The Football Factory (2004)

 

Director: Nick Love

Screenplay: AJ Lovell

Based on the novel by John King

Cast: Danny Dyer as Tommy Johnson; Frank Harper as Billy Bright; Tamer Hassan as Fred; Roland Manookian as Zeberdee; Neil Maskell as Rod; Dudley Sutton as Bill Farrell; Jamie Foreman as the Cabbie; Tony Denham as Harris; Calum MacNab as Raff; John Junkin as Albert Moss

Ephemeral Waves

 

Jesus, I was expecting cornflakes and a morning wank.

Produced at a time when the likes of FHM and Loaded magazines existed, for a young male demographic in the United Kingdom, post Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (199) adaptation, and produced by Rockstar Games, the British developer at the time when Grand Theft Auto was making waves post Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) onwards, The Football Factory presents a contentious subject for a film about football (soccer) hooliganism. The opening credits play to this contentiousness with newspaper headlines, but the irony is that, returning to the film, it really is not about the beautiful game in the slightest. All the concerns of this promoting hooliganism from the time come to a film which merely mentions the sport, never shows onscreen games, and is more about a ritualistic world of fans of different teams getting together in an underpass to fight each other, all disillusioned and bored working class men with not much else to do.

My hostility when I first watched the film, back when I was in college at the late 2000s, the NME magazine era of indie bands like the Noisettes and emo to time stamp when this was, was entirely under the immediate presumption to hate The Football Factory for presenting lads being violent and racist. What this is now in the modern day, when those lad magazines with topless model photos are now gone, and films about crime and geezers is not as much of a trend as back then in British cinema, is a film which should have been more braver and transgressive but spends its time trying to be cool. It is a tonal choice which makes no sense as, to an outsider like me, these are desperate characters whose acts of standing in a line in an urban wasteland beating each other up into the hospital, or spending all their money down the pub, is not heroic but tragic. The Football Factory's tone, meant to be heroic but within a grey Britain, is its own worst enemy and the real flaw to something which could have worked. Considering the first brawl has a woman with a pram call it out as idiocy, only to undercut it with Dyer's thoughts that at least it is a good Saturday's activity, the film is clashing with itself. This could have led to something about a world of drugs, brawls, racism and people stuck on council estates as kids, subjects which are deserve their time to be detailed upon even with a chirpy sick sense of humour as this tries to have. With these subjects however, arguably the film is far safer with hindsight than one realises, and at times is being safe to the point it makes certain moments more an issue with hindsight, such as the racist cab driver, a semi-frequent side character that represents all the worst anti-immigrant ideas, who called a wanker and is a butt of jokes but is allowed to spiel monologues without actually tackling why racist cab drivers even exist and what makes them tick.

Context really comes to mind with The Football Factory for me, less nostalgia but more an artefact which brings up a lot of the aesthetic and tone from this time period throughout this movie, seeped within this period and thus difficult to separate without going off into a tangent. This entire period into the 2000s can be seen through this film for me, where one on one side you have the music promoted by Q and NME magazine, some of which scores this film, and on the other side you had the aforementioned lad's magazines, which in tone you can find in all the times the term "bird" come in when describing women the cast are attracted to. It was a time when you saw Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008), about the notorious criminal Charles Bronson, on a Tesco's supermarket DVD shelf with a British Union Jack in the background of the cover, trying visible to sell this type of film to a guy's market of being cool, about crime and men, despite films like Refn's especially being far more complicated in its subject and even style. The most infamous I remember, promoted with Danny Dyer's face on the cover and also spotted in the same Tesco store, was The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), a forgotten work which would have been a disastrous marketing choice to sell on Dyer's popularity pre-EastEnders era; from director Thomas Clay, it was a British entry in the wave of extreme cinema in the 2000s like Irréversible (2002) which pushed extremes including the depiction of rape. These films were finding themselves being slotted to specific audiences even when they probably should have focused on being sold not as crowd pleasers. The Football Factory is no different as a film, in scope a lot more complicated in its themes, particularly as the original novel by John King, his debut, is one I think would be rewarding to read. It comes off as a much more complicated and elaborate piece on this subject and the themes it is tackling, the film feeling like it glances past so many for the briefest of macho cheers.

In the centre of Football Factory too is Nick Love, the director whose career up to American Hero (2015) has moved towards executive producer roles and television, whose work around this time into the 2010s includes work about criminals and remaking Alan Clark's The Firm (1989), another work about football hooliganism. His entire filmography is remotely alien to my own personal interests, which I admit a bias to, but what concerns more with The Football Factory is how there is enough grain of interest here and that, in a twisted irony, a far more misanthropic and transgressive film on this subject, bearing in mind it would have to work around being a novel adaptation, would have been far more successful. It may take risk of being more offensive and being misinterpreted as being pro-hooliganism, but it may have gotten to the themes more successfully if it had pulled them off. It begins with how much heavy lifer Dyer himself has to do in terms of narration, where there are large portions where the term "show don't tell" really would have been necessary even if I have no qualms with narrative heavy films existing. The influence of Trainspotting cannot be denied, but whether you think that film was good or not, it carried with it moments of horror as much as gleefully leant into its world of heroin addicts.

The style is also a clear influence, in spite of the fact that, as mentioned, football barely if tangentially is part of this world. The arranged brawls between teams, with only one full length one actually happening by its ending, are more the existential crisis of working class men, something which also can be seen as a link to the Boyle film in how its down-and-out addicts were miscreants of society. Whilst their arguments they would prefer their drug filled life over a materialistic one were in themselves liable to be challenged as juvenile, the closest thing here is the lowest of hanging fruit, the middle class woman one of the characters dates which is just an excuse to mock the middle class, insult her with sexist language, and really not prod at class biases with anything trying to leave a justifiable scar. The one time the film is catching onto something, but barely covers it, is the elderly character who acts like Tommy's father figure, who is from the source novel. The World War II veteran who now, with his friend, lives in an estate with the only hope for life being Australia, saving his pension, his story raises where this film could have gone. He complicates this film and offers a tantalising subplot barely covered, especially as whilst a war hero, his anger also comes from how, having fought the Fascists, he now has to live in a place where casual racism against minorities happens on the bus in front of him. Played by Dudley Sutton, stealing the film, his contrast to Dyer's Tommy, the surrogate grandson who has willingly given himself into violent hooliganism to compensate the ennui of his life, is something you could have expanded upon.  

The stylisation of the film in itself is also something of its time. I do not mind the almost magical realist tone of Tommy's journey, in which an event in the future returns to him over and over, presided upon by an angel of ill omen with bandages on their face. The attempt at being cool as mentioned however struggles. Miss Lucifer by Primal Scream is a good song, but its use here is less appropriate, meant to be for a fist pumping film when the brawl comes, but in reality about guys struggling in what their lives are even if they try to find it by punching Millwall fans. It is not glamorous in context, and should be more cathartic ugly in tone, especially as there is never a football stand or pitch where these events transpire; likely this is due to the controversial subject matter, and trying to film it, but the grey urban locals and CCTV footage are not what I personally would call "chic" for a edgy hooliganism film. The dark ambient of the score makes more sense, especially as the one fight the film reaches is where all the premonitions of ill omen, shot in grey in an underpass and a brick being used on the skull, transpires alongside the lasting physical damage when it finally comes to be. Examples like this, or the weird use of The Jam's Going Underground, which makes no sense with its politicised lyrics, clearly undercut the film. Like that song clearly being one where people only know of it through singing the chorus, the film really is not as confrontational as it should have been.

This is also aware that, with certain Blu Ray releases of The Football Factory as I had, Nick Love's 1999 short film Love Story shows what he should have stuck to only on a significantly higher budget. A tale of two drug addicts, one a pregnant woman about to have a child, the production restrictions on that film would have worked perfectly for a film about football hooliganism. He has a personal touch, having written that short unlike the theatrical film, dialogue from working class characters who cuss all the time, but is distinct and interesting to hear. The emphasis on Love's dialogue, the c-word up the wazoo, and longer scenes using diegetic sound make more sense to have brought over to The Football Factory, only using the style of the feature film and certain songs like Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes when needed. Love Story, a series of vignettes around this central pair of characters, but also following the likes of a lonely cab driver hiring sex workers or the unexpected cameo of Ewen Bremner, aka. Spud from Trainspotting, could have easily been made into a feature film and a rewarding one, intertwining in this world of the homeless and the poverty class interesting characters. Alongside the prowling camera, spinning around the cast and following them like Nick Love used a wheelchair to carry the film camera on, and it is an admirable work set among the graffiti covered public bathrooms and streets. Considering too its use of licence songs works fully, suitable for the slower tone like electronic musician Surgeon or Portishead's Undenied, and it exposed the real issues with The Football Factory. This is a film whose surfing on what was considered hip for the time would make it a far less interesting and far less brave film than it presumed itself to be.

First Name: Carmen (1983)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

 

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a health clinic, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff. "Uncle Jean" as he is explicitly called by his niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, is a filmmaker who refuses to make films again, lost to his boom box matching classical piano pieces to combat sounds. Said niece Carmen, part of Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, comes to her uncle, during his stint in getting stick every week to find somewhere else to live, to ask to use his paid up place at the coast for a film production she is currently in the middle of with friends. This is however a cover, as she is part of a gang, posing as a film crew, who intend to rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, due to his concerns of trying to be a political filmmaker, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. The thing about his films however, in the same way as with the original run of his first successes in the sixties, is how he would structurally undercut them in presentation.

First Name: Carmen is narrative drive, among films where he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interested in the experimentation around the plot. This is also at the point when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse, and their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter. She would also work as an editor, and as a general collaborator, which gives her significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, or a female cleaner left to sort out the mess with her mop, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. With this central pair of Carmen and Joseph hiding out in Uncle Jean's apartment, the later falling for Carmen fully, there is still the set up of a poetic story, contrasted by scenes of a string quartet that score this narrative almost entirely outside the main narrative. This drama is sincere even if with the scenario undercut by grim and absurdist moments of humour. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in attitude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected from Godard's career, because of the iconography of his sixties films was what codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, alongside when he fully embraced colour in magnificent visual choices in films like Pierrot le Fou (1965). By the later renaissance in the 2010s, that final era before Godard's passing in 2022 was experienced in real time when he was already canonised as a filmic giant.

In contrast, something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960), its own rich art style of naturalism constantly punctured by the experimentation. Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. This does admittedly provide his humorous side including the delight of how he would parody himself, here lovably goofy as an older befuddled man in one scene who just wanting some baked productions and a wardrobe woman to mend his coat. He is riffing on a man who exists out of time and even bumbling in-between a second fake film shoot, to kidnap a man and daughter at a casino, channelling his love of Jerry Lewis in awkward form. Even this character though has his moments of clarity and show Godard's mood from this era, the quotation opening this review his, of a man who has seen time continue, and neither likes the threat of nuclear war nor the consumerism of the time.

First Name: Carmen is almost the least experimental of a lot I have seen from the eighties period barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using Godard's beloved Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

In terms of the melancholia the film has, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still as mentioned - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind whilst two people handcuffed together attempt to negotiate around one of them needing to pee whilst he is in the same bathroom - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.

The Da Vinci Virus (2005)

 

a.k.a. Cup of My Blood

Director: Lance Catania

Screenplay: Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson

Cast: Daniel Patrick Sullivan as Jack Fender; Janina Gavankar as Iona; Allie Smith as Tina; Roger Anderson as Sparky; Lance Mulvaney as Alex; Circus-Szalewski as Nibbles; John Turk as Memoli

Ephemeral Waves

 

The Da Vinci Virus is a film you the reader may have never heard of before. In reality, its real title is Cup of My Blood, a low budget religious suspense film with horror tropes, but I came to this when it was under an entirely different title to ride the coattails of another bigger film, something its director/co-writer Lance Catania probably did not know about for its British release. This is a tradition that has managed to last even into the streaming era, for better and for worse, in that in the past, of taking grindhouse/drive-in films and selling them under new names on the back of big Hollywood films, something which also found its way into the 2000s DVD era here, clearly distributed under a different name for British supermarket sells on DVD to sell off the back of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 film adaptation of the big Dan Brown novel. With hindsight, there is remotely no connection to Brown's success, controversial and divisive 2003 novel at all, making the act of having read The Da Vinci Code and rewatching the 2006 adaptation starring Tom Hanks pointless. The context is important as, whilst an unofficial "mockbuster" title, this is the context of how I came to this film, and how it once came to be among the "worst I had ever seen", so it is worth establishing my history before returning to this.

For those who do not know, Brown's fiction novel became a huge seller but a controversial one, about a symbologist named Robert Langdon who finds himself in a conspiracy about the truth of Jesus Christ's legacy. It was accused for being blasphemous; it was challenged for the theories it was based on in premise; it was sued for "borrowing" said theories from the non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); and was challenged as being badly written. It however became a cultural zeitgeist that helped put Dan Brown on the map, and the decision to rename Cup of My Blood into the title I came to it as, when my parents bought it, was likely in mind to the hype behind the 2006 film, directed by Ron Howard and with Tom Hanks playing Langdon. Reading the book, it is fun if you take a pinch of salt every time Brown brings in facts of history and art, pulpy hokum in its page and adapted form. Truthfully, none of it connects at all to Virus, baring the likelihood to albino henchman briefly seen is connected to one from the book tentatively. Whether you think of the Da Vinci Code - love it, loath it, think it is the work of Satan - it does deserve to be canon in pop culture, and I have no shame in enjoying the thing with no expectations, as this pop culture phenomenon that blew up in my adolescence, never reading the tome until for this review, has the pace and tone of naive eyed silliness to it I could appreciate. With mind this segment was meant to be a prologue to the film I covered, only for them to be entirely foreign to each other in premise and tone, The Da Vinci Virus is a film which could have been something interesting as a low budget oddity, and is instead a curious schism of ideas of its own which awkwardly mismatch.

There is, before anyone asks, no references to Leonardo Da Vinci whatsoever in this film, the Italian polymath a huge part to the Da Vinci Code's premise, and the only connection to religion in its apocalyptic premise, which touches on a Book of Revelations style scenario, is the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is turned into a MacGuffin here in a curious mix of the profane, religious iconography, discussion about photography clearly of interest to Lance Catania, who beyond this film is primarily a cinematographer, and what he likely brought to the script on a personal level, cheesy horror tropes and a surprising level of sexual explicitness, with a pronounced level of green hue to everything in the DVD version we got in supermarkets.

The Grail is there to heed the apocalypse; with a touch of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones films there is the issue when handling this sacred object as, if the person not chosen to protect it opens the box it is housed in, everyone who does is turned into a (CGI assisted) skeletal husk by the spectres of former protectors. The one chosen to protect this box is Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan), a former art gallery/art book photographer who has fallen into being the photographer for a porn website "2nd Cumming", which will later be revealed to be a (not so) secret cover for a religious conspiracy group. This was the aspect I remembered as the most idiosyncratic and likely to still be the most memorable thing of all this film, as that does raise an eyebrow as an idiosyncratic plot choice alongside naming a side character of importance "Nibbles". Jack's career choice, even if he will argue about the virtues of photo film over digital, is trauma over the murder of his girlfriend Tina, who died three years prior to the start of the film and is clearly a more suspect event from the get-go to its cause. Neither helping is that ghosts who have clearly been inspired by the 2000s boom in J-horror, terrified by images of black eyed spooky children and grey undead figures, are haunting him.

The religious may not appreciate the premise, including the mix of sexuality into this, although I should be frank in saying that this is not really a religious film with its apocalypse threat and talk of a chosen, more a secular pulp plot tone that could have changed the Christian iconography to high fantasy tropes and not changed much in the plot, which is one of the huge issues with this. When the double-double crosses and abrupt crucifixions with guts disembowelled out the body transpiring, it would have been appreciated if this had really taken the esoteric route further in referencing real dogma, even if in a profane direction, to make the plot more than the boiler plate one it does become. When it is proclaiming that the Second Coming will actually be by way of binary code, you see what a weird and interesting film this could have been, even as a low budget pulp one, but it feels instead a film which "could have" been this. This feels lost in all the plot it wants to get into, the reason likely I hated this back in the day alongside my dismissive attitude to low budget cinema, when the low budget cinema aesthetic and the clear idiosyncrasies, the sexuality and the obsession with photography, are the more compelling touches. Honestly its interest in sexuality is the one aspect to the film which could have sold it for luridness but actually becomes the most compelling aspect, especially as this is riffing on eroticism as found in photography art books, something distinct as a subject to touch on. Contrasting the porn site's blatantness with the erotic art of Jack, which does evoke real art book productions, even when being blasphemous with the melding of sensuality with Christian iconography you see that, in another world, Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson with the script could have jettisoned the apocalypse plot as this is clearly more interesting to the pair of them. Horror plot themes could have still been in this, of the figure named Iona (Janina Gavankar) who inspires Jack romantically and creatively, with the horror being that she is not who she may seem as the ideal. Even the starkness of the porn shots, actresses bluntly asking which dildo to use, as a nice contrast, whilst keeping the philosophical porn producer with shady criminal edges to him, is a more compelling idea than the conspiracy plot is wrapped within.

The plot itself is ambitious and convoluted, but also with the sense, even if you only had access to some locations including an indoor swimming pool, it feels far less interesting than being in this world of a photographer trying to find himself. In general, whatever budget, I find that the plot structures are less inteteresting than the tropes meant to sell a film, and here you have such a vague religious end of the world scenario, as you might find in a big Hollywood film, that is not interest, which means the Holy Grail or the ghosts to loomed around are of far less interest than the quirks. The gore that is split, some lower budget CGI and some fake guts, feels with a sense that if this had let its hair done and been more indulgent, embracing the absurd tone with its green hued corridors and apartments feeling like liminal spaces, I might have been able to appreciate this more. [Huge Spoiler] When it even pulls the twist Jack killed his own girlfriend by accident, but hid the body and had traumatising amnesia, it cements the curse this decided to put upon itself with trying to follow what is expected as compelling genre thriller tropes than just being indulgent. [Spoilers End]

The irony is that, whilst with little connection to each other, The Da Vinci Code managed to be compelling because for all the controversies about it showing real theories of the true nature of Christ, it was far more interesting as the adventures of the least conventional hero and his quirks, Robert Langdon, in a very over-the-top adventure where the clues and suspense where in the least conventional ways possible, by looking at all paintings and trying to find clues. All pretensions of its real theories was lost to pure old school storytelling when, whether tasteful or not, a Catholic albino monk assassin was brought in, and even Dan Brown's shoehorned attempts at profoundness in the cultural references in the novel had an eccentric charm. With hindsight, it became for me that weird and eccentric work which inexplicably caught fire, rather than stay an obscure work as an idiosyncratic author, and become a megahit. The Da Vinci Virus as I learnt of it as is as brazen in its own way, which I have to admire, part of an era of straight-to-DVD pulp cinema that will eventually get interest for how it led to curiosities like this, but with this one unfortunately a title which took too many clichés from bigger films than ride its own idiosyncrasies.

Games of the Abstract: Rez (2001)

Developer: United Game Artists

Publisher: Sega

One Player

Originally for: Sega Dreamcast

 

Finally reaching a game I wanted to play for a good few decades, Rez does live up as a one-off experience. It feels like a labour of love for developer United Game Artists, under the watch of producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Starting off as a member of Sega AM3 working on the likes of Sega Rally Championship (1994), he would later focus his career on games which matched Rez's fascination with music and visuals to create interactive examples of synaesthesia, melding together both the images and the sounds of the games like Tetris Effect (2018). Tellingly, among his many projects included founding an actual band, Genki Rockets, which had a prototypical virtual idol in Lumi as their lead female singer, which is a fascinating transition as someone producing great and fun racing games for Sega's arcade arm, like Manx TT Superbike (1995), which were well made and built with love. Clearly, however, he found a love in the likes of electronica and esoteric New Age influenced ideas that influence the games he would make with his collaborators from United Game Artists to future companies of his like Enhance, Inc.. The irony is that it was during his research to produce Sega Rally Championship 2 (1998) where the seed of Rez comes from, as Mizuguchi took time off in that time to go to Zurich, Switzerland for Street Parade, a huge musical event for electronic dance music where he saw firsthand the transcendental qualities of music that influenced the ideas behind Rez itself¹.

Thankfully, the beginning of this new career, made alongside the original Space Channel 5 (1999), lasted both in quality even if played in its non-high definition remaster, and in terms of being a game that was available to play without old hardware. It became the one cult hit which did not mean scarcity. Certainly, it has had its fair share of forms, as originally this visual-audio experience as an on-rail shooter was possible through Sega's habit of producing magnificently unconventional materials. Sadly, those were not the games to necessarily sell whole consoles, as Rez was originally designed for their last hardware, the Dreamcast, before they left to be a multi-platform software publisher, the end of a dynasty. Released in 2001, it was being released at the same time on the Sony Playstation 2, with them having decided to end the Dreamcast early that year.

The later versions included a new stage taking advantage of virtual reality headsets becoming more readily available, but focusing on that original Dreamcast/Playstation 2 version, the melding on a simplistic gameplay mechanic with audio-visual ambition was perfect from the get-go. Rez being created around the on-rail shooter template was a great design decision to start with, tellingly taking advantage of the fact one of Rez's key members is lead graphic designer Katsumi Yokota, who was an integral part of the aesthetic and tone of Panzer Dragoon², a cult Sega franchise of on-rail shooters which began on the Sega Saturn. On-rail shooters, restricting you to a path but with the difference to light gun games of allowing a form of movement, are a genre I find myself growing in love for and appropriate for the tone set out here. They, like other arcade genres, allow the truly artistic without the issue of full freedom potentially undercutting the design experience for the player.

The genre allows for idiosyncratic art styles, even in mind to the full motion video games which may be dismissed as having limited gameplay in the modern day but, like Novastorm (1993), still fascinate me in their artistic styles in a simple template. Panzer Dragoon itself, with its unique futuristic world encompassing fantasy and even using the language created for the franchise to build its lore, is an apt comparison with those who transferred their skills to this later Sega production. Rez has its own idiosyncratic touch in how, in a tale of a hacker who is going through corrupted firewalls to reawaken and fix an artificial intelligence named Eden, you are not following the tradition of a cursor that fires bullets, but plants bombs instead. This presents an interesting challenge as you can lose levels as regular on-rail shooters, if your form of a health bar is lowered by being hit enough, but you are more encouraged (with six at a time maximum) to set the bombs on enemies in a rhythm, either in a string or pressing the button over and over to cover everyone, pressing the fire button to set the planted bombs off in a cascade of pixelated implosions. The game has enemies who will fire at you, but until the bosses who can (mostly) attack back credibly, most of the enemies are entirely to get the hundred percent clear and points. Important as well, alongside those pickups which increase your health bar or the limited specials, allowing you to cover everything onscreen with bombs beyond your limit, are the cubes you need to spot. You grab them using the bombs, and bomb them repeatedly as a metaphor for hacking codes, requiring hundred percent per level of all of them unlocked to access the final stage.

Visually the game looks gorgeous between the four initial levels and its final fifth one, where you have a wire frame computer aesthetic which was influenced by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who painted abstract pieces which inspired Mizuguchi in terms of his own form of synthesisia². Fighting unnatural organisms, apt for the computer interface setting but also at times evoking the intergalactic aquatic aesthetic unique to Taito's Darius scrolling shooter franchise at point, this also separates the levels with clear distinctions so they all stand out, be it taking visual cues for one from ancient Egypt to Buddhist temples for another. Even your player character, as you have increased health, evolves with literal emphasis of this. Lose health, and you are a mere fragile orb, whilst as you grow from wireframe man to wholly drawn, you reach floating in a sphere in the lotus position, to a full bright orb of enlightenment, with the final level in the boss battle with Eden starting you off in a stage higher initially, that of a 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) star baby.

The bosses are worth their own praise, representations of the computer system's attempting to crack down on the player. Some do provide challenge, as it becomes a task of figuring which visual pieces of the spectacle are damaging you, and they add the x-factor to the presentation. One, which can easily be defeated, is yet one of the best bosses I have encountered in a video game, Level 4's Running Man who is a spectacle of beauty, chasing this shifting form that turns into a literal giant running man. By its unlockable last level, you go through Rez's one attempt at profoundness in an overt way; with very little exposition or context for the game for the most part, it may be a very heavy handed and earnest run through the theory of evolution and technological singularity, but you will not complain when it is part of a cavalcade of increasingly digital natural landscapes with trees combined with spaceships. The last boss, a female super computer, is a challenging multi-section epic where she shows confusion and self-awareness at what is happening, asking why you are trying to stop her and of her own existence. In another context, it would be incredibly oversimplified but in context of an arcade game at heart, with this vibrant artistry, it is instead a wonderful conclusion by the time she wishes to be freed from her state for a true climatic conclusion.

To talk about Rez also means discussing the music, which is all incredible. Collaborating with both Japanese and Western musicians, from Ken Ishii and Adam Freeland, my first encounters with Rez was a video demo on an Official Playstation 2 magazine demo disc, which gave you a snippet of its score especially for the first level's boss, of a spinning form whose spherical shield can be blown off in pieces to hack the entity within. This is arguably a musical on-rail shooter at heart with emphasis on being a musical game too, where each bomb planted and set off creates a percussion beat. The music is the final touch which made Rez a great game, with an honest-to-God sense of this as video games as art without necessarily needing to have a story and tackle profound themes through a story to get to this. It does have Level 5, which emphasises themes of human consciousness, evolution and spirituality, like a science fiction New Age piece, but for the most part, this is art as pure synaesthesia, something which has sadly been dismissed in arcade games despite the richness to the art form. From scrolling shooters, the silliest of Parodius to the disealpunk aesthetic of Battle Garegga (1996), to even fighting games with their character designs to music, there is a linking of aesthetic, gameplay and music which can be captivating when embraced fully, and in this case, with the critical acclaim Rez got, you see a wonderful example of this.

Rez thankfully lasted in public consciousness. Infamously there was the Trance Vibrator, which emphasised the sense of connectivity with the artistry, but was a vibrating attachment to the human body which can lead to jokes about it generating tingling sensations in strategically placed areas...something even Tetsuya Mizuguchi himself admitted in later interviews could be a misinterpreted use, when it was a "serious joke" reminiscent meant to let the gamers feel the vibrations of the music³. Child of Eden (2011), designed for the Xbox Kinect and PlayStation 3 Move, involving Genki Rockets, is less innuendo ladened, and is a melding of full motion controls with beautiful live action footage mixed with the high definition polygons. (It is though a game I remember was an exhausting experience in trying to do the same bomb planting mechanics with one's arms and body, but that is an entirely different review). The return of Rez in high definition was in 2008, but Tetsuya Mizuguchi clearly wanted to take advantage of the growth of virtual reality being more widely available, which I can respect, leading to 2015's Rez Infinite and its new "Area X" level taking advantage of the technology. The original game, even in its standard definition form, is transcendental in itself, and I have nothing but love and admiration for a game I finally reached as a gamer.

 

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1) Rez retrospective: A look back at Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s early days, written by Polygon staff, and published for Polygon on November 22nd 2016.

2) Tetsuya Mizuguchi: Reexamining Rez and Space Channel 5, written by James Mielke, and originally published by 1UP.com on July 26th 2006. Archived from the original on the web archive on July 11th 2012.

3) Still Shinin': Tetsuya Mizuguchi on creativity, music - and bringing emotion to gaming, feature by Rob Fahey, and published for the Gamesindustry.biz on July 26th 2006.

Eldorado (2012)

 

Director: Richard Driscoll

Screenplay: Richard Driscoll

Cast: Darren Morgan as Stan Rosenblum, Richard Driscoll as Ollie Rosenblum, Daryl Hannah as The Stranger, David Carradine as The Spirit Guide, Peter O'Toole as The Narrator, Jeff Fahey as "Doc" Martin, Michael Madsen as Ted, Patrick Bergin as Roy, Brigitte Nielsen as Angel, Steve Guttenberg as J.J., Kerry Washington as Tamara, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, Sylvester McCoy as General Zwick, Caroline Munro as Lilly, Robin Askwith as Mick, Tyrese Gibson as David, Bill Moseley as Lemma, Robert Llewellyn as "Meat", Buster Bloodvessel as the Sheriff

Ephemeral Waves

 

Opening Eldorado, the late Peter O'Toole literally has to appear onscreen, as the narrator, to explain that he is hired to clarify the events of the film we will be seeing, which will be a first for me to witness in any production. Eldorado is not very well known, and my prior knowledge of British filmmaker Richard Driscoll is entirely based on The Comic (1985), his very odd little debut which got dug up by Arrow Films for Blu Ray restoration and release, the kind of cool trait of theirs to rediscover some oddball films like that particular one. His career at some point beyond this transformed into what Eldorado became, the curious results of when known actors from Hollywood and British television, when older and stepped out of the limelight, are offered some work, the era of 2010s cinema where production design like computer effects are more freely available, and a true sense of this particular film entirely existing because this is what Richard Driscoll wanted to make for himself, with absolutely not a wink of cutting any of the tangents out of this. It is also, infamously, one of his films used as evidence for his arrest and jail sentence for a £1.5m VAT fraud, when investigators from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) investigated the production and found he had falsified invoices¹. This included how a purported production and promotion budget of £12 million was around about £750,000 instead², or the fees for the stars in this film, including late comedian Rik Mayall's supposed £44,350 for four days’ filming was revealed as 6,000 for two days².

He is definitely one of those one-offs in cinema, whatever you think of the films, certainly a man gifted with the gab as, not including other films before and after, only here is where you can get a credit list including O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Mayall, Michael Madsen, Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg, former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy and others, including David Carradine even if likely here in outtakes. He also really wanted to remake The Blues Brothers (1980), which ultimate sets up why I really could not even appreciate the film in terms of a piece of delirium, that being for all its parts, its tantalising strange juxtaposing of actors from American cinema against British pop culture, its desire to indulge in areas I find not that interesting to see as a viewer instead transpired. There are aspects to the film which raise uncomfortable parts of Driscoll himself, but most of my experience of this comes from the one viewer who would have defended this for all the cheapest of CGI, the most random of tangents and the sense of self-indulgence, only to feel instead it did not progress to anything even if really an interesting form of self-indulgence. Remaking the John Landis film and paying tribute to others, in his own curious way, dragged Richard Driscoll's film down when one was envisioning stranger and more interesting ways to connect the disparate pieces altogether. This managed to get an article, written by Chris Bell and published in The Telegraph called Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made³, but I cannot even say my disinterest in the film is a vehement hate, but a long period of attrition where it loses me.

The set up is The Blue Brothers, only now following the Jews Brothers (director-writer Driscoll  and Darren Morgan), two Jewish musicians who are introduced having made the ill advised decision to perform for Neo-Nazis, leading to a tribute to the car chase from the John Landis movie with former Dr. Who Sylvester McCoy as a substitute Henry Gibson. Their name is an obvious if tasteless joke, but a pastiche to the original Saturday Night Live characters by way of musical numbers dubbed over the actors would have least been something, especially if this played to the lo-fi remake energy or even touched upon Yiddish music by way of local pub karaoke night. Their manager J.J. (Steve Guttenberg), in a room full of CGI flies in one of his only scenes, sets them up with a new gig, unfortunately this time for cannibals, explicitly getting into the premise of Two Thousand Maniacs by Herschell Gordon Lewis, of a group of people accidentally setting forth in a group of Southern Confederate ghosts. I suspect, rather than the original 1964, the version of the story nodded to is the 2005 remake as cult actor Bill Moseley is among these ones too as a cannibal southerner. It also shows how disquietingly easy it was, even in the early 2010s, to find Southern Confederate flags in the United Kingdom, as portions of the film were shot in Cornwall³, but cinema as well as other medium has referenced and even crossed paths with other productions and works from the past. The most obvious example to me, whilst not one of Wim Wenders' widely praised works in the slightest, is Palermo Shooting (2008), in which an acclaimed German director of highly regarded films effectively paid tribute to the filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, when they passed away, by crossing Blow-Up (1966) with The Seventh Seal (1957), and if an art house director as Wenders will pay tribute like this whilst creating new stories, there is nothing wrong in a lurid genre film here for Driscoll to do the same. Quentin Tarantino, he who is paid tribute to and recreated in Eldorado a lot, has done this himself so many times, but notable, even when overtly referencing images and dialogue from other films, he placed them in different contexts, which begins a concern with Eldorado itself.

This begins remaking the Blues Brothers with same songs used and lip synched by the cast throughout, as this is also a musical. This is then bolted onto 2001 Maniacs, as a horror-musical pastiche which is blasphemous to the former film but tantalising as a perverse crossover within itself, alongside the fact this was originally supposed to be seen in 3D as well at a time when the format returned in mainstream cinema into the early 2010s. Then there are all the other tributes which instead come off as if they are meant to be laughed at for getting the references, but not sewn into the context so they work without this in-joke. The opening of Reservoir Dogs (1992), with the George Baker Selection song Little Green Bag, is recreated with southern cannibals, there is a briefcase with glowing contents like Pulp Fiction (1994), and the Jew Brothers are confused as the Soggy Bottom Boys in reference to O, Brother Where Art Thou (2000). There is even an actor cast to play Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, just to have an actor who clearly plays Captain Jack Sparrow in his regular career as an impersonator there, in a random back story involving a lower budget CGI kraken. It all amounts to the film focuses on referencing and recreating other films other than its own ideas. Or, if to continue this, to subvert them as one would presume.

It is also very English, attempting to hide itself as an American set film despite actors who are wavering in accents, and literally a Las Vegas set diner scene which is shot in someone's kitchen. The later however offered something beautiful as a film, a remake or tribute to these films with this literal homemade look, with the waitress having the exact accent for an American diner, and the kind of ornaments I would find in a Hollywood themed cafe for a seaside. This idea of recreating the US films in English rooms and kitchens on a low budget is something I could get into for a surreal spin on proceedings, imagining the way this could go in pastiching films in a curious hybrid and allowing the odd crossovers this has. Where I find myself as a film viewer feeling exhausted and disinterested one hour into a two hour film is that the things that interest Richard Driscoll do not match anything of this in context, as we get the Aretha Franklin scene from Blues Brothers in that cafe among others recreated with no sense of interesting for this particular viewer, only bemusement as they feel not properly tethered into the world. You can be pretentious and/or random in your films, but as long as they feel they match the beats of the moment, they least make sense even if it is up to the individual viewer to either appreciate or hate the moments as a whole, but Eldorado's biggest problem is that the scenes are fragments which do not seem to even connect together in their own logic.

There is also an uncomfortable streak of violence, in language and gore, against female characters which cannot be ignored, one of the moments where the indulgences of the film do reveal something negative in the director-writer. The risk of any personal creation is that it reveals your worse side if you yourself are guilty of anything in your thoughts that should be rightly damned, which is more prominent as a danger both in auteurs and even in micro-to-lower budget genre cinema where the creators have more leeway to create how they want, but can shoot themselves in the foot metaphorically by opening up their worldviews far more to the public in letting them see their neuroses, obsessions and/or their worse sides. Here, if by accident or an uncomfortable axe to grind, Richard Driscoll does end up with horror scenes having this misogynistic streak, or even dialogue between male characters arguing that they should date strippers but never marry them, and other such moments which feel pointedly spiteful for no reason. This is content which should be warned of for any viewer who is still morbidly curious about the film. Everything else beyond this, where these moments jut out with distaste, is entirely tame with their issues. Even when they involve prurient nudity and blood, the issue becomes that, even in terms of unconventional cinema, it really does not qualify in terms of "weird" accept for me in terms of awkward. For me a film like this should be the world where Robert Llewellyn, the actor I grew up with as Kryten in the cult sci-fi comedy TV series Red Dwarf, should have crossed paths onscreen with Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) even if Driscoll had only a day's time with one of them, just to see how two actors from wildly different spectrums could have interacted and contrasted in performances, something sadly though we were never going to get in the presentation of the film we got.

This is where Daryl Hannah, even if she is still playing the ancillary angelic figure reciting Edgar Allen Poe poetry, where the Eldorado reference comes from, intervenes in a story which brings us Moseley and Jeff Fahey attempting to recreate the trailer battle she herself was in for Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004). What we get is like when the bean eating scene from Blazing Saddles (1974) is recreated in this film; what in the original context was undercutting a classical Western shot with fart gags, this nods to it without the set up to the punch line, which is felt with a lot of the moments here, punch lines without the set up to really make the film something which, on paper, should have been one of the most gleefully strange and ambitious genre films to exist even just in terms of cast.

David Carradine is in footage recorded at another time in a random ghost fight with a woman with no context to the story, with no ties to the entire production as an actor who passed at the time it was being made, and one actress, a stripper accidentally sent the Bar Mitzvah the musical brothers were meant to in the opening, is immediately never seen again despite being established in a long topless conversation scene over the phone with Steve Guttenberg, an entire segment lost because the actress never returned. The director was even dating the main female lead, Rebecca Linley, only to break up mid-production and force him to re-cut the entire film³, which is a case of unfortunate bad luck out of his hands, but there are times where this neither works as a full story, as pieces are undercutting into each other, or even as a symbolic and/or random piece of filmic brain fever because it still wants to try to be regularly plotted film. It has the cannibals and the musical leads, but also the cheated-on wife of a strip club owner stealing a glowing briefcase, prompting him and Michael Madsen after her, yet it undercuts itself by having characters quietly disposed of messily or off-screen, and even the ending is abruptly ended, not with an ironic middle finger against expectations but a sense the film just hastily ended without thinking how to.

Within this, you find yourself stumbling over moments that, in another context, would be memorable for whether emotional response, an abrupt scene of Brigitte Nielsen in a sing-along of the song Respect with strippers, or Jeff Fahey's random Vietnam War flashback with green screen. Sometimes there were moments which did actually win me over, showing how the film could have been special, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, as a cannibal cook, briefly appearing lip-synching gamely to a rock guitar version of Verdi’s La Traviata, or Fahey himself as a dentist without a license working on teeth in his trailer to a reggae version of Groove Me. However, most of the film does not stick in the mind, or is drowning in all the material this has over nearly two hours length. For all this film's odd cameos, luridness, and unexpected musical choices (like a cover of Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf), nothing here ever reaches anything I myself as a viewer would find intentionally or unintentionally memorable. It feels not even with a real sense of the dreamlike or strange in the surreal sense. Despite everything about its production being shot between Cornwall and the United States, including the Wild West tourist attraction near Padstow The Spirit of the West for the cannibal's hometown of Eldorado, which could have really played this homemade tone to its advantage, it never wants this either. Even when it presents the bizarre sight of Michael Madsen lip-synching So Glad We Made It by Steve Winwood next to pole dancers, naked expect for Mexican lucha libre masks, it slipped out of the mind in the time after because the film continues on and on aimlessly. By the time of Fahey's Vietnam flashback, that was the moment too I learnt it had been fifty one minutes into Eldorado, and it already felt like I had wondered on for far too long. Eventually the film literally ends, without closure, with Daryl Hannah having her one single direct interaction with the main story, and even when Heaven is involved, which always symbolises a grand conclusion even if merely depicted with clouds here, there is not even the sense of a real conclusion. I write this review with no sense I am out to get Richard Driscoll but merely shrugging my shoulders wanting to know why the film, with all its interesting pieces, never got anywhere. All it feels like we got was, unfortunately, a group of what-ifs and jail time.

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1) Film producer Richard Driscoll jailed for three years for VAT fraud, written for BBC News and published on July 1st 2013.

2) How the ‘worst film-maker in the UK’ used Hollywood stars in huge Cornwall tax fraud, written by Lee Trewhela and published for the Cornwall Live on February 3rd 2019.

3) Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made, written by Chris Bell and published by The Telegraph on January 23rd 2017.

Ghoulies IV (1994)

Director: Jim Wynorski

Screenplay: Mark Sevi

Cast: Peter Liapis as Jonathan Graves, Barbara Alyn Woods as Kate, Stacie Randall as Alexandra, Raquel Krelle as Jeanine, Bobby Di Cicco as Scotty, Tony Cox as Ghoulie Dark; Arturo Gil as Ghoulie Lite

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Ease up Dirty Harriett!

The end of the Ghoulies franchise was the first I ever saw the whole of, from one of many multi-film DVD packs that used to exist in the 2000s era of DVDs with their own separate whole DVD case with another film. It was also once a film I held as one of the worst I had ever seen, though I have moved back from this opinion as being too harsh. It starts with another change in distributor in CineTel Films, a company that exists from the late eighties as one meant to produce films for the straight-to-video market but with an eye for getting notable names over the years - be it Gary Busey for Bulletproof (1987) or Rowdy Rodder Piper for Sci-fighters (1996). They were a company I crossed paths with in that DVD era of releases, with those two films mentioned among those I found at the time, and they lasted until 2023, past an entire change to the film industry with the streaming market, until they were bought out by Vision Films in 2023. In mind CineTel Films moved to making films for the likes of the SyFy Channel, this feels less like a tragic end but the follow-on to a group who have managed to survive healthier than most major film industry giants over the decades since they were founded in 1980, and got to be bought out well off.

The film itself is set up with a woman in tight leather armed with martial arts, guns and shurikens mowing down security guards in a warehouse to steal a jewel, one used in a ritual there drawing a pentagram with spray paint on the floor, and sacrificing the guards' corpses for summoning her master. This is Alexandra (Stacie Randall), who however fails the ritual, needing to find another owner of a red jewel, an on-the-edge cop named Jonathan (Peter Liapis), and accidentally summons two Ghoulies in the process. Aside from these are not Ghoulies as before, in a film attempting to follow up from the first 1984 film, even using some footage from the production, this feels like its own narrative bolted into the final film. We do get some bang for our buck, as Jonathan is introduced with his put-upon partner getting caught up in a gun battle in a convenience store with a shotgun welding till thug, which is least more distinct than the first Ghoulies film. It is explicitly connected to that film as this is the same Jonathan who was centre to the first film, replayed by the original actor Peter Liapis, somehow finding his way out of being an occultist to being a cop who has a habit of dating sex workers he arrests, a taste for using handcuffs in the bed room, and has an old relationship with a female officer Kate (Barbara Alyn Woods), now promoted as his superior and dragged back into helping him. The later is not surprising as, whilst involving one dubious Indian stereotype for a trigger happy shopkeeper, played by a white actor, most police partners would not want to stay with a guy like Jonathan who keeps getting into shoot-outs in liquor and convenience stores. Jonathan, naturally from his past, is knowledgeable of ancient occultism and is immediately aware the warehouse crime scene is suspicious, especially as he knows Alexandra, a former girlfriend who escaped a mental hospital and wants to resurrect an evil side to him as a permanent lover. It is an odd choice to follow up the original but as sequels go, but at least it's distinct.

I definitely can see, however, why I did not like this originally, if I was too extreme in my severity in opinion. This is very broad, still wacky as the Ghoulies, more actors who are wearing masks which cannot move and are visible in the eyes behind said masks, are side characters with broad accents and very little to do. One of them is actually Tony Cox, in a very early role before he would star in films like Bad Santa (2003), playing with co-actor Arturo Gil what are closer to actual goblins as comedy foils bolted onto the plot. It is very silly if not as severe as when the Ghoulies went to college in the film before, only instead with a strange contradiction where the Ghoulies feel like children's film characters, even when mugging a caretaker for his keys, but has them look on curiously at female sex workers waiting to be picked up by clients in one scene.

Directed by Jim Wynorski, he is arguably the most distinct director for this franchise, where the silly tone fits some of his films I have seen. He was eclectic if one pretty notorious for titillation in his films, including a string of erotic thrillers in the early nineties such as Sins of Desire (1993). Yes, he would also helm family films and Christmas films as many did into the 2010s, but this was a man who cut his teeth on erotic parodies like The Witches of Breastwick (2005) by the 2000s, so it comes with a surprise, when the third Ghoulies film did bring in actual nudity and sex comedy humour, this is "tamer" than before in air quotes. Titillation is not necessary, and that Wynorski is definitely a director who stands on a knife edge in the modern day to whether to roll your eyes on that softcore side of his career or not, especially as the documentary on him making The Witches of Breastwick is named Popatopolis (2009), the title an abbreviation of saying "pop your top off" to do a nude scene. Ghoulies IV is thirsty just in the dialogue and the costume choices for the female cast, not explicitly lacking of but in terms of how fetishishtic it can be, but one of the more curious choices for this film, considering its director, is that this was the film rated as suitable for twelve year olds in the United Kingdom, and is lacking overt sexuality but also more overt horror edges of the previous films. It suggests more that dichotomy between the films of before and a more cartoonish tone that feels more appropriate for a kid's film, which is an odd combination and really does emphasis how, sex or sexless, Ghoulies as a franchise was an odd duck in terms of how its selling point could have been sold to kids, cuddly little critters, but was juggling both more edgy content against pure slapstick.

Credit to Ghoulies IV, this feels like it had some production values even above films from before in the franchise, shot in exterior city locations of Los Angeles and even having a stunt involving an exploding car. It however does not feel like a Ghoulies film, like a different script only to get footage from the first film and explicit references. I found it a fun film, especially as to be brutally honest, I think the original Ghoulies was the least rewarding of all four, all curious in the directions they went for a series which never figured itself out and lasted as the Puppet Master franchise did in terms of anything Charles Band briefly got involved with that had sellable puppet figures. By Ghoulies IV, we have definitely seen the sunset fall on this entire franchise by here, never to come back, but even if slightly lame in finale, it is lame in a charming way here. This is a great example of a horror franchise when they unexpectedly swing in tone and mood per sequel, as Ghoulies IV quaintly waves us goodbye, literally, with a sense of playful fun.

 

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1) Vision Films heads to MIPTV, Cannes market with CineTel library (exclusive), written by Jeremy Kay, and published for Screen Daily on 14th April 2023.