»17th November 2008

Return of the Dead

There has been another film festival at Leeds recently, the 22nd one, if the people who run it are to be believed. In a nod to culture, and after Ali's persuasion "Do you want to go to this?" "Okay." I decided to go to the 'Return of the Dead' event which was yesterday afternoon. The event showcased a selection of new, independent horror flicks. The 'Return' comes from the fact that it was actually an extra addition to the schedule after the yearly 'Night of the Dead' sold out--scientists believe--a few billionths of a second after the Big Bang. The basic formula for the 'Night' is a midnight start and four back-to-back horror films, 'Return' was later on in the same day at two in the afternoon and for some reason played the films in the reverse order from the night before. The reverse order was clearly because the shiftless projector operator couldn't be bothered to unload the film from the night before.
I enjoy text formatting so here's some headings.



Getting there

As usual, I had to make my way to the event.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, buses are shit, they are usually late, always unreliable, increasingly expensive, increasingly infrequent, completely inconvenient, and an utterly miserable way of getting around. My tried and tested way of offsetting the fuckings dealt by buses is the use of a portable music player, in this case my iPod. The greatest calamity of all befell my only a short time into my trip on the 229 into Leeds, my iPod had run flat. This changed everything, all of a sudden I could hear the noise about me. Despite it being a sunday, the top deck had a high density of assclowns aboard. Two asian guys who appeared to know eachother and be travelling together were sat at completely opposite ends of the bus and were continually smirking to each other. The one at the back of the bus of course had a mobile phone and was inflicting shit dance music on everyone else on the bus, much to the chagrin of the eastern european man at the front of the bus. There were inconsoleable screaming children on the lower deck, whose constant cries were completely ignored by their mothers. At Batley the asian guys got off the bus, back-seat techno guy was fully decked out in chav gear and was immediately replaced by an almost identically dressed white guy, who of course had a mobile phone, though had a taste in drum and bass. Further on at Birstall, a young couple got on the bus with a young child. They took up position towards the back of the top deck as well and the child proceeded to run up and down the aisle whilst the mother had the most foul-mouther and one-way conversation with her disinterested boyfriend/spouse ever. She was as thick as pig shit and as I noted in my notebook--into which I usually note fragmented lyric ideas--"couldn't bring up phlegm, let alone a child." At Gildersome, a guy with long hair held back in a pony tail (sound familiar? Well it was blonde and curly, so not this time) got on and sat in front of me. There was something unusual about this man, I couldn't quite place it until, over the din I heard the distinctive wail of heavy metal lead guitar coming from his headphones. If this guy wasn't already a Slayer fan then I'm making him an honoury brother for showing such concern to his fellow brothers. Bringing me under his aura of metal I was most grateful for the bonus 33% resistance to fuckings afforded to all party members. This made the remainder of the journey into Leeds at least tolerable.


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

I know I wouldn't be so annoyed by all of this if I didn't always listen to my iPod on the bus, but why build up a resistance to idiots like that when I can just block them out entirely? I read an article once that said that modern technology seperates us from real contact with people, and I largely agree with what it was saying. But I can't see why anyone who already has to suffer buses must further suffer at the hands of those certain people who give 'other people' a bad name. It irritates me when people quote Jean-Paul Sartre's "Hell is other people"--I mean I almost on principle have to disagree with what French marxist existentialist philosophers have to say anyway--for hell is not other people, it's probably just public transport... Though public transport does eventually get you somewhere you want to be, only incredibly late, flustered and angry, not cool. In that way I suppose it's more like purgatory.

Bagel Nash

Ugh, so much for quickly summing up 'getting there', I can't believe I actually managed to rope in a french philosopher into that... So I had arrived at the train station where I met up with JK. We then went to Zavvi Virgin Megastore where I bought Judas Priest's 1990 album Painkiller before heading over to The Light to wait for Ali.
Whilst waiting at The Light, I decided it would be a good idea to get something to eat seeing as I wasn't sure if there would be breaks between the films or how long they would be. Somehow, Bagels had become a talking point the night before and it was clear that I had to get a bagel to be sure that I'd actually had one at some point. As a fortunate surprise, Leeds-based independent bagel-chain, Bagel Nash had a branch in The Light. So I went in and became part of the Jewish conspiracy after being bought out by Bagel Nash to promote their products bought a bagel which was probably the first bagel the best bagel I've ever had! YUM! It was the Swiss Cheese one and had some chutney and too much lettuce. It probably needed more cheese was great.


"It all makes sense now!"

Despite the fine snack I still remain sceptical about bagels purely because they seem to appeal to bagels are great and have nothing to do with my antipathy towards pretentious city types whose cosmopolitan habits appear as a thin veneer. I mean there was this middle-aged guy at Bagel Nash who was sat there with his bloody laptop doing... oh I don't know what he was doing, what could he possibly doing on a laptop which was of such great importance to interrupt enjoying a fine, fresh bagel as part of his lunch and yet was NOT so important for him to be doing in what was presumably his lunch break. Did you know that Bagel Nash have seven branches in Leeds alone? Coffee shops and coffee in general is also part of this problem. Of course, I'm not going to have that as some kind of justification for a ludicrous boycot on coffee and bagels, I mean that would be letting them win. You're not going to see me at Starbucks any time soon though.

Tickets/Leeds City Council are fuck ups

I had ordered the tickets online, as I had done so for Rug Cop the year before (a descriptively-titled Japanese film about a police detective with a magical wig which could fly to attack criminals and possibly talked (it was last year and it was a pretty bizarre film, give me a break.)) The year before I had picked up my ticket, as Ali had, at the ticket office at the Hidepark Picture House as was made abundantly clear to me during the online order process. This year however I was able to order the tickets online and get them delivered to me before the event. The underlined text in that previous sentence indicates where Leeds City Council's film festival website was totally misleading. It only mentioned in the small print on the order summary/receipt page that actually all film festival tickets are simply picked up at the venue before the screening as is apparently always the case. I'm guessing that this fuck up was due to my previously not being involved in the Jewish conspiracy and I was able to pick up the tickets at Vue cinema at The Light with no problems.

The Films

I can't be arsed now making this update any longer than it needs to be so I'm going to keep this as brief as necessary.

Dance of the Dead


I lifted these from the Leeds Film Festival page. Get over it.

Plot: There's a prom at a high school and then zombies emerge from their graves because of pollution from a local power station, a bunch of very different teenagers have to... kill all the zombies and blow up their school(!) using only a handful of weapons, wisecracking one liners and by enlisting the help of the wisecracking divorced survivalist gym teacher. Eventually the sci-fi society geeks manage to get with the prom queens, the unlikely hero gets the girl (pictured above) and the band play the best gig of their life and... well there was even a weird zombie make-out scene.
This was a horror comedy poking fun at zombie horror film conventions as well as more broadly horror and american high school culture in general. The gore was--for a zombie film--actually fairly light. The humour and one liners was absolutely spot on and the cast were clearly really behind the whole thing. The only let-down was the time the film taken to really get going, with a zombie-shuffling pace first act. Particularly enjoyable was the discovery that the power of rock music could temporarily hold the walking dead at bay as was most of what the Kyle and the Gym Coach characters had to say.
Summary: Hilarious zombie farce only slightly let down by initial slack pacing, would be great to own on DVD. Very much in the same vein as the wholly-recomended and bizarrely-underrated John Carpenter masterpiece, Big Trouble in Little China.

Tokyo Gore Police


Tokyo Transfusion Police: Ruka inbetween blood fountains

Plot: As I remember it, the film festival guide's entire synopsis of this film was 'In the future.' Basically, near-future Tokyo has a privatised police force who are brutally enforce the law and battle with a new kind of criminal known only as 'engineers' (that was probably intended to sound subtly threatening in Japanese.) Police detective Ruka (Eihi Shiina) (hot) fights the brutal engineers (basically, near invincible mounstrous genetically enhanced mass killers) and uncovers a secret about her past that makes her question the very law that she enforces.
First, just look at that title. This is a straight-up goresploitation film where practically every scene ends in a completely over-the-top crimson-soaked orgy of depravity and blood fountains. The film had some great costumes and a mix of deliberately and hilariously bad effects as well as some ones that actually looked good (the weird sword-limbed gimp-girl-dog (don't ask) thing toward the end of the film immediately springs to mind.) The depravity on show in this film was taken several steps beyond what you'd ever expect and was all the better for it. It'd be unfair to ruin the surprise. Beneath this cartoon bloodsplosion was a Verhoeven-esque satire of Japanese society, right down to some absolutely hilarious television ads and segues that cut between the action. There was clearly a lot of references I would have got if I knew more about Japanese culture but this was still really good. The exploitation element of the film, as it should do, cuts very close to the bone, and so if you're not on the same page as this film, you're just not going to like it. It's only a film, remember.

One of the more depraved scenes I suppose. Can you be bothered to split hairs?

Summary: Totally excessive ode to gore and a manic satire. If you don't already know precisely what this film is about and what it's trying to do then try to imagine an even more comic-book and violent Robocop crossed with a healthy splat of Judge Dredd and of course buckets of gore, oh, and Japanese. Thumbs up.

Deadgirl


Note to Vue: This is what the film looks like if you actually have the projector bulb turned up as it should be.

Plot:Two teenagers wander into an abandoned asylum (never a good idea in a horror film) and after forcing past a locked door sealed up with rust in the deepest recesses of the asylum, are shocked to discover a naked young woman chained to a table. Casting aside the fact that this girl was miraculously still alive and that she was largely unresponsive to anything they said, JT (henceforth 'Mr. Crazy') decides it would be totally okay and free of consequences to rape her, accomplice Ricky initially thinks it's a fucking stupid idea (as anyone with even the faintest hint of a moral code would), but this is a modern american horror film so he quickly acquiesces and decides to leave JT to his dirty deed. Joaquin Phoenix lookalike Ricky and Mr. Crazy decide to keep the girl a secret though this doesn't last for long. At some point, and I can't remember how this was revealed, it turns out that this girl just won't die, she is shot and beaten but appears unaffected, so it is never clear whether she is alive or dead. Soon both Ricky and Mr. Crazy unravel before us as the depths of depravity and taste are plumbed.
This film was the most flawed of the evening and certainly the one I struggled with most. It is clearly part of the whole American Modern School of Horror (if that isn't a school already, it is now) in the same line as Saw and Eli Roth's rather ropey Hostel, and I do have some problems with this style and its conventions which I'll touch on later. Initially sceptical this film quickly showed itself to have an interesting premise and there were some clear avenues that the film could take to open a debate on the modern American male psyche. One major problem was that the film didn't really get to grips with many of the issues that were there. The violent rape of the girl was without consequences, she did not protest, she was chained helpless to the table and any violence inflicted on her had no real effect beyond superficial wounding. JT didn't seem to see it as rape, 'it's as if she's not there, she's not real' but Ricky never really seemed to take a stance, or at least not hold it in the face of peer pressure long enough for us to have any insight into his character or to think about what it is that makes rape, murder or violence such heinous acts.
Peer pressure was clearly one thing the film wanted to look at, how it might force people to regress on their moral code, but no real conclusions ever seemed to emerge. The nihilistic though quite ambiguous and unresolved endind in a more complete film would have made more sense. The central character Ricky was clearly confused and seemed to be making more moral choices as the film went on, however, why he abandoned this at the end did not seem clear and seemed to betray the character as it had been for the previous 85 minutes of the film (all these films were pretty much bang on ninety minutes.) After the excess of Tokyo Gore Police, this film was always going to struggle to out-depravity it. The fact that these characters felt it was okay to violate the dead girl as it was seemingly not 'real' was never brought up by a character in the film, their actions were never challenged and any insight on them was muffled, the audience never had to question the 'wrongness' of what was going on on screen because no alternatives were ever proposed. Further puzzling was the Candice Accolo's character 'JoAnn' the object of Ricky's adolescent lusting. Whilst being led to believe that Ricky harboured genuine feelings of love toward JoAnn, despite his almost heroic efforts to save her in the finale, the coda to the film seemed to shoot down all of this and instead show Ricky's attraction being only physical. The emphasis there is because the film simply does not make this clear, I honestly can't tell if I'm attributing more meaning to this film than the director intended.


The dynamic duo: Schizo and Question Mark tackle their toughest case yet! JT inbetween completely different characters.

Baffling were the occasional forays into black humour that the film made, an unwanted distraction to the faint moral debate which may or may not have been going on. Another blind alley was the dog--which had initially chased Ricky and JT into the dead girl's room to begin with--it surely wasn't going to be just an ordinary dog, perhaps a motif for the devil a la The Omen? Perhaps it would represent the other half of the Deadgirl, an embodiment of the animalistic rage which she showed more as the film developed. Nope, it was just a regular dog. Clearly I was looking for imagery and motifs in this film which should have been there but weren't. Whilst all of the films were low budget and no doubt filmed entirely on digital film, Deadgirl was just too dark at times, a problem which was no doubt worsened by what I can only assume was a sixty watt bulb being used in the projector and also the sound issues namely the ludicrous gain and fluctuating volume which had dogged the first half of the film, making menacing sub-woofer rumbles into laughable crackling moos which drowned out the dialogue and the rest of the score, which was a shame as the score seemed the most competent aspect of the film. An additional weakness which detracted from the interesting premise were some stock exchanges between Ricky and the under-developed stepfather character as well as a couple of exchanges with JoAnn, where the two characters offered cryptic advice to Ricky in the help of informing decisions he'd surely have to make in a more complete film.
Summary: Whether deliberate or not (and having seen Hostel and the conventions it seems to adhere to it may have just been deliberate) there was no moral resolution or judgement made on the characters in this film--who I can only assume were the people supposed to be on trial here (again, in light of Hostel, the goal might be for the audience to be the ones on trial, which I struggle to understand.)
Lack of resolution aside for one moment, the film's sporadic lurches into comedy were infrequent and distracting from what I assume was meant to be the overall thrust of the film. The initial structure for the film suggested a coming-of-age drama would be one element but this never materialised. Character development was also a serious issue, particularly that of JT. Over the course of the film he went from a cocky rebel, to an amoral rapist with an eventual descent into manic, necro-pimp with no factors seeming to drive this change other than the need for the story itself to progress. Three one-dimensional characters do not make a three-dimensional character which was what was needed to make Ricky's character any more than a confused non-committal shrug.
The only possible conclusion I can think that this film tries to offer is that adolescent males only see the world, or perhaps just women, as physical objects, and that whilst they may sacrifice themselves to protect what they 'love', there is no human connection present.
If that is what the film is trying to say, it doesn't succeed in delivering its unpalatable message about the male psyche in the same way that equally unpalatable messages are delivered by American Psycho (which I love) or Fight Club (which I am undecided/unreceptive toward.) There's a good idea in there somewhere.

My Name Is Bruce


Bruce inbetween cracking one-liners.

Plot: B-Movie megastar Bruce Campbell stars as himself in this self-referential comedy horror where as a struggling, washed-up, alcoholic B-movie actor, Brucie finds himself drawn into a battle against and ancient Chinese war god (and protector of bean curd.) Of course, for most of the film, Campbell's self-involved character believes the whole thing to be merely an elaborate birthday present organised by his agent and takes great joy in hamming it up to the distressed villagers of Goldlick who he believes all to be actors, when they plead with him to help them against the war god, Guan Di, who he again assumes to be merely a guy in a rather shoddy costume.
Heavily referencing both Campbell's cult following and the slapstick low-budget horror films which have become his trademark, this film was the most easy to watch of the evening and looked to have benefitted from probably having the most money spent on it too. My recollection of the film is hindered by the fact that at this point only getting two and a half hours sleep the previous night was starting to take its toll, however it hit all the buttons that I expected it would. I've seen and enjoyed the Evil Dead films and whilst aware of the whole thing surrounding Bruce Campbell I didn't enter this film in the same way I might enter say an Arnie or a Christian Bale film. Still, Bruce Campbell really does know what he's doing when it comes to slapstick and corny deadpan comic delivery. This was the second zombie farce of the night but I can't be bothered with any comparisons with Dance of the Dead. Campbell is ably supported by long-time cohort Ted Raimi in mulitple roles (younger brother of Evil Dead director Sam Raimi), Ellen Sandweiss as ex-wife Cheryl (she totally coincidentally played 'Cheryl' in Evil Dead) and Grace Thorsen as the 'only one with her head screwed on' love interest and victim of multiple ass-grabs Kelly. One of the surprises of the film were the entertaining country music segues which explained key plot developments between some scenes.
Summary: An incredibly silly and enjoyable film that made a lot more sense as the closer for the event as it was clearly the most anticipated by the audience. If you like Bruce Campbell, you're going to like this film. Deadpan and slapstick comedy mixed seamlessly with low-budget horror corn.

Conclusion?

This has gone on far too long again. After the films we went to Weatherspoons and then parted ways with Ali before getting the 209 at eleven back. Additional things I've not really gone over were how the pre-film introductions from the festival staff broke down severely over the course of the evening, the ludicrous 'competitions' for free things organised by the idle projectionist where one prize was awarded for shouting 'Sean Bean' as the answer to the star of the film the projectionist claimed to be thinking of (clearly, '33 hours awake' had taken its toll on the projectionist if the sound fiasco during Deadgirl wasn't a dead give away.)
Must... pull this to a conclusion.
So, the Return of the Dead was a success and culture was observed. Buses are awful. There is no Jewish conspiracy. This update was in no way sponsored by Bagel Nash or the Jewish Conspiracy. All hail His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Yorkshire, Sean Bean.

Extar, over, out.

TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!