London After Midnight (1927, Tod Browning)

"A cloudswept sky... trees moaned... owls hooted... a muffled shot... a groan... a scream pierced the midnight... Roger Balfour was found dead in his London home."

As a child, i thought, spake and got ill as a child.  One particular summer a long, low time ago i was laid down low with a particularly nasty case of the mumps - not that i suspect that there are any nice kinds, but my nine year old self prone on the couch barely able to speak (possibly to the relief of my beleaguered family) with glands all a-swollen wasn't having a very nice time.  To occupy me and keep me from feeling sorry for myself, my mother picked up a book she spotted in a second-hand bookshop's window that she knew i would like, and i spent the next few days on my sick bed (or sick settee) eagerly devouring the contents of this large hardback volume that would be a treasured possession to this day.  The book was Alan Frank's Horror Films, a chronological essaying of le cinema fantastique from the inception of the medium by the Lumiere Brothers to circa 1978.  I'd loved horror, science fiction and fantasy ever since i was a mite, and i delighted in being educated upon my favourite subject, learning all about these films and their plots and protagonists, and most of all being young i was entranced by the hundreds of images (stills, posters, lobby cards et al) from these movies.  One image that particularly caught my attention was Lon Chaney's vampiric visage leering from the page in a photograph from London After Midnight - all wide bulging eyes and bird's nest hair sprouting out from 'neath his hat and mocking taloned finger pointed accusingly toward me.

But, most of all, the teeth.

Not the wolfish canines i had seen displayed by Christopher Lee and Barbara Shelley in the colourful Gothic Hammer romps i'd been allowed to stay up and watch; these were the teeth of a shark - Chaney's grinning maw brimming with fangs, each and every gnasher a razor pointed weapon.  I was terrified.  I was intrigued.  I needed to see this, one day.

As i grew older i found myself seeing a great many of the films covered in that book, mentally ticking off each one, until now some 27 or 28 years later i'm sure i've seen the vast majority of them. But some seemed to perpetually remain elusive, including 'the one with the freaky looking vampire'.  I was quite saddened around ten years ago when i learned that London After Midnight was a Lost Film (in fact, the very notion of 'Lost Films' is one that saddles me with a heavy heart, as the realisation that not all art, including cinema, is preserved for the ages and can be ephemeral bites at my cineaste soul).  Growing up as a Doctor Who fan, the notion that we cannot simply access all of these delights that we've grown up reading and hearing about - a fair portion of 1960s monochrome Who having been 'junked' by the BBC in the 1970s - is a familiar but awful one, and learning that London After Midnight had survived as an extant print all the way to 1967 before being consumed in an MGM vault fire seemed to be putting me through the trials of Tantalus: it had reached out across fifty years of the void of time since its release, but then been cruelly snatched away.

But then i discovered that, much like the lost Doctor Who stories i was so familiar with, a reconstruction of the film had been made using photographic elements.  Much like, say, "Fury from the Deep", this was the only way i was ever going to 'see' the film - as close as i could ever get to experiencing it.  Good enough, i thought, it's better than nothing.  And so i finally sat down, almost three decades after first becoming aware of it, to see what i would make of London After Midnight.

After the mysterious murder that opens the movie, we are swiftly introduced to the intrepid Professor Edward Burke (Lon Chaney), private investigator liaising with Scotland Yard.  Burke, P. I. (which almost demands it's own Bellasario-style spinoff show) shows up at the scene of the crime surprisingly quickly - a mere 'fifteen minutes' after Balfour's death - to question the household and neighbours.  The rather pertinent question from Arthur Hibbs (Conrad Nagel) as to how the Professor-Inspector arrived so fast is deflected with an imperious "That's my business, young man!"

Five Years Later....

As with the later Universal horror movie cycle, what would a monster movie be without peasants? This time, they're merely passing a property in a cart rather than brandishing burning torches.

"'Oly 'Enry! The 'ouse is 'aunted!" exclaims the woman in the carriage, perhaps displaying the first ever cultural recognition of the Cockney peasant on film.  Chaney's befanged vampire has decided to rent this particular property after his spooky moonlight overlook of the premises.  For some reason unfathomable by the mind of man, the only thing the legal functionary can think to ask this shark-toothed boggle-eyed spectre of the macabre is "You understand that if you lease this house, the owner will not pay for the repairs?"

I think he's fine with that.

"Sir James, it's 'orrible!  The Balfour 'ouse is 'aunted!"  "Dead people from the grave!  Vampires is what they are!"  are some of the proclamations made.  At this point, Professor P. I. Burke returns, looking a bit older than a mere five year elapsing of time: Chaney's make up skills are evident here, white-haired and monocled was he.  The vampire in the beaver hat's signature on the lease for the Balfour house is signed 'Roger Balfour'.  Chills.  Scenes.  Lucille Balfour (portrayed by the absolutely lovely in a heart-stopping manner Marceline Day - i really must try to break this habit of falling in love with silent movie actresses one day) says that she has heard a voice calling to her from the garden.  "It sounded exactly like my father calling... Lucy!  Lucy!" - the parallels with Stoker's Dracula, which Browning would translate to the screen in a clunky and stagy rendition four years later, are obvious.

Then we have the discovery of an ancient tome of vampire lore - The Undead: The True History of Vampyrs Being a Compilation from Authentic Sources of Quaint and Curious Phenomena (Published London, 1721) - a la Murnau's earlier Nosferatu, prompting Burke's (probably quite valid) expectoration of "This is all ancient tommyrot!".

Hibbs says to Lucille "You turn to me first in danger - that proves love, Lucille" (or indeed instinct, you fool).  He then winds up in a steamy clinch with Smithson the Cockney peasant maid.  "Can't I sleep upstairs with you tonight, Mr Hibbs?" pleads the terrified menial.  I'm sure you can, dear - the man's an animal.  An ANIMAL.  "There isn't going to be any sleep about this house tonight..." he says. I'm quite sure, you dog, you.

Inspector Burke and Sir James explore the grounds of the Balfour house in a sequence highly reminiscent of the staging of Harker and Van Helsing's casing of Carfax in Dracula.  They see such sights as should never be seen - Sir Roger himself, sitting in a chair in a room with the vampire.  Burke then decides to protect Lucille's room from the undead, with a twist and lore-change in that two crossed swords of steel and a wreath of roses are utilised, instead of the more traditional crucifix, garlic and / or hawthorn.

Burke then decides to hypnotise Hibbs - forcing him to remember the night of Balfour's murder. While Hibbs remains in his Mesmerised state, Burke goes to Hibbs' bedroom and lies in the bed awaiting the coming of the footfalls of the murderer.  A hooded figure enters, and attempts to kill him...

Lucille goes missing from her room, lured to the Balfour house by the bat-girl vampiress Luna (Edna Tichenor - tres Gothy).  "Tell Luna, we are ready" instructs the late Sir Roger to an Irving Pichel-esque (in the sense of his role in Dracula's Daughter, rather than the more unpalatable rumours...) flunky, and Lucille is duly brought in.

"Remember, Lucille... you... are doing this... for your father".

Burke gives Sir James his gun, and takes him to the Balfour house, telling him to look whomever he may meet "straight in the eye - show no fear!".  The mysterious vampiric 'Man in the Beaver Hat' hypnotises Sir James, telling him to remember the night of Balfour's death.  Meanwhile, Luna has given Lucille the same white dress that she wore upon that fateful night, and as Sir James - thinking that it is five years ago - enters, Lucille is with "Sir Roger" re-enacting some disenchanted evening.

Burke: "Smithson, i'm all ready to prove that, when hypnotised, a criminal will re-enact his crime!"

The ersatz Sir Roger announces that he has signed his will, naming Sir James as the executor of his estate and Lucille's legal guardian.  Sir James announces his hopes that, Papa Lazaou-like, Lucille will one day be HIS WIFE.  "But... she's only a child, James!" exclaims Rog.  "I don't mean now," says reasonable paedophile Sir James, sounding for all the world like the basis for Brass Eye's 'Someday I Want To, But Not Today' song, "I mean in five or six years!"

Oh.  Well, that's alright, then.

At 1. 10 A.M. Sir James returns with two guns, telling Roger to write his own suicide note.  Then he shoots him.

"That's how Roger Balfour committed suicide, is it?" asks Burke of the Yard as he wraps up the case.  "Sorry i had to be so rough with you, Mr Hibbs, but i guess your reward was worth it!"

Oh.  He's objectifying the radiant Marceline Day. Still, i suppose i did a bit.

Another case, another collar for Burke, P. I..

I'm not quite sure what to make of that.  I'm not sure anyone can give an actual opinion on a film based solely upon an after-the-fact reconstruction to begin with, but that was...  Well, i enjoyed it.  I would have preferred another way than the "cheat" ending, and for the legendary Lon Chaney to have actually played a vampire rather than some kind of Fake Shemp for a maverick detective.  But, in this life, you can't always get what you want.

'Swamp Thing' (Wes Craven, 1982) / 'The Return of Swamp Thing' (Jim Wynorski, 1989)

In July 1971, DC Comics released issue #92 of its mystery anthology series House of Secrets, featuring a horror-themed story from the pen of legendary scribe Len Wein (co-creator of Marvel Comics icon Wolverine, and writer on such titles as The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Batman, and Green Lantern over his long and illustrious career) and illustrated by artist Berni Wrightson (whose often grimly beautiful art was a mainstay of series such as House of Secrets and its sister publication House of Mystery, as well as the appositely nomenclatured Eerie and Creepy before progressing to adorn novels like Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf [1985]). This dark pulp tale was a man-into-monster story reminiscent of the horror and sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s, and told of a scientist transformed in a laboratory explosion engineered by a jealous rival into a green muck-encrusted bog-dwelling travesty of humanity called 'Swamp Thing'.

This one-off gruesome gothic proved popular enough to be spun-off a year later into its own title, and issue #1 of Swamp Thing emerged from the briny depths to menace mankind in the October of 1972.  Over the next few years Wein (and later Gerry Conway, creator of Marvel's violent vigilante the Punisher) steered the saga of the Swamp Thing as the shambling revenant that was once Dr Alec Holland and his eternal struggle against the machinations of the diabolical Dr Anton Arcane, as well as his burgeoning girl-meets-mockery of a man romance with Arcane's niece Abigail.  The fortunes of the comic book waxed and waned throughout the mid-Seventies, until there was a revival of the title in 1982 when Embassy Pictures released a motion picture adaptation directed by horror maven Wes Craven (creator of such ghoulish delights as The Last House on the Left [1972], The Hills Have Eyes [1977], the monumental A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984], The Serpent and the Rainbow [1988], The People Under the Stairs [1991] and the sporadic Scream tetralogy [1996, 1997, 2000 and 2011]).  A year later, the writing reins were entrusted by Wein to British up and comer Alan Moore, a decision that would turn around the fortunes of the book as well as totally revamping it in style, tone and direction.  Moore - later to become a titanic cornerstone of the graphic novel with such feted tomes as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - shook up the meandering monster magazine by transforming it into a labyrinthine Southern Gothic with strains of environmental, social and societal issues as well as turning the basic founding principle of the protagonist.  No longer was Swamp Thing Dr Alec Holland transformed by a combination of flames 'n' formula into a creature of the quagmire - now we discovered that the titular tree-man was actually the essence of the mire itself - the very embodiment of the elemental spirit of Nature itself, known as 'the Green' - infused with the essence and intellect of the late scientist.  Not a man who had become a plant, but a plant who thought it was a man.

Away from the 2-D of the printed page, the Craven film came a year or so too early for Moore's psychedelic regeneration of the title, but is a fairly faithful rendition of the 1970s and early '80s incarnation engendered by the Wein / Wrightson axis.  Craven assembled a fine cast for his circa three million dollar picture, including Ray Wise (recognisable to genre fans as Leon 'Don't touch me, maaaan!' Nash in Paul Verhoeven's future-shock classic RoboCop [1987], and forever to be known as the haunted Leland Palmer in David Lynch's mindfuck mystery Twin Peaks [1990 - 1991]) as Dr Alec Holland, and Adrienne Barbeau (at the time married to legendary horror director John Carpenter and earning the title of Scream Queen through appearances in Carpenter's The Fog [1980] and Escape from New York [1981], as well as Creepshow [George A. Romero, 1982], the splendidly-titled Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death [J. F. Lawton, 1989], and the Edgar Allan Poe diptych Two Evil Eyes [Dario Argento, George A. Romero, 1990] as well as providing the purring tones of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman in Batman: the Animated Series [1992 - 1995]) as government agent Alice Cable, an amalgamation of the original comic characters of Abby Arcane and Swamp Thing's best frenemy Matthew Cable.

As the movie's villainous contingent were David Hess (who had started out his career as a songwriter, penning Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" and Pat Boone's "Speedy Gonzalez" among others, before starring as the vicious and demented Krug in Wes Craven's notorious The Last House on the Left [1972], before adding his intimidating presence to two Italian features by Ruggero Deodato - he of Cannibal Holocaust infamy - The House on the Edge of the Park [1980] and Body Count [1986]) as Arcane's thuggish henchman-in-chief Ferret, and as the diabolical Dr Anton Arcane himself the ever suave and sophisticated presence of Louis Jourdan (matinee star of such classics as The Paradine Case [Alfred Hitchcock, 1947], Decameron Nights [Hugo Fregonese, 1953], Three Coins in the Fountain [Jean Negulesco, 1954], and Gigi [Vincente Minelli, 1958] before going on to give a superlative turn as the lord of the undead Count Dracula [Philip Savile, 1977] and face off against an eyebrow arching Roger Moore as Kamal Khan in the 007 adventure Octopussy [John Glen, 1983]).

Jourdan lends an aristocratic and debonair air to the perfidious Arcane, the presence of whom is felt long before his physically appearing due to his name being mentioned in the muted whispers between the staff of Holland's bayou-based research lab as a kind of bogeyman, before a stylishly dramatic reveal as the laboratory is overrun by hired mercenaries led by the despicable Ferret.  Holland's head of security, Ritter (Don Knight), appears to have betrayed the project and let the armed intruders into the complex:

"No", cries a betrayed Holland as he as overpowered by goons, "No, Ritter.  Not you!"
"No, Dr Holland.  Not Ritter" says the once-familiar man before him, before his voice suddenly becomes that of a stranger. "Ritter, poor fellow, is long dead."  Then he reaches up and begins to peel off his face!, which is now a lifelike latex mask of the kind oft-employed by the IMF team on Mission: Impossible, and Ritter's face comes away to real the saturnine features of Holland's nemesis.
"You have heard of, but never seen me, so i will introduce myself" says the sinister stranger, casually sitting atop a laboratory table and aiming a gun in Holland's direction. "My name is Arcane."

And just like that, Louis Jourdan plays a far superior Bond villain to Kamal Khan, a year early.

The plot of the movie unfolds along the lines of the original comic book saga, with the villains' attempts to get their hands on Holland's unique 'bio-restorative formula' - a green glowing goo that looks very like Dr Herbert West's resurrecting refreshment in Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) and can cause flowers to spring from wooden floorboards in a shower of sparks as if by magic, and promises to yield harvests of tomatoes the size of beachballs growing int he desert to cure famine - ending in a destructive inferno, as Holland becomes a human inferno, plunges into the brackish brine and becomes the titular titan of the tarn.  Holland's new monstrous alter ego, Swamp Thing (played by 6' 5" stunt performer and actor Dick Durock, who had played another shambling green comic book character as the transformed 'Evil Hulk' Del Frye, going toe-to-toe with Lou Ferrigno's Gamma-ray Goliath in The Incredible Hulk two-parter 'The First'), has to fight for survival as Arcane's men hunt him through the swamplands (Craven making great visual use of the verdant South Carolina locations) to extract the only remaining traces of the bio formula: his blood.  Arcane is on a quest for immortality, and believes that the unique regenerative effects of the fluid can give it to him.  When a sample of the formula is tested out on his hulking henchman Bruno (Nicholas Worth, Hell Comes to Frogtown [1988], Darkman [1990]), shrinking him into a stunted ratlike creature (Tommy Madden) Arcane demands answers from the concoction's creator.

"Why doesn't Bruno have your strength?"
"Because he never had it", says Swamp Thing. "...It only amplifies your essence.  It simply makes you more of what you already are."

Arcane's monumental ego judges that if Bruno's true self was revealed as a rodentlike parody, then his inner truth - his genius - will become manifest as a living god.  Drinking the tincture, he goes through a startling transformation into a grotesque chimaera - a werewolf mixed with bear and boar, Arcane's monstrous inner self red in tooth and claw.  This of course leads to a Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man / King Kong vs Godzilla style clash of the creatures, as we flip genres slightly from Man Into Monster tale to full on Monster Mash.  Our swampy hero engages the Arcane monster in battle, as Alice watches on relegated from tough government agent to damsel in distress (and discovering that diaphanous white nightdresses might look great as fenland fashionwear, but aren't really the correct attire for the terrain) and eventually triumphs, leaving the once brilliant and urbane Arcane a slain pig-man oozing the strangest of ooze as he lies in the bracken - a slaughtered swine festooned in slime.  Not the most dignified of ends.

Which made it all the more startling when he reappeared as right as rain to menace our hero once again in The Return of Swamp Thing (Jim Wynorski, 1989).  Dick Durock resumed the eponymous role, now in an improved costume that more closely resembled the portrayal of the character in the comic series, rejoining the eternal struggle with the seemingly indestructible Arcane - essayed again by Louis Jourdan - whose survival and restoration to human form were hand-waived in a few lines of dialogue from Arcane's evil scientist sidekick Dr Rochelle (the wonderfully named Ace Mask, who seems to have been one of Wynorski's lucky charms, appearing in his Chopping Mall [1986], Not Of This Earth [1988], 976-EVIL II: The Astral Factor [1991] and Ghoulies IV [1994]) about finding him dying in the swamp and bringing him back to the laboratory to restore him.  Director Wynorski (helmer of many a z-grade B-Movie, in addition to the aforementioned he's churned out such dubious delights as Sorority House Massacre II [1990], Scream Queen Hot Tub Party [1991], Munchie [1992], Vampirella [1996] and The Bare Wench Project [2000]) wholeheartedly embraces the 'comic book' aspects of the property, with lurid coloured lighting gels and split-screen effects giving the movie the air of a comic book brought to life, an effect previously achieved by George A. Romero in the 1982 portmanteau horror anthology Creepshow.

Also starring Heather Locklear (Firestarter [Mark L Lester, 1984], and long-running roles in TV series T. J. Hooker [1982-1986] and Dynasty [1981-1989]) as a ditzy 'Valley Girl' portrayal of Abby Arcane far removed from the original, Sarah Douglas (eternally to be known by genre fans as Ursa in Superman: the Movie [Richard Donner, 1978] and Superman II [Richard Lester, 1980], as well as the tyrannical Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer [Richard Fleischer, 1984]) and the buxom charms of the director's then-partner Monique Gabrielle ('star' of such wonders as Emmanuelle 5 [Walerian Borowczyk, 1987], and Planet of the Erotic Ape [Lou Vockell, 2002]), this lurid, garish and hyperactive spawn of the more introspective original is certainly fun if lightweight fare - though it does take on one aspect of the Alan Moore comic run by treating the audience to the possible cinematic first of a human / plant sex scene (Cheryl's tree rape in Sam Raimi's seminal 1983 The Evil Dead notwithstanding), as Abby gnaws on a tuber / root from Swampy's body (steady, there!) and enters an altered state where she can see him as the naked human Alec Holland before an extremely 1980s soft-focus love scene plays out.  Whether the viewer reacts with a freak out or a 'Cop out!' will entirely depend on whether you want your girl-on-dirt-monster action implicit or explicit.

Whilst a third cinematic outing for Swamp Thing has to the date of writing yet to materialise, a year after Wynorski's effort the property made the transition to the small screen courtesy of Universal Television and DiC Enterprises.  Durock once more donned the foam latex bodysuit to play the Green Man himself, opposite British actor Mark Lindsay Chapman (Annihilator [Michael Chapman, 1986], The Langoliers [Tom Holland, 1995], Titanic [James Cameron, 1997], Legend of the Mummy [Jeffrey Obrow, 1998], and stretches in US soap operas such as Dallas [1988], Falcon Crest [1989], Days of Our Lives [2002-2004] and The Young and the Restless [2006]) as Anton Arcane.  I was first made aware of the existence of the series via a cursory, cussing and cutting review in the April 1992 edition of The Dark Side magazine, which castigated the CIV Video release of four selected episodes of the show (under the title The New Adventures of Swamp Thing) as 'truly abysmal', with '[t]epid effects, awkward, cliched dialogue and poor performances' which 'make this a tape to be avoided at all costs', and closed closed with the reviewer's 'doubt [that] video shops will be swamped with orders for it anyway'*.  This roused my 12 year old self's interest as much for the invective heaped upon the project as for the revelation that there was a television incarnation of one of my favourite comic book characters, but alas neither a VHS copy of the above artifact nor a television broadcast (certainly not a terrestrial one) materialised.

* Video Vault review by Norman Taylor, The Dark Side issue cover date April 1992, Stray Cat Publishing.

Nosferatu: the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Sepulchral.  Now there's a word.  A word redolent of the grave, and of foul decaying fiends and cor'ses that from their tomb rent (as Byron so put it in The Giaour: 'But first on Earth, as vampire sent / Thy corse shall from thy tomb be rent / Then ghastly haunt thy native place / And suck the blood of all thy race').  The awful stench of ill-fard inhumation.  The terrifying paralysis of obsequy with the very breath of the wind of the winds of madness pricking each and every hair on the back of your neck.  These are words that could begin, in some way - like the chained prisoners in Plato's cave attempting to describe reality from the flickering shadows upon the wall before them - to go about beginning to describe the infernal opus that is Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu (originally subtitled Phantom Der Nacht), possibly the greatest representation of dread and crawling terror that an auteur ever unleashed.

Originally filmed in 1922 by Teutonic cinema pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Nosferatu was a thinly-disguised 'free adaptation' of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.  Dispensing with the business of securing copyright and paying royalties (much as he had done in 1920 when he directed Conrad Veidt as 'Dr Warren' and 'Mr O' Connor' in Der Januskopf, rather than filming Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Murnau and his screenwriter Henrik Galeen took the basic outline of Stoker's plot and grafted onto it the very folkloric roots of the vampire legend.  Here there is no seductive Count, no opera-caped and top-hatted aristocratic Mephistophelean charmer - in actor Max Schreck (the actor's actual name, despite the fated coincidence of his surname meaning 'Terror' - a name that has been homaged in cinema from Peter Cushing's Dr Schreck in Freddie Francis' 1965 Dr Terror's House of Horrors to Christopher Walken's villain in Tim Burton's 1992 Batman Returns) Murnau gave the silver screen a truly repellent vision of the blood-drinking undead: a rake-thin, pallid hairless ratlike creature with elongated talons and a feeling of having actually crawled from a cobwebbed tomb to slake his inhuman thirst and fill his emaciated body with the hot lifeblood of the living.

Murnau's copyright-dodging did not, however, go unnoticed and in short order Florence Stoker (widow of  Bram) gained a court ruling against Prana Film (rendering the company bankrupt by 1925) stipulating that all extant copies of Nosferatu should be destroyed.  Thankfully for cinema history, copies survived - possibly in part due to the fact that a number of differing variant versions had sprung up in so short a time, including an attempted re-release in 1930, re-edited and with added soundtrack, under the title Der Zwolfte Stunde (The Twelfth Hour).  This and other versions of the movie utilized different character names in order to further distance the movie from the original source, and so Gustav von Wangenheim's distaff Jonathan Harker is renamed Thomas Hutter, Greta Schroder's role of Mina is renamed Ellen (or the closer to the original 'Nina', depending on the variant being watched), John Gottowt's Van Helsing character becomes Professor Hutter, and Alexander Granach's insane Renfield substitute is retitled Knock.

In the 1970s, the German cinema was undergoing a creative renaissance due to the wave of young directors spearheading the New German Cinema, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Beware of a Holy Whore [1971], Fear Eats the Soul [1974], Satan's Brew [1976]), Wim Wenders (Summer in the City [1970], The Scarlet Letter [1973, starring the wonderful Senta Berger], The American Friend [the 1977 Dennis Hopper-starring adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game], and later to direct Paris, Texas [1984] and the superlative Wings of Desire [1987]) and Werner Herzog.  After starting his cinematic career with several shorts and documentary pieces, Herzog had begun to make a name for himself with the haunting and frankly startling Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) before making the first of many motion pictures starring his 'best fiend', the unpredictable, anarchic and quite possible not quite sane Klaus Kinski (whose turbulent anti-friendship and working career with Herzog would prove as productive as the invective that was wont to fly around the set) with Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972).  While these scions of Neuer Deutscher Film were being touted as the future of the filmic arts for their country, some of them were interested not only in forging ahead into the future, but also in connecting the modernism of the present with the heritage of Germany's cinematic past.  Fassbinder utilized established cinematic stars from past eras of German film history, and Herzog decided to bring Teutonic Kinema full circle by delving early into its roots and remaking the work that he called the greatest film Germany had ever made: Murnau's Nosferatu - the enfant terrible of the modern German cinema paying homage to his illustrious Golden Age predecessor.

Herzog opens his movie with a spectacularly eerie title sequence of footage of mummified corpses (filmed in Mexico) - and the handheld camera lingers lovingly over these dessicated denizens of the catacombs as a canto Gregoranio unspools form the soundtrack, the spellbinding tones invoking a literal Fear of God as we experience a Thanatophobic reaction to these tenants of the tombs with their yellowed leathery hides pulled taut over wizened ligaments and protruding bone.  The spectre of death haunts the film from its very opening seconds, and even in the establishing scenes set in the pretty town of Wismar (the North German Hanseatic township that Murnau had chosen as his surrogate for Stoker's Whitby, the location shooting for which in Herzog's film taking place mostly in the picturesque pottery setting of Delft, the Netherlands), with Bruno Ganz (later to garner great acclaim for his barnstorming portrayal of the Fuhrer in Oliver Hirschbiegel's masterful 2004 Untergang [Downfall]) as Jonathan Harker going about his daily routine - Herzog having made the decision to revert the names of the dramatis personae of the film back to their more well-known Stoker nomenclatures.  Herzog pays homage to the Murnau film in these establishing shots, with a number of camera set-ups being almost exact recreations of the '22 film such as the small kitten batting playfully at the locket containing the picture of Lucy hanging from the vanity's mirror.  As Lucy (Herzog opting for that name for the film's conflation of Stoker's Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker characters, rather than Murnau's Nina / Ellen), French actress Isabelle Adjani (The Tenant [Roman Polanski, 1976], the titular Queen in Patrice Chereu's La Reine Margot [1994], and Jeremiah Chechik's best-forgotten-about 1996 bastardisation of Clouzot Diabolique) is the very incarnation of a Gothic (in both the literary and the more modern senses of the term) heroine, with raven-black hair, porcelain pale skin and lips of blood red (levres de sang, as Jean Rollin rolled), a fragile and spectral beauty amidst the haunting images of death and decay when Death comes to Wismar.

 

 

Sent by his employer, the estate agent Renfield (played by writer Roland Topor, who had authored the original 1964 novel of The Tenant in a strange piece of serendipitous synchronicity), Harker finds himself bidding farewell to his loving Lucy and embarking upon a strange journey to the wilderness of Transylvania, the 'Land Beyond the Forest'.  This long sequence, filmed in locations across the Czech republic and in the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, is largely free of dialogue and with the striking vistas of forests and mountains soundtracked by an effective combination of the German avant-garde electronic ensemble Popul Vuh and Richard Wagner's Rheingeld from the Ring Cycle we are swept along with Harker into a strange land where the normal laws no longer apply.  Herzog may have lacked the inter-titles of the silent film, but where Murnau used text to tell us '...and when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him', here the same chilling effect of stepping into The Beyond is conveyed purely with sound and image: the very essence of pure cinema in full effect.  Here in this realm of ghosts Harker arrives, conveyed by a hearse-like phantom carriage pulled by night-black horses, at Castle Dracula to be met by the Count himself.  Klaus Kinski plays Dracula in a make-up extremely faithful to the Max Schreck Orlock, his head a moon-white and waxen hairless skull with pointed batlike ears and rat's teeth - the very embodiment of the unclean ('necurat'), insufferable ('nesuferit') enemy ('nefartat') bearer of disease ('nosophoros'): ancient atavistic folkloric horror incarnate.  Kinski portrays the character as shuffling wearily under the weight of the centuries, his voice a sighing suspiration, his movements languid and fatigued - this is a creature who has crawled down through the centuries cursed by the inability to die, a far cry from the image of the Romantic 'life' of the undead portrayed in the works of Anne Rice or the glittering ghouls of Stephenie Meyer.

As Harker languishes imprisoned in the corbelled crypt that is Castle Dracula, fed upon nightly by the Count whose polite and courtly manner disappears in the dead of the night to become a predatory animal (the image of his death-white visage emerging from the Stygian darkness to hover over the vulnerable supine Jonathan reminiscent of Fuseli's iconic The Nightmare), Herzog conveys a spiritual or psychic connection to Lucy who wakes screaming from strange dreamings - slow motion close up images of a bat in flight accompanied by the strains of Popul Vuh emphasising the lovers' bond betwixt one another transcending space and time, Lucy feeling Jonathan's pain and fear from afar.  The Count leaves Jonathan behind in his dungeoned hell, travelling in his crated coffin of earth by ship to Harker's homeland and arriving in another shot mirrored from Murnau, as the ghostly barque with it's dead crew sails into the harbour and its sail obliterates the view of the town's church.  The Nosferatu lives up to his name of 'plague bearer' as he arrives in Wismar bringing death and disease in his wake, as hordes of rats (around 10, 000 white lab rats - which the production tried to make resemble black 'plague rats' by covering them with makeup - being imported into the Netherlands by zoologist Maarten t' Hart under Herzog's instruction) sweep the streets and the Black Death decimates the population.  The slow creeping dread that falls over the town like a shadow, and Lucy's growing realisation of the cause, leads to the film's most powerful sequence - the white-robed virginal Lucy wandering through the town square through a vista of death: stacked unburied coffins and the unshriven dead, as the remaining townsfolk dance, drunkenly carouse and sacrifice animals as the strains of the desolately beautiful and poignant Georgian folk song 'Tsintskaro' ('At the Spring Waters', perhaps better known to Western audiences through its sampling by Kate Bush on 'Hello Earth' from Hounds of Love) echo all around.  Herzog expertly conveys a populace in disintegration, the thin veneer of civilisation being so easily stripped away to reveal the ugly animalistic face of humanity as civilisation collapses all around, and as the town's remaining enclave of the petit bourgeois sit at repast, dressed in their finery and inviting Lucy to 'Join us - it's our last supper' as the plague rats crawl about their feast and anarchy howls all around them and Lucy stands appalled at the insanity surrounding her like a lone sublime rose in a graveyard of dead flowers.

Lucy's attempts to appeal to the town's remaining authority figures to convey the root of the disease ('I know the cause of all this!  Why won't you listen?' she implores) are met with deaf ears, and the character of Dr Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast, portraying the character as a closed-minded buffoon as far from the wise and heroic portrayals of Peter Cushing, Frank Finlay et al as can be imagined) is unable and unwilling to come to her aid.  Following the denouement of the Murnau film, Lucy uses her beauty to entice and entrap the vampire, willingly giving her life and her blood (the blood, of course, being the life) to the undead Count as a sacrificial lamb to keep the monster occupied and engrossed in his engorging upon her until the dawn wherein he will be destroyed by the cleansing rays of the rising sun.  This sequence of willing self-destruction for love and the greater good plays out without any music, and the grim naturalism of Dracula's puckered dead lips approaching the terrified Lucy's throat, and then the suckling sound as he drinks her blood whilst his taloned hands paw at her breasts and lift up her nightdress to claw at her thighs is an absolutely perfect image of the abhorrence of violation and of death ravaging beauty and youth.

 

 

Herzog saves his final devastating sucker-punch for last, however.  After Lucy has given her life to destroy the Count and breathed her last lying upon her bed strewn with flowers - the very image of a Rosetti painting as she passes beyond the veil - and Professor Van Helsing has finally summoned the courage to do the right thing and hammer a wooden stake into the dying monster's heart to prevent the revenant's return, the surviving bureaucracy of this blighted burgh descend upon the house to arrest him for murder.  'Is it true?' barks the town official (Rijk de Gooyer), 'Did you kill the Count?  With this stake, here?', indicating the blood-covered lump of sharpened wood clutched in the hapless academic's hands.  As Van Helsing is carted away to face the petty 'justice' of the bourgeoisie for helping to end the plague of death, Jonathan - who has been ill, recovering from his ordeal, and sitting in a chair that Lucy has surrounded by a circle made from crushed wafer of the sacred Communion host by Lucy to protect him - suddenly awakes and barks orders at the terrified maid to clean up. 'Can't you see', he indicates the circle around him, 'this place is full of dust?'  As the maid returns with a dustpan and brush to sweep away the fragments, Harker leaps from the circle and triumphantly pulls the crucifix from round his neck with taloned fingers, smiling a terrible smile to bare the ratlike teeth of the vampire.  'Bring me my horse.  I have much work to do.'

And our final shot is of the vampirised Harker riding away upon his steed across the shifting sands and into the horizon as dark clouds gather in the sky to signal an oncoming storm (shades of the end scene of James Cameron's The Terminator of five years later) and the Sanctus from Gounod's Messe solennelle en l'honneur de Sainte Cécile soars on the soundtrack.  All sacrifice has ultimately been in vain, as death triumphs over life and the Count is reincarnated in Harker to continue his works.  The undead is dead, long live the undead.

Nosferatus dominus.

Casino Royale (TV, William H. Brown, 1954)

 Long before (well, eight years before, at least) Sean Connery essayed the role of superspy James Bond in Terence Young's 1962 Dr. No, and two years prior to Bob Holness of TV's Blockbusters playing Bond in a version of Moonraker for South African radio (and how i hope that the story of the genial Mr Holness greeting the news of Connery's casting with "Who's this cunt that's got my job?" is not apocryphal, because it never fails to amuse), there was only one actor to play Agent 007.  His name was Nelson.  Barry Nelson.

Starting out his career as an MGM contract player, Nelson had made his screen debut in the fourth in the series of William Powell and Myrna Loy's Nick and Nora Charles series Shadow of the Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1941) before appearing in a string of movies as diverse as the noir mystery Eyes in the Night (Fred Zinnemann, 1942) and Victor Fleming's wonderful romantic fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943) - the basis for Steven Spielberg's 1989 remake Always - and then returning to the US after his wartime military career to feature in prestigious Broadway productions (Moss Hart's Light Up The Sky and F. Hugh Herbert's The Moon is Blue) before making many appearances in television dramas.

 Cast as James Bond, 007 - referred to throughout the American adaptation as 'Jimmy' - Nelson was unfamiliar with the character or the material with which he was working ("I was scratching my head wondering how to play it.  I hadn't read the book... it wasn't well known", he admitted in an interview), the source novel - the first of Ian Fleming's soon to be world famous series - having only been published two years earlier.  Made and aired as part of CBS' Climax! mystery theatre anthology series (which also went on to feature an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - starring Michael Rennie of Robert Wise's seminal 1951 SF classic The Day the Earth Stood Still) and broadcast live as was the televisual practice of the time, the episode is introduced by host William Lundigan who explains to the audience about the game of baccarat (which i honestly could have done with Martin Campbell 2006 film version doing with the rules of Texas Hold 'Em poker).  Nelson's flat-topped Combined Intelligence Agent 'Card Sense' Jimmy Bond is paired with Clarence Leiter - changed from the Felix Leiter of the novel and now a British agent, possibly as part of some kind of foreign exchange programme with Bond - played by Australian thespian Michael Pate (best known to me through my penchant for the slightly less dignified areas of cinema as the undead gunslinger Drake Robey aka Don  Drago Robles in the extraordinary vampire Western Curse of the Undead [Edward Dein, 1959], and his turns as the President in two Philippe Mora directed spectaculars: The Return of Captain Invincible [1983] and Howling III: The Marsupials [1987].  I do watch more edifying films.  Honest.  Sometimes.) and French agent of the Deuxieme Bureau Valerie Mathis - a composite of Fleming's Vesper Lynd and Rene Mathis characters - played by the gorgeous Mexican actress (and wife of Hollywood star Tyrone Power) Linda Christian.

Bond's mission is to take on and 'clean out' the villainous Le Chiffre, played by the great Peter Lorre (of Fritz Lang's superlative classic M [1931], Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934], John Huston's The Maltese Falcon [1941] and many, many more - including favourites of mine Stranger on the Third Floor [Boris Ingster, 1940] and The Boogie Man Will Get You [Lew Landers, 1942]).  Lorre is perfectly cast as the 'toadlike' Le Chiffre, wheedling and plotting as he tries to win back the funds of his Soviet paymasters that he has blown (he's blown the funds, not the Russians) and dreading the dreaded revenge wreaked by SMERSH should he fail in his gambling endeavour.

The story moves at a good pace (perhaps due to incorporating the famed 'Fleming sweep' of its source material) across it's just under an hour runtime, with no perceptible gaffes or errors - always a danger in live broadcast material, as evidenced by the earlier Climax! production of Raymond Chandler's 'The Long Goobye', in which the actor playing the corpse assumed he was out shot, got up and ambled away.  It also stays pretty close (merged characters and swapped nationalities aside) to the novel, including the scene in which Le Chiffre's henchman holds Bond to ransom during the duel of cards by holding a trick walking stick that is actually a gun to the base of his spine in order to persuade him to leave the game and hand over his winnings - a sequence changed in the 2006 version to Bond being poisoned with a Digitalis-flavoured Martini and having to race to his car to self-administer defribrillation and medication.  Perhaps EoN Productions simply didn't think escaping a life or death situation by gripping the edge of a table and throwing oneself backwards onto the floor fit the image they wanted for the 21st century Bond they wanted to project. Still, it's nice to see it here.

One sequence that has altered however, inevitably due to the sensibilities of 1950s US television, is the torture sequence after Bond has been lured into the clutches of the vile Le Chiffre by the kidnap of Valerie / Vesper.  There was simply no way that the original scenario (a naked Bond tied to a wicker chair with the seat cut out and having his genitals battered by a carpet beater) was going to stand, yet the replacement in which a beaten Bond is tied and placed in a bathtub, his shoes removed and having his toes worked on with a pair of pliers is actually quite effective.  Due to the camera cutting away from what is precisely being done to the Bondian dactyls, and the agonised reactions of Nelson and Christian (Valerie being forced at gunpoint to watch her lover's grueling ordeal) it is left vague as to whether his toes are being broken or his toenails pulled out.  Either way, it led to me wincing almost as much as the canonical clacker-cracking.

 An enjoyable oddity of a production, obviously very different to the 'canonical' Bond series but still a fascinating curio, 'Casino Royale' features good performances from a great cast and a nicely taut and pacy script.  Rumours suggest that it had been mooted as a backdoor pilot to launch a 1950s US James Bond  TV series, and i do like the notion of a parallel universe wherein Barry Nelson was as well-known as James Bond as, say, Richard Greene is for Robin Hood.  He'll always be remembered by me, however, as 'officious little prick' Stuart Ullman, martinet manager of the dreaded Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's seminal The Shining (1980).  Shaken and stirred.

Captain America (Albert Pyun, 1990)

 With Marvel Studios' current domination of the cinematic box off ice like a veritable four-colour Kirby-dotted Titan, it's very easy to forget the long lean days of yore when to be a comic book fan who wanted to see one's mighty heroes transliterated from the pulpy page to the silver screen was to be given less choice than Sophie Zawitowski.  It must be near impossible today, when Disney chairman Bob Iger confidently states that Marvel film productions "will go on forever" as the production slate for the Marvel Cinematic Universe shifts from Phase Two to Phase Three (with a projected roster of eleven movies spanning from Captain America: Civil War [Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, 2016] to Inhumans [2019]), to conceive of a time when a superhero movie was a rare beast - when the David Hasselhoff-starring made for television Movie of the Week Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Rod Hardy, 1998) would be eagerly anticipated, when reruns of the classic Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982) would be gleefully enjoyed with any thoughts about how unlike the source material it really was pushed to the back of the mind, or when perfunctory Dolph Lundgren actioner The Punisher (Mark Goldblatt, 1989) would transcend its slightly grubby B-list Death Wish status in the eyes of the viewer because it was Marvel character Frank castle there on the screen.  Slim pickin's indeed.  For the Marvel comics fan cum cineaste, it was like trying to convey to a young Doctor Who fan in the modern age what the 1990s were like.  "We didn't have all this stuff!".

And much in the same way that a Who fan can sometimes sound like he's perversely nostalgic for the days when there was less of what he likes around, in some ways I do look back fondly upon the days when a comic book adaptation was the rarity rather than the rule.  As good an actor and likeable a screen presence as Mark Ruffalo is, Bill Bixby remains the archetypal (David) Bruce Banner for me.  Neither Tobey Maguire nor Andrew Garfield have displaced Nicholas Hammond as Spider-Man in my mind's eye.  The fervour with which the TV showings or VHS releases of Marvel product in the 1980s and most of the 1990s was met meant that these portrayals were seared indelibly upon my impressionable young brain.  In the case of Star-Spangled Avenger Captain America, long before Chris Evans strode onto the screen as Steve Rogers there was another actor who had essayed the role.  Well, there were three previous actors, actually: Dick Purcell (star of Jean Yarbrough's 1941 King of the Zombies) had played Cap in a 1944 Republic Pictures movie serial that saw the character's alter ego changed to crime-fighting district attorney Grant Gardner, and Reb Brown had taken hold of the mighty vibranium shield for a pair of TV movies in 1979 that i won't cover in any detail here, as they're so genius / awful that i'm certain i'll get round to doing them in detail some time.  But the film i'm concerned with here is the 1990 Cannon Films production starring Matt Salinger, son of reclusive Holden Caulfield-spawner J. D. Salinger.

Coming hot on the heels of Pyun's superlative essaying of futuristic apocalyptic angst Cyborg (1989) - and you know what, i may not even actually be joking there - but before the dizzy heights of 1991's Dollman or 1996's Omega Doom (alright, yes, i'm just straying into ridiculous territory here) this feature eschews both the modernising take of the 1970s movies and the historical setting of the most recent iteration by going the whole entire hog and establishing the character's origin from the frail polio-stricken Steve Rogers into the titular Super Soldier during World War II, as well as his first skirmish with the villainous Red Skull (Scott Paulin, of Teen Wolf [1985] and other stuff, probably) before literally putting the character on ice until 'the present day'. 

The film features Ned Beatty, possibly best known to fans of the superhero movie as Otis 'Otisburg' from off of the Superman (1978), as childhood Cap'n 'Murica fan (his younger 1940s self being portrayed by Beatty's son Thomas) and confidante Sam Kolawetz, 'Dick Jones from RoboCop' Ronny Cox as President Tom Kimball, and in a weird piece of double casting that makes my fannish mind explode both Bill Mumy (from Lost in Space [1965-1968] and Babylon 5 [1994-1998]) and Darren McGavin (Carl Kolchak himself from Kolchak: The Night Stalker [1974-1975]) as the respective younger and older versions of the dodgy General Fleming.

The more recent films obviously have the talents of performers such as Hayley Atwell to call upon, but this modest take upon the material does quite well with the performance of Kim Gillingham as both Steve's 1940's love interest Bernie and her present day incarnation Sharon in a contrast of 'The Olden Days' with 'The Present Day' that Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) would exploit to more comic effect later in the decade.

I was a bit sad when the Red Skull died.  But then, i tend to be on the side of the super villains more often than not.  I have no idea what this could possibly mean, psychologically speaking.

Slashers (2001, Maurice Deveraux)

 Even with my somewhat arcane and eldritch knowledge of the more obscure back roads and byways of horror and exploitation cinema, the sheer number of movies produced over the last century or so means that there are always a number of films that have eluded my evil clutches, fallen through the cracks, that i just haven't got round to yet (but are on the - very long - list of Things To See), or that i simply haven't heard of or encountered before.  This is especially true of films of the recent decade or two, as a lot of my time is spent focusing on the 'classic' periods of horror of 1925-ish to 1950 (the Universal Golden Age), 1955 to c. 1975 (the Hammer Horror Age, incorporating Roger Corman and others of the era) and then we have the 1980s and early '90s, the Video Age of the slasher movie sequel sagas, the Video Nasties, and my misspent youth when indulgent video shop staff would turn a blind eye and rent 18 rated movies to a morbid eight year old who eagerly enquired whether the latest Friday the 13th installment was better than The Toxic Avenger.

It's little wonder, then, that in this day and age when many - if not most - genre movies (especially the grubbier lower end of the budget spectrum films to which this blog is nominally dedicated) are straight to DVD and Blu-Ray, there are many that i come to with absolutely no foreknowledge or preconceived preconception whatsoever.  One such bloodstained treasure is writer / director Maurice Deveraux' 2001 video opus Slashers, a Quebecois Canadian killer thriller.

Taking the format of a Japanese TV game show, the film uses the by now well-worn theme of the 'snuff game', wherein contestants take part in a real kill or be killed, hunter versus the hunted scenario for the delectation of the spectating audience.  Familiar to most of the present audience through Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and its cinematic adapted offspring (Gary Ross' The Hunger Games [2012], and the Francis Lawrence helmed Catching Fire [2013], Mockingjay Part 1 [2014] and Mockingjay, Part 2 [2015]), but traceable back through seminal Eighties-tastic Stephen King penned Arnie Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) - which was the clear inspiration behind 1990 arcade and home computer game Smash TV - the basic plot stretches back as far as Richard Connell's 1924 story "The Hounds of Zaroff, which was first adapted as a motion picture as The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932) wherein Joel McCrea and Fay Wray were hunted through the jungle as human quarry for the sport of Leslie Banks' Zaroff.  More recently, at the time of Slashers' conception, the real-life Japanese industry had given Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2000) to the unsuspecting world.

With more of a tongue-in-cheek sly and dark humour than Fukasaku's brutal realism, Deveraux presents the film as an episode of the eponymous game show complete with dancing cheerleaders, resident DJ, live studio audience and dancing cheerleaders, all presided over by host Miho Taguchi (Claudine Shiraishi) who begins with a fourth-wall address straight to camera (as we, the viewers of the movie, become the audience of the fictitious television programme) which switches from initial subtitles Japanese into English as she welcomes the show's new viewers in North America - a move which brings to mind Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. I (2003) in which Lucy Lui's character gives an in-universe diagetic explanation for utilising Western-friendly English dialogue.

The six members of the Anglophone public willing to bet their lives for the jackpot of "Twelve million American dollars!" are a combination of types: boxer and ex-marine Devon (Tony Curtis Blondell), computer programmer Michael (Kieran Keller), tough and sassy fitness instructor and 'Extreme Gladiator champion' Rebecca (Carolina Pla), nightclub doorman Rick (Jerry Sprio), legal student Megan (Sarah Joslyn Crowder) and model "and aspiring actress" Brenda (Sofia de Medeiros), who are to be pursued and hunted down to the last man or woman standing by the show's eponymous Slashers: Chainsaw Charlie (a dungaree-wearing "good old inbred Redneck" Southern hillbilly stereotype wielding the infamous Texas Massacre weapon of choice) and Preacherman (an extreme parody of a 'Fire and Brimstone' preacher who vows to slay all "sinners") are both portrayed in a rather impressive doubling-up by Neil Napier, whilst the ghoulish Dr Ripper ("the medic who's psychotic") is enacted by the surely pseudonymous Christopher Piggins.

The motley crew of contenders are accompanied into the arena / labyrinth of death by cameraman Hideo (Takaaki Honda) who provides occasional commentary as well as supplying the images of the film, which from this point in are almost entirely from the subjective point of view of Hideo's handheld camera.  As a young fledgling film buff, i was always impressed with the opening prologue of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 horror opus Halloween, wherein Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey contrived the appearance of a single one-take uncut tracking perspective shot.  Here, director and editor Devereaux and cinematographer Denis-Noel Mostert go much further by making the majority of the movie the feed from a single camera (although the edit points can quite easily spotted in the moments we pan past a dark background or the lighting flickers and we get a second of blackness, or in the whip-pans and sudden zooms, they are very neatly done).

The prospective survivors / winners and their characterisations and interactions play out like a bizarre cross between Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) - strangers with disparate personalities all together and struggling to outwit their deadly environment and survive - and a particularly perverse installment of Endemol's Big Brother.  Megan has volunteered for the show to make a political protest against the programme and its packaging of human slaughter as entertainment, railing against the audience for "consenting to my execution, for giving your support to this show and its advertisers" in a moment quite reminiscent of Bing's excoriation of the TV judges and their passive audience in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits (2011).  The reality television voyeurism is addressed by Brenda asking what her chances of survival are, and then immediately removing her top to spend the rest of her time topless aside from her bra (Brenda [re: her chances]: "Now?".  Devon: "Better."), ignoring Rebecca's "Where's your self-respect?" in order to 'play the game' for her own survival.

The reality show gameplay reaches its simultaneous apotheosis and nadir when Megan and Michael find themselves in the 'Love Room' - a boudoir replete with heart-shaped bed, glitterball and cheesy muzak - and Michael insists that "If we have sex, we buy ourselves some no attack time... Sex is ratings!", and Megan's refusal (complete with trope reference: "Don't Slashers always kill those that screw?") leads to his sudden transformation from nerdy and slightly irritating geek to rapist ("They want this to happen!  They won't stop me!").  The unleashing of his inner predator, and his rationalisation of his actions as "survival strategy", serves as much as a damning indictment of human nature and the extremes to which an individual may go in order to ensure their personal safety and achieve fame as it is a satirical critique of the kind of televisual entertainment that a passive audience will lap up without question.

Entertaining and interesting, Slashers is a neat little film that is more than just a low-budget gore movie with thrills, spills and kills, but also offers a wry commentary upon modern TV audiences and poses questions as to the extremes that entertainment can and will go in order to hold an audience and corporate sponsorship.