Worldwide zombie shorts collection

Left Films’ Ultimate Zombie Feast is now up for pre-order on Amazon at a bargaintastic £8.99. This double disc is packed with short zombie films from around the world including:

• Paul Cranefield, Scott Kragelund and Erik Van Sant’s The Book of Zombie (USA, 61 mins) 
• William Bridges’ Dead Hungry (UK, 10 mins) 
• Jay Reiter’s Arise (USA, 17 mins) 
• Gregory Morin’s Paris by Night of the Living Dead (France, 12 mins) 
• Tor Fruergaard’s It Came from the West (Denmark, 17 mins) 
• Rafael Martinez and Inaki San Roman’s Zombies and Cigarettes (Spain, 17 mins) 

...and loads more.

More than five hours of top-quality zombie goodness for nine quid. The package is set for release on 18th June. How can this not be utterly brilliant?

The Comic - review

Originally posted on my main site in about 2005 or so, I think. As with Kannibal, this was removed not because it contains anything untrue or libelous but simply to prevent Richard Driscoll sending threatening e-mails to the young man who hosts my main website for me. The four-part, epic Evil Calls review will follow. - MJS


The Comic 
Director: Richard Driscoll
Writer: Richard Driscoll
Producer: Richard Driscoll
Cast: Steve Munroe, Berdia Timimi, Vass Anderson
Country: UK
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK DVD (23rd Century) 

I am about to damn this movie with fainter praise than has ever existed in the history of film criticism: The Comic is not as bad as Kannibal.

That is not to say it’s any good, or even adequate. It is, in point of fact, shite. It is boring, pretentious, completely incomprehensible, poorly acted and packed with godawful 1980s haircuts. In short, it’s like watching an amateur remake of a Spandau Ballet video.

But this debut feature from the man who might reasonably described as the British Ed Wood scores over his later picture in a few important ways. It is at least an original idea rather than a shameless rip-off of two successful Hollywood movies. The music isn’t bad (but, as they say, you don’t come out of the cinema whistling the - oh, hang on, that doesn’t work here, does it?). Most impressively, Driscoll himself stays behind the camera in this one and there is no sign of Lucien Morgan, the officially recognised Worst Actor in the World.

Nevertheless, this is a bad film.

Steve Munroe, a wooden actor saddled with a ginger mullet so unappealing that it suggests he was really bad in a previous life, stars as Sam Coex, a wannabe comedian (Munroe followed this with bit parts in Robin of Sherwood, Casualty and The Bill and a role in the Driscoll-produced serial killer biopic Cold Light of Day). But the local club already has a regular comedian on its books, Joey Myers (Jeff Pirie, who had recently spent two years as Eddie/Dr Scott in The Rocky Horror Show; he is credited as Jeff Perrier in the closing credits and Jeff Pine on the sleeve of the DVD). Frustrated, Coex kills Myers late one night and buries his body. Then, when the comedian fails to show the next night, Coex goes on instead and is a hit.

He becomes involved with a prostitute, Anne (the surely anagrammatical Berdia Timimi), who has some sort of secret agenda although it’s never made clear what that is. He also gets picked up by Joey Myers’ old agent Stan (Bernard Plant), who charges a staggering 80% fee for booking him into various dives. As his career progresses, Coex is haunted by visions, often involving the zombified return of Joey Myers.

Now here’s the odd thing: this all happens in a dystopian near-future even though this has no relevance to the plot whatsoever. Our only clue is an opening narration by a blonde woman, to camera, which seems to be based on the opening of Dune. This actress (who is presumably the Kim/Kym Stone credited in the opening titles but not at the end) tells us that in this world “people don’t live, they merely ... exist.” We then have a shot of a soup kitchen where a small squad of goose-stepping, jackbooted soldiers/cops march in and beat up a man - apparently for daring to crouch under a table.

The DVD sleeve tells us: “In a fascist near future Britain has become an oppressive police state, the drugged population is entertained by ‘the Comics’ who keep a smile on their faces while everything gets worse.” Precisely none of this comes across in the movie, even if you have read the sleeve and are actively looking for this stuff.

Instead, we get Sam’s rise to fame and a highly speeded up social life. When Anne tells him she is pregnant he asks her to marry him, on condition that she gives up the drink and drugs, although there has been no suggestion up to that point that she indulges in either. They have a little girl - there is a hilarious silhouette shot of a nurse holding an obvious doll up by its leg and smacking it - and before you know it his daughter is three and his wife is looking for work.

“But how can I help?” asks Stan when Sam asks him for a favour in this regard. “I’m an agent - I just find jobs for people.” Actually, Bernard Plant has several unintentionally great lines, my other favourite being “This is a hell of a place to meet,” as he settles down next to Sam in what appears to be a relatively quaint English pub.

The nightclubs themselves are mostly just collections of tables with people sitting at them; there is no attempt to integrate audience shots with shots of Sam, Joey or anyone else on stage which were very obviously filmed separately. Even the very limited laughter and applause (the paucity of which matches the material on offer, though I don’t think that’s intentional) doesn’t connect in any way with the ‘performance’ footage.

Despite what it says on the sleeve, the people in the audiences appear relatively affluent, rather than being a subjugated lower class kept in their place by cheap entertainment. There is no suggestion that the people in the soup kitchen ever get to visit a club. I get the impression that the combination of cabaret and stark class division is meant as an allegory for Weimar Germany but I could be wrong. Had The Comic been any good it could actually have served as a strangely prophetic look at Britain 20 years later, with a populace kept distracted by mindless entertainment while a right-wing regime dismantles democracy around them. But it’s shit so it doesn’t.

There is also some sort of subplot about a local bigshot named George Ellington (Vass Anderson, who was also in Kannibal) who waltzes off with Anne, who is some sort of gold-digger. Also, for some reason, everyone travels around in vintage cars (or in one instance, a horse-drawn carriage). ‘For some reason’ is a phrase that seems appropriate to most aspects of this film, although not as appropriate as ‘for no reason whatsoever’.

Sam’s nightmares are some of the worst-written, worst-directed, just plain worst parts of the film, although towards the end it’s difficult to tell one thing from another (though not in a good, enigmatic way; more in a bad, incompetent way). He even says to someone at one point, “It was all a really bad dream.” Ah, but if only it was... There is a particularly funny sequence not too far into the film where Sam appears as a sort of demon, body-painted green and with enormous furry eyebrows matching his carrot-coloured thatch.

It is absolutely impossible to follow what is meant to be going on in The Comic. Better minds than mine have tried and failed. Perhaps Richard Driscoll knew what he was trying to do but he completely failed to communicate that to the viewer. Which is in contrast to Kannibal, where we could all see precisely not only what he was trying to do but also how incredibly badly he was doing it

So, apart from Driscoll, who else has this film on their CV as a guilty secret? The cast includes Bob Flag, who was Denis Nilsen in Cold Light of Day and was also in Calendar Girls, 1984 and Eat the Rich; Gary Twomey, who was in Robin of Sherwood and Taggart; Joy Lale, who subsequently became script editor on All Creatures Great and Small, producer on Between the Lines and Ballykissangel and then died in a car crash aged 30; and Eddie Blackstone, who is now half a cabaret act called Tjay and the Bear. Simon Davies (surely not the Blue Peter presenter?) is quite dreadful as the club compere.

Cinematographer Alan Trow started as a stills photographer and went on to a busy career as DP on such movies as Xtro II, Project Shadowchaser I and II, Monolith, Cyberjack, Grim and Dragonworld. Special effects are credited to Chris Tucker who previously worked on Star Wars,The Boys from Brazil, The Elephant Man, Dune, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and the unjustly under-rated vampire picture Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.

The Comic was famously booed off-screen at its one British theatrical outing and subsequently surfaced very briefly on video. Twenty years later it surfaced on DVD courtesy of 23rd Century, a ‘company’ whose extensive range of bootleg films was on sale from pound shops across the land. Normally I deplore the purchase of bootlegs but in this instance my feelings are different. Given that out of my quid has to come a profit for the retailer plus distribution and manufacture costs, the people behind 23rd Century must make about tuppence ha’penny from my purchase. More to the point, I think that Richard Driscoll films are ones which can be bought on bootleg with a clean conscience because if any money went to the film-maker it might encourage him to make more of his rotten films.

MJS rating: D

Kannibal - review

This was my original review of Kannibal, written in about 2001. The reason it's on my newsblog and not with all my other reviews is that, when it was originally posted on my main site Richard Driscoll sent threatening e-mails to my web host. Despite repeated requests to explain which part of this (or my other reviews or news items) were untrue or libelous, he has never been specific. So now it has a home on Blogger. My reviews of The Comic and Evil Calls will follow. - MJS

Kannibal

Director: Richard Driscoll
Writer: Richard Driscoll
Producer: Richard Driscoll
Cast: Steven Craine (ie. Richard Driscoll), Linnea Quigley, Eileen Daly
Year of escape: 2001
Country: UK
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Film 2000) 

Kannibal is very possibly the worst British horror film ever made. Ever. At all. Bar none.

Ever.

And remember that I’m the person who found nice things to say about Virgin Witch...

When the same person writes, directs and produces a film and stars in it too, albeit under a different name, then you know you’re dealing with a vanity project, and that’s never a good sign. Is Kannibal as bad as The Jekyll and Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical? Not quite, but only because it hasn’t got any awful songs in it.

Richard Driscoll is a legend among fans of British horror movies. Well, I say legend; I mean joke. Here’s a succinct summary of the man’s career, courtesy of Pass the Marmalade webmaster Darrell Buxton, from a discussion on the British Horror Films forum:

“Driscoll produced and directed a terrible mid-’80s movie called The Comic, all about a stand-up comedian who murders a rival and buries him in the garden - for some reason the film is set in a near-future fascist Britain but it doesn't really make any more sense than the rest of the movie or add anything to it. Richard also produced the Fhiona Louise movie Cold Light of Day [One of the final releases by Screen Edge - MJS], which purports to tell the story of Dennis Nielsen but does so in an extremely slow and uninteresting way. Driscoll took prints of both films to the legendary 'Splatterfest' event, held at the Scala Cinema in King's Cross in February 1990 - but since we'd all sat spellbound through the amazing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and laughed our heads off at Rabid Grannies by the time The Comic was unspooled, Driscoll's film got a disastrous reaction from the audience and was almost booed off screen! He was last seen disappearing into the King's Cross night, clutching both movies (we never got to see Cold Light of Day and I eventually caught it years later).”

In 2001 Driscoll re-emerged with Kannibal, the most shameless rip-off of Hannibal imaginable. The sleeve is designed to look like the Hannibal sleeve, with ‘Steven Craine’ pictured a la Hannibal Lecter. (The stage name is because there’s already an actor named Richard Driscoll; he played a vicar in EastEnders.) Even the tag-line ‘Break the silence’ has been shamelessly - and meaninglessly - aped as ‘Keep the silence from breaking’. Without exactly following the plot of Silence of the Lambs or its sequel, Driscoll’s film lifts scenes, shots, ideas, images and dialogue wholesale.

Let’s say something good about the film. The production values are mostly top-notch. Sets are lavish, locations are impressive, props and set-dressings are luxurious, and there are large numbers of extras in scenes which require them. This is not half a dozen people trapped in one location. With second-unit work in the USA and Italy, the cost of this film must have been considerably more than many recent British horror flicks.

But... the direction is lame, the script (quite apart from its unoriginality) is banal, and the acting is almost uniformly dreadful. No, dreadful is too mild a word. The actors who are merely dreadful are among the better ones here. Let’s put it this way: if a six-year-old acted this badly in a nativity play, they would be recast as one of the sheep.

The overly complicated plot has Linnea Quigley, looking about a hundred (she was actually 42 when this was shot) and never removing her sunglasses, even when naked, as Georgina Thereshkova, heiress to a US-based Russian organised crime ring dealing in prostitution, pornography and drugs. She inherits this from her mother, who is found murdered in a grisly prologue; presumably she also inherited the extraordinary accent she uses. It’s meant to be Russian but sounds uncannily like Steve Martin doing his impression of a Frenchman.

We pick up two years on from Thereshkova Snr’s death, when Georgina has transplanted to London, hiding her activities behind a company called NewTech. It wouldn’t be a British horror film without Eileen Daly (Razor Blade Smile, Witchcraft X, Pervirella, Demonsoul, etc) and here she plays Tanya Sloveig, Georgina’s PA. Within five minutes, bisexual Georgina has her PA pressed up against a corridor wall, has ripped open her PA’s jacket - no bra, quelle surprise - and is asking her, “Do you want to fuck?” Before you know it, she is mechanically manhandling her PA’s breasts while Eileen does her best not to look bored. Ten years ago this might have been erotic, or even interesting, but neither actress is an ingenue and frankly it’s enough to turn the stomach of the devoutest heterosexual.

Now, I like Eileen Daly. I’ve met her a few times. I’ve had breakfast with her. She’s lovely. But she’s not the world’s greatest actress. However, compared to Richard Driscoll himself - ‘Steven Craine’ - she is like a RADA graduate. Craine/Driscoll cannot act. At all. He’s not a bad actor, he’s a non-actor. Is he trying to mimic Anthony Hopkins? Quite possibly. Is he reading off idiot boards? Probably not, which is a shame as it might have improved his performance.

Of course, there’s no director to tell him what he’s doing wrong. And nobody else on set is going to say anything because he’s also the producer so he’s paying their wages. He ‘stars’ as a police pathologist called Kavanagh, who is actually the mysterious Quinn responsible for Valentina Thereshkova’s death. Honestly, that’s not a spoiler. Because you’re never going to watch this film. Not if you have any self respect whatsoever.

Watching Driscoll act is a painful experience. And there are lots of close-ups of him mixed into various other scenes and montages. The man’s barely off-screen, yet he has the presence and charisma of a house brick. There are a few people in the cast who can act. Steve Evans as Police Sergeant Webber is not bad, and Vass Anderson (Life Story, series two of Auf Wiedersehen Pet, and a small role as one of the elders of Krypton in Superman) brings some characterisation to his under-written role as an old guy who has taken over the US branch of the Thereshkova operation. Probably the best actor in the whole film is Tim Reynolds who has a tiny role as director of a porn movie about an SS Officer raping a nun.

Anyway, various people are being killed. “That’s five dead in the past six months, all young women,” says Webber as he watches Kavanagh remove cocaine-filled condoms from a prosthetic body so badly made and plastic-looking that it actually has a visible seam down the side. Next to go is Georgina’s cousin, drug baron Salvatore Sabine (fine old Russian name).

Then we meet the Inspector.

I have no hesitation in saying that Lucien Morgan is The Worst Actor In The World and I challenge you to find me a worse one. This man would be thrown off the set of a Santo movie. He’s worse than the American GIs roped in to play themselves in Junk. He’s shit beyond belief. He’s even worse than ‘Steven Craine’. Morgan’s previous greatest hit was as one of the ‘actors’ in the fake porno flick seen in An American Werewolf in London. In an extraordinarily over-the-top performance as monocled Inspector Lewis Reed, he mis-emphasises everything, pronounces words oddly, and his every stance, his every expression betrays the hideous truth that Somebody Told This Man He Could Act. No. No, Lucien, you can’t act to save your life. Become an accountant, a dustbin-man, an MP, anything. Just stop trying to act. You know why I’m not an airline pilot? Because I don’t know the first bloody damn thing about how to fly a plane! Do you see the analogy here?

Anyway, back to the overly complex plot... no, sod it, forget the plot. I already have and I only finished watching this crap thirty minutes ago. Imagine if you took all the memorable bits of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, made them not as good, cast them with shit actors, jumbled them up a bit and filmed them expensively. That’s what you’ve got here. Parts of it make no sense at all (the sequence in Florence seems to have fallen in from a different film) and those that do make sense are boring, the only spark of interest being the gall with which the two better-known (and it goes without saying, better) films are ripped of. Even details like the chianti and the fava beans are included. (When I say ‘better’, this should not be construed as any suggestion that I thought Hannibal was anything other than a pile of crap. I also seem to be the only person in the world who can see the gaping plot holes in Silence of the Lambs. We now return you to your review.)

I’ve got nothing against B-movie makers producing cut-price cash-ins of A-movies. That’s been going on since Rocketship X-M beat Destination Moon into cinemas half a century ago. But normally it involves some degree of wit, some chutzpah, some alternative take on the basic concept. The Terminator a hit? Okay, let’s make Nemesis. Let’s just take the concept of a cyborg built like a brick shit-house travelling back in time and do our own spin on it. Not: let’s reshoot a bunch of scenes from The Terminator in a different order with shit actors and call it The Derminator.

And throughout this whole dreadful film you have the incredible non-acting ability of Driscoll and Morgan, frequently both together. It’s unwatchable, it really is. But they’re not alone. The very first voice we hear is a US newsreader describing the police discovery of Valentina Thereshkova’s death and the actress (let’s name the guilty: Mandy Adams) is more wooden than a stripped pine wardrobe. It doesn’t get any better after that.

All of which is a shame because, as I say, the film looks gorgeous (crappy prosthetics aside) thanks to cinematographer Peter Thornton (Out of Bounds/Dead in the Water, the Welsh western Guns of Honour, also camera operator on The Curse of King Tutankhamen’s Tomb) and production designer Bill Alexander (David Wickes’ versions of Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, also art director on The Sweeney, Minder and Van Der Valk). The most extraordinary name in the credits is script supervisor Renee Glynne whose career in continuity extends from late 1940s Hammers such as The Man in Black and The Adventures of PC 49 to recent British horrors like Simon Hunter’s excellent Lighthouse, John Stewart’s The Asylum and, well, this. Along the way she has worked on such notable titles as Spaceways, Stolen Face, The Quatermass Xperiment, Fanatic, The Nanny, Curse of the Fly, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, A Room with a View, Beyond Bedlam, The Krays, Catweazle and, um, Delta Force II. What a career!

Kannibal is bad enough, but on the DVD you also get a commentary track by egomaniac Driscoll, singing the praises of his creation, and a featurette, The Making of Kannibal (as if anybody cared). As with the commentary, in The Making of Driscoll explains how good his film is - but this time you can marvel at how he is saying it with a straight face. He must genuinely believe the crap he spouts, because we’ve already established that he’s no actor. The film will appeal to people who enjoyed movies like Hannibal and The Silence of the Lambs, according to Driscoll. No, they’re the last people it will appeal to. Though it might appeal to people who have never seen - or even heard of - either film, perhaps, if anybody in the cast could act.

Oh, by the way, at the end Kavanagh/Quinn confronts the still-alive Valentina (Claudia Boulton in amazingly pisspoor make-up) in the same way that Hannibal Lecter confronted the Gary Oldman character. Turns out that Quinn has been bumping off her entire operation one by one in revenge for the accidental death of his wife during a bank raid by Thereshkova’s goons. Also, he frames Georgina for the murders and we finish with that same wooden US reporter being shown down an underground corridor, told, “Do not approach the prisoner,” etc - and it turns out to be Linnea in the cell doing a bad Anthony Hopkins impression, not Driscoll. Well, duh.

Anyway, back on the DVD there’s a trailer and a short film which is, if anything, even worse than Kannibal. Surely you lie, MJ! No sir, because Inspector’s Diaries is a solo turn by Lucien Morgan in ‘character’ as Inspector Reed. In this staggeringly amateurish nine-minute quickie (which seems to last for a good half-hour), Morgan/Reed talks straight to camera, taking us through the history of movies based on real-life serial killers: Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, etc. “We begin with this man,” he says. “Jack the Ripper. ... Who was he? ... Who knows ... who he was? ... Do you?”

I wish I could say that every single thing about Kannibal is shit, but it is very nicely photographed and the sets are good. However, as they say, you don’t come out of the theatre humming the sets. It’s such a tragedy that, while many British indie horror flicks are scraping funds together, Driscoll has somehow got his hands on the cash to make something this lavish. But the other tragedy is that no amount of production value can disguise the facts: the script stinks, the direction stinks, and the acting stinks.

Driscoll had hopes in 2001, as indeed he had ten years earlier, of setting up his own Hammer-style studio. Thankfully this has never appeared and his only subsequent film has been a thriller called Alone in the Dark which stars Driscoll/Craine again with Robin Askwith (proving that you can go downhill after Queen Kong), the ubiquitous Ms Daly and 1980s teen heart-throb Jason Donovan! (Still unreleased, this movie will need to change its title in order to avoid being confused with the video game adaptation directed by Uwe Boll. Or, being a Richard Driscoll production, it probably won’t.) Among his announced plans were such unsubtle homages as Blade Hunter, Harry and the Wizard and Legend of the Rings - ‘based on the best-selling book’: erm, which book would that be? - which were all promoted with full-page ads in the 2001 MIFED brochure, plus an all-CGI animated feature to be called ... Toy Monsters. In 2001 Driscoll attended a Fangoria convention in New York where he mentioned a film called The Raven starring Christopher Walken, saying he had already shot Walken’s scenes and that the film was “the Poe story with a Lara Croft spin on the material”...! (Apart from anything else: Poe’s 'The Raven' is not a story, it’s a bloody poem, you numbskull!)

The single scariest thing in this pitiful excuse for a horror movie is the final, post-credits caption: ‘The Kannibal will return’ - please God, no. And in the whole sorry, frankly tedious mess there is one moment of genuine entertainment, in The Making of Kannibal, when Richard Driscoll says of his masterpiece, “It’s like an opera version of Tosca.”

MJS rating: D-
No. E
No, that’s still too generous. F
Well, the photography was very good. Okay then. F+

New interview: Paul Hyett

Simply the top make-up effects artist in the UK, Paul Hyett has been doing this stuff for nearly 20 years. He has worked on most of the great British horror films of recent years (and a few of the less great ones too). This is a general interview that I did with him for Fangoria in 2008, published now to coincide with the start of production on The Seasoning House, his first film as director (see my other blog for details).

'Hardcore' porn mockumentary to be released!

It's at least seven years since I reviewed Mark Withers' very funny mockumentary Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice. And it's finally - finally! - coming (ahem) to DVD. Retitled Hardcore: Bare Naked Talent, it's due for release in the UK by Safecracker Pictures on 26 March. There's even a quote from me on the Amazon page!

Safecracker previously released Bane and, this very week, Bordello Death Tales so they are clearly a label worth keeping an eye on.

First trailer for Wrath of the Crows

All I can say is... holy crap, this looks like Ivan's best one yet!

Driscoll reviews removed

Richard Driscoll is up to his old tricks again, sending empty threats to my webhost and ISP in an attempt to make me remove my reviews of The Comic, Kannibal and Evil Calls.

I don't give in to bullies - especially ones with no sense of humour - but for the sake of those guys, I have removed the reviews from MJSimpson.co.uk. But they still exist. Where will they pop up next? Watch this space.

Driscoll's latest slice of nonsense, Eldorado, is due out on 30th January if it doesn't get hit with a cease-and-desist order first (a real one, not the ranting e-mail sort that RD likes to send out).