Collector.' Originally and memorably filmed in 1965 with twitchy Terence Stamp, the theme has been re-used down the years, including the underrated 1981 movie Tattoo, with Bruce Dern as a tortured artist and Maud Adams his captured muse, and 2007's Captivity, where Eliza Cuthbert is exposed to all sorts of indignities by her crazed abductor.

Pet starts slickly if unpromisingly: nervous kennel assistant Seth bumps into beautiful but glacial and aloof Holly on a bus, claiming they were at school together. Holly denies knowledge of him, leading to Seth finding out her likes and dislikes via social media and stalking her at the restaurant where she works. When he is again rejected Seth drugs and abducts her to the kennels, where he keeps her prisoner in a cage. So far so formula, but without giving anything more away the tables are slowly and cleverly turned, with the imprisoned Holly slowly waging a war of nerves with the distinctly unbalanced Seth.

Basically a two hander, Pet grips throughout its tense hour and a half - it has the same air of claustrophobia that director Carles Torrens brought to his 2011 spookfest Apartment 143. Strong performances from Dominic (TV's Lost) Monaghan as the just-the-right-side-of-bonkers Seth and Ksenia (Black Swan) Solo as Holly are aided by a Jeremy Slater's literate script and a nerve jangling score by Zacarías M. de la Riva (who also produced the haunting music for Evolution, one of my favourite films of last year). Pet was a big hit at festivals last year and will hopefully do well in the home market.

SiREN (USA 2016: Dir Gregg Bishop) Jonah, about to get married, is whisked off to a stag weekend by his effervescent brother and best mates. Disappointed in the choice of lap dancing joint picked for the start of their festivities, the group are persuaded to head out to a remote house where they're promised something a little raunchier. But when Jonah falls for a young girl who dances for him in a locked room, he decides to do the gallant thing and free her, little knowing that she is Lilith, the siren of the title whose benign exterior masks an ancient monster within.

I watched this fully aware that it was a feature length development of the 'Amateur Night' segment from the 2012 movie V/H/S. 'Amateur Night' was directed by David Bruckner (responsible for the excellent 2015 movie Southbound). SiREN was directed by Gregg Bishop, whose was responsible for the 'Dante the Great' segment of 2014's V/H/S Viral. Symmetry cries out for the feature length development of 'Dante the Great' to be directed by David Bruckner. But I digress.

SiREN is, surprisingly, a lot of fun. It has some genuinely laugh out loud moments and wears its horror lightly enough, but it's not short on tension. It has a decidedly old school feel (when I started watching it I though possibly that I'd acquired the 2010 film of the same name instead - is seven years ago 'old school'?).Hannah Fierman as Lily reprises her performance in the V/H/S segment and joins a relatively small list of actors whose claim to fame is spending an entire movie in the altogether. It's normal here to describe such a performance as 'brave' but Fierman inhabits the siren character with an astounding physicality not usually seen in Trowbridge, Wilts (from where she emanates). Far better than its origins suggest, then.

The Disappointments Room (USA 2016: Dir D.J. Caruso) If you're old enough to remember I-Spy books, well by the time you've got through this one I'm betting your page of  'things you always see in haunted house movies' will be fully ticked. Really, what terrible generic nonsense this is.

Kate Beckinsale (sleepwalking - how surprising that she turned in her brilliant performance as Lady Susan Vernon in Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship the same year as this - maybe it means she's 'versatile') plays Dana, an architect who with her husband David and son Lucas movie to a real fixer-upper in the countryside, to make a new start after the accidental death of their baby daughter. So get those pencils out and get ready to tick some boxes: on their first night Dana hears a baby crying; there's a locked room in the attic that she's drawn to; Lucas starts talking to an imaginary person; the house has a terrible history; Dana has had psychiatric treatment following the baby's death and David thinks she's going bonkers again; the steadicam prowls around the house constantly: a kooky local librarian provides all the information Dana and we need to understand what's going on.

There are so many films like this that have been made in the past few years, and I bet there's a load in production - astonishingly there does seem to be a market for them; this one is prolific TV director D J (The Shield) Caruso's first attempt. As you'd expect from his credentials The Disappointments Room is very well made, but I do wonder what film historians will make of this almost fin de siecle outpouring of the supernatural onto our screens in, say, twenty or thirty years' time? Will this ever be seen as good?

The Monster (USA 2016: Dir Bryan Bertino) Back last year the only criticism I levelled at the otherwise very good South Korean movie Train to Busan was the arguably exploitative way that the young actor Kim Su-An was made to cry her eyes out for the last twenty minutes of the film. Well there are child's tears aplenty in writer/producer/director Bryan Bertino's stifling modern fairytale The Monster. Oh and rain. A lot of rain.

Lizzy (an astonishing Ella Ballentine) is a young girl living with her dysfunctional booze and drugs addicted mother Kathy (Sarah Michelle Geller lookalike Zoe Kazan). Kathy can no longer parent Lizzie, who is to be shipped off to her grandmother's house. But en route their car is involved in a night time collision with a dog. Mother and daughter must await roadside services, but there's something in the woods that's large, hungry and has very big teeth.

The Monster wears its fairytale elements a little heavily (Lizzy mistakes the injured dog for a wolf; the visit to granny's house etc) but there's no doubting the integrity of the two central performances. I may be getting older and a bit over-protective, but I wasn't sure that having long scenes of Lizzy getting soaked to the skin in the rain while crying her eyes out was a particularly healthy way to add drama to the piece. And the simplicity of The Monster very nearly kills it. At times the setup feels like an extended homage to a scene from Jurassic Park but its metaphoric power, never overstated but always obvious, lets us know what this film is really about. It's powerful stuff, carried by strong performances, some very effective monster sequences, and such a bleak world view that it's only at the end you'll realise how tense the whole thing has been.

We Are the Flesh (Mexico/France 2016: Dir Emiliano Rocha Minter)

Mariano, a lone man living in a squalid apartment (in a possibly post-apocalyptic near future, but nothing is explained), invites a young brother and sister to live with him, in return for helping him turn the flat into some kind of cave like dwelling. Mariano, who has manipulative, Charles Manson like tendencies, encourages the pair to lose their inhibitions (starting with that outmoded idea that siblings should never do the nasty with each other) and go through various degradations for him. Mariano is killed, only to be reborn for no specific reason, and the brother and sister pair eventually turn to murder as they cast off any remaining vestiges of morality.

“There’s no such thing as love. Only demonstrations of love” says Mariano at one point. Well we get quite a few (real) demonstrations of this in the course of We Are the Flesh (aka Tenemos La Carne), the debut feature from Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter, as well as ponderous dialogue, copious nudity, and a lot of primal screaming.

I have no idea what most of it’s about. My guess would have been that the whole thing is some impenetrable social satire on Mexican society (although the 26-year-old Minter has rejected this idea during interviews – in fact even he doesn’t really profess to know what’s going on).

The closest thematic comparison I could offer to assist any appreciation of We Are the Flesh would be Claude Faraldo’s dialogue free 1973 movie Themroc, in which a middle aged worker smashes up his flat, howls at his neighbours and has a relationship with his sister. And indeed there is a strong comparison between Michel Piccoli’s completely unhinged performance in that film and Noé Hernández’s as Mariano; he also reminded me of the Mexican director José Mojica Marins’ Coffin Joe character (especially the 2008 film Embodiment of Evil, where Joe aka Zé do Caixão encourages his disciples to give in to their wildest urges). 

But if Hernández could be described as brave in his acting, the performances of Diego Gamaliel and particularly Maria Evoli, as the brother and sister, have to be seen to be believed. Not only are they frequently naked, but they indulge in real sex acts (one wonder whether Minter has possibly seen any Gaspar Noé movies), a lot of slimy clambering about, and in one scene Evoli pees direct to camera. 

While this does feel like a now rather outdated attempt to shock the audience, it is directed with some flair and the art direction, with the flat gradually becoming a beautifully lit womb-like cavern, is very impressive for a film presumably with a limited budget. But while the movie starts off reasonably coherently, by the end, with its baffling final scenes, this writer was totally lost. I’m sure the director would be happy with that reaction, but unfortunately I found it an opaque, quite tiresome viewing experience which isn’t as shocking as it would like to be.