Three Films Make A Post: This murder is set on repeat.

Time Cut (2024): You can’t convince me this thing wasn’t written by ChatGPT following a prompt like “write a script to a nostalgic time travel slasher”. That’s the only explanation to characters quite this generically lifeless, dialogue quite this empty and bland, and a plot this shamelessly cobbled together from other, generally better or at least more interesting films.

This is the sort of thing that gives Netflix originals a bad name, but there’s really nothing in the Netflix approach that explicitly forbids a filmmaker to make a good movie or at least one that shows an occasional sign of life – many manage, after all.

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024): I am a bit disappointed that this Christmas thriller/murder mystery pretending to be a Christmas slasher is by far my least favourite of the films directed by indefatigable British low budget indie horror director Charlie Steeds.

On the other hand, given the man’s output (this is film number three or four this year, depending on who is counting), they can’t all be winners. This one suffers from a somewhat limp script (by lead and frequent Steeds collaborator David Lenik) that clearly wants to be sharp and snarky and clever, but can’t quite hit the right notes – certainly not in the dialogue, which isn’t helped by a cast that often simply isn’t quite up to it.

Appointment with Death (1988): On the other hand, I still enjoyed this lesser Steeds quite a bit more than this limp Peter Ustinov Poirot directed by Michael Winner for Cannon films.

You’d think Winner would have sleazed up the material a bit – something I rather like to see done to the works of Christie (but then, I’ve never been a fan) – but instead, this is a mix of about forty percent tourist footage of Israel and sixty percent draggy, unrhythmic dialogue, snoozed through by an on paper fantastic cast. Even Peter Ustinov – a man typically not letting go of any scenery coming his way – seems bored and disengaged, and if you manage to make Ustinov look bored, you’re doing something very wrong indeed.

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

Three Films Make A Post: Human blood is only the beginning…

Detour aka Snarveien (2009): A Norwegian couple on a booze run in weird and peculiar Sweden (gasp!) end up stranded in a forest, encountering one strange situation after the next. Violent men in gimp suits, a disturbing backwoods family and a cop of dubious trustworthiness are only parts of a very bad night.

Severin Eskeland’s shortish horror-leaning thriller is pretty silly and improbable in its set-up, and obvious in many of its twists. Yet it is also well-directed and effectively paced, and dominated by a handful of very solidly structured and shot suspense scenes, as well as helped along by quite a few fun performances. That’s more than enough to make for a pleasant time of thrills and a bit of violence.

Vampire Virus (2020): This entry into the ever-growing filmography of the apparently indefatigable Charlie Steeds mixes elements of the Lesbian Vampire film with very 80s horror lighting (and a perfectly fitting synth score by Matt Akers), a bit of a male gay romance, some subtext about vampirism as a metaphor for all kinds of societal outsiders, and a bit of blood and gloop. All the while, it keeps to a handful of locations and sets – as typical for Steeds, all looking better than you’d expect or fear, which also always goes for his filmmaking – and has one eye pointed in the direction of proper low budget cheesiness.

It’s pretty great for what it is, even though you won’t confuse Steeds with Rollin, Larraz or Franco.

Impulse (1984): After a pretty shocking call from her mother during which the good lady first berates her and then shoots herself, Jennifer (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriends Stuart (Tim Matheson) return to her small town home. There’s something not at all right in the place: her family – played by people like John Karlen and Bill Paxton – and the rest of the population act very strangely indeed. It seems as if they have lost some of their impulse control, doing whatever comes to mind, whenever they please.

Director Graham Baker portrays the ensuing chaos with a nice eye for the creepy in the familiar and some suspenseful set pieces. There’s a feeling of creeping dread running especially through those parts of the film during which little happens on a surface level.

The film also looks fantastic in a very specific early 80s way that would be lost to films just a year or two later. The only real minus is the conspiracist coda that adds little to the film at hand.

Three Films Make A Post: LONDON IS ABOUT TO GET A TASTE OF TEXAS

Gate aka 게이트 (2017): Shin Jai-ho’s comedic heist movie suffers from the general lowbrow-ness of its humour, a certain tackiness in the presentation of its melodramatic moments, and never gets to the point you find in so many South Korean genre movies when they just straight out break iron-clad genre rules to go and do their own thing.

It’s still watchable enough: Shin certainly is a slick director, and the cast do their best to fill out their thin characters enough to at least make them halfway fun to watch.

Freeze (2022): Clearly, Charlie Steeds never stops making movies for a second. This time around Steeds and his usual ensemble go for a tale of Arctic horror with clear traditional Lovecraftian signifiers like murderous, weird fish people, and books that should not be read. Between the wonderful hand-made gore, this one puts particular emphasis on Steeds’s brand of home-made surrealism, turning parts of the proceedings so dream-like, the film’s weaknesses – some of the sets really only suggest what they are supposed to be instead of portraying it, and the acting is often decidedly un-naturalistic – only emphasize the peculiar mood of the whole affair. Half gory low budget fish people action and half surrealistic cheap nightmare is a pretty irresistible combination, if you ask me.

One Ranger (2023): Jesse V. Johnson is certainly one of the better directors working in low budget action today, so there’s always at the very least a solid standard to the basic filmmaking in his movies, as well as action sequences that tend to look much costlier than they are.

This time around, Johnson seems to have been able to work on a slightly better budget than usual, but the resulting film isn’t one of his best. I appreciate the film’s peculiar sense of humour, its attempts at giving its villain an actual character arc, and I’m certainly happy to see a “The Expanse” reunion with Thomas Jane (pretending very hard to be Texan) and Dominique Tipper in the leads, as well as short appearances by John Malkovich and Patrick Bergin.

However, the structure of the film as a whole just seems off, rather as if this wasn’t shot following a proper script but a first draft of one – and while people who have no clue will tell you action movie scripts only need action scenes, flow is incredibly important for the genre. And flow is what One Ranger lacks.

Three Films Make A Post: There's something in the snow…

Emily the Criminal (2022): This fine crime movie about what living in a capitalist hell hole can do to a person’s moral self (which makes it something of a neo noir, now that I think about it) by John Patton Ford (who also scripts the film) was a bit ignored when it came out last year, unfairly so, I must say. It’s not an outwardly spectacular film, but one that follows the downwards drift of its protagonist (Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance) with an observant and careful eye, finding tension as naturally in the set of Plaza’s shoulder as in the slowly evolving plot, and doing so brilliantly.

Project Wolf Hunting aka 늑대사냥 | neuk-dae-sa-nyang (2022): Kim Hong-seon’s South Korean action horror movie on the other hand only ever wants to do things that are outwardly spectacular. Mostly, this combination of “Die Hard without a proper protagonist on a prison transport ship”, a zombie super soldier, various conspiracist plot twists and so on, manages to do this quite entertainingly. I’m convinced the production sucked up all the movie blood in Korea, bloody and gloopy as things get. Kim shows himself as quite adept at finding new ways to deliver carnage for the full two hour runtime, so he deserves all the blood he can buy.

Apart from the typical outrageous and pretty nonsensical plot twists you’d expect (which are fortunately delivered with verve and proper earnestness), there are also a couple of very South Korean moments when the film shifts and twists a little against genre rules, killing off the “wrong” characters at the “wrong” times to keep the audience on their toes.

Winterskin (2018): How much one will appreciate this predominantly cabin-bound movie by Charlie Steeds, working with his usual coterie of actors, may very much depend on one’s tolerance for fake American accents, done badly. For this tale of a young man looking for his father in the wilderness and getting stranded in a cabin with an old woman of dubious mental health is a cornucopia of dubious American accents whose horribleness it is difficult to ignore. If a viewer can make their peace with them – I did, though perhaps with some cursing and gnashing of teeth particularly during more dramatic sequences involved – they may very well appreciate how much good Steeds does in other regards: how tight and interesting his framing of the central log cabin sequences; how much a film taking place in a fake American snow wilderness uses ideas of the macabre that belong very much in the US tradition of someone like Bierce; how cleverly the film escalates its threats and gore to the over the top yet still on budget climax.

In short: Death Ranch (2020)

1971. Brandon Cobbs (Deiondre Teagle) somehow manages to escape from imprisonment for a crime he may or may not have committed, ending up in a pretty swampy looking patch of woods somewhere in the South. His siblings Angela (Faith Monique) and Clarence (Travis Cutner) come to help him out, and together, the three decide to wait out some of the heat that must be coming after Brandon hiding in an old farmhouse half a state or so over.

Alas, the place they’ve chosen is not ideal for three African-Americans, for it is in the territory of a Klan chapter which not only consists of your usual violent racist pea brains in silly outfits, but violent racist pea brains in silly outfits who are also cannibals. When Brandon witnesses and interrupts the first Klan murder ritual he stumbles upon at night, all hell breaks loose.

Or really, as much hell as the budget of Charlie Steeds’s Death Ranch can allow, so don’t expect a huge – or even middling - number of locations and more than a minor horde of cannibals. Fortunately, the director is very adept at filming around problems like that in a way that distracts from them so much, they stop being problems and just become part of the general background of the film; things you notice when you keep an eye out and think about them, but not things that get in the way.

Typically, Steeds is about as British a filmmaker as you can be when making gory low budget fare, but he doesn’t seem to have much trouble with adapting to a short stint in America, leaning into the history of backwoods and survival horror movies with loving care.

The whole film is simple, but also very satisfying, putting the emphasis less on the racists torturing the black protagonists, but much more on the latter striking back, so there’s pleasantly little – beyond what you need to set things up properly – to watch of black people being violated, and quite a bit more of the racist cannibals getting killed and mutilated via fun practical effects. Thanks to a general sense of fun and a pleasantly light hand when it is needed, the whole affair, despite objectively being rather tasteless from time to time, never feels mean-spirited or unpleasant (unless you’re a cannibalistic Nazi, I suppose).

As usual in most of Steeds’s films, the bloody violence is choreographed effectively, and shot and edited with a sense of vigour and pace, using as much time for characterisation and interpersonal elements as you need for the plot to work, putting the emphasis on keeping things decidedly un-boring. Which makes it crap as a meditation on family or race relations, I suppose, but rather great at being the joyful exploitation throwback it is supposed to be.

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Werewolf Movie In Years”

A Werewolf in England (2020): As much as I adore many of director/writer/low budget genius Charlie Steeds’s works in general, I can’t say this one’s more me. As always, camera work, editing and lighting are pretty great (particularly when you keep the production budget in mind), always influenced by the tradition Steeds is working in, yet also creative in how that influence is used, and the cast is often much better than you’d expect. Locations and sets are fine, as well. It’s just that the whole tone of the movie is pretty much the opposite of what I like: instead of the more straightforward werewolf fare you’d expect, this is a deeply campy comedy, with joke after joke after joke I found nearly painfully unfunny. Which becomes a bit of a problem in a comedy, even in one where I ended up laughing two or three times.

If viewers who actually like camp will have the same problem with this as I have is anybody’s guess, obviously.

The Corpse Eaters (1974): Teenage (at the time) Lawrence Zazelenchuk’s little – the only existing versions run for apparently incomplete 57 minutes – bit of early (non-voodoo) zombie horror may be Canada’s first gore film. It is certainly a bit of a mess in the state you can see it now, a blown-up, sometimes pixelated greenish print. Much of it doesn’t work and makes little sense, but there are moments when the whole thing does take on the quality of a freakish nightmare, especially in the gore scenes where the (mostly library, I assume) soundtrack drops into synth chirps and drones while we witness improbable but – as far as you can see it in this version – excellently gloopy gore, filmed with wildly wavering camera and edited over-excitedly. As an extra bonus, the film warns us before the gore scenes with its own version of the Horror Horn: shots of a balding guy about to puke set to annoying synth noises. If that doesn’t convince you of a film’s quality, clearly nothing will.

Vampires (1979): Vampires were in the air in 1979, though this entry into the BBC’s venerable (and sometimes absolutely wonderful) “Play for Today” series, as written by Dixie Williams and directed by John Goldschmidt may not feature any actual vampires. Most of it follows a trio of kids in a particularly desolate part of Liverpool finding their imaginations fired by a viewing of Dracula – Prince of Darkness. So much so, they decide a pale man walking the local graveyard is a vampire, as well.

All of this works wonderfully as a compassionate, sometimes funny, exploration of a specific time and place and its people. It finds much joy (and a bit of subtextual anger) in the kids’ resilience in interactions with a grown-up world that mostly – apart from a joke shop owner – seems to go out of its way to nip in the bud anything that might make the dullness of the surroundings more interesting, more adventurous. That it ends on an ambiguous note that might turn this into an actual tale of vampirism is nearly beside the point, but still appreciated.

In short: Werewolf Castle (2021)

Some medieval fantasy England. Young and not particularly courageous Thorfinn (Peter Lofsgard) witnesses the slaughter of most of his village – lover and parents included – by a group of werewolves captained by one Wulfstan (Reece Connolly). What’s left of the local authorities believe the wolves will continue to be a problem and attack other villages in the vicinity, so they decide to ask their very much not beloved king Vortigern (David Simcock) for help. There’s just a little problem: between the village and the king’s castle are several days’ worth of a journey through the werewolf-infested forest. So the villagers round up a small group of heroes with wonderful names like Hal Headsplitter (Jay O’Connell) and the geographically confusing Hamelin Wiltshire (Tim Cartwright) to make a quest out of the business. An angry and confused Thorfinn joins the group as their local guide.

It’s going to be a rather difficult time for everyone involved.

I don’t think this fantasy horror piece that seems to reuse some of the werewolf suits from director Charlie Steeds’s Werewolf in England is ever going to be a particular favourite of the man’s merry output for me. It’s – rather atypical for Steeds – a bit slow in parts, taking breathing breaks for characterisation that’s often not terribly interesting even in the realm of tropes and shorthand this film moves in. It is also clearly rather difficult to make a proper quest narrative on what the film can afford, so it plays out as a series of somewhat escalating encounters with the same werewolves during each of which characters and audience learn something more about the threat’s nature and where Thorfinn gets to have a variation on the Hero’s Journey. Given the circumstances, this is probably the best way to tell this particular story.

Speaking of the Hero’s Journey, the script’s best – and certainly its original – idea is how it actually subverts some of the ways modern screenwriters tend to use this particular holy writ, letting Thorfinn hit all the right beats on the road, make the proper experiences, and then lets him fulfil his destiny in a way that feels closer to the darkness in actual myth and legend than our modern readings of this. Which is not at all bad for a low budget movie about guys with swords fighting werewolves.

While they don’t all hit for me this time around, I do think that at least two of the film’s set pieces – the surviving heroes’ stay in a rather unhealthy village with the proper mood of doom and the climax – are really well done and edited with the kind of controlled verve I’ve come to particularly respect about the Steeds’s films. That our filmmaker is still pretty great at finding atmospheric and photogenic locations (no warehouses for his films, unless a warehouse actually makes sense) might deserve a mention here as well.

So, even though I didn’t quite love this as much as I did The Barge People or A Haunting in England I still had a fun enough time with Werewolf Castle.

The Barge People (2018)

Sisters Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and Sophie (Natalie Martins) are going on a barging holiday on the British canals with their respective boyfriends, the eminently likeable Mark (Mark McKirdy) and the eminently punchable banker Ben (Matt Swales). There are some tensions between the men, what with Ben being a total twat, but things do seem to go well enough. That is, until Ben manages to provoke the – admittedly easily provokable – ire of some people actually living on the canals (among them British low budget horror regular Makenna Guyler).

The English barge-dwelling version of the more common US backwoods murder hick isn’t going to be the quartet’s main problem for long, for there is also a school of human-eating fish-person mutants to cope with.

Director (and often editor, producer and writer) Charlie Steeds has been making a pretty astonishing number of movies in the last half decade or so, wildly varying in tone and horror subgenre. Those I’ve seen by now are all very low budget but a far cry above quite a bit of your typical amateur or semi-professional genre movies. That’s mostly thanks to a mixture of actual filmmaking chops on the side of Steeds and his cohorts behind and before the camera and an impression of drive and energy that suggests these films to be made by people who’d make movies independently of how much money they can scratch together. There’s also an air of this being made by an actual troupe, with actors and off-camera talent recurring again and again in various films in different mixtures, the sort of thing otherwise only Mike Flanagan seem to still get away with on a higher budget level. This approach can – and does certainly do in the case of Steeds’s Dark Temple Motion Pictures – lead to films that feel just that decisive bit more personal, like actual labours of love.

The Barge People with its wild mix of elements of a good handful of exploitation and horror sub-genres certainly feels like such a labour of love, with a director who clearly hasn’t just seen a lot of genre movies but also learned why they use the tricks they use and how to apply these to his own work productively; a script – this time around not by Steeds but by Christopher Lombard – that uses and mixes genre tropes with verve and intelligence, and an acting ensemble that can actually act.

That last point is of course not always a given on this budget level, and also helps The Barge People to avoid my greatest bugbear with contemporary lowest budget/DIY horror – dialogue scenes that are slow like molasses, and start too early to then go on and on and on until they arrive nowhere, too late. Here, acting and dialogue are tight, get to the point the film wants to make with them, and then end when they should. Pacing is one of Steeds’s strengths in any case, so The Barge People not only zips along nicely for most of the time but also knows when it is actually useful for it to slow down. So there’s an actual rhythm to the film that’s not easy to reach on the cheap, when reshoots and unlimited time to get a scene just right are most certainly not on the table.

Also rather nice are the copious scenes of gore. Realized practically, the effects are just the right side of not being realistic, so that the gore elements are eminently fun. Admittedly, the fish mutant masks are less than perfect, but these guys are such natty dressers, I can’t say I find myself caring about this as a weakness one lick.

Finally, as someone who has historically gone on about the importance for low budget cinema of any kind to mix the filmmakers’ favourite genre tropes (let’s call it the genre universal) with elements of local specificity, I can’t help but love a film that does variations on backwoods horror on the English canal system. I’m not sure that Robert Aickman or L.T.C. Rolt would have approved of this particular usage, but I’m all too happy about it.