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.

In short: A Dark Path (2020)

Abi (Makenna Guyler) is accompanying her sister Lilly (Mari Beaseley) to the hen party of one of Lilly’s friends. Because it’s apparently cheaper to fly out to get drunk than simply get drunk in the UK, the thing takes place in what I will from now on call Unnamed Eastern European Country (UEEC). Abi’s a bit of a party pooper, according to her sister, for a very bad experience that would have turned out even worse if she hadn’t found a very useful propensity for violence in herself, has made her rather careful when it comes to letting herself go completely.

The morning after all drinks are drunk and puke and other bodily fluids have been removed, the sisters get into their car to make their way to the airport the flight’s gonna be leaving from. Alas, Lilly has broken their car’s satnav while drunk, and Unnamed Eastern European Country has no cell service available anywhere, apparently. People don’t seem to live there, either. So, eventually, the sisters find themselves stranded in the deep dark woods of UEEC at night. Which would be bad enough by itself, but they have somehow managed to find the monster infested deep dark woods. Well, at least there are some other people with British accents with the same problems around.

For a film with as many flaws as it has, Nicholas Winter’s (who is also responsible for the script) A Dark Path is still a perfectly watchable little horror movie. While the film is unwilling or unable to situate its sister characters in anything that feels even like the horror movie version of an actual place – you’d need details and specificity for that where the script uses vague hand-waving motions – its character writing isn’t half bad, turning out a pair of sisters that seem flawed yet likeable in a believable enough manner. As always, this secures the film at least some viewer interest in the fate of these characters, not exactly turning things extremely  but at least somewhat interesting.

The two leads, particularly Guyler who has to carry most of the second half of A Dark Path alone, are certainly the best thing about the film, providing tension where the script and the direction can’t quite on their own, and making the most out of the moments when the script actual contains concrete emotional beats.

The film’s pretty well structured too, clearly not believing in filler and coming in at the 75 minutes its simple plot needs.

Rather less great is the utterly terrible monster suit. To be fair, the film keeps the thing out of sight for as long as it can, but it still looks shoddy even when only shown as a shadow, with suit acting and sound design to match, making the third act less convincing as the acting and Winter’s capable enough suspense direction deserve.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,nicholas winter,makenna guyler,mari beaseley,horror

In short: Blood Bags (2018)

American Tracy (Makenna Guyler) is in her  last month of a study year in Italy. She dreams of becoming a photographer, finding herself somewhere between enchanted and obsessed by old, empty buildings and the kind of urban semi-ruin you don’t really get in the USA, apparently. She takes her friend Petra (Marta Tananyan) on what may very well be the last photography expedition of her stay to a pretty picturesque street in Turin. When the two find the gate to a particularly impressive building to be open, Tracy drags Petra with her inside. Alas, Petra is soon killed by the shrouded inhabitant of the place, someone, as the audience already know, with a rather dire lust for blood.

Tracy manages to escape for a time, but she’s now locked in the place, stalked by the killer. And she’s not the only one, for she quickly encounters the thief Alex (Emanuele Turetta), who has been hiding from their stalker for hours. To make matters worse, the killer may also have an accomplice making their way to the house.

Emiliano Ranzani’s Body Bags may be a low budget movie with limited ambitions, but I found myself rather pleasantly surprised by it all the same. For while the acting is all over the place (with Guyler and Turetta sensibly the most professional people on screen as well as those with the most screen time), and the whole affair really is a simple “people running through an old house chased by a monster” set-up with just enough scenes set elsewhere to introduce characters and provide a sense of place and time, the film mostly realizes it with competence.

There are some clear nods towards Italian genre greats – Fulci must be a particular favourite I assume – and the slash and stalk scenes are often low-key but suspenseful. The film also features a very nice nightmare sequence that actually makes me wish the production had taken more steps in the direction of the dream-like, but I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?


You could criticize some elements of the script for not being exactly tasteful – porphyria doesn’t work this way, and the whole “sick people are evil” thing is a bit distasteful  – and its mechanics for keeping characters where they are supposed to be are a bit too much the standard mechanics of all horror films. However, given the constraints the filmmakers were working under, I’m still rather taken with Blood Bags.