A Sweet and Vicious Beauty – review

Director: Eric Thornett

Release date: 2012

Contain spoilers

If there was ever an example of a film that was overly long this would be it, but before we look into it let us address the vampirism within the film. This film features a form of energy vampirism – it has a lore where the corpse of a deceased person contains the last breath – take that last breath and it can extend life and heal disease. The fresher the corpse, the bigger the impact – therefore a freshly murdered corpse will yield better results. It might not be standard vampirism, but with the breath being a simile for energy, vampiric it is.

However, this interesting premise, and some brave period work for a budget film, cannot hide the fact that from an editing sense this is a dog’s dinner. It weighs in at 131 minutes and I’d say an hour could have been shaved of the entire thing. Let’s look at it…

Narcissa dying

We are in the town of Harbour Bridge and we are told there is a graveyard overlooking the river and run off from the graveyard has imbued the waters with the essence of the deceased. Nearby there is a manor house where the last member of the Sentinel family resides, Narcissa (Bette Cassatt). She was dying and left the house for the first time in years. A large murder of crows waited in the trees for her and she collapsed, in the river. The essence of the dead revived her and gave her an idea on how she might continue to live.

Brenden McDougal as Ethan

In the town the local doctor, Moreland ( Bill Taylor), has hired a new young doctor, Ethan (Brenden McDougal), and no sooner as he arrived than the town elders send him to visit Narcissa (Moreland refuses to go up to the house anymore). They send him to local tailor Felix (Omar Ott) first and he suggests that rather than hire a horse (Ethan is no equestrian) Ethan goes to his friend Ingrid (Sara Cole, Faces of Schlock) who will drive him up in a trap. He meets the toy-boy who does take him, as far as she can as the horse will go no further and he must walk the last part of the journey. She gives him a red flower as the red will ward spirits said to haunt the woods.

costume party

Now we (and Ethan) do see strangeness in the wood. A spectral hand reaching from the river and branches reaching for him (in an unconvincing manner it has to be said). This all led to nothing. He gets to the dilapidated house and is met by Narcissa – pale and bloodless, one might say, but now ambulatory without a cane and better than described. He examines her (she has a slight fever, but apparently that is normal) and she insists he stays the night – she will throw a party in his honour. As he is coming down to the soirée the butler gives him a mask – it is a costume party and she will insist he wear the mask. He doesn’t wear it, she doesn’t insist, but they do dance. When he retires to bed the maid Sophia (Katherine DuBois) warns him not to open his door due to the ghosts that haunt the house. If he does, he’ll let them in.

with her parents' heads

He awakens to scratching, opens the door and then a ghost gets into the room – it is an effective little scene all told but absolutely not part of the plot and all talk of ghosts is lost thereafter. However, it does make him leave his room where he sees Narcissa take possession of a sack (her men have been digging). He follows her to an attic room and sees her remove the mummified heads of (we later learn) her parents. She kisses them (to his point of view, whilst we know she is drawing the breath from them). He makes haste to his room but Narcissa follows and explains what she was doing. She needs fresher though and asks him to get the heads of vagrants and homeless from the town’s morgue. The fact he does this is a bit of a stretch, even though she appeals to his scientific curiosity. Moreland allows this, but forces Ethan to decapitate the corpses himself.

sucking the breath

When a hospital administrator confronts Narcissa with a view to blackmail, she grabs an axe and takes his head. From here the film morphs from a period Gothic with necrophilic overtones (and a ghost story lurking somewhere but unused) into a slasher – Narcissa exchanges black attire for a white ballgown and mask and starts axe murdering her way through the town (with an uncanny knack of not getting blood on the dress). Of course, she is still stealing the breath. Ethan vanishes for a large portion of the film and Ingrid takes centre-stage as she tries to defend the town from the mysterious killer. Eventually the film will twist again as the headless zombies of Narcissa's victims return to put an end to her madness.

hunting

As well as making her less ill and extending her life, the last breaths do seem to make the woman stronger, faster and a fearsome expert with the axe, able to out-do any martial artist (one would guess). She actually says she is “becoming more than I was”. Somehow, however, the film should be a lot less than it is. It overstays its welcome by at least an hour and that causes the pacing to be awful. I’d remove the ghost aspects – they go nowhere – and then look for huge swathes to hit the cutting room floor. Bette Cassatt is clearly having a blast as the mad axe-woman but some of the performances are best described as wooden.

headless zombies

The costuming is, for a budget film, excellent and one does not get a sense of attire out of place and, indeed, the sets are suitable for the period portrayed. The entire thing about the crows (which want to take her overdue spirit to the land of the dead) was under-used and one might have suggested they would have been a better karmic provider than the headless zombies. On the other hand it is unlikely that any scene involving a murder of crows could have been rendered in any way without it moving to an unfortunate level of campness. But the zombies just looked odd (and we won’t ask how they knew Ingrid pointed at Narcissa to turn their attention that way).

Bette Cassatt as Narcissa

There is a good budget film wanting to crawl out of the grave of this film’s unwieldly length. It can’t however. I commend it for the sets and costuming, for the good performances (but not the wooden ones) and the absolute bravery of trying to do an unusual period film on a budget. That length, however, is unforgivable. 4 out of 10 is reflective of all the good bits I saw in it.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

The Vetala: A Novel of Undying Love – review

Author: Phillip Ernest

First Published: 2018

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Nada Marjanovic, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has spent more than twenty years translating an obscure text on the vetala, a parasitic, vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she finds herself face-to-face with the undead that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her lover - and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge. She must rely on her intellect, mythic lore, and even dreams to piece together the mystery of the manuscript. The vetala's opposition grows increasingly violent as Nada nears the book's conclusion, and with the help of two colleagues, struggles to decipher its climactic secret, which would allow her to exorcise the demon at last - freeing not only the mysterious man whom he has possessed for centuries, but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love. Suspenseful and unforgettable, Phillip Ernest's debut novel captures the most universal elements of human experience - even the monsters we face.

The review: When one accepts a wider definition of vampire than that drawn from the Slavic folklore from where we get the V word, then the folkloric/mythical incidents of blood drinkers, unquiet corpses and beings with vampiric traits is truly staggering. The vetala is such a creature, this time from India. Sir Richard Burton, 19th Century polyglot and explorer (amongst other things), first brought the vetala to the Western consciousness in the book Vikram and the Vampire. In the preface to the 1870 edition it is said that “The Baital-Pachisi, or Twenty-five (tales of a) Baital—a Vampire or evil spirit which animates dead bodies—is an old and thoroughly Hindu repertory.” In a footnote to this it is explained that, “In Sanskrit, Vetala-pancha-Vinshati. “Baital” is the modern form of “Vetala”.”

Author Phillip Ernest is a Sanskrit scholar from Canada, living in India, and has chosen the vetala as the focus of this novel and the world of Sanskrit scholarship as its stage. The book itself is a curious (in a good way) mix of supernatural horror, academia, high octane action (with one scene particularly coming to mind) and romance. It all merges together rather nicely and the book hurtles along with a sprightly pace.

The vetala itself is, within the lore of the book, dualistic with regards modus operandi but deliberately so. The vetala is a possessing spirit and it has the ability to possess a corpse and bring it to a state of undeath – raising the corpse like a more traditional Western undead. However, in this the vetala is also an entity that inhabits a living man (though there is a primary person the vetala possesses, it can also possess other people as well). The primary possession is of a man named Avinash who, centuries before, became jealous because his twin brother Amruteshvara fell in love with the woman he loved. It was this jealousy that allowed the vetala to take a hold of him until he was possessed.

Since then the three – the two brothers and the lover – have been reborn time and time again, the brothers always as twin brothers and the vetala possessing Avinash. Amruteshvara learned to replicate the tricks and powers of a vetala and the two brothers remember their past lives as they struggle with each other through their incarnation. It was Amruteshvara who wrote the obscure Sanskrit text that Nada had been working on with a respected Sanskrit scholar, who leaves her the manuscript and the task of completing the translation on his death. The book itself acts as a weapon and apotropaic against the vetala, who cannot allow the secret it holds (how to destroy it) be found. I won’t spoil the pay-off but suffice it to say it draws upon a trope that will be familiar to those who know the Western media vampire.

Definitely worth your time, this book touches on a variety of the vampire that deserves more exposure. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

A Mosquito-Man – review

Director: Michael Manasseri

Release date: 2016

Contains spoilers

Science goes mad and creates a mosquito human hybrid… its actually not an unheard of trope and the madness of the science is underlined by the fact that in every example (as well as this film we have also looked at Mansquito & Weresquito: Nazi Hunter) the mosquito human hybrid is male… and male mosquito’s don’t drink blood (they actually feed on tree sap, it’s the female mosquito that feeds on blood). Ok… perhaps that is thinking about it too hard!

bring on the mad science

The other thing to note is that it isn’t always necessarily enough to make the film a fully-fledged vampire movie – Mansquito actually became essentially a giant bug, rather than the hybrid that might lend itself to be called a vampire. But in this case the creature is a hybrid and we are definitely playing with the tropes – indeed vampires are mentioned at one point (in a dismissive way).

being drained

The first thing to note about this budget film is… it's great fun. Silly, yes, but great fun. It starts in a swamp, a mosquito settling on a hunter and being splatted for her trouble. The scene really is just a mosquito moment, with no story impact. Then we are in the city and a woman, Evelyn (Jordan Trovillion), is at an ATM when she realises that two muggers (Derek Faraci & Nathanial McClure) are behind her. She runs and they chase. She manages to mace one but ends up in a blind alley. Across the cityscape runs the Mosquito-Man (Michael Manasseri, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). He sucks the blood out of the first mugger with a long proboscis that emerges from his mouth and pierces the victim's throat (similes to the vampire work of Del Toro spring to mind) and then drains the other through his forehead. Evelyn faints.

the cops

She is being removed from the alley on a paramedic’s gurney. Two cops, hard-assed Shanahan (Monty Bane, Sleepwalkers) and Bowen (Danny Mooney), have got the case. They see the coroner (Lee Thomas) who confirms the victims have been exsanguinated. Like some kind of vampire? The coroner says no – a vampire would have left two punctures not one! So more like a mosquito then. The film then folds back to earlier that day…

Jim's having a bad day

Jim (Michael Manasseri) is a nice guy. Too nice (and unobservant) to notice that his shrew of a wife, Jackie (Kimberley Kates, Kindred: the Embraced), is cheating on him – cutting her call to her lover as he walks into the room. On his way to work he picks up co-worker Evelyn – she, it becomes apparent, is in love with him. He is hoping to get a promotion at the nuclear plant he works at but his boss, Mr Kopple (Lloyd Kaufman), promotes his rival Dan (Ted Myers) instead and sacks Jim. Jim’s car has been towed from the company parking lot as he no longer works there. On the way home he spots Jackie’s car at a motel and sees her with… you’ve guess it… Dan.

hybrid

With rain falling he runs into traffic but the car heading for him stops. In it is Dave (Ricky Wayne) who takes him to a bar and gets him drunk. When Jim passes out he takes him to his lab… What I haven’t mentioned is that the world is being ravaged by a mosquito borne virus and Dave is trying to find a solution to it. He injects the insensible Jim with an experimental serum and releases mosquitoes into the room – if it works they won’t bite Jim but he is indeed, eventually, fed upon and goes into a fit and dies. His body is dumped in an alley but a swarm of mosquitoes descend on it and he suddenly revives (so, technically, he has come back from the dead). The mosquito DNA in the serum, the bites and his exposure to nuclear material causes him to mutate. He hears Evelyn scream and we are back at the scene from the start of the film. From there he starts to avenge himself on those who wronged him.

summoning the swarm

So, he is faster, stronger (he is able to punch through three inch, bullet proof glass) and at one point seems to vanish. He now sees in a compound way (his eyes have multiple pupils) and he needs to feed (and, once sated, breed). He can summon swarms of mosquitoes – sometimes, it appears, from nearby and at other times from within him. He is able to see through the eyes of his mosquito swarm. He is able to perch up walls. Much of this comes out of the vampire playbook. Daylight isn’t an issue – but in his lab Dave has a giant bug zapper! And, as I said at the start, it’s fun.

Jordan Trovillion as Evelyn

All the cast seem to be having a blast – specific mention going to Monty Bane, who is great as the hard-headed cop, and Jordan Trovillion who gives some fantastic looks and offers a solid performance. Most of all Michael Manasseri is clearly having a blast. This is not serious, how could it be, but is played with a wink and a tongue in its cheek. The film is on a budget but does great things with it, considering said budget. Its sort of a creature feature meets super (or anti) hero flick with a hybrid bug vampire. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Aswang – review

Director: Michael Laurin

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

This is a US/Philippines’ production that uses the traditional form of the aswang. The term aswang literally means monster and is both an overarching term for several folk creatures from the Philippines but also for a specific monster type often associated with the vampire.

You’ll see that in this there is an interesting merging of the western monster types (we see the aswang with standard vampire fangs at one point and it is called a type of ghoul at another) with various versions of the Philippines’ creature.

adults of the family

It begins with a family arriving in the Philippines. Tia (Shelene Atanacio) is from the area and married to Richard (Michael Laurin) and they have two kids Alice (Shannon Laurin) and David (John Michael Laurin). They have been met by Tia’s brother Vince (Merwin L. Gicain) who has taken them to meet Richard’s cousin Jake (Bryan Billy Boone), who has been over for two months fixing up Richard and Tia’s beach house. Unfortunately it isn’t finished yet and so Jake has hired the Liamol House – Vince is aghast and says they can’t stay there, it is rumoured to be haunted by aswang.

the Liamol House

They go to see the house and Richard describes it as the Addams House. The kids discover that there a cemetery in the backyard and the house itself looks absolutely decrepit. Local rumour is that it is built on a cemetery, as well as hosting one. When they get inside it clearly needs cleaning throughout. Why then they stay there when they have the beach house (which can’t be in any worse state) or, indeed, the offered opportunity to stay with Vince, is beyond me. Of course, there wouldn’t be a film if they did that.

Lady in white

The first night Alice wakes and sees a figure out back (it is later seen to be a lady in white). We also get visitations by a dog (also the aswang) and she shapeshifts quite a bit to be fair and in her lady in white (with veil) form she takes on Tia’s visage. Jake and the kids find pictures of Aswang in the basement and, of course, do the sensible thing and start playing Ouija boards down there and eventually the aswang puts Richard under her control. This is done with a combination of hypnosis, saliva through a kiss and bites. It is described as possession.

Merwin and the mananambal

A local young cop, Merwin (Christopher Eli Razo Hubahib), who is a friend of Tia’s, comes to the house as a corpse has been taken from a grave and he wants them to keep an eye out for anything strange going on. He tells Tia that it is the time when aswangs look to create other aswang and he also mentions a mananambal (Ernesto A. Tundaan) who is due to visit in a couple of days. A mananambal is a traditional healer/wizard and it is he that tries to help the family. What is interesting is that he uses a combination of traditional and Catholic aspects as he does this.

bitten

So, the aswang takes both the young form and an old lady form (Brigida H. Magalona) and can also appear as a shadow (which is a real rubbish looking sfx, just a person in a whole-body black suit). At one point we see her acting ghoul like by digging a nice meaty bone from a grave (though the graves looked too old to have such fresh occupants). To keep her at bay we get the use of garlic, oil (that boils in her presence) and to fight her we have a silver dagger and a sting ray tail. Whilst possessed Richard suddenly can speak tagalog.

fangs and blood tears

The set-up feels a tad false. The fact that they stay at the spooky house, ignore Tia’s family offer of a place to stay and do things like play Ouija board all seem a bit forced and silly. That said the pay off isn’t bad. This isn’t the best horror film put together but it does what it is trying to do and has quite a bleak outlook. The use of Western vampire fangs feels a tad put on for the US audience (not that other films don’t give aswang fangs, but it felt a little more appropriated in this). The acting wasn’t fantastic but it didn’t need to be. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Warriors of Terra – review

Director: Robert Wilson

Release date: 2006

Contains spoilers

Ok, it’s “made by science” vampire time and whilst the V word isn’t mentioned and the film is shot as an atypical creature feature, this is definitely a vampire though an unusual one. I had considered for a moment whether to write this as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ article but decided the use of genre tropes was strong enough to just review.

Its also not the greatest film in the world. The premise is unusual enough but the plotting is by the numbers, the acting mostly so-so and, worst of all, is the choice in visuals a depressingly dull greenish hue that sets the tone all wrong.

Jade and Ali

So the opening credits have a voice over as we are told about a bio-tech lab that a bunch of young college animal rights activists are going to hit in order to vandalise, video and rescue the animals within. They have pulled off twelve successful raids previously and this time they have someone on the inside. One of them, Fix (Andrew Hachey), brings Ali (Ellen Furey), to their van and introduces her to remote tech girl Izzy (Krystin Pellerin), Tim (Dylan Taylor) and leader Jade (Andrea Lui). Ali is the daughter of head researcher Dr Woods (Andrew Gillies) and has brought his access card – she wants to make him notice her.

part of the squad

Ali insists on going with them – though Jade tries to prevent it. Inside are two security guards and one of them, Chris (Edward Furlong), is Ali’s new boyfriend and the inside guy. He opens the gate for them after distracting the other guard, Wayne (Marc Hickox), and is to open the door for them but Jade is impatient and uses the key card. This sets off an alert that Wayne notices and he calls his boss, Peter Issacs (James McGowan), who in turn calls in an armed tactical security squad. Meanwhile the kids have hit the labs and found nothing, cages are empty and there is an elevator that needs both the access card and a code (the second of which they don’t have).

Trina Brink as Maya

Realising the squad is there, Izzy tries to hack the code but there are too many door codes and she eventually just purges the IT system and unlocks all the doors in the facility. They manage to get in the elevator but Chris is tazed. Now the layout made little sense. There is nothing of interest upstairs and the underground facility is abandoned and decrepit. Inside it is Maya (Trina Brink) and she is our vampire. Plot wise she stalks and kills and people die – until final girl, all under the threat of nerve gas being released to destroy Maya, but why do I say she is a vampire?

Woods and Maya

Woods was working on a cure for cancer and was successful, with pigs. He essentially genetically modified them having pulled genes from creatures with strong regenerative traits and then bound the new DNA via a virus. However his concoction failed to work with human test subjects and so he upped the virus ante – as it were – and used a virulent strain of Ebola. His test subject was Maya and he was successful, her cancer gone within a day, but she continued to mutate. So what was it about the mutation that makes me say she’s a vampire?

melting

She is hungry (always) and her new food of choice is us. She uses her fingers to inject a toxin into the victim that causes their flesh to liquidise and she literally drinks her victim – the toxin is also touch transmitted, so touch the liquid gunk of a victim’s remains and you’ll start melting too! She is incredibly cold to the touch, she regenerates from injury with speed (but needs to feed) and her reflexes are heightened. Unanswered issues focus around the facts that she seems to be able to both vanish and become semi-transparent, and there also seems to be a thing about her transmitting a light (which was seemed important as Issacs and Woods mention it but don’t explain it).

vamp face

She was captured after killing several nurses by slowing her down with an anti-toxin designed to fight botulism and placed in cryogenic storage. This included an iron crate that looked remarkably like a sarcophagus, which was ‘buried’ in the cryogenic unit. In the actual film she is tricked into ingesting the anti-toxin again and this leads to her developing a monstrous visage – akin to a vamp face (though it's a full body transformation). That is about all we got for traits but, whether the filmmakers realised it or not they did liberally spread the vampire tropes around.

semi-transparent

But the film went by the numbers. Most of the characters are forgettable, there isn’t the tension needed to carry the film but the worst thing was the colour decisions. The off-green look feels turgid and this has affected the score I’m afraid. The high security lab with only two guards felt wrong and under-staffed and the lack of anything in the upper building didn’t ring true. As for the lab below, as well as ripping off Resident Evil in design, the design also felt wrong as it was too much abandoned factory and not enough high-tech lab mothballed. I should also mention the sound; mostly non-descript, Maya’s sound effects made her vanishing sound like a bug and the slurping noises sounded off.

3 out of 10 – the score would have been higher if the film looked better but it wouldn’t have limped over being average.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Blu-ray @ Amazon UK

Ghoul – Season 1 – review

Director: Patrick Graham

First aired: 2018

Contains spoilers

This is an Indian mini-series, made for Netflix and combines a dystopian future with the supernatural and – if we are going to be honest – a large dollop of the Thing (1982) and does so with a massive amount of style. The horror (and gore) building through the three episodes until it crescendos.

First thing, of course, is I am going to have to tackle the fact that it is based on a version of the Arabian Ghoul before someone comments and says “it’s a ghoul not a vampire”. The fact is the two creatures have been closely linked for quite some time. The ghoul as a creature from Arabic myth entered into Western consciousness as it was mentioned several times in the Arabian Nights, as translated into French by Antoine Galland in the 18th Century. The story of most interest is The History of Sidi Nu’uman, which tells of a man suspicious because his new bride never seems to eat. Long story short he follows her to a cemetery and witnesses her indulging in eating the dead with the other ghouls.

fanged teeth

Cut forward to 1821 and E.T.A. Hoffmann published a story entitled Vampirismus as part of his Die Serapions-Brüder. There is every chance that the story title was added by an editor as the story is essentially a reworking, into a modern Western setting, of The History of Sidi Nu’uman. Jump forward a century and Dudley Wright adds the same story into his reference book Vampires and Vampirism and Summers conflates ghouls and vampires in The vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928). Ghouls were used in the work of HP Lovecraft and his ghoul story Pickman’s Model (1927) was reworked by Neil Gaiman, with a vampiric twist, in his film A Short Film About John Bolton.

the squad

In this case we start with a man cutting into his own flesh so that he can gather his own blood to paint out a glyph, a blood ritual that will summon the ghoul – we’ll come back to this. We are in an India of the near future, a radically different place from now. There is a military clampdown and a rampant (and I daresay popularist) nationalism. We follow a military raid on a terrorist base, looking for terrorist leader Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj). A man approaches the squad, saying “they’re all dead”. When they get to where Saeed is there are bodies and he sits there. He whispers something to the squad leader.

Radhika Apte as Nida

Jumping back a month and Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte), a young Muslim woman, is in a car with her father (S.M. Zaheer). He is taking her back to the academy of the National Protection Squad, where she is being trained in interrogation techniques, but he is complaining about raids and the burning of books. He reveals he has books that he has rescued in the car and his lecture notes – he’s been teaching off-syllabus. They reach a checkpoint and he becomes defensive but Nida intervenes to get them past. However, she thinks on his actions and the propaganda she is fed, and reports him – he is sent to a re-education centre but not before she reveals she has done this to him.

torturing Saeed

Nida is pulled out of the academy early and posted to a detention centre (the one her father was sent to). There is a difference of opinion of how to treat her. Commander of the post, Colonel Sunil Dacunha (Manav Kaul), wants her put on the squad who are to interrogate Ali Saeed (who is being transported there that day), but his Lieutenant, Laxmi Das (Ratnabali Bhattacharjee), doesn’t trust her and thinks she is a terrorist/sympathiser. It soon becomes apparent that Saeed is more than he appears and this is shown at first through mind games that get his interrogators turning on each other. Quickly it is revealed that he is the ghoul.

it's behind you

So, what are its powers – having been summoned, its purpose is to reveal their guilt and eat their flesh. There seems to be some level of telepathy involved, so that it can manipulate people – causing fights and generally freaking people out. However the primary power is that the ghoul will eat the flesh of victims and take the form of the last person it bit (hence dropping the pronoun to it). This transformation can occur whether the victim is alive or dead. This leads to the Thing aspect, with the series playing with the “who is it” card a few times. The ghoul can reveal sharp teeth, talons and black eyes. It does also appear to be very physically hardy.

hunting the ghoul

I really enjoyed this. It had a dark atmosphere with the dystopian setting, the torture/detention centre, the characters who were all fatally flawed one way or another and the gore and violence that built through the three episodes. It was superbly acted and, yes, it was derivative but in a good way. Whether you’d throw this into vampire filmographies depends on how wide you cast your vampire net but this ghoul certainly eats fresh flesh and not longer dead corpses (as is the norm through a lot of ghoul material) and can shapeshift (again not a power normally put in ghoul related material, more a vampiric power). 7.5 out of 10 and recommended.

The imdb page is here.

An Accidental Zombie (Named Ted) – review

Director: Anne Welles

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This is a kooky little comedy that is inoffensive but perhaps lacked either a little depth or a little offensiveness to give it that bit of an edge. That said it is a genuine little piece with a nice edge of comedy.

That comedy comes from absurdism that remains unexplained through the entire film, the viewer has to just accept that certain things are, go with it and the film contains an internal logic that then works.

Cameron McKendry as Ted

It starts with Ted (Cameron McKendry) heading to work and dropping papers as we hear a conversation between his boss Frank (Kane Hodder) and Frank’s new secretary Bonnie (Tanya Chisholm). This gives a background to the workplace. It is a place that takes discarded skin, renders it (in boilers in the basement, known colloquially as Hell) and turns it into new things – suits, lingerie, purses. It sounds ridiculous because it is part of the thread of absurdism I mentioned. Ted seems to step in some gore on the way in and explains to Frank that he has had an accident and a report will be late.

Akari Endo as Livia

Meanwhile Bonnie has noticed Ted’s skin and asks (as Frank has just mentioned a new worker initiative – "don’t be a zombie") whether Ted is a zombie. This is something he gets accused of often – though he repeatedly states that it is a skin condition (it runs in the family, though his parents adopted him) he picked up during a vacation to the Caribbean. A woman, Livia (Akari Endo), enters the office – thinking the building abandoned and trying to get out of the sun. We notice she has fangs. Ted is emotionally struck by her but she leaves, dropping a card for Dr Lovio (Tami Brockway Joyce) – who treats disorders of the paranormal.

Chad Eric Smith as Wolfgang

Ted attends the therapy in order that he might meet Livia – there is also a real Dr Lovio (Izzy Church), a psychologist, dismissive of her sister’s practice. It is a group therapy and there is Wolfgang (Chad Eric Smith) a werewolf with alopecia, Grendel (Jordan Liddle) a cave troll who became smart and Evie (Christina Nigra) a fairy who got big. Livia has been feeling strange since a holiday in Romania – fangs and strength being mentioned. Whilst there she met a botanist who always went out at night. She denies that she is a vampire.

fangs

So the film follows Ted and Livia getting together, both in denial about what they have become. There is a sub-plot about his kooky family and his Poppy (Timothy Brennen), who is apparently dying and suspicious of Ted’s skin condition – not being overly tolerant of zombies. There is a further sub-plot of a group of co-workers going missing, whilst one co-worker, Mel (Mary Druzba), repeatedly suggests that Ted ate them. This could have stood to be explored more and felt too throwaway. Ted himself often suffers visual hallucinations – of brains, blood etc…

therapy

Its all very gentle and, as mentioned, inoffensive. But it is professionally drawn together and the cast do well with amusing but thin material. The missing co-workers thread might have added character, and more importantly narrative depth, to the production had it been expanded. As could the sub-plot of the gold-digging sorceress with her claws in Poppy, which was dealt with in a rather cursory manner. Both plotlines offered a route to a much more fulfilling film, whilst keeping the “in denial” central plot point fresh. Though it didn’t do this it isn’t as though the film didn’t work. It did, but it could have been much more. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

Short Film: the Phantom Hour

From 2016 and directed by Brian Patrick Butler this is an 8-minute short film that takes some inspiration from the expressionist films of yore and we see this as it opens in the stylised intertitles and the establishing picture of a building in the expressionist style. The fact that the film lists out “the players” at the head also makes us think of a earlier age of cinema.

A dinner party has been organised for four strangers – though the (bug eating) chef Bryce (Brian Patrick Butler) has fouled up the dinner and they have brought chicken takeout. The guests are there for different reasons one (Morgan K. Reynolds) thinks it is a casting call, another (Dakota Ringer) is there to buy weed and another (Raye Richards) to buy sold out concert tickets. The fourth (Connor Sullivan) is carrying a wooden stake…

fangs-a-go-go

Just as well as their host, Nikolai (Luke Anthony Pensabene), happens to grow a pair of front placed fangs and does not get on with wooden crosses. Who will prevail? Only watching the short will answer that question but it is an amusing effort and the expressionist aspect works really rather nicely – it is all situation, however, with little plot and narrative. Perhaps a tad more style than substance. However sometimes that’s all you need.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? We are the Flesh

Controversial art/horror film Tenemos la carne (which is actually 'we have the meat') was a 2016 Mexican film directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter and I feel slightly disingenuous running this as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ as it kind of isn’t – despite part of El Topo’s negative deconstruction of the film having a section entitled “Fin – we’re all rape vampires in the real world” and asking “so they’re vampires now, question mark.” Yet it certainly is a film that plays with vampire tropes. It reminded me, in part at least, of A Nocturne: Night of the vampire though that was tonally more than anything and A Nocturne has much more narrative.

Now I will also say that I don’t share El Topo’s dislike for the film but I can certainly see why it was disliked. This is non-narrative with an inner desire to shock when perhaps shock became overused. However I was mesmerised by the film and, in particular, blown away by primary actor Noé Hernández’s expressive performance as Mariano.

Noé Hernández as Mariano

So we start with him, specifically him building a still essentially. He uses bread pulped in water, as the primary fermenting ingredient to make (as he states) gas – but clearly hooch. Now I have seen suggestion that the film is post-apocalyptic and I understand why one would feel that way. He seems to be alone in a building until siblings Fauna (María Evoli) and Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) enter his world. They say that they have wandered through the city and there is nowhere to go. Later still we get others in the place, and notice that the bread he uses appears fresh and he trades the moonshine for trays of eggs through a pulley system in a wall. My feeling was this was more a rendition of a purgatory or Hell – but even that steps aside from the ending.

siblings

As it is the two siblings are coerced to work with him and they construct a cave like surrounding in the building. Building a frame and then papering it – but it does appear to be a cave once complete and also the womb. He encourages the siblings to have incestuous sex and masturbates over the scene – dying at the point of orgasm. So, we have a theme of incest, which is a theme that ties into the vampire genre, and then la petite mort leading to his actual death. The incest aspect ties in as a cause of vampirism – the act sometimes said to lead the perpetrator(s) to become vampires after their death.

the constructed cave

Vampirism is often seen to be an analogy for sex (and deviant sex at that) hence incest being a cause. Certainly there was also a connection between necrophilia and vampirism with historic figures such as Sergeant François Bertrand called vampires (in Bertrand’s case he was dubbed the Vampire of Montparnasse) due to their necrophilia. As this film lurches through deviance and excess it should come as no shock that Fauna eventually has necrophilic sex with the corpse of Mariano. However the act causes the corpse to vanish and then be reborn within the womb like cave.

feeding Lucio

Fauna is the most dominant of the characters. She not only (at Mariano’s urging) instigates the incest and becomes insatiable, she also feeds her brother her menstrual blood, rapes a woman (when more people are found for the rooms/cave) in a sapphic attack and beats the reborn Mariano because she feared he had left them and wouldn’t return. She is with Mariano as her brother lies injured and they have a soldier held captive – Lucio stabilised by Mariano putting his mysterious drug, which we have seen him occasionally use, in the wound.

feeding blood

As they hold the soldier Mariano assures him that they will not kill him for the various reasons that someone might kill. Rather they will kill him simply for his blood and his flesh and “all the exquisite substances inside you”. They slit his throat and bleed him. The film cuts to the pair looking at each other, blood on their mouths as they flap – it is almost as though they have transformed into birds (through their movements). Then they feed the blood to Lucio to revive him and, so, we have blood drinking and an apparent transformation, though I would say it is more shamanic than anything else. Mariano uses the flesh within the still as he previously used bread – making a communion connection as well as the vampiric trope. (Later Mariano will declare that those in an orgy should drink his blood, “as warm as Holy Mary’s c*nt”, underlying the religious subversion occurring in the film as well and strengthening the idea that this might be some form of Hell).

the scream

So, there is blood drinking (with transformative and restorative applications) and sexual practices that (through the genre’s development/journey) have been tied into the figure of the vampire – be that aggressive lesbianism, necrophilia or incest. This isn’t necessarily a vampire film but it certainly uses the tropes (and I’d like to think that the multi-layered film uses them knowingly). This is not for the faint-hearted, there are hardcore sexual aspects with a desire to shock, no narrative as such, ambiguousness aplenty and some gore. However if you appreciate that in a film and want to see a stupendously animated performance this might just be something you want to see. Ultimately I’d say it is of genre interest.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK