DVD Review: ULTIMATE ZOMBIE FEAST (2003-2011)

Flesh-eating zombies may never be likely to take over the world for real, but they have certainly dominated the horror genre for some considerable time now, and the infection shows no sign of easing up its widespread virulence as the plague continues its lethal march across the landscape of international horror, consuming all that fall in its path as it rapidly jumps host and moves from film to computer games,  converts the world of graphic novels and now moves on to its most recent acquisition, TV drama -- which takes the form of AMC’s hugely popular The Walking Dead, which was based on Robert Kirkman’s popular comic book series. This multi-platform dominance has been accomplished with apparent ease and equal success. One of the most heavily susceptible species of media, especially prone to harbouring a particularly unshakable variant of this most persistent of infections, has long been recognised to be the no-budget independent feature. The living dead have planted themselves firmly in place and taken root in that film backwater, as a permanent fixture that shows little indication of being supplanted anytime soon: all any aspiring Fulci needs these days, after all, is a camcorder, a little bluish grey face make-up and an "extra" or two happy to moan incoherently and affect a shambling gait for the viewfinder (and if they have no objection to chowing down on some raw butchers’ guts, all the better), and his/her film career is up and running!

Of course, very few of these flicks -- the vast majority of which are customarily proven to be amateurish dreck of the first order -- are worth even the effort it takes to insert the disc into a DVD drive, yet still they keep on coming by the dozen, dominating the landscape through a persistence of numbers that eventually makes them impossible to hold out against as they continue their mindless mission to fill DVD bargain bins in never ending bulk supply.

 

The zombie sub-genre remains popular of course (which partially accounts for this abundant harvest of flesh-eating variants) and it still occasionally but regularly supplies interesting material; yet one can’t help but be aware of the poverty of imagination which ultimately lies at the root of the ubiquity of the phenomenon. Yet, if there’s one interesting thing to comes out of a recent collection of zombie-based indies, released in the UK as a double-disc set by Monster Pictures (distributed by Eureka Entertainment), then it’s the set's inadvertent highlighting of the fact that the zombie sub-genre is actually capable of sustaining an incredibly wide selection of divergent approaches, and there are a spectrum of distinctions to be made, even within the indie movie bracket alone. Of course, the term ‘indie’ also covers a multitude of budgets and standards of professionalism, but rest assured -- everything included here meets a certain core level of competence (in other words, there’s nothing included in this set that is a complete insult to your eyes!), whether it be shot for tuppence on DV or aspires to widescreen cinematic standards of presentation. Across two discs, we’re given over five hours’ worth of zombie shorts from all over the world and in all sorts of styles, incorporating comedy, romance, action, satire and even the odd existential meditation. Although it’s an obvious PR line to take, there is indeed something here for everyone: if a particular short doesn’t happen to do it for you, then there’s every chance that the next one along will float your boat instead. The shooting standard ranges from grungy indie DV amateur style to comparatively glossy-looking fare. And there’s even a puppet animation zombie western here as well! The variety extends to running time, as we're given everything from brief five minute vignettes to hour-long mini features, with most entries averaging around fifteen minutes in length.

Dutch directing duo Barend de Voogd and Rob van der Velden demonstrate versatility even with the simplicity of their opener’s minimalist set-up: Zombeer (2008, Netherlands, 11 min) is an initially slick comedy short that highlights what happens when a bibulous brewer at a high-tech distillery keels over and drowns in a huge vat of his firm’s finest booze (‘beer with a bite’ is the company’s apposite tag-line!). Not only is the dead man (Rogier Schippers) reanimated by a secret mixture that’s being stirred-up in the bowels of the brewery, but everyone who samples it (which includes a party of Japanese day trippers) instantly becomes a flesh-craving revenant too. This quickie spans the gamut of the zombie sub-genre’s stylistic traits: starting off as a fairly proficiently filmed piece of work before moving into a (presumed) parody of [REC] by having most of the climactic zombie action shot as found-footage, viewed from the POV of the shaky camcorder of one of the fleeing visitors to the brewery.

Similarly, Zombies and Cigarettes (2009, Spain, 17min), also directed by a duo, Inaki San Roman & Rafa Martinez, takes the most familiar scenario imaginable – a zombie outbreak in a Spanish shopping mall which leads to a small group of survivors barricading themselves against the hordes – and uses it as something of a director’s show reel: it’s extremely well-shot and sharply edited, and it has gathered a raft of festival awards including some for best visual FX and best director. One can see why its flashy slickness would attract such attentions ... it may be the least original of any of the films included here, but it does at least attempt something interesting and new with the bitter-sweet cynicism of its conclusion, and the brief running time is perfectly judged for preventing it from outstaying its welcome. 

Zombies and Cigarettes (2009) Spain

Joseph Avery and Matt Simpson’s Plague (2008, UK, 17 min) heads for more obviously satirical waters in a grungy tale about an illegal migrant and gun-runner who flees the troubles of his Latvian homeland and winds up in a London that’s become overrun by the living dead. This sombre tale of urban isolation and despair makes fitting use of the zombie metaphor to examine the alienation, loneliness and persecution suffered by those forced to make a life for themselves in the jostling metropolitan sprawl that is contemporary London by removing the "jostle" and the "sprawl" and leaving only the apocalyptic decay of the aftermath of zombie plague. There’s one affecting and atmospheric scene in the middle of this piece which occurs when the narrator and protagonist investigates a derelict building, resulting in one of the most well-executed scare scenes to grace any of the films in the set.
 
Duncan Laing’s Bitten (2008, UK, 6 min) is another downbeat effort with an intriguing and disturbing premise. Here we join a young woman, played by Claire Wilson, in the middle of a zombie infestation and after she has just been bitten and is awaiting her own imminent transformation in the familiar surroundings of her home. Tense, ugly and grim, this is a fraught meditation on the prospect of the loss of one’s own faculties -- a situation which, frankly, will face us all in some form or other eventually. It combines gruelling body horror with a thought-provoking contemplation of mortality, and is only let down by poor "pancake" zombie face make-up, which rather breaks its spell. Another low budget effort, Arise (2010, USA, 18 min), attempts to excuse its own shoddy splatter effects with recourse to a facetious line in silly humour. The annoyingly cliched Death Metal soundtrack and the deliberately bad gore which accompanies all the "action" throughout risks losing the goodwill of the viewer fairly quickly, but this does actually have a thoughtful payoff about parental responsibility and maturity behind a long line of suppurating zombie cadavers shuffling forth to be deprived of limbs when the hero’s proficiency with his work tools finds another use after the living dead invade his workshop. Not Even Dead (2009, USA, 5 min) examines the misguided urge to hang on to a loved one and hope that a cure can eventually be found for the zombie infection: David (Joseph Will) keeps his zombified wife(Treva Tegtmeier) chained up in the basement and illegally feeds her, convinced there is still some remnant of the woman he used to know preserved inside the salivating creature’s brain. This is a bleak little tale about the catastrophic repercussions of irrational, undying love. Unfortunately, well-enough staged as it is, it just doesn’t go anywhere you don’t already expect it to go to.

 

Bitten (2008) UK

Randy Smith’s Fear of the Living Dead (2009, USA, 16 mins) is a cheaply shot attempt to do action and mystery with a small cast and a tiny budget and never really gets convincingly off the ground. April Campbell plays a young woman who believes she is the last woman left on Earth thanks to her immunity to the zombie virus, which has turned the rest of the world into flesh-craving ghouls. However, while raiding suburban houses for supplies she finds she isn’t the only remaining human being who's out and about after all. After becoming well-used to living in "survivalist" mode, this discovery becomes a difficult circumstance to adjust to. But she may well now be in even more danger than ever before. This is watchable enough as far as it goes, but it’s too slight and cheap-looking to pass muster as anything else but a minor quickie. Kidz (2010, Canada, 9 mins), on the other hand, is a delightful comic vignette in which a trio of child friends prove to be well-equipped for the death of their parents during a zombie plague because of their well-honed proficiency at shoot-em-up video games. Approaching the entire ordeal as just another game, they suit up as super-powered comic heroes and set about protecting the neighbourhood from the encroaching zombie hordes. Nicely acted by the young leads, this combines zom-com humour with a gentle evocation of the nostalgic joys of childhood fantasy and play.

Kidz (2010) Canada

 The Book of Zombie (2007, USA, 64 min) is, of course, the most substantial work here in terms of running time, and thus it’s no surprise that this is the one which most successfully manages to build up some degree of character interaction, which helps to create and hold on to viewer interest. A troubled married couple (Brian Ibsen and Larisa Peters) attempt to bond on Halloween night while their daughter is away having a sleepover with friends, but the evening is already going far from well for their relationship when the couple are suddenly assailed by zombie Mormons at their door who have taken over the small sleepy Utah town in which they live. As they battle through the streets to reach their daughter, they meet a couple of stoned and slightly vacant slacker youths working late in a local store, and the group attempts to hole up in a Medieval themed bar with a feisty waitress who’s got her zombie boss locked up in the store room. The conceit behind this gory comedy is that only Mormons are initially affected by the zombie infection, and they can only be stopped by exposure to caffeine (Mormons won’t touch anything that contains it, apparently), which is most readily available to our heroes in the form of soft drinks sold in the store they find themselves barricaded in (one character meets his end when his defensive can of Coke turns out to be of the decaffeinated variety!).

The Book of Mormon (2007) USA

 Andrew Loviska puts in a decent effort as the laconic, bespectacled slacker shop clerk Darwin, and Ibsen and Peters make their initially annoying bickering couple (who are gradually brought closer together over the urgent need to kick some serious Mormon zombie butt) more and more likable as the film proceeds towards its Evil Dead-style splatter-based finale. Not quite so likable in the comedy stakes is the British effort from Sat Johal, Tony Jopia and John Payne:  Zombie Harvest (2003, UK, 11 min) starts with someone tripping over while trying to escape from a zombie revenant by running through a farm, and ending up with their head stuck up a cow’s arse; things go pretty much downhill from there on. A few nice shots near the end, of a ghostly army of the re-animated dead shuffling, like rotted Fulci-esque cadavers, through a cornfield in the Oxfordshire countryside, is small compensation for this facetiously narrated tale which is told from the viewpoint of a soldier from a nearby American base, who’s on the turn after being attacked by a scientist who's been experimenting on himself with a genetic virus that has had some unforeseen consequences.  

The Skin of Your Teeth (2009, USA, 14 mins) is more a vignette than a fully-fledged short, and ends up leaving the viewer wanting more. But in terms of atmosphere and creepiness it’s by far the most successful piece included in this collection and is actually my favourite. Shot on a working farm in Western New Jersey by Dan Gingold -- a director/producer/editor based in Brooklyn, New York -- the film expertly uses landscape and space to create a mood of forboding which has a Cormic McCarthy-style sense of impending doom about it. The dialogue is kept to an absolute minimum and the set-up is conveyed visually, as we are introduced to a quartet of young survivors from a recent zombie plague taking refuge in a derelict farmhouse on the brow of a hill surrounded by a flat expanse of countryside. The group monitor emergency radio broadcasts for news and keep watch for the approaching hordes from the roof of the farm building using binoculars. The film vividly evokes a sense of dread relying on the featureless landscape as a means of emphasising the fact that there is nowhere to hide, and when the zombies eventually do come, the frantic battle for survival is by far the most visceral and scary out of this bunch of films because of this acrophobic feeling of the vastness of the countryside that the dead are seen to now dominate. Poor zombie makeup may slightly let the side down, but the last few minutes are the most terrifying out of any of the shorts here.

The Skin of Your Teeth (2009) USA

David M. Reynolds’ Zomblies (2009, UK, 47 minutes) is the other substantial work included in the set, with its TV episode-like run-time enabling a proper storyline to unfold rather than just the sketching out of a mood or the delivery of a set-piece. It’s steeped in the stylistic mannerisms and tone of 28 Days Later and its ilk, with shaky camerawork and digitally de-saturated colour tones ... but it sets up its dystopian world quite effectively and sells the action set-pieces it’s been designed to convey with conviction. There’s also quite an enveloping score accompanying this action and gore-drenched apocalypse. This is basically a ‘guys on-a mission’ film in which an elite squad of Rangers are sent out beyond the automatic-machine-gun topped wall, that provides a protective perimeter for a high-tech military base with a control room that looks like CTU from 24, in search of a rookie bunch of zombie hunters who have gone missing after leaving a distress call. The macho squad soon find themselves in trouble when it turns out that the zombie virus is mutating and can infect people even if they’re only exposed to the blood of one of the dead. There’s nothing wrong with this film other than the fact that it’s just a straight-down-the-line, low budget version of a typical zombie action film, with nothing new to offer. Performances are generally acceptable but characters, as tends to be the case with such material, are simply "types" and its hard to get more than casually engaged with the plight of the cookie cutter squad of military men who find themselves cornered and cut-off in a wilderness of marauding dead, as their superiors decide to cut their losses and bomb the whole area with their men still in it.

If it’s originality rather than straight-line thrills and action you’re after then look no further than the next offering: It Came from the West (2007, Denmark, 16 min) is an animated western created with hand puppets and directed by a 27 year-old student of the National Film School of Denmark called Tor Fruergaard. It tells the story of a freckle-faced, ginger-haired youngster with an overbite, called Virgil. Bulled by his oafish father and the mean guys who prop up the bar at his local saloon, who collectively dismiss him as nothing but “a wannabe cowboy weak pisser”, this plug-eared hero finds himself trapped between a rock and a hard place when the daily round of abuse he suffers at the hands of his daddy and his boorish friends is interrupted by a good ol’ zombie siege. A serial killer called the Dark Destroyer has been busy chain-sawing the local redskin population to death, and the natives decide to strike back by raising the dead in a sacred ceremony to take revenge on the white man. Before the bog-eyed-ugly cast of totem-faced cowboys have realised what’s going on, the Saloon is besieged by flesh-eating zombies freshly risen from a nearby graveyard and it’s up to Virgil to fend them off as the other patrons meet a variety of gory deaths at their undead hands. This humorous puppet adventure revels in outrageous cartoon gore, quirky characters and a great score that mixes tribal drumming and some extra twangy tremolo guitar licks.

It Came from the West (2007) Denmark

 Gregory Morinhas’ Paris by Night of the Living Dead (2009, France, 12 min) takes some stylish cinematography and cartoonish CGI splatter effects and combines them with fluid camera movement and vertiginous crane shots to make up this fast-moving action-fest, in which the dead take over the streets of a series of Parisian tourist destinations and only a handsome-looking, newly married young couple (Karina Testa and David Saracino) are available to fend them off when their wedding vows are interrupted by the zombie outbreak. This twelve minute piece is all about style, with the couple whipping off their wedding clothes in a trice and producing huge pump-action hand guns from nowhere (it’s always good to come prepared) before striking a series of action poses while variously either machine gunning, decapitating or otherwise eviscerating the staggering zombie crowds. The CGI is pretty low rent, but then that only adds to the cartoony artifice of the action, and despite the superficiality of it all, this manages a few tense moments and even a little poignancy at the end.

Paris by Night of the Living Dead (2009) France

Tarunabh Dutta’s Savages (2011, India, 39 min) is billed as one of India’s first independent zombie films and the imagery that comes with its interesting mixture of semi-rural/jungle locations is certainly different enough from anything seen in the other films included here to make this fairly cheaply-made effort stand out, although the influence of The Evil Dead and a few other classic Italian-made zombie films is always apparent. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of the participants in front of and behind the camera is rather fatally undermined by the sheer amateurishness of the cast performances. This mostly just looks like a bunch of mates having a laugh with a video camera while they spend a weekend making their own zombie picture. The story, in which a group of teenagers idly amble off into India's equivalent of the backwoods on the outskirts of their village in order to give one of their number a special ‘treat’ by taking him on a camping trip to a contaminated area that’s been sealed off as a biohazard for years, requires said characters to behave with more than the usual quota of stupidity we expect to find distributed among the cast of zombie fodder flicks like this. There’s a dishevelled-looking ‘wise man’ who at first tries to warn them off and then, when that doesn’t work, resorts to martial arts skills to get rid of them; but by then it's already too late and one of the group gets infected with the zombie-inducing contaminate with predictably half-arsed results.

The final film in this collection, Dead Hungry (2009, UK, 10 min), is the surprise gem of the bunch and is probably best summed up by its tag line: ‘life’s a bitch, and then you die. Then you’re a zombie, and death’s a bitch too.’  The unfortunate protagonist of this little adventure is a forlorn-looking and very hungry revenant with a rumbling belly who’s in desperate need of fresh brains. Stumbling through a forest clearing, dressed in baggy dungarees, our “hero” encounters a number of classic clichéd zombie/horror movie situations but is too generally hopeless at being a member of the walking dead to capitalise on them. Basically, he’s just a little bit clueless when it comes to the business of eating people. Director William Bridges deals in a wry, poignant humour that closely resembles the attitude of Shaun of the Dead, but here it’s the hapless zombie we feel for, and his point of view we take throughout this ten minute film ... not  that of the potential victims he’s attempting to make a meal of. When the classic zombie siege situation develops after a bunch of American teenagers attempt to take refuge in an old log cabin, it is the poor old hungry zombie outside whose fortunes we’re actually following, as he continually gets crowded out by the other more pushy zombies surrounding the trapped kids' hideout, who are also attempting to break in. Eventually a quirky little ‘romantic’ relationship develops between "our" zombie and another female zombie who's also taking part in the siege -- and the ironic bittersweet ending takes the concept of funeral humour to  extremes!

Dead Hungry (2009) UK

As a collection, the films included in this Monsters Pictures release demonstrate the full range and the great versatility the zombie film is still capable of; and although a few of the entries merely deliver standard zombie flick fare, many others remind us how there is still more than a spark of life left in the genre’s shambling cadaver, should the more inspired indie writers and directors choose to search for it.  

RELEASING COMPANY: Monster Pictures/AVAILABILITY: Out Now/GENRE: Zombie Horror/FORMAT: DVD/REGION: 2 PAL/ASPECT RATIO: Various/DIRECTOR: Various/CAST: Various

CLASSIC BRITISH HORROR BLU-RAY: The Blood Beast Terror (1967)

This review contains giant moth-related spoilers!

Following hot-on-the-heels of producer Tony Tenser's first post-Compton production of 1967 (the often underrated, Michael Reeves-directed Boris Karloff vehicle, The Sorcerers) which came in the wake of his break with former Compton Club partner and distributor Michael Klinger, this bizarre attempt to emulate the box office success of two grisly period-set Hammer classics, The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile (both of which had been filmed back-to-back at Bray the previous year), also became the first film to officially sport the Tigon British moniker; it went into production at the tiny Goldhawk studios in London’s Shepherd’s Bush in the summer of 1967 (coincidentally, on the same day that Terrence Fisher commenced shooting the stylish The Devil Rides Out at Elstree), under its original (and better) title The Death’s Head Vampire, but was eventually held back until after the release of Michael Reeves’ next Vincent Price-starring project, which turned out to be the classic Witchfinder General. By this point the film had been retitled with its current, much more potent-sounding, moniker. (In the US it was to trade under the even more disreputable-sounding The Vampire Beast Craves Blood!) In any case, the finished article initially opened as part of a double-bill with the Italian-shot, black & white Christopher Lee Gothic vehicle, Castle of the Living Dead, but was quickly overshadowed by the success of Reeves’ critically acclaimed masterpiece, and promptly paired up with it for national distribution by ABC's chain of cinemas, though now relegated to support feature status; even so, this canny pairing saved the day for Tigon’s investment and ensured that the film didn’t sink into total obscurity.

The Blood Beast Terror has not exactly gone on to enjoy a particularly distinguished reputation since then, with even its lead, the great British horror star Peter Cushing, damning it as one of the worst films of his career. But beyond the questionable belief that its cheap-looking veneer of rush-job, cut-price Victoriana is somewhat unconvincing, and despite a sometimes insipid script of (often) only barely-developed plot ideas cadged from seemingly every piece of Gothic horror literature going, the film today stands peculiarly proud -- a murderously rich, gas-lit testament to a faintly perverse but deeply mischievous brand of British-made macabre on the cheap, pioneered by Tony Tenser during what turned out to be the high summer of British Gothic cinema.

At the helm of this opus was Vernon Sewell -- a true British veteran, at the time considered a reliably safe pair of hands by Tenser (‘you don’t go far wrong with chaps like Vernon’) who had worked with Michael Powell during the making of his The Edge of the World in 1937, and whose work went on obsessively to develop and return to one particular haunted house tale which the director continually re-made across three decades-worth of pictures, starting with his 1934 film The Medium and ending with a deeply creepy Beaconsfield Studios second feature released in 1960, called House of Mystery (currently available with volume four of Network’s excellent The Edgar Wallace Mysteries series). Sewell had certainly proved his mettle by this point, during a long career which had now spanned four decades; he was attracted to this particular low-budget offering because of his friendship with its screenwriter, Peter Bryan. But Sewell doesn't exactly get proceedings off to an auspicious start: a laughably inept and unnecessary pre-credit sequence attempts to persuade the viewer that a chilly day on what looks like a lake in middle-England surrounded by a few weeds and a lot of mud, is really an adequate stand-in for the Limpopo River and the wilds of Africa. However, a few stock footage inserts of exotic animals (along with some African extras in a canoe and a Victorian naturalist in a Pith-helmet) do not succeed in selling the illusion, and the scene ambles on for no reason for far too long before we suddenly cut to a decidedly non-African setting with a histrionic horse & coach galloping down a murky day-for-night country lane while the title credits play over Paul Ferris's traditional, period horror score. Throughout, the film's curiously sloppy editing and badly looped dialogue are faults only  compounded by rather static direction from the sixty-four year-old Sewell, none of which makes for an overly exciting visual spectacle. Next to, say, Terence Fisher's contemporaneous The Devil Rides Out, it pales horribly in comparison.

 

 

But the core idea at the heart of the screenplay (Bryan was also responsible for penning the Hammer classics The Plague of the Zombies and The Hound of the Baskervilles) is so thoroughly off the wall that one cannot help feeling rather more lenient towards it than usual when regarding its all too numerous shortcomings. Where else will you see a giant humanoid Death’s Head Moth with the ability to transform into an alluring but voraciously sex-mad young Victorian woman, and which leaves a foetid trail of mauled and blood-drained male corpses in its wake wherever it might flutter? When this unlikely creature isn’t flapping its way across the suburbs of Victorian London in search of its latest prey, it poses as the daughter of the starchy Victorian Professor Mallinger (Robert Flemying), who created it while experimenting with the artificial breeding of hybrid African moths in his home laboratory.

While Wanda Ventham's Clare Mallinger continues to engage in stealthy, black-cloaked, nocturnal prowls which all too regularly result in the delicate flapping of scaly wings mingling on the night air with the diabolical cries of thwarted male amour, her buttoned-up father affects an air of obliviousness to her rum doings, while surreptitiously using his position of authority in the community  to cover up her crimes (even disposing of one victim by throttling him right in front of Peter Cushing’s investigating police Inspector), obsessed as he is with arcane electrical experiments on toads which he conducts in his home laboratory with the aid of a mini Whimhurst Generator.

This important work is occasionally interrupted by slide-show-accompanied entomological lectures on Lepidoptera for the local students from the nearby college (although they’re perhaps really a means of his supplying Clare with a ready store of potential victims) and taking delivery of exotic moth species, brought to him by an intrepid and unsuspecting young explorer named Britewell (William Wilde – seen sporting his pith helmet in the opening African-set sequence of exploration), who, soon enough, also comes to the attention of the insatiable Clare ... with predictable results!

 It turns out that Mallinger's latest experiments have all been directed towards creating a male moth-mate for his young ‘daughter,’ which requires the blood of young females in order to precipitate its emergence, unscathed, from its giant cocoon -- although quite why anyone would wish to create an intelligent moth-woman hybrid in the first place, let alone a mate for it, is a question the screenplay refrains from making even the most cursory attempt at answering. Bryan’s script is also rather hazy on the details of precisely how Mallinger accomplished this uncanny feat in the first place. As offbeat and unusual as this whole sex-crazed moth-woman idea may be, it doesn't prove too difficult to guess what the solution is with regard to ending her/its reign of terror once the creature’s pursuer, the waspish Inspector Quennell (played by the indomitable Peter Cushing, who is, essentially, reprising his role as Sherlock Holmes here), realises what he is up against: he simply builds a bonfire and waits for his prey to flutter predictably toward its inevitable doom!

The whole thing is, of course, quite ridiculous, and, as stated previously, Sewell’s direction is mostly pretty flat throughout, although sexploitation producer Stanley Long supplies agreeably sombre lighting in his capacity as director of photography, and art director Wilfred Woods and costumer Marie Feldwick manage to fabricate between them a pretty authentic-looking late Victorian milieu, which is agreeably aided by the exterior locations at Tigon’s habitual haunt, Grim's Dyke House -- the former residence of WS Gilbert and a mainstay of British drama during the ‘60s and ‘70s (now a restored hotel). Nevertheless, what really saves the film from cod-Hammer mediocrity is a whole slew of entertaining performances from a very strong cast. All of the participants seem to be on top form here, despite the paucity of quality material they may have been given to work with. Top of the bunch, as usual, is Peter Cushing who turns what one might've assumed to have been a rather thankless investigating police inspector role into almost a definitive career performance. Cushing was apparently convinced from early on in the production that this just might be the worst film he’d ever made, and said as much to Sewell, who claimed to take it as a compliment! Tony Tenser is quoted on the subject in John Hamilton’s book Beasts in the Cellar, where he discusses how the actor was dissatisfied with Peter Bryan’s script and added quite a bit of his own dialogue. One of these additions comes at the very end of the film, after the giant moth has perished in the bonfire's flames: Quennell’s phlegmatic subordinate, Sergeant Allen (played by future Minder star Glynn Edwards, sporting a fetching pair of false mutton chop sideburns!), gazes upon the absurd scene in question and deadpans: ‘they’ll never believe this at the Yard’ to which Quennell wearily replies, ‘they’ll never believe it anywhere!’  

Roy Hudd, who has a small comic role in the film as a morgue attendant who tells off-colour ’gallows’  jokes throughout Quennell’s examination of the victims, and who cheerily balances his pie & beer lunch on the end of a mortuary slab, between the stiff white feet of one of his ‘clients’, recalls how he met Cushing in the makeup chair on his first day on set: "Have you read the script?" enquired the great horror icon, to which Hudd replied that he had. "Not very good is it... I'm sure we can do better than that! How can we make it funnier?" The two subsequently rejigged their scenes together and between them manage inadvertently to disarm any criticisms of the film's shortcomings that one might have had by sending the whole thing up beautifully.

Prior to taking this role, Cushing had just finished work on a downmarket exploitation feature called Corruption in which he had been persuaded to indulge in a seedy sexual murder scene intended for the foreign export markets which involved him groping a topless dolly bird. The Blood Beast Terror represented a return to familiar period-set horror after this unfortunate dip into the muddy waters of exploitation, and the actor enters into the role with all his usual boundless energy and fastidious attention to detail, resulting in a decent trial-run for his then forthcoming return to the Sherlock Holmes role in the BBC TV version of the detective's famous adventures, which was to be one of his next engagements after the completion of this film. The tender relationship essayed between Cushing's Inspector Quennell and his screen daughter Meg (played by nascent sex-pot Vanessa Howard of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush fame) is also represented by a few nicely played scenes which make an interesting contrast with the strange and twisted father/daughter interactions of Dr Mallinger and the femme fatale, Clare. Unfortunately though, Howard is lumbered with a forgettable role when not in the company of her on-screen father.
 

 

The role of Mallinger was originally intended for Hollywood actor Basil Rathbone. The prospect of Cushing and he -- the two Sherlocks! -- sharing a screen in the same film, must have been a very tempting proposition for Tony Tenser, but sadly the actor died just a few weeks before production started, and the role was hurriedly recast with Robert Flemyng. Genre fans will be familiar with this actor from his titular appearance in Riccardo Freda's L'orribile segreto del Dottor Hitchcock. Perhaps he was cast with the thought in mind that Tony Tenser had started his film career distributing Italian films like this and Freda's La spettro as support features for his early sex comedies. In anycase, Flemyng essentially reprises the same role in The Blood Beast Terror, and does a marvellous job in indicating the obsessive but calculating madness of Malinger in an understated fashion. The blatant incestuous necrophilia themes which were at the heart of [...] Hitchcock are not so obvious here -- but anyone who artificially breeds for themselves a moth-monster daughter endowed with an unquenchable appetite for blood and sex is obviously not your average fatherly sort! Especially when that creation is given the pleasingly curvaceous form of a Wanda Ventham, who is also excellent in the role of Clare, happily entering into the lepidopterous blood-sucking spirit of things, even when she was apparently expected to wear the moth mask and costume herself during the transformation sequences! Other notable screen presences, which draw attention to themselves even if they’re not exactly given anything much of importance to do, include Kevin Stoney as Mallinger’s disfigured butler Granger, who’s only role really, involves stalking about looking suspicious and tormenting an eagle -- used in the script as a not-very-persuasive red herring. Doomwatch actor John Paul also turns up briefly as a fly-fisher called Warrender, who hooks one of Ventham’s victims, earlier dumped in the river.

The moth creature make-up ,supplied by Roger Dicken, is not so hot of course, and is sensibly kept in the shadows for most of the film -- only a few flashes of it appear towards the end amid some lazy lap-dissolves which take no account of Wanda Ventham’s full Victorian garb; and even they are pushing their luck, particularly when the thing attempts flight! Wilfred Woods' already mentioned art direction does help furnish the film with several very memorable sequences though: Cushing's investigation of a skeleton-strewn, cobwebbed basement room where Mallinger once kept and fed his ‘moth-daughter’ is effectively eerie and unsettling (Cushing’s fastidious brushing down of his jacket when he emerges from this grim lair is another example of the actor’s thoughtful elaboration of character with the aid of specifically worked out mannerisms) while a scene set in the dank basement of the house the Professor and Clare later up-sticks and steal away to in order to continue their work (which is where he torches the twitching cocoon of the male companion, ill-advisedly created for his ‘daughter’s pleasure) is cast in the kind of lush emerald gels more familiar from the Gothic works of the Italian masters of the period.

Although the special effects may not have always been up to the job assigned to them, and despite Peter Bryan’s script to some extent simply being a slight re-jigging of certain ideas already being used on a regular basis in the Hammer cannon (it even follows a fairly similar trajectory to Bryan’s own screenplay adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles) those ideas are pretty central to the British Gothic genre, and invariably revolve around a common theme often found in those British horror movies made in the sixties & seventies that were set in the Victorian period, and in which the country’s then-fading colonial role is critiqued from the vantage point of narratives set within the period when the British Empire was at the height of its self-regarding pomp.

These narratives usually involve colonial returnees, back from various outposts of the Empire but coming home with a dark secret which eventually consumes them. The Blood Beast Terror is basically a rehash of Hammer’s The Reptile, which featured a father covering up for his snake-woman daughter after she’d previously been cursed by an ex-servant for her father’s past colonial transgressions, but with India replaced by the Dark Continent as the site of reproach for colonial crimes. The idea of an apparently virginal beauty who tempts men with her innocence and then transforms into a sexually voracious predator during the sex act is a fairly common horror movie motif founded in male anxiety regarding female sexuality in general, and which finds perhaps its best known and classiest example in the Val Lewton 1942 production Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur. In the present case, the same theme is developed in the context of presenting a challenge to male patriarchy and Victorian scientific authority by dint of the fact that nearly all of Clare’s victims are students in training as entomologists at the local college! As the film progresses she preys on a young naturalist, who visits her father bearing more specimens; and later she attempts to make a victim of Warrender’s butterfly collecting son, William (David Griffin) who is pictured bounding through the countryside indiscriminately brandishing his net and attempting to kill every exotic example he finds with an arsenic-laced killing jar!

Okay, so a giant moth perhaps isn’t the most convincing or threatening iteration of the idea of predatory female sexual transformation, but matters are made considerably easier to bear by virtue of the fact that the HD transfer included on this Blu-ray release from Odeon Entertainment is, quite simply, one of the very best restorations of a 1960s horror film I’ve ever seen. Anyone who has been exposed to previous VHS and DVD releases of this title will know that even the best transfers were always muddy and extremely faded in colour. But now, the film really does look like it was shot yesterday. Colours are extremely vibrant and the increased picture clarity is, not to put too fine a point on it, astonishing! The restoration was apparently carried out by the BBC using the original 35mm interpostive, and it is very difficult to imagine how the results could have turned out better.

The main consequence of the film’s appearance being improved so radically and to such an extent here, is that one’s opinion of it becomes almost inevitably prone to revision in the light of the sheer beauty now on display. Suddenly, one of the grottiest-looking out of the batch of some of Britain’s most cheaply-made sixties pictures has been transformed, like a (ahem…!) butterfly -- emerging from its careworn chrysalis to reveal its true majesty for the first time. The mono audio isn’t quite so impressive, but then this seems to be down to the original, sloppily recorded post-synched dialogue, which occurs in large portions all the way through the film and doesn’t seem to have been recorded to a consistent quality. There was never any chance of any restoration improving on the original elements if they were always bad to begin with. Still, the results are intelligible enough though, and considerably better sounding than past DVD releases have been.

Another plus point is that the print used for this restoration turns out to be several minutes longer than other previously released versions, and features an extended incarnation of the scene involving the amateur play that’s staged in Mallinger’s drawing room midway through the movie, as well as a previously cut sequence with Peter Cushing and Jon Paul by the riverside during Warrender’s fishing expedition.  These two added sequences turn out to be something of a surprise to Jonathan Rigby (author of English Gothic and Studies in Terror) and David Miller (author of The Peter Cushing Companion) who provide the entertaining, witty and informative commentary track for this release. The duo point out Peter Cushing’s many additions to the screenplay and his fleshing out of his rather uninteresting character with various improvised ‘quirks’ to give the role more depth. Rigby in particular is adept at finding all sorts of quotable historical materials relating to the film’s production: we learn here that if Cushing was unimpressed with the fact that he found himself appearing in such a film, then that was as nothing in comparison to the contempt that Robert Flemyng had for the whole enterprise! Doctor Who fans can rejoice in the large number of actors appearing here who have had major involvement with the series at one time or another (Wanda Ventham being top of the heap with guest appearances alongside Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, Tom Baker’s and Sylvester McCoy’s), all of them dutifully pointed out by Rigby and Miller as they appear.

In addition to this enjoyable commentary, a charming twenty-five minute video interview conducted by Hammer expert Marcus Hearn with British cult icon Wanda Ventham is included.  On the aforementioned commentary Jonathan Rigby says at one stage of Ventham that ‘she’s got cult written all over her’ and with numerous appearances in Doctor Who, The Avengers, and, probably her most famous role, as Colonel Virginia Lake, in Gerry Anderson’s U.F.O., it’s hard to disagree. Hearn’s interview covers most of the pertinent portions of Ventham’s career (now also known for being the mother of Sherlock Holmes actor Benedict Cumberbatch) and is full of anecdotes and tributes to actors she’s worked with during the course of a wide-ranging career, including her favourable impressions of Troughton and Cushing. One of her first roles was a small part in Hammer’s Pirates of Blood River, but she walked off set in a huff after one of the assistant directors kept referring to her as ‘the blonde one’! This didn't hold her back though and she went on to appear in all sorts of interesting bits and pieces, even returing to Hammer years later for Brian Clemens' Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter.

The disc also includes an unrestored cinema trailer (in 4:3) and a comprehensive animated gallery of stills which includes production stills, behind-the-scenes shots and lobby cards, as well as the often over-the-top cover art for various VHS releases down the years.

Odeon Entertainment have made available one of the very best restorations of what is objectively a fairly mediocre 1960s British horror movie from Tigon’s earliest beginnings, yet it now plays better than it ever has before -- at least since it was first released back in 1967. With it featuring Cushing and much of the mostly television-appearing cast at the top of their games,  The Blood Beast Terror is a much more entertaining prospect than many might have realised, and this excellent release certainly deserves to be added to any self-respecting British Horror fan’s collection forthwith. 

RELEASING COMPANY: Odeon Entertainment/AVAILABILITY: Out Now/GENRE: Classic British Horror/FORMAT: Blu-ray/REGION: All/ASPECT RATIO: 1.66:1/DIRECTOR: Verrnon Sewell/CAST: Peter Cushing, Wanda Ventham,Robert Flemyng,Vanessa Howard, Glynn Edwards, Kevin Stoney, Roy Hudd, David Griffin, John Paul.

 

 

DVD REVIEW: The Harsh Light of Day (2012)

This review contains spoilers.

This recent independent British supernatural revenge thriller adapts the exploitation themes of the home invasion flick to suit the current post-Let the Right One In art house boom conditions enjoyed presently by a culturally renewed vampire genre, wherein contemporary urban locations are often requisitioned to provide a mundane (and in this case chav-inhabited) backdrop for some deliciously warped occult horror happenings. The result here is a conceptually intriguing potpourri of genre elements, not always entirely satisfactorily realised on the film’s ultra-low budget, but suggestive enough to imply the notion that some degree of thought has gone into the presentation of the motivations and actions of the characters whose lives it follows, and even, to some degree, providing a philosophical basis for them. Young, British first-time writer-director Oliver S. Milburn and producer Emma Biggins -- both graduates of Bournemouth University film and production courses, who embarked upon this project soon after obtaining MAs in their respective disciplines – have been as savvy in their marketing campaign for the film since its limited theatrical release in June 2012, as  they have with their genre-splicing choice of material; a fascinating internet blog focusing on the production processes involved in low budget independent film-making (including their travails and pitfalls), being just one of many online tools they’ve since utilised to conjure up visibility in an overcrowded marketplace.

The film itself reveals Milburn’s implicit feel for genre and makes the most of its picturesque Dorset coastal cliff-top locations and the contrast such idyllic surroundings makes with the grim-looking Bournemouth and Poole housing estates, shown by sodium-drenched night at the top of the film -- their looming concrete tower-blocks saturated in a pall of sickly neon luminosity amid environs inhabited by the vaguely feral-looking hooded figures who roam their dimly lit underpasses and flyovers. It’s from these dank, benighted urban locations that the violence which sets the main events of the film in motion is eventually seen to emerge, marking this initially as another entry in the distinctly British but much reviled ‘hoodie horror’ sub-genre category. The tensions invoked by the ambiance and character of these two very diverse settings as they're juxtaposed during a chronologically fractured opening sequence which inter-cuts between two very different social worlds (the film benefits greatly from some intelligent editing by David Spragg), and the image this creates of the contrasting lives and values of their respective inhabitants, provides an unspoken reminder throughout of the other conflicts and dichotomies being dramatised by the dialectically driven narrative -- the main one being the moral relativity which is implied by the positing of a world that’s uncomfortably split between two irreconcilable realms – the supernatural and the material.

The airy, comfortable, middle-class safeness of the lifestyle enjoyed by occult researcher and writer Daniel Shergold (Dan Richardson) and his loving wife Maria (Niki Felstead), stands in marked contrast to the dreary, rootless transience of the hoodie wearing, semi-criminal thirty-something yobs who are about to smash the comforting certainties of the couple’s existence apart. While Jeremy Howard’s sombre piano score implies a dark fatalism to the violence and brutality which is about to envelop the couple’s quaint, countryside cottage locale, the editing scheme used here sets up a thematic collection of parallel pairings which act as an illustration of the opposition between, say, the secular and the occult, lightness and darkness and the rural and the urban -- suggesting Daniel as a figure who is about to find himself precariously balanced between all of them.

At its core this is a traditional Faustian pact narrative, which begins when Daniel and his wife Maria arrive home from the publishers’ launch party celebrating the publication of the author’s new book about the occult, entitled Dark Corners, and are subjected to a harrowing Clockwork Orange-style invasion of their home by silent black-clad masked figures wielding iron bars, who proceed to film the murder of Maria on camcorder while Daniel is forced to watch her demise, powerless to intervene, his spine having been shattered during an attack which subsequently leaves him both bereaved and wheelchair-bound -- craving a vengeance he is never likely to obtain in his newly embittered state. The killers leave no clues behind them, and the police investigation soon peters out (‘no CSI magic,’ Daniel bitterly intones). One of the contributors to his recently published book, a mysterious unseen voice on the telephone called McMahon (Lockhart O’Gilvie) whom Daniel seems implicitly to trust, arranges a home visit from an enigmatic stranger by the name of Infurnari (Giles Alderson), who in turn claims to be able to offer Daniel the chance to find and then take his revenge upon those who have wronged him – but only for a special price, which unfortunately doesn’t involve the transference of money …

Infurnari looks at first glance like a sales assistant more likely to be found behind the counter of an electrical goods store, dressed in his short -sleeved shirt and jumper combo. The demonic red eyes soon give the game away though. The word vampire is never used at any point in the film (and fangs are conspicuous by their rarity), but the gory, torturous, glimpsed-only-in-flash-frame transformation process (which has a sadomasochistic element to it, highly reminiscent of some of Clive Barker’s work) that Daniel eventually agrees to undergo at Infurnari’s hand, leaves him with an inability to tolerate sunlight while nursing a deep craving for human blood that has to be sated at all costs. On the other hand, crucifixes are easily endured and Infurnari seems little detained by the vagaries of Catholicism, or any  religion for that matter, assuring Daniel that they're all just human constructions used as a device for framing a human-centric morality that means nothing to his kind, and which will soon have to be abandoned by Daniel as well.

The transformation (and this is the crucial part) also restores the use of Daniel's legs, and endows him with the handy ability of being able to pick up psychic traces and sense impressions which will help to track down the perpetrators responsible for Maria’s murder just by his being able to sniff out their sweat or traces of their blood, and to pick out other olfactory clues that the killers may have unwittingly left in their wake, but which are invisible to ordinary mortals. There’s an effective scene at this point which acts as a powerful allegory for the state of mind endured by those who are cursed by the need for vengeance: when Daniel examines the bedroom in which Maria’s death occurred, looking for a lead using his newly acute powers of perception, he is forced to relive the moment over and over again, as though he were being physically transported back to the time of the event; the deductive investigation process consequently becomes a painful and emotionally harrowing one, which keeps the wounds raw and fresh and stokes the fires of vengeance with even more fuel.

 

The supernatural world which Infurnari occupies is a gateway existence that represents the replacement of one set of moral values and standards with that of another, separate but apparently equally valid one; values which are visually represented by the vampiric abandonment of the daylight world, and its replacement with an existence exclusively conducted under the cloak of night. Infurnari claims that his race have never warred and never individually fight with each other, and that their occult, secret society of the supernatural is the realisation of a Utopian dream that’s far removed from and infinitely superior to anything in the human world, which is defined by the ugly horrors its peoples are capable of inflicting upon each-other almost as a matter of routine. To emphasise such a claim, the film also follows the progress of the three housebreaking masked intruders responsible for Maria’s murder, and reveals them not to be the imposing, diabolical satanic creatures of the night they appeared when they were kitted out in their all-black hooded uniforms and expressionless white masks, but instead merely a bunch of opportunistic, moronic small-time villains -- out to make a quick buck by peddling homemade snuff videos to a fat, greasy-haired gangster called Roy (Tim J. Henley).

In many ways, these three unkempt villains, played by Paul Jacques, Wesley McCarthy and Matthew Thorn, are the best thing in the film: a brutal, emotionally stunted trio of louts who even get ridiculed and chastised by their equally unbecoming ‘business partner’ for still dressing like chavs even though they’re all now well into their thirties! The fact that one of them (the nominal leader of the troupe) looks disconcertingly like Carl Pilkington is just the icing on the cake that spells out ‘losers’ in large sugar-coated lettering. These unlikable yobs have their own distinct code of conduct which sets them in opposition to anyone outside their enclosed estate of cramped tower block apartments and late-night dockside meeting places. At one stage the group ponder who they should make the subjects of their next ‘snuff’ project after having filmed a series of street muggings in their local vicinity at night, and end up deciding that they won’t prey on ‘their own kind’ anymore -- meaning those others who dwell amongst the twilight maze of underpasses and flyovers which surround the blocks of flats on the housing estates in which they themselves live.

People such as Daniel and Maria on the other hand, lead a life so far removed from their own that the gang have next to no empathy with them as human beings, and think nothing of carrying out the kinds of atrocities we’ve already seen result in Maria’s death and which later become voyeuristic material for Roy’s clientele. They’re the ‘underclass’ of tabloid mythology rendered here larger than life: out to 'happy-slap' you for delinquent kicks; lurking on darkened street corners waiting to follow you home. Except that their latest little money-making venture takes them right into the heart of the well-heeled existence of their middle class prey.

The street gang’s inability to empathise with people from other social strata can be parallelled with Infurnari’s lack of moral feeling for the human beings whose lives he needs to extinguish in order to perpetuate his own existence. In this version of vampire lore, humans can’t be turned by being bitten (that requires the special occult processes of bodily reconstruction which were seen being performed on Daniel earlier) – instead they are merely a source of nourishment and food. Infurnari compares his attitude to humanity to that of most people towards animals: we might entertain a certain fondness for our furry friends, but in most people that fondness exists perfectly comfortably alongside the idea of killing other creatures for their meat, without causing any moral disquiet whatsoever. But this, of course, is not true for everyone; and Daniel finds himself attempting to balance on a precarious moral seesaw thanks to the conversion process which has allowed him this opportunity to exact a bloody revenge upon his wife’s unrepentant tormentors, but which also obliges him to feed on sometimes perfectly innocent human beings in order to continue to exist at all.

Daniel’s attempt to reconcile his disgust with the moral vacuity of the killers he seeks out during the final act of the film with his own lust for the blood of the young care assistant, Fiona (Sophie Linfield) (who has so assiduously looked after him previously, during his anguished convalescence), and Infurnari’s insistence that he should give up any thought of possessing a moral obligation to humans now that he has been made anew, is the dilemma which lies at the heart of the film: for if Daniel were to truly extinguish all human sentiment, as Infurnari demands of him, then he would no longer have any compulsion to make the killers pay for the crimes they committed against his wife – and that is still what drives him onward, even despite an ugly scene, staged in his own kitchen, in which he is forced to gut and drain an unfortunate innocent of their life-blood.

This low budget offering addresses some interesting concerns, but doesn’t in the end entirely quite follow them through satisfactorily and settles for merely enacting clichés several times too often. I would also have liked more background on the Fiona character; she is perfectly sympathetic as far as she goes thanks to Sophie Linfield’s performance, yet the character is always overshadowed a bit too heavily by Daniel and Infurnari’s vaguely homoerotic relationship; we never get to know anything of her life outside her apparently boundless concern for Daniel’s welfare, which as a trait becomes just enough to allow her to play the role assigned to her in the script as a possible victim who is quite plainly entirely undeserving of the potential fate Infurnari would mark out for her; yet she is never allowed to become fully rounded enough to make the dilemma as acute and as impossible for Daniel as it should be. I found Giles Alderson’s Infurnari a bit too clean-cut and wholesome for someone who is supposedly a representative of a Nietzschean super-race of occult beings and the inexperienced cast also occasionally struggle to sell some of the gauche dialogue which has a tendency to clatter out of Milburn’s typewriter.

Other irritations revolve around the use of wholly unrealistic CGI blood splashes (the film would have been infinitely better off with no blood at all rather than the unconvincing animated variety seen here) and some missed opportunities to expand the narrative with regard to the Sean McMahon character, who is described at the start of the film as having been Daniel’s most forthcoming contributor of occult materials during the author’s researching of his book, and who even gets a thank you at the launch party. He is also the one who fixes up Daniel’s meeting with Infurnari  over the phone after the death of his wife, yet there is never any more of an explanation than that regarding the nature of his involvement in proceedings. Right up till the final moments I was expecting a last minute twist of some kind in relation to this character, but it never comes!

Nevertheless, the film comes over as a professional production despite its evident low budget giving it the air of a TV drama episode from about ten years ago. Jeremy Howard’s score is effective and the film even gets a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and a sound design that helps considerably to sell its low-rent effects. On the commentary track, which is included on the DVD from Monster Pictures, Milburn and Biggins talk about the difficulties they encountered  on this, their debut effort and offer advice to other first-time filmmakers on script writing, casting and location scouting. The picturesque stone cottage which provides the location for Daniel and Maria’s countryside home was only found a week before the start of filming, which resulted in any storyboarding already worked out by Milburn and director of photography Samuel Stewart having to be thrown out. To be fair, most of their problems seem to have been the result of a very low budget forcing them to dispense with the services of casting directors and location managers etc., so their anecdotes can only serve to relay a summary of the kinds of problems anyone attempting to make a film with very little money will inevitably also have to expect to encounter.

The DVD also comes with trailers, goof reels, deleted scenes and an interview with the director accompanied by some behind-the-scenes footage, again designed to act as a mini demonstration reel for the budding director just out of film school, in which Milburn expounds on his own experiences of the casting process, his attitude on set during the shoot, the post production process (including editing and sound designing) and the kinds of problems one can expect to encounter on a day-to-day basis when shooting any low budget film.  The disc also includes Milburn’s comedy short Speechless which was long-listed for a BAFTA in 2012 and has won numerous awards since its release on the international festival circuit last year. It demonstrates the director’s talents are developing fast and is in fact a much more confident production than the main feature. If Milburn continues to work in the horror genre we could be seeing great things from him in the near future.

RELEASE DATE: 2012/FORMAT: DVD/RELEASING COMPANY: Monster Pictures/GENRE: Home Invasion and Vampire/REGION: 2 PAL/ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1 OAR/DIRECTOR: Oliver S. Milburn/COUNTRY: UK/LANGUAGE: English/SUBTITLES: None

 

Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack! (2012)

A quick glance at the cover art and title of this seventy minute Japanese OVA (which finds a welcome UK DVD release courtesy of the Terracotta label’s TERROR COTTA imprint) might lead one to expect this film to be the anime equivalent of all those silly Asylum flicks such as Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus: a big dumb action/monster movie in manga form, with little of substance about it to hold the attention for long.

How wrong could one be? The only difficulty with attempting to dispel such an impression is that it might involve giving away too much of the deranged insanity that finds its way to the screen during the course of this increasingly bewildering tour of outlandish horrors from the mad mind of horror manga-meister Junji Ito.

 

That name will already be familiar to some, and if I mention a few of his other peculiar creations, such as Tomie or Uzumaki for instance, even non-manga fans will probably be starting to form a picture of the kind of thing they might expect from this straight-to-video anime spectacular, even if their previous knowledge comes only from familiarity with the live action film adaptations of these works which, although weird, were as nothing compared to the surrealistic but dense allegorical nature of the tales of mutation and bodily transformation which continue to be Ito’s stock in trade.

This adaptation of Ito’s ten-year-old manga “Gyo” has been directed and written (with Akihiro Yoshida) by Takayuki Hirao, himself no stranger to the weird side, having previously been entrusted to direct the first episode of Satashi Kon’s magnificently offbeat anime series Paranoia Agent after first learning his craft under the Paprika director’s assured guidance. Naturally, condensing a two-volume manga down to a seventy minute film results in a great deal of the substance and subtext from Ito’s original tale being simplified or lost, and Hirao’s version does indeed play more like a fast-moving action movie in some respects, with those in-depth and more perverse beats common to Ito’s manga characterisations finding themselves muted or abandoned altogether here. In actuality though, this oddball spectacle of nightmarish freakery still does some interesting things with the original protagonists: switching the gender of the principle lead and making the lead character of the manga merely a subsidiary presence here, who, in this alternate rendering, actually meets one of the most grotesque fates out of anyone in the film (although it’s a tough call, admittedly)! This subversion of the original manga’s focus might be lost on those of us coming new to the tale, but Hirao’s adaptation doesn’t lose the core essentials from the frankly bizarre set of ideas that motivate another feverish outpouring of insanity from Junji Ito’s brain.

The film takes the approach of starting quietly and then building up the intensity and the weirdness until the narrative reaches a surreal apocalyptic crescendo of madness at the end. It begins with three young female grad students taking a vacation in a summer house on the island of Okinawa when they notice a peculiar smell, like that of human corpses (the death stench) which seems to be permeating their surroundings like a foggy miasma. Then they discover a bizarre walking fish, scuttling about inside the house on what appears to be a metallic supporting ‘spider body’ framework. Hirao and Yoshida spend some time establishing this trio of anime female stereotypes as their lead characters (Kaori, the nice girl-next-door; Erika, the boy-hungry ‘slut’; Aki the chubby depressive) and then parallel the compete (and I mean complete) breakdown of their friendship with the coming of the end of the world, when the entire fishy contents of the pacific ocean suddenly emerges onto dry land in a biological tidal wave of devastation -- first on the Okinawa island chain, then the rest of Japan, and finally the entire world.

Seeing on television the disaster which appears to be consuming Tokyo, where her boyfriend Tadushi is still trapped, Kaori leaves her friends and embarks on a desperate journey in order to be with him, which involves her and a young photojournalist called Shirahawa (who she meets on the flight back), in first, an emergency aeroplane crash-landing, and then a monorail derailment during the course of their efforts to reach the capital.

This slightly offbeat iteration of a disaster movie scenario constitutes only the beginning of events though: back on Okinawa, Erika -- having indulged herself in a threesome with two local ‘horn dogs’ (there are times when the sexual content pushes this towards Hentai territory, although in the end the sex is used merely as a first act taster for the general atmosphere of derangement that’s soon to come) -- discovers she is breaking out in spots and emitting a horrid stench, much like the walking fish themselves, after an earlier run-in with a giant shark resulted in a foot injury (and the loss of most of her clothes). It turns out that these creatures of the sea are carrying a virus which turns their victims into bloated bags of death stench gas.

Even this is only the starter for the true madness to come, though, of which I should really say no more. All I will mention is that Ito’s main concept involves an utterly delirious cocktail of biological mutation, biomechanical invention & experimentation, and supernatural agency, which results in imagery that is grotesque, outrageous and utterly original. In the short text-based interview which appears on the TERROR COTTA disc, Ito says he’s a fan of the Beatles and writes his horror mangas while listening to their music. There’s something of the psychedelic fantasy landscape of the group’s 1968 animated film “Yellow Submarine” discernible in the colourful circus imagery which appears towards the end of this film, but the scatologically inclined direction things take here probably wouldn’t have appealed to the fab four’s sensibilities!

Hirao pushes the macabre levels to the max in imagery which embodies the original manga’s concern with sexual disgust and fear of bodily contact. The quality of the animation itself is often slightly cruder than is technically possible these days. But when it comes to realising the monstrosities and bizarre concepts that lie at the root of Junji Ito’s vision, this OVA adaption is second to none.    

 Company: Terra Cotta/Format: DVD/Region: 2 PAL/
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1/Original Release Date: 2012/Genre: Anime
Director: Takayuki Horao