Pat Higgins Gets Fake Blood on the Lens

Round up of stuff..

2012-01-19T16:12:00.003Z

Ok, lots and lots to get through. That's my fault for updating this blog so goddamn rarely. If you'd like more regular updates and info you'd probably best follow my Twitter account, where you'll be able to find out all sorts of fairly useless information.

First of all, if you haven't seen The Devil's Music yet, click the widget above to rent or buy it wherever you are in the world. Plus you can make money embedding it on your own site. Distrify is cool.

Second of all, if you haven't seen Bordello Death Tales yet, you can buy that sucker from Amazon, HMV or wherever. It's all over the place. HERE, for example. Or you could try and win a copy somewhere like HERE. Oh, and don't forget to sign up on the official Death Tales Facebook page OVER HERE

Third, we proudly announced last month that filming has started on Battlefield Death Tales; all the madness of Bordello Death Tales but significantly more war. All three directors (myself, Jim Eaves and Al Ronald) are back, and you can check out the very first images from the shoot over at HORRORTALK. It's been a blast so far, and there are many more brilliant images to come from the Battlefield shoot. Keep your eyes peeled for an exclusive monster-tastic image in one of the big genre mags next months.

What else, what else? Well, as of this morning something cool happened with one of our older titles, but I can't tell you about that just yet. Soon, though. Soon.

Oh, and the Strippers vs Werewolves trailer hit the web a while back.

As I type these words, I'm actually laid up with a stinking cold which has completely taken my voice away. It's a very weird sensation. Funny how you get used to being able to communicate so effortlessly; I keep forgetting that I can't talk, and then I'm all surprised when I open my mouth and nothing emerges but a strained squeak. It's pretty bloody horrible, (especially as I was hoping to record some DVD supplemental stuff this evening, and now can't).

Pretty sure I haven't even mentioned Chainsaw Fairytale on this blog yet, have I?

Maybe that's a story for another day.

And they lived happily ever after.

House on the Witchpit / The Devil's Music

2011-10-14T14:36:00.003+01:00

The Devil's Music widget is staying at the top of this blog entry because it's simply too cool not to. If you haven't already got involved, started making money or at very least watched the actual movie then now's the time to do it. Make 10% per referral through the affiliates plan (by clicking the 'share' bit in the player) or simply watch the flick right now. No software to install, nice and simple.

Right, sales pitch over. Well, at least it's one sales pitch over, because now it's time to talk about our beloved The House on the Witchpit and the cool teaser artwork that we've released this week. It's designed by the brilliant Paul Cousins and it looks a little something like this:

We haven't released all that much in the way of cast and cre details, but we did give a few plot details to friends like MJ Simpson and HorrorTalk, so you can read a bit more about it here and here.

There are two more things I can't tell you yet.

Not long now, though.

The Devil's Music is BACK!

2011-10-07T14:37:00.001+01:00

Yes, simply by clicking in the widget above you can watch the brand new edit of the trailer for The Devil's Music (now featuring me) and then, once that's finished, you http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcan watch the WHOLE FILM on demand as a streaming rental, or pay a bit more and download it for keeps.

After years of being frustrated by the geographic boundaries of releasing movies on DVD, this is new ground for us. We've been keeping our eye on Distrify for some time, and now we're delighted to say that we've decided to use them for the re-release of The Devil's Music.

Not only does it provide a neat, easy way for people all around the world to watch the movie, but there's also a rather brilliant affiliate scheme whereby if you use the 'share' option in the player and set up your own account at the Distrify you can actually make 10% of the rental/download price as a referral fee. So you can plug The Devil's Music on your facebook site, and then actually make some money off the back of it. I think it's a fucking awesome system and, as the physical formats gradually die off, might well prove to be the way forward.

So watch it! Share it! Make some money out of it! It's possibly my favourite of the first wave of Jinx movies (although I love them all in different ways, bless 'em) so dig in and get your hands dirty.

Are you guys as excited as I am? Looks like the future's finally turned up.

A long time away..

2011-09-29T15:40:00.000+01:00

And the year started so well. Loads of video blogs and fairly consistent updates, keeping you all up to date with the various goings on at Jinx and beyond. Now, here I sit, with a blog I haven't updated properly in absolutely months and a nagging sense that I've left you guys hanging.

So, where were we?

Well, the unfortunate suspension of operations over at Indie Movies Online had a couple of knock-on effects, including the delay and reorganisation of the Bordello Death Tales DVD release and the temporary unavailability in the UK of The Devil's Music. Both of these situations are close to being sorted out so stay tuned for further details (and I promise I won't just bugger off for three months again).

The House on the Witchpit shoot has also been a little delayed. It's a shame, but it's definitely worth delaying the shoot to make sure it gets done right rather than just getting it done quickly.

I've also been editing together some videos charting my experience with Strippers vs Werewolves over the course of two years, which I have culled from my nightly video blogs. I record these largely for my own amusement, (and don't usually make them public, given my various states of sleepiness/bedhead hair) but when you edit them together they can sometimes create an interesting portrait of a particular period of life.

Finally, there might or might not be another secret project in the offing. Long-time readers will know that there have been two in the past, one of which ended up being The Devil's Music and the other Bordello Death Tales. This one might or might not involve some shooting next month. We'll see.

Bottom line, though, guys... We really need to meet up more often. I've been neglectful, and I've missed you. I'm sorry. It won't happen again.

What have you been up to?

I'll be at this on Monday in Southend on Sea. Come along.

2011-07-15T22:42:00.000+01:00

SO YOU WANT TO WORK IN THE FILM INDUSTRY?
Monday 18 July 1pm - 4pm

A three-hour master class, where the audience will hear new filmmakers talk about how they make their films, followed by a discussion with those who have made a career in the Film industry.

The event will start with a screening of selected short films from the Southend-on-Sea Film Festival’s short film competition:

Southend-on-Sea Film Festival Ident – Aaron Foster
Dream Builders – Focal Point Gallery
Spirit of Carnival – Chantelle and Shelby Ryan
No Strings Attached – Amanda Dube
Serendipity – Rob Shaw
Loss – John Ford-Crush
Ghosts – Luke Stazaker
The Confessions of.... – Kyle Springford
The Lonely One – Richard Laverick
Queensway – Gary Leon Bowyer

Running time: 53 minutes

Meet the Filmmakers: Some of the filmmakers of the previously screened short films will be invited on stage to discuss their work and talk about their future plans.

Meet the Professionals: Local professionals from the Film industry:
John Attwell - (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0041110/)
and Pat Higgins (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1664081/)
will join Paul Cotgrove on stage to discuss their careers and to offer advice on how to make the move from being an amateur to a professional in the Film industry.

Solomon Monk’s Pump House, Chalkwell Park, Chalkwell Avenue

STOP PRESS - Bordello Death Tales release date

2011-06-03T16:22:00.000+01:00

Having gone on about not having a release date for BDT yet, the flick seems to have quietly gone up for pre-order on Amazon.

August 8th.

Go get it!!

Bordello Death Tales Revisited

2011-06-02T15:44:00.000+01:00

This week has been largely taken up with delivering final materials for the Bordello Death Tales DVD. The release date should be forthcoming very soon indeed, and you'll know as soon as I do. Well, that's not strictly true, I suppose. You'll know as soon as I do unless the distributors say to me 'and keep quiet about the release date for now', in which case you'll know as soon as I'm allowed to tell you.

Bordello Death Tales came about at the suggestion of Jim Eaves. He'd kindly invited me to the cast and crew screening of his great sci-fi horror flick Bane (which is itself heading for a UK DVD release on 18th July so be sure to check that one out). After the screening, we had a couple of beers and Jim mentioned that he rather fancied shooting an old-school anthology flick; a throwback to the 70s Amicus movies, or even Creepshow et al from the 80s.

I flat-out loved the idea straight away. I couldn't help feeling that an awful lot of anthologies from the 90s and 00s had been, at best, disappointments and, at worst, a dumping ground for unsold, unconnected shorts. I loved the idea of a proper anthology flick, with interconnected tissue but a separate vision behind each section. And that, pretty much, was that. I managed to coax Al Ronald on board with a trail of brightly coloured breadcrumbs, and suddenly we had our three directors. A brief meeting a couple of weeks later gave us an umbrella title of Bordello Death Tales and even some idea of a likely shooting window. Before you knew it, all three of us had scripts ready(ish) to go, (except my fledgling draft of Vice Day was actually called Wanking the Id at that point), and somehow we were actually shooting a couple of months later.

I've really never known a project come together quite so painlessly, to be honest. Maybe it was the fact that all three of us were used to helming full-length features rather than anything shorter, maybe it was because all three of us had amazing regular producers (thankyou Debbie, Laura and Pip) who were able to get the three stories off the ground with absolutely no mucking about. Well, at least in terms of getting them shot, anyway.. Somehow we pissed away over 18 months in post-production, meaning that the flick didn't actually show on a screen anywhere until its festival run last year.

Last week we reunited to do the commentary, which was a triumph of technology over location. Because getting all three of yus in the same room at the same time is notoriously difficult (and has only happened once since mid-2008) we opted to conduct the commentary as three separate local recording which would be mixed together, with us listening to each other via Skype headsets. Ridiculous, really, but apparently the end result sounds good. Elsewhere on the disc should hopefully be the notorious fake trailers that we played before the premiere, plus various other stuff that we've shot in the way of interviews, etc.

Hope you guys enjoy the disc when it turns up.. It was a really great experience to shoot and put together.

Strippers vs Werewolves starts filming

2011-05-16T11:49:00.000+01:00

Strippers vs Werewolves, which I began writing back in 2007 and has gone through a thousand permutations since then, began shooting this morning. Over the weekend, the story broke that the mighty Robert Englund has been signed for the role of werewolf boss Tapper, which resulted in another flurry of news attention to add to SvW's already substantial buzz.
I wish all those involved in the shoot all the very best for the weeks ahead, and hope everything goes brilliantly. It's a bit weird being disconnected from the process, but it's going to be great fun just sitting down to watch the finished movie like everyone else.

One process that I'm certainly not disconnected from is the pre-production cycle of House on the Witchpit, which is still dropping nicely into place. I'm sitting on some beautiful artwork (as indeed I am for the upcoming DVD release of Bordello Death Tales too, come to think of it) which I wish I could share with you, but I'm having to hold tight to my chest for a little while yet. I keep tinkering with the script, too.. Largely because I keep coming up with other moments to ratchet the scare count even higher. Scares are such odd, subjective things. I keep hearing massively contradictory reports of recent horror flick Insidious, where people either seem to be giving it rave reviews or kicking it to pieces and I honestly think it might be due to the subjective nature of the scares within it. Haven't seen it myself yet, so can't offer an opinion.. But one man's 'terrifying' is often another man's 'meh' and I really want to make sure that Witchpit smashes it out of the park regardless of your personal fear weaknesses..

Cannibal Holocaust with only 15 seconds of BBFC cuts..

2011-05-09T16:53:00.003+01:00

According to this post over on Cult Labs forum, the BBFC have just rated the long version of Cannibal Holocaust with only 15 seconds of cuts. For anyone who has followed the film's remarkable censorship history, this is an amazing situation.

Cannibal Holocaust is a brutal, unpleasant and difficult film to watch, and it crosses a line which many people (myself included) feel that films shouldn't cross with regard to the depiction of the killing of animals. The BBFC have decided that only one of these numerous sequences (the killing of a muskrat with a knife) actually represents animal cruelty, which boggles my mind a bit. The part of me that hates censorship collides with the part of me that really doesn't think that creatures should suffer or die in order to make a goddamn movie.

Regardless, I saw Cannibal Holocaust back in the early 90s, during a time when I was sharing a flat with a guy who was determined to watch every banned film that he could lay his hands on. I don't feel particularly moved to watch it again, but understand the point of view of those who praise it as a landmark film, and the unpleasantness with animals is clearly a big part of what makes the film as a whole feel so horribly transgressive. It blurs the lines of what you're watching, takes the viewer way out of their comfort zone and gives the faked violence against humans the uncomfortable air of something that might be real after all. The version I saw was a million-generation pirated VHS that had been Frankenstein-ed together from various prints, and whenever anything really unpleasant was about to happen, the screen tinted green (presumably these bits were spliced in from a fully uncut print with much worse picture quality).

Can't quite believe that those 'green bits' (as I shall always think of them) will now be legally obtainable in HMV. Amazing how much the BBFC has changed since their days of butchering the knockabout gore comedy in The Evil Dead.

There's a speech in the original script of The Devil's Music, (which ended up being shot but not used, and can be found in the deleted scenes short called 'The Last Tour' on the US Special Edition DVD) in which Erika Spawn explains her attitude to horror. 'Coincidentally', it mirrors my own.. Horror is a form of escapism, and when you mix real life shit into it the whole thing stops being fun.

The BBFC passing of Cannibal Holocaust almost unscathed is culturally significant, but that doesn't mean I'll be rushing out to pick up a copy. Not when I could spend that 90 minutes watching The Haunting for the umpteenth time instead.

Fake Blood on the Lens: TrashHouse Aftermath

2011-05-07T11:33:00.000+01:00

I found this footage sitting in a drawer yesterday. It was filmed the week we wrapped TrashHouse back in 2004, just before we tore the sets down.

Elisabeth Sladen

2011-04-20T13:26:00.002+01:00

I try not to let the deaths of people I've never met affect me too much. Life's big and loud and emotional enough when you're just dealing with the people who are physically there in your life, those wonderful people that you can hug and touch and punch. If you start letting yourself get overly emotionally affected by that other whole universe of people.. Those people of whom you are aware but who aren't aware of you, those spirits who dance within the tellies and across the cinema screens of our lives.. Well, the whole thing just becomes unmanageable. So, when one of those people dies I tend to just raise a glass and move on.

I seem to be having a bit of trouble doing that with regards to Elisabeth Sladen, the wonderful actress who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and cheerful CBBC spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures. I heard about her sad death from cancer last night, via the Grim Reaper's usual 21st century information service of choice; Twitter. It was one of those stories that seemed to have gained an awful lot of ground before it had actually been reported by a reliable news source, and for several minutes I hoped it was a hoax, or a mistake.

It wasn't.

See, I just can't seem to process Lis Sladen's death. Partly because she always seemed so energetic and vital, (not looking anywhere near her 63 years, but not looking like someone 'trying to look young' either), but also because she's always been there. I was so young when I first saw her in the role of Sarah Jane that I literally cannot remember life beforehand. She was the first companion that I ever remember seeing onscreen and although she'd left the role by the time I was old enough to watch Doctor Who without running away and hiding around the corner, when BBC video released Revenge of the Cybermen as their first ever VHS release of Doctor Who I rented it repeatedly. She left an indelible impression on me.

It's a tough gig doing the whole companion thing, especially in old-school Who. Elisabeth Sladen made it look effortless. By all reports she was as generous and kind in real life as one would dearly wish their onscreen heroes to be, a standard that precious few ever live up to.

I love the fact that she came back to the show, and that she gained a whole new generation of fans over the last few years. Can't help feeling for them too, today; if I'm left reeling by her loss, what effect must it be having on the legions of young fans who were eagerly awaiting the new series of Sarah Jane Adventures later in the year?

Rest well, Elisabeth, and thanks for the memories. You meant an awful lot to an awful lot of us.

(Tardis noise. Fade to black)

"Sale" at the video shop..

2011-04-18T14:31:00.002+01:00

About a billion years ago, (1995), I worked in a video shop. It was part of a chain. I won't mention which chain, obviously, but it's probably the first one you thought of. Yes, that one. Yes, I suppose it does rhyme with 'cockthruster', now that you mention it, but I'd rather not think about that, thanks very much.

Look, can I get on with the bloody story?

The particular store I worked at, (which I'm sure wasn't policy across the chain, naturally), used to generally employ a single member of staff at the very bottom of the payscale (£3.01 per hour, I seem to recall. My only pay rise during my tenure brought this up to a dizzying £3.03) and would just leave them to it in the store on their own. This presented a few problems, since various day-to-day requirements of running the store revolved around use of management level passwords, on the assumption that the poor grunts on £3.01 wouldn't be left solely in charge for days on end. Which we were.

One day, I got a call from a 'regional' manager which I remember vividly to this day. He told me that the quarter's takings across his stores hadn't met targets. The store that I worked at had met them, but some stores in the middle of nowhere were dragging his average down and he wanted a quick boost of profit over the next week.

His instructions run thusly;

1) Tape up the 24 hour drop box with industrial tape, and put a sign reading 'Drop box out of order; please return films to counter' on it.
2) Whitewash out all of the windows in the store and write 'Massive Sale Now On!' in the whitewash.
3) Sit back and watch the cash roll in.

His logic about the dropbox ran thusly;

1) If a customer is forced to walk into the shop, they might buy something.
2) If a customer can't return a video in the middle of the night, they'll come back tomorrow and buy something.
3) They might not be able to come back tomorrow, and will thus accrue profitable late fees.

His logic about the whitewash/sale ran thusly;

1) Everyone loves a sale! Whitewashing the windows will increase the curiosity factor!
2) Once inside the shop, they'll forget why they came in and won't notice that there isn't a sale. They might buy something.

My objections were varied and manifold. A small selection might include;

1) People will notice that a sale doesn't exist.
2) No, honestly, they will.
3) They'll ask what's on sale. I will reply 'The usual fine selection of goods'
4) They might, at this point, stab me. I wouldn't entirely blame them.
5) How can a hole in the fucking wall be 'out of order'?
6) A customer who has accrued a late fee because we've removed his means of returning his video will refuse to pay it.
7) A customer who has travelled all the way to the store in the middle of the night to find that we've removed his means of returning his video will simply post the video forcefully through the letterbox instead.
8) A videotape being pushed through the letterbox with sufficient force will set off the motion detectors and summon the police.
7) The police will contact the keyholder to come out in the middle of the night to turn the goddamn burglar alarm off.
8) The keyholder is me. I hate you beyond my ability to express myself.

Funnily enough, I managed to express my rebellion at the whole plan by sticking to the company rulebook.

"Where can I obtain whitewash?"
"From the store down the road"
"Where can I get the money to purchase the whitewash?"
"Perform a disbursement from the till"
"I can't do that without a management level password"
"Look, I'm sure you know a management level password"
"For an employee to obtain the passwords of other employees is grounds for dismissal"
"Just take it without running it thorugh the system"
"That would also be grounds for dismissal. Besides, I can't close the store"
"Just put a 'back in 5 minutes' sign up"
"It's grounds for dismissal to close the store during opening hours"

and so on and so on.

Eventually, the horrible bastard got utterly fed up with my complaints and came down and did it all himself, which was at least more satisfying than me having to do it myself. It clearly made me the guy's number one enemy, though, and provided me with my first real glimpse of management level thinking.

Ah, hell. I didn't have much in the way of life-fun back then, and small victories meant a lot. I also look back fondly upon completing a staff-improvement manual, which the same regional manager had to deliver to his superiors. My favourite questions (with my responses afterwards) from that manual were:

Q) Read the 'Health & Safety' information on the wall in the staff room. What have you learnt that you weren't previously aware of?
A) That the store is 5 degrees below legal minimum operating temperature.

Q) It is important for any store to listen to the concerns of its customers. Write down, exactly, the next question a customer asks you.
A) "Why is it so fucking cold in here?"

No pillow as soft as a clear conscience

2011-04-14T11:14:00.002+01:00

I sometimes use the phrase 'My name is Pat Higgins and my conscience is clear' as a sign-off when I do live events (like the one coming up on Wednesday 27th April at Southend Film Festival) and have done for years. In fact, I gave the expression to a comedian in Hellbride as a catchphrase (although using the character's name, not 'Pat Higgins'. Otherwise that would be ridiculous. And confusing). The phrase started out entirely as a joke; a call-back to something that I tended to mention earlier in the evening. Over the years, though, I guess I've become fond of it.

Received an email yesterday, informing me that a distribution company that I have dealt with in the past are to cease activities. I won't name them, since their website hasn't broken the news yet and the last thing I want to do is leak the story if it's not public yet, but I feel that the demise of the company is particularly heartbreaking (above and beyond the usual sadness of a business closing its doors) because of one simple fact.

They were nice.

Actually, I'll expand upon that. They were honourable. They had excellent communication with people they dealt with, they were polite and friendly and they always delivered whatever they'd promised. I've been paddling around in the shallows of the movie industry for close to ten years now, and those sorts of qualities have seemed depressingly few and far between.

Is being nice really so tough? Because, if you want to be all hard-nosed and business-like about it, in terms of gaining loyalty and repeat business and all those other things that companies claim to seek, being nice is a pretty goddamn cost-effective way of getting those things. As either customer or co-worker, I'll put up with a much worse situation for much longer if I feel I'm being treated with empathy.

So why don't more people in the industry embrace being pleasant and honourable as the default way of doing business? I don't mean the fake smile, have-a-nice-day bullshit so favoured by soft-skills training courses; I mean genuinely treating people well for no other reason than it makes the whole experience much more rewarding for all parties?

There was a particular film set I visited a few years ago that sticks in my mind. The shoot was several budgetary notches above the films that I was making at the time, and in several respects it should have been the sort of shoot I was aspiring to. Didn't take long on set to work out that it wasn't. In fact, the atmosphere was borderline poisonous. Not only would cast and crew not talk to each another, but half of the crew wouldn't even talk to the other half of the crew. Conversation on set seemed to consist almost entirely of bitching. It felt like a state of arrested development; adolescent egos rubbing each other up the wrong way and constantly trying to get one over on each other. I thought about how it compared to the upbeat atmosphere that I try to foster on my shoots and I found it rather sad.

The film industry seems to attract assholes like moths to a flame. I understand the reasons for that, but that doesn't mean I have to like it and that doesn't mean that it's the only way things can be done. Yes, of course there's pressure.. But teachers dealing with classes of 5 year-olds are under pressure too, and they somehow manage to avoid using it as an excuse to treat people badly.

So, on a day when a rather lovely little company has closed its doors for the last time, I'm reminded of why I liked them so much and reminded that, no matter how long I stay in this business, I will never let it turn me into something I'm not. I will never run a set where the cast and crew won't speak to one another. I'll never put someone in a position where they'll regret signing a deal with my company. I'll never accept that behaving like (for want of a better word) a dick is somehow a norm, or something to be aspired to.

My name is Pat Higgins and my conscience is clear.

Scre4m (Or Scream 4 if you're not in marketing, or 12 years old)

2011-04-13T12:35:00.002+01:00

The Scream franchise means quite a lot to me.

When the original hit the screens in the UK in May 1997, my life was changing in all sorts of ways. I initially saw Scream at the cinema with my friends, some of whom weren't used to horror films and found it pretty gruelling. By the time the run had finished, I had gone back to watch it again with the woman who would later become my wife. It was the first horror film we saw together at the cinema.

I approached Scream 2 with a certain amount of trepidation, but thought it was fantastic. For me it stands up as one of the great sequels; one that ratchets up elements of the original without ruining the feel of the cinematic world by doing so. The sequence in the trashed police car stands up as a fantastic bit of tension building, and the death of Randy remains one of the most heartbreakingly ruthless yet utterly necessary bits of business in any franchise. By killing Randy, the flick reminded you that, yes, this is a horror series, and people aren't going to be safe just because you feel affection for them.

Then along came Scream 3, which ruined the feel of the cinematic world and kept people safe just because you felt affection for them. Not only that, my enjoyment of the film on first viewing was also marred by the fact that I'd fallen victim to a spoiler.. Some twunt on a message board had posted the identity of the killer in caps on an unrelated thread, thus ruining my day and causing me to grumble endlessly. Except, funnily enough, the twunt hadn't actually posted the killer's identity; they'd taken a guess and got it wrong. Nevertheless, I spent the movie convinced that I knew the twist.. The tragic thing being, of course, that the actual resolution of Scream 3 wasn't even as imaginative as the twunt's fake spoiler. So I got the worst of all worlds, which probably didn't help pump any excitement into a film that was already pretty limp.

So, we have the approach of Scream 4. I'm torn; on one hand, I'm concerned that it's going to feel like that piss-awful Blackadder reunion show they did for the millennium, but on the other hand Scream 3 wasn't exactly closing the series on a perfect note, so maybe the creative team will come back with batteries recharged and all guns blazing.

I've just got to make it through the next few days without seeing any spoilers, fake or otherwise. Plus, I'm a bit apprehensive about viewing the flick with an audience, which is kind of a shame.. It's been given a '15' over here in the UK (a first for the series) and whereas seeing a horror movie with a pumped up crowd of fans can be fantastic (just go and see a screening at Frightfest if you need convincing), watching a '15' rated horror movie in Essex can be a truly punishing experience. It just takes one nervous teenage boy blurting out endless 'jokes' to show how not scared he is and the whole experience takes a tumble.

Still, sod it, I'm in. Optimism engaged.

Thrill me, Wes.

Into the Pit

2011-04-11T16:00:00.002+01:00

Non-disclosure agreements can be the enemy of decent blogging, but trust me.. The one I'm under at the moment will be well worth it. Can't tell you much at all about the upcoming shoot for House on the Witchpit, for reasons that will become apparent once things kick off.

We're unlikely to be advertising for cast and crew through our regular channels, however we have set up a special email address for interested parties (for either cast or crew) to get in touch. I realise that this is all frustratingly vague at the moment, but the details we can give are as follows..

House on the Witchpit is a feature film shoot taking place in the UK later in 2011. The creative team have a proven track record for producing critically acclaimed, internationally distributed genre features. It's a full-tilt supernatural horror with a decent helping of wit and intelligence; it's not a body count movie or a torture flick, but instead sets out to genuinely freak out the viewer.

If you've got something unique to bring to the flick, either in front or behind the camera, feel free to contact the production team at..

intothepit@jinxmedia.co.uk

Can't guarantee individual responses, (it's just not realistic I'm afraid, and a standard cut and paste response has always struck me as oddly pointless) but we can reassure you that we're grateful for your interest!

And, for those of you who are just interested in watching the thing rather than making it.. There should be some news soon. I know I've said it before, but it'll be worth the wait.

New Workshop Date

2011-04-08T16:14:00.002+01:00

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be running another workshop at the Southend Film Festival this year.

On Wednesday 27th April at 6.30pm, I'll be chatting about micro-budget filmmaking at an event called "DIY: Making a Feature Film to Launch Your Career". Places are really limited, but can be reserved on 0845 5212345 or by emailing learning@southessex.ac.uk

More details can be found over at http://www.southendfilmfestival.com/film_schedule.php

Bringing it all together.

2011-03-03T14:54:00.003Z

Keeping everything together in the sprawling age of Facebook, YouTube et al has proven a bit of a headache for me. Working out what leads where, and following how the hell people ever find out about us are challenges that face any small business.

With this in mind, we've just whacked some fucking great big buttons on the front page of http://www.jinx.co.uk which will hopefully point you towards whatever it is you're after.

For example, we've been updating our official Facebook page with never-before-seen photos by the brilliant Debbie Attwell from the shoots for KillerKiller and Hellbride

We've put together a nice, convenient list of our stuff over on Amazon that features all our flicks so far, (we'll be adding Bordello Death Tales very shortly, of course), which can be found over here..

Plus, there's other stuff too.. Ah, hell. Just go to the main site and click the buttons. The first step in a long process of keeping all our stuff together rather than being scattered all over the web..!

Fake Blood on the Lens: Remakes, remakes everywhere..

2011-02-24T19:23:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Re-edits from Bieber to Blade Runner (plus Vamp ...

2011-02-22T18:46:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Radiohead, The King of Limbs and Digital Distrib...

2011-02-18T22:53:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Screenwriting, Celtx and Final Draft

2011-02-17T17:40:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: BBFC fees, classification and The Devil's Music

2011-02-11T21:49:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens:2003 Flashback

2011-02-10T22:17:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Witchpit Meeting

2011-02-09T20:59:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: House on the Witchpit.divx

2011-02-08T20:12:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Collecting VHS

2011-02-07T17:37:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Marketing and publicising independent films usin...

2011-02-06T21:00:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Beating Writer's Block with Software

2011-02-05T12:20:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Titles for Horror Movies

2011-02-04T16:24:00.000Z

Fake Blood on the Lens: Film Censorship

2011-02-03T21:38:00.000Z

Kevin Smith, Red State and self-releasing

2011-01-27T09:56:00.004Z

In 2002, Pip and I drove 26,000 miles around America. We didn't have a grand plan and went pretty much wherever we felt like. I did insist, however, that we stop in a tiny town called Leonardo in New Jersey. I tracked down the Quick Stop convenience store where Kevin Smith shot the movie Clerks. I bought 2 decks of Marlboro Light and two bottles of Mountain Dew, and marvelled at just how goddamn tiny the place was. Amazing how the camera can make things look bigger and more important. The only indication that this was anything remarkable about this particular convenience store was one tiny press cutting about Clerks blu-tacked up behind the counter.

I love an awful lot of Kevin Smith's work. Not all of it, but a lot of it. More than that, though, I love what Kevin Smith represents. Even more than Sam Raimi with his cabin, even more than Peter Jackson with his DIY gorefest, to me Smith represents the 'fuck it, I'll do it anyway' spirit. The idea that a guy working in a shop could do a day's work, then close the shutters and shoot a feature film that would go on to be distributed all over the world is an idea that I find vital and exciting. Hell, even if you can't stand Smith's work, if you don't find something to applaud about the methods and determination by which he got that work to a global audience then something inside you just ain't working right.

I've seen Kevin Smith doing live Q&As a couple of times.. The last time he came onstage at 7.30 and was still going strong well over 4 hours later with no interval. The guy can chat, endlessly. It's kind of remarkable to watch.

As you've probably already heard, this week KS used the Sundance festival to launch his new flick Red State, and (after a fake auction) sold himself the distribution rights. He gave an impassioned 25 minute speech about what's wrong with the Hollywood distribution model (specifically on how much is spent on marketing vs how much is spent on the movie) which you can check out over on YouTube, and explained how he's going to tour Red State prior to conventional release and bypass regular marketing by using word-of-mouth, social networking, podcasts and so on. Funnily enough, the reaction to this has been strangely hostile in certain parts of the internet. Anti-Smith articles and message-board diatribes have been popping up, saying that Smith's speech was spitting in the face the community he was purporting to be supporting.

Personally, I love seeing someone work outside their comfort zone and I love the fact that KS is trying to approach the distribution model in a different way. Yeah, of course his plan of four-walling works rather better when you've got a huge built-in audience like Smith has, but where did that audience come from in the first place? This was a guy who had no contacts, no industry experience, nothing but a shitty job in a convenience store and some black & white film stock. At this point, the man can do whatever the fuck he likes, and good luck to him.

I couldn't help but be fascinated by the bored-looking dude slumped behind the counter at that Leonardo Quick-Stop when I bought the smokes and sodas. I wondered about him all day. A wannabe filmmaker? Someone who was an acquiantance of Smith's crowd back when Clerks was shot? Or just a guy working in a shop for minimum wage, vaguely aware that someone once something there?

"Yeah, someone filmed something. Some movie with a load of dick jokes. I dunno. Listen, d'you wanna hear my band's demo? We're gonna be huge one day"

What's Going On..?

2011-01-26T09:22:00.002Z

There have been a bunch of news reports lately about Strippers vs Werewolves, (a pretty typical example of which can be found over at Arrow in the Head) detailing various exciting new details about the project including the additions to the cast of Sarah Douglas (Ursa from Superman and Superman II) and Barbara Nedeljakova (from Hostel).

The more eagle-eyed of you may also have noticed the announcement of Jonathan Glendening (director of 13 Hrs) in the director's chair.

Yes, indeed, for the first time I'm entrusting one of my scripts to somebody other than me.

At the point that SvW starts shooting (April 18th), I'm going to be up to my neck in House on the Witchpit.

It's been a project close to my heart for years and years. Even in this rather endearing local press cutting from 2005 I was listing it as one of my next projects. That was back before TrashHouse had even been released. Yeah, me and the pit go back a long way, and the script has changed a great deal over the years (as I've rabbited on endlessly about in various previous blog entries). But the time was never right to shoot it.

Sometimes the stars just kind of align and the right circumstances arise, and 2011 is finally the point where everything has dropped into place for the Witchpit shoot. If I didn't take advantage of the moment, I'd always regret it. We'll be shooting in the first half of this year and, (as I've already promised), further details will be along soon.

For those of you who prefer the actual scary bits in my flicks to the trashy bits, this movie is going to be an all-you-can-eat buffet. The script still creeps me out. I shall be directing with one hand over my eyes.

Plus, this way, I get to settle down and watch Strippers vs Werewolves as a completed movie with everyone else.

2011 is going to be an amazing year.

Stop! Hammer Time..

2011-01-04T15:59:00.003Z

Actually took a moment to breathe over Christmas, and started making my way through a boxed set of Hammer films which I'd been given. Much as I'd like to think that my horror film knowledge is full, comprehensive and encyclopedic.. There are gaps. And one of those gaps, without doubt, has been Hammer shaped.

This fact has been even more evident to me during the last year or so, where the re-emergence of the long-dormant studio has made me ponder exactly what Hammer should mean in 2011 (and, by extension, what it meant last century too). The remake of The Woman In Black, in particular, has been pinging on my radar as an object of interest, and whatever mentality the studio shows when dealing with that property is likely to be an indication of the way they're going in general.

But, what of the Hammer of old? Over Christmas, I checked out five films: The Devil Rides Out, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Quatermass & The Pit and The Nanny. Of these, my favourite by a considerable margin was The Devil Rides Out; a full-blooded black magic flick with some terrific set-pieces and an unusually 'good guy' turn from Christopher Lee. It summed up everything that I'd enjoyed about the handful of Hammer flicks I'd seen previously and would have easily gone down as the best horror movie I'd seen over the holiday period, had I not also checked out the sublime Night of the Demon.. (Not being a Hammer flick, I don't want to digree too much and talk about NOTD here, but it was a real gem and made me feel incredibly remiss for not having watched it previously).

I spent a little while wondering whether the straight-faced approach of The Devil Rides Out would translate easily to the 21st century Hammer flicks and whether it would be wise to attempt to do so. Looking back to The Woman in Black in particular, both the stage play and the masterful 1989 TV movie rely on something that contemporary cinema seems positively allergic to; the slow burn. The devastating shocks in the original WIB depend entirely on the *lack* of scare tactics in the rest of the movie. Likewise, Quatermass & The Pit represented a slow ratcheting of tension building towards a single, large-scale set-piece. Is a 2011 audience prepared to accept that dynamic? Is Hammer going to be comfortable taking that approach? After all, their name may be synonymous with horror, but the word itself has very different connotations for a contemporary audience than it did in the company's heyday. The average viewer of Saw 3D will have genre expectations which the majority of my shiny Hammer boxed set is unlikely to coincide with.

As for me, I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the box has to offer. My last stop was cleavage-fest Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, a rip-roaring tale of a resurrected Egyptian Mummy with fantastic tits, which was probably closer structurally to a contemporary horror flick than any of the other examples I've mentioned thus far. So maybe the new Hammer doesn't need to differ from the old so much after all; it just needs to cherry pick the elements that'll work in this new century.

Speaking personally, I can't wait to see the results.

2010 - The Year in Films I Watched

2011-01-02T12:32:00.004Z

Well, that's 2010 done.

2011 is going to bring a lot of interesting stuff (not least of which being the shoots for both Strippers vs Werewolves and House on the Witchpit) but before we dive headlong into all that, let's take a quick look back at all the flicks that I watched in 2010. As usual, if I know someone involved with a shoot I'll usually decline to give it a rating. Ratings are subjective. No refunds will be issued. Etc. Etc.

These are the flicks..

January 8th
Gremlins (with commentary #1, 80-something viewing) - *****/5

January 9th
Moon - ****/5

January 11th
Mirrors - **/5

January 12th
The Princess Bride (?th viewing) - *****/5

January 15th
Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist - ***/5
Sorority Row - **/5

January 16th
Terminator Salvation - ***/5
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - **/5

January 19th
Rear Window - (4th-ish viewing) *****/5

January 23rd
Joy Ride 2: Dead End - ***/5
Sunshine Cleaning - ***/5
Road Trip: Beer Pong - **/5
Tormented - ***/5
Bride Wars - */5

January 24th
Antichrist - ****/5
The Visitor - ***/5
wAz - **/5

February 2nd
Super Size Me (2nd viewing) - ***/5

February 4th
Lesbian Vampire Killers - (Not rated as I know people involved)

February 8th
Bowling for Columbine (2nd viewing) - ****/5

February 9th
Up In the Air - ****/5

February 11th
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2nd viewing) - ****/5

February 13th
Isolation - **/5

February 15th
Timecrimes - ****/5

February 18th
Precious - ***/5

February 20th
The Hurt Locker - ****/5

February 23rd
March of the Penguins - ***/5
A Serious Man - ****/5

March 1st
Crazy Heart - ***/5

March 2nd
Minority Report (2nd viewing) - ****/5
An Education - ****/5

March 6th
The Lovely Bones - ***/5

March 7th
Dragonslayer (?th viewing) - ****/5

March 16th
Stand by Me (?th viewing) - *****/5
Shutter Island - ***/5

March 19th
I Love You, Beth Cooper - **/5

March 20th
The Fourth Kind - **/5
Ghoulies IV - */5

March 21st
Triangle - ****/5

March 23rd
Pan's Labyrinth (2nd viewing) - *****/5
I Love You Phillip Morris - ****/5
Infestation - ****/5

March 25th
Paranormal Activity (2nd viewing) - ****/5

March 28th
Eliminators - **/5 (***/5 for entertainment value)

April 2nd
Kick-Ass - *****/5

April 5th
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - ****/5
Lips of Blood - ***/5

April 6th
Class of 1999 (4th-ish viewing) - ****/5
A Bucket of Blood - ****/5

April 7th
Starsuckers - ***/5
Nosferatu the Vampyre -***/5

April 8th
Fear(s) of the Dark - ***/5

April 9th
Clash of the Titans (2010) (3D screening) - **/5

April 11th
Phantoms (1990) (2nd viewing) - **/5
His Girl Friday - ****/5

April 13th
2012 - **/5

April 14th
The Men Who Stare at Goats - ***/5
The Box - **/5

April 15th
My Boyfriend's Back (2nd viewing) - ****/5

April 20th
Blade Runner (Final Cut, ?th viewing) - *****/5

April 27th
12 Angry Men (2nd viewing) - *****/5

April 28th
Critters 3 (2nd viewing) - ***/5
Hot Tub Time Machine - ****/5

May 3rd
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnasuss - ***/5

May 6th
Night of the Comet (2nd viewing) - ***/5

May 8th
Erasing David - ***/5

May 9th
The Last House on the Left (2009) - **/5

May 10th
The Sixth Sense (2nd viewing) - ****/5

May 15th
Four Lions - ****/5

May 18th
The Truman Show (2nd viewing) - *****/5
Iron Man 2 - ***/5

May 20th
Dr No (2nd viewing) - ****/5

May 27th
Sherlock Holmes - ***/5

May 29th
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (3rd viewing) - ****/5
Alice in Wonderland (2010) - ***/5

May 30th
Prince of Persia - ***/5

May 31st
Capitalism: A Love Story - ***/5

June 1st
Speed - ****/5

June 2nd
Waxwork (?th viewing) - ****/5

June 3rd
Botched - ****/5
The Woods - **/5

June 5th
The Babysitters - ***/5

June 6th
Boogeyman 2 - **/5

June 7th
Exam - (Not rated because I know people involved)

June 8th
Alien - (?th viewing, Director's Cut) *****/5
RoboGeisha - ***/5 (**** for entertainment value)

June 14th (ish)
The Wolfman (2010) - ****/5

June 15th (ish)
April Fool's Day (2008) - **/5

June 23rd
Shaun of the Dead (4th viewing) - *****/5

June 24th
The Room - */5 (*** for entertainment value!)

June 28th
Fired Up! - **/5

June 29th
Solomon Kane - **/5

July 6th
American: The Bill Hicks Story - ****/5

July 12th
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - **/5

July 17th
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (3rd viewing) ****/5

July 19th
Inception - *****/5

July 24th
Bruno - ***/5

July 28th
Predators - ***/5

July 29th
When Harry Met Sally (?th viewing) - *****/5

July 30th
The Boondock Saints - ***/5

August 4th
The Odd Couple - ***/5

August 7th(ish)
Go (2nd viewing) - ***/5

August 8th(ish)
Wall Street (2nd viewing) - ****/5

August 9th(ish)
Clerks 2 (4th viewing) - *****/5

August 15th
Botched (2nd viewing) - ****/5
Toy Story 3 (3D version) - *****/5

August 17th
Youth in Revolt - ***/5
Whip It - ***/5

August 18th
Away We Go - ***/5

August 20th
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - ****/5
Piranha (2010, 3D screening) - ****/5

August 21st
Orphan - **/5

August 22nd
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream - ***/5

August 25th
Confessions of a Shopaholic - */5

August 27th
Scott Pilgrim vs The World - *****/5

August 29th
Dagon - ***/5

August 30th
The Last Exorcism - ****/5

August 31st
Snatch - ****/5

September 3rd
Heartless - ***/5

September 4th
The Trouble with Harry - ****/5

September 5th
Tamara Drewe - ****/5
Godzilla: Final Wars - ***/5
American Grindhouse - ****/5

September 6th
The Awful Dr Orlof - ***/5

September 13th
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - ***/5

September 18th
Date Night - ***/5

September 20th
Citizen Kane (?th viewing) - *****/5
Cop Out - **/5

September 22nd (ish)
Just for the Record - (Not rated as I know people involved)

September 27th
Following - ***/5

October 2nd
Buried - ****/5

October 3rd
Dead Cert - (Not rated as I know people involved)

October 11th
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - ***/5

October 12th
Burning Bright - **/5

October 13th
Dance of the Dead - ***/5

October 15th
The Human Centipede - ****/5

October 16th
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - ****/5

October 17th
The Assassination of Richard Nixon - ***/5

October 18th
Get Him to the Greek - ****/5

October 20th
It's A Wonderful Afterlife - ***/5
The Social Network - ****/5

October 23rd
The Abominable Dr Phibes - ***/5
Scream (4th-ish viewing) - *****/5

October 25th
Couples Retreat - **/5

October 26th-ish
O Brother Where Art Thou? (2nd viewing) - ****/5

October 31st
An American Werewolf In London (?th viewing) - *****/5

November 1st
Creepshow - ****/5
Black Death - ****/5

November 6th
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - **/5

November 7th
The Faculty (2nd viewing) - ***/5

November 15th
Forrest Gump - **/5

November 18th
The Woman in Black (1989) (2nd viewing) - ****/5

November 25th
Devil's Playground - (Not rated as I know people involved)

November 29th
The Naked Gun (3rd-ish viewing) - ****/5

November 30th
Eat & Run - **/5

December 1st
The Muppet Christmas Carol - ****/5

December 3rd
The Lord of the Rings (1978) (?th viewing) - ***/5

December 4th
The A-Team - ***/5

December 6th
Four Christmases - **/5

December 11th
A Golden Christmas - */5

December 12th
Natural Born Killers (Director's Cut) (?th viewing) - *****/5
The Rocker - ***/5

December 18th
Christmas with the Kranks - */5
If.. - ***/5
Trading Places (3rd viewing) - ****/5
Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story - ***/5

December 20th
The War You Don't See - ***/5
Tron Legacy - ***/5

December 23rd
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (2nd viewing) - ***/5

December 26th
The Devil Rides Out - ****/5

December 27th
Catfish - ***/5

December 28th
Night of the Demon - *****/5

December 29th
Dracula: Prince of Darkness - ***/5
Quatermass and the Pit (1967) - ****/5

December 30th
Love and Other Drugs - ***/5

December 31st
The Nanny - ***/5
It Came from Beneath the Sea (4th-ish viewing) - ****/5

House on the Witchpit

2010-12-29T11:49:00.001Z

Just threw my hat over the wall.

I'll be shooting House on the Witchpit in early 2011.

More details to follow.

Stay tuned.

FBOTL: Update and advice

2010-11-21T17:33:00.000Z

That's due back on Tuesday before ten.

2010-08-31T16:13:00.004+01:00

Back in 1996, I worked in a video shop.

Loads of people who want to make movies end up working in video shops and cinemas, for at least a while, whilst they try and get their careers started. I worked in Blockbuster Video, Westcliff. Blockbuster had just taken the store over when I joined; previously it had been a Ritz Video, and the takeover had meant all of those thousands of distinctive yellow sleeves had been replaced with blue and white ones. I'd attended an interview but failed to get a job at Ritz about a year previously, so the new regime of blue and white had bolstered my confidence to reapply. Exactly the same guy interviewed me, asking much the same questions, but this time I got the job.

Lucky, lucky me.

The vast majority of jobs are little loops of routine presented with very minor variations on a daily basis until you are fired or die, and this applies to jobs in shops even more than most. From the opening rituals to the closing rituals, it started out unfamiliar, then became comfortable, then became soul destroying. I can still picture every shelf, and could have a pretty good stab at telling you where the majority of individual titles were located upon them.

After I'd been there a few months, an edict came down from head office that all branches were to play a single 45 minute trailer tape, presented by Ulrika Johnson, on a loop throughout business hours. This is the sort of thing that doubtless sounds wonderful in a board room but can have a calamitous effect on the sanity and well-being of staff; at least Bill Murray had a whole day to play around with in Groundhog Day, whereas living the vast majority of your waking hours feeling trapped in a single 45 minute loop is cruel and unusual torture. I kept a tape of music labelled 'The Jonsson Solution' tucked under the counter, and would play it over the shop's PA system whenever I felt like I was at breaking point. To this day I can't hear her voice without wincing, and will forever associate the first song on that tape ("Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn't Have Fallen In Love With)?" by The Buzzcocks) with sweet, sweet relief from Jonsson's voice.

I wrote the first odd little fragments of what would eventually become the screenplay for TrashHouse whilst standing in that video shop, although those fragments wouldn't end up gelling into any sort of coherent whole for six years or so. I can clearly remember writing 'It's raining. A girl in a red cloak walks up a hill towards a dark house' on a notepad beside the cash register, and that became the opening scene of the movie.

Except the hill.

And the cloak.

And the rain.

And it wasn't quite the opening scene, because we had to add a pre-credits sequence to get a gore shot in nice and early.

But there was definitely a girl and a house, so the point remains valid.

I quit Blockbuster at one point, then somehow ended up getting rehired a few months later when desperate for money. I can remember that first shift back, standing behind the same counter, looking at the same shelves, thinking "Fuck, I'm never going to get out of here". Every time I see the last shot of Clerks 2, it resonates within me so much I can't express it.

On 20th February 2006, TrashHouse was released on DVD across the UK. I went for a long walk that day and spent a lot of time thinking. In the early afternoon, I found myself in Blockbuster Westcliff. I hadn't been there for a few years, even as a customer, (I'd moved house a couple of times and it was no longer my closest branch), but I walked in and saw my movie on the shelf. It was, actually, the first time I'd seen one of my films on a shelf anywhere. Available to the public.

Available to rent in the shop where I'd stood for thousands upon thousands of hours, dreaming of making films but worrying in my heart of hearts that I'd never get to do it.

If I get ten moments as good as that in my whole life, I've got nothing to complain about.

Bordello Death Tales Festival Screenings

2010-08-23T12:32:00.003+01:00

The first chances for the public to catch our sensational terror anthology Bordello Death Tales (with brand new interlaced stories from James Eaves, Al Ronald and my bad self) are coming up over the next couple of weeks.

The flick is nasty, funny and full-tilt.. The first online review can still be read over at MJ Simpson's site and the first festival dates are as follows..

September 1st , 7pm, at Cine Olido, Brazil (Part of Cinefantasy Festival)

September 4th - Portobello Film Festival, London, UK Click Here

September 9th , 6pm, at Centro Cultural, São Paulo (Part of Cinefantasy Festival)

Strippers vs Werewolves Announcement

2010-08-13T17:38:00.005+01:00

The full story is over at Dread Central..

Click here to check out the full story & teaser art

The short version is that SvW is a go. Directed by me, produced by Jonathan Sothcott and starring the wonderful Adele Silva.

Folks, this one's gonna be great fun. Trust me.

Should be shooting either late this year or early 2011. I shall keep you posted!

Strippers vs Werewolves: 2nd Draft Complete

2010-07-20T21:41:00.001+01:00

The VHS Mountain

2010-07-13T14:51:00.001+01:00

Back when I was doing my A-levels in 1991, I filmed a short documentary about film censorship. As the opening shot, I stacked up a selection of my VHS collection and made a wall out of them, so that I could crash through the wall, sending them tumbling, and deliver the line "In the UK, movies are big business" straight to camera. This anecdote will probably lead you to conclude a few things about me.

1) I have a flair for the over-dramatic which is probably better suited to fiction than documentary
2) I am no longer able to describe myself as being in my early 30s.
3) I had a VHS collection big enough to build a wall out of in 1991.

Buying movies was my thing, from the mid 80s onwards. It's easy to forget nowadays, but the retail market for films was non-existant back then; the tapes stayed on the shelves of rental shops until they snapped or got stolen. Very, very occasionally somewhere would sell off some tapes; in 1986, when I was twelve, my parents bought me an ex-rental copy of Gremlins for £56 because I had been renting it nearly every week since the film's release the previous November and it was bound to work out cheaper in the long run. The other early additions to the collection were also ex-rentals, which included Ghostbusters, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Spies Like Us.

Then, something strange happened. My family were on holiday one summer (presumably 1987) and a batch of feature films were for sale in the local WH Smiths. All Warner Brothers titles, and all brand new. All priced at £14.99. The video market in the UK had launched the idea of 'sell-through' pricing, where the units were priced for consumers to purchase rather than for rental shops. The market had caught up with me, and my insatiable desire to own movies, and suddenly the idea of building a collection became an actual possibility.

To say that I spent all of my money on videos would be an exaggeration. I also bought cheeseburgers, whenever I went into town at the weekends. To buy videos. Once the water had been tested and the public got the taste for buying rather than renting their movies, suddenly you could buy them everywhere.

And I did.

By 1991 I could, as previously mentioned, build a decent wall out of my collection. That was just the beginning. By this point, video stores selling off ex-rentals was the norm rather than an oddity, so I was not only assembling a collection of sell-through ("small box") titles, but a collection of ex-rental ("big box") and the collection just grew and grew. In 1992 I headed off to University, which meant that the collection had to be broken in two. A select couple of hundred titles accompanied me to Exeter, the remaining thousand or so stayed put at my parents' house. Like mythological beast or a simple earthworm, both sections of the collection continued to grow post-split, meaning that both my shared house in Exeter and my family home in Essex were groaning under the weight of eclectic videotapes by the time I graduated in 1995 and reunited the collection.

DVD killed it, of course. The arrival of the new format, so perfectly pitched at film fans like myself who had long dreamed of seeing deleted scenes, hear directors talk about their work or simply watch a movie in a format that didn't crop a third of the picture off, meant that my collection went from prized possession to retro throwback more or less overnight. Ebay was the other nail in the coffin, of course; it takes all of the damn fun out of collecting. My decade plus of rummaging around in second hand shops and car boot sales for titles was rendered meaningless by the takeoff of Ebay; there's nothing impressive about owning an obscure original pre-certification release of The Evil Dead when any bugger with a thick enough wallet and a little bit of patience could pick one up from Ebay any day of the week.

That's one of the reasons that my DVD collection has never grown to the size and diversity of my VHS one, too.. Collecting stuff just seems a bit pointless in the on-demand age.

My Blu-Ray collection numbers less than a dozen discs.

With apologies to Stand By Me, I never had a film collection later on like the one I had when I was twelve.

Jesus, does anyone?

Clip from Live FBOTL

2010-07-11T18:06:00.001+01:00

Live shows and writing

2010-06-29T16:29:00.004+01:00

A lot of my time recently has been taken up with live shows and writing screenplays, which are a million miles apart in terms of action and reaction.

See, one of the things I used to love about doing stand-up (the gravestone of my stand-up "career" reads 1998-2002) was that the reaction was instantaneous. If I said something, I knew straight away whether people liked it or not. They laughed or didn't, applauded or didn't.. There was no real waiting involved. This principle carries across to doing live shows about filmmaking, to a degree; I know how a show is going from the reaction of the audience and the feedback/questions I get throughout. It's nice. No waiting.

Writing a screenplay, on the other hand, is nothing but waiting. I wrote a great gag for the Strippers vs Werewolves screenplay today. How long am I going to have to find out to hear an audience reaction to that gag? Best part of two years, in all likelhood, by which point I will be so sick to death of the gag that I won't actually find anything funny about it myself anymore. The delay between action and reaction is so interminable that I'll be a different person by the time I get to the payoff.

So maybe that's why I enjoyed the live shows so much. I'd be up for doing some more, so if any educational establishments/film festivals/film clubs or whatever fancy booking a 90 minute show about making low-budget horror movies and getting them distributed around the world, feel free to get in touch.

If I can keep the instant gratification itch scratched, that might hopefully prevent me from going back to the fickle arms of stand-up again. I suspect that my millennium bug routines are now somewhat dated..

Fake Blood on the Lens - LIVE!

2010-06-03T14:42:00.004+01:00

Click here for more info!

Scene X

2010-05-12T15:51:00.004+01:00

There's a video on YouTube that I don't want you to watch. You probably haven't seen it. It's one of the truly great moments in horror cinema, and I don't want you to go and check it out under any circumstances. In fact, I'll be genuinely pissed if any of you do go and check it out as a result of reading this blog. Don't do it, kids.

In fact, sod it, I'm going to call it 'Scene X' and won't even tell you which movie it's from. Because if you watch it on YouTube, you won't actually see it in any meaningful sense.

Scene X has got a whole load of heartbreakingly crass and badly written comments underneath it. "This is supposed to be scary? ROFL", "its not even scary", "I thought ti was hilarious" and so on, the dull echo chamber of fuckwittery reverberating through the bowels of the internet. The sound of the barely literate congratulating themselves on their lack of engagement with a thirty-year old clip removed from any sense of context.

The reason that Scene X is one of the greatest scenes in horror history isn't the scene itself, it's because of all the rest of the movie around it that isn't Scene X. An ear-splitting gunshot in the middle of a Terminator movie might not even be noticed, whereas an ear-splitting gunshot in the middle of a film of a child playing would have a very different effect indeed. It's all context, and if you rob a powerful scene of that you reduce it to meaningless pixels on a screen and then wonder why it doesn't engage you.

So, no, I'm not going to tell you what Scene X is. Irritatingly, even knowing that there's a brilliant scare-shot on the way will massively dilute your experience of the movie. The movie which is almost impossible to get hold of regardless.

So now you'll probably never see it at all. Because I've painted myself into a corner, where telling you the title would be a meta-spoiler.

My name's Pat Higgins, and my conscience is clear.

Indie Movies Online at Cannes

2010-05-07T14:24:00.002+01:00

I'm kind of gutted that I won't be at Cannes this year. I love it and I want to get back there.. Hopefully next year. In the meantime, our good friends over at IMO have set up a special Cannes Film Festival site to help me keep up to date with what's going on and miss it even more. And whilst you're over in the IMO neck of the woods, don't forget that if you're based in the UK you can still check out our award-winning flick The Devil's Music by clicking below..

And if you've already seen TDM, why not check out one of the other movies on the site?

When I haven't been getting all nostalgic about long-closed cinemas or doing Q&A sessions, I've been working on the House on the Witchpit screenplay again. Don't know if it's my mood in general, but the pendulum is swinging back to slightly lighter tonally once more. Maybe I just can't handle writing dark stuff for months..

The Classic, Westcliff on Sea

2010-05-06T12:17:00.002+01:00

This is what I remember, although you can't call it a memory.

Poster frames outside. Six frames, left to right. The two central ones are advertising 'Now Showing'. When I try and focus on the one second from the left I can't get a firm image in my head. It might be advertising local businesses. It's certainly not as interesting as the others, which are advertising all sorts of coming attractions. The one furthest to the right is advertising late night shows on Fridays and Saturdays. The posters for the late shows are pretty lurid, and either scare me silly or tempt me with the forbidden depending how old I am at that particular moment. Scanners, Videodrome, Play Misty for Me, Come Play with Me, Lemon Popsicle, Confessions Of.. through to The Witches of Eastwick, Ruthless People and beyond. Movies I'm not allowed to see. By the time I'm old enough to do so, many of them will be quaint relics of another age.. So the power lies in the posters, and for me at least it always will. In the tease, not the strip. Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Inside, the lobby smells of cigarette smoke, candy and popcorn. An assistant looks out from behind glass, dispensing little numbered tickets depending on what screen I was heading to. The assistant, who much have changed a dozen times over the years but is present in my mind as either a cheerful balding guy or a faintly disapproving middle-aged woman. They ask my age once only (Lethal Weapon 2, 1989) and the rest of the time just check smoking or non-smoking.

Screen One is downstairs. A whole bunch of memories trip over one another as I try and picture the screen. I'm sitting looking at the pillars and the cladding on the walls whilst waiting nervously to watch The Black Hole, the advertising for which both scares and intrigued me. I glance at my Scooby Doo watch and wonder how many minutes until the film starts. Scooby's arms are the hands of the watch, and I'm getting pretty good at working out the time. Then suddenly, I'm sitting with my Mum eating Revels and watching Breakdance, whilst some kids smoke dope a couple of rows behind us. Then I'm watching Howard The Duck with my buddy Dan Rice, and we're the only people in the screen until about a minute before the film starts.

But this film isn't in Screen One. It's in the smaller screen upstairs, which means walking past another 'Coming Soon' poster midway up the staircase. It's for Damien: Omen II and now I'm too scared to go past it because I'm only a toddler. But somehow I manage it, and I end up in the upstairs lobby looking at a big cardboard stand for Battle Beyond The Stars which looks brilliant, and suddenly I'm a couple of years older and I'm at Saturday Morning Cinema. Screen Two is full of a hundred or so kids all about my age, and a long suffering member of staff called Uncle something is entertaining us and handing out prizes prior to the films. The films are a collection of shorts and cartoons. The main feature is called Electric Eskimo and is about 50 minutes long. There's a serial called Chimp Mates which we see a different episode of every week, except we don't because it's now 5 years later and Uncle something doesn't do the Saturday Morning Cinema anymore, and they show proper, actual films and don't give out prizes. The only criteria is that they have to be PG, so the films aren't always tailored to a crowd of 7-13 year olds. Thus we watch Police Academy 2. And then I'm once again too old to be going to Saturday morning cinema.

And then I'm making plans to go off to University, and I'm too busy thinking about sex and music and pubs and girls and videos to particularly worry about that little cinema down the road because I've, quite frankly, got a lot of other stuff on my mind. And I don't even bother to go to the final show there in 1991.

And then I'm 36, I'm married and I'm probably as grown up as I'm ever going to get.

I'm looking at a Halfords in Westcliff that happens to be standing where some cheap little second-run cinema used to stand. I've stopped by because I need some antifreeze for the car engine but, for some unknown reason, I'm fighting the urge to cry.

Tickets for special festival screening of The Devil's Music

2010-04-26T12:36:00.003+01:00

A rare chance to see The Devil's Music on the big screen with a Director's Q&A. I've never done a Q&A for this particular movie before, largely because it's more fun to lie about it. But, on Saturday, for one day only, I'm planning to tell the truth. So, if you're anywhere near Southend (which is only 45 minutes outside London) on Saturday 1st May, you can book your tickets here..

Click here to purchase tickets

The Octopus that wasn't in The Goonies

2010-04-24T09:11:00.000+01:00

I think it’s fair to say that it all started with 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

My Mum took me to see a cinematic re-release of the 1954 Richard Fleischer version back in the Seventies. Common sense tells me it must have been around 1978, when I was four, but the official date for the re-release was apparently 1976, which would place me at the tender age of two. Either way, I’d seen the ads on the TV and had badgered my already long-suffering mother into taking me. My poor old Mum still had untold delights of genre cinema awaiting her over the next few years, until I reached such an age as I could be safely abandoned in the cinema on my own. The arrival of this date may have ultimately been somewhat hastened by her sense of parental responsibility failing to outweigh her desire not to sit through Krull for a fourth time.

My four/two year-old self had been looking forward to 20,000 Leagues for one reason alone, and that reason had tentacles and a snapping yellow beak. The TV ads for the re-release had focused on the squid fight scene to such an extent that I genuinely think I expected Giant Squid: The Movie rather than the well-meaning Jules Verse adaptation that unrolled before me. Result: I fidgeted. A lot. I suspect that I may have engaged in thoughtful discussion regarding the narrative with my mum; discussion along the lines of ‘Will the squid be on soon?’ every couple of minutes throughout the lion’s share of the running time.

But when those tentacles finally crept onto the screen, I fell silent. How could I not? I was absolutely and utterly transfixed. The bastard was glorious. I left feeling that I’d seen the single greatest sequence ever filmed, and the tiny seeds of cheerful, fanboy obsession were scattered onto the fertile soil of my pre-school mind. Without seeing that squid attack, who knows? Maybe today I’d be the kind of guy who feels more comfortable with a rugby ball in his hand than a box of popcorn. Maybe I’d have never fallen in love with film. Of course, this being in the days before VHS, it was years before I got to see the sequence again. So, in the meantime, I hunted for memorabilia and photos. But, more than that, I hunted for more movies with enormous rubber cephalopods.

Pickings were pretty slim. A few years later, I fell instantly in love with Warlords of Atlantis and was more than willing to overlook its flaws on the basis of the wonderful stop-motion octopus. I tried, but failed, to find somewhere showing Tentacoli after hearing it luridly described by my uncle, but was delighted when that same uncle (genre writer Tim Stout, who had a novel and a couple of anthologies of short stories published in the seventies and early eighties) pointed me in the direction of It Came From Beneath The Sea on ITV one Sunday lunchtime.

The years passed, and the arrival of VHS meant that I was suddenly able to compile my favourite mollusc moments on one dog-eared tape. I’d sit with play and record set to pause, waiting for the brief arrival of an octopus or squid in countless movies, such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where I felt that such an appearance would be inevitable. My interests broadened and my tastes became more varied, but the root of why I grew to love cinema in the first place always remained.

I was eleven years old when pre-publicity started turning up for the big Spielberg-produced Christmas movie that year, The Goonies. By this point, I was devouring any information about film that I could lay my hands on. I used to obsessively collect bubblegum cards just to catch glimpses of scenes that hadn’t yet seen the light of a projector bulb. I used to read novelisations that were released before the movie’s launch.

And that was where I found it.

First page of the novelisation of The Goonies. On the inside leaf; a teaser bit of text from later in the novel, designed to whet your appetite. A description of an octopus attacking the kids, in a flooded cavern with a pirate ship floating sedately in the background.

For those couple of weeks, pocket money went exclusively on Goonies bubblegum cards. Early on in my quest, I picked up an index card. I noticed that cards 43 and 44 were listed Tentacles of Death! and The Rockin’ Octopus! respectively. Those were my Grail. I tore packets and chewed neon pink bubblegum until my teeth were falling like rain. Eventually, I got both cards. Tentacles of Death! was actually a split image, meaning there were two pictures on one card. Two smaller pictures, in other words. I squinted and squinted. I even used a magnifying glass. My appetite was most definitely whetted. The Rockin’ Octopus! showed the beast in all its glory, and took my breath away when I opened the packet. I bought the soundtrack album and grooved to the absolutely dreadful sounds of Eight Arms to Hold You by the Goon Squad, the song that I knew would ultimately score the scene.

I can still remember how I felt, queuing to see the movie a couple of weeks later. When it finally hit the screen, I knew virtually every line in advance from all my background reading. My impatience to get to the octopus stopped me from enjoying it fully. Twenty minutes from the end, the kids splashed down into the cavern with the pirate ship. I knew that, at any moment, Stef would start accusing Mouth of groping her underwater, not realising that it was a tentacle brushing past her leg.

Except she didn’t. The kids got on board the pirate ship without incident.

I did a double-take. I simply didn’t understand. I watched the rest of the film in a sort of daze, wondering where my octopus had gone. In the final scene on the beach, when a policeman asked the kids about their adventure, Data piped up;

“The giant octopus was pretty bad. Very scary”

It was everything I could do to stop myself crying.

I went to see the film again the following week at a different cinema, hoping that somehow there’d been a mix-up at the initial screening and that a reel had been missed. When it finally became apparent that all prints were mollusc-free, I wrote to Warner Brothers demanding the scene be reinstated. Or for them to send me a copy, whichever was easier. They didn’t reply. I collected any magazines that might be able to explain the situation, even spending the majority of a week’s pocket money on an imported issue of Cinefex which featured a couple of photos from the scene and, at last, a vague explanation of why it was removed. The word ‘unrealistic’ was cruelly bandied around.

It was another thirteen long years before I finally got to see the octopus scene in any form. During that time I considered various way-out plans to get to see the footage, including applying for a job at Burman Studios (who made the octopus) and asking for a copy of their showreel. I dreamt about the scene more times than I care to think about.

Then, one day in the late nineties, a grainy video clip turned up on a Goonies fan site. It had been video-captured from a US screening on The Disney Channel which reincorporated the scene. I sat and watch it a couple of dozen times, not really able to process the experience or even tell whether I was enjoying it or not. It was a further two years before I got to see it on a decent size screen, (on the final, nowadays inevitable, special edition DVD release), and probably another three for me to come to terms with the truth.

The truth about the octopus scene is very simple and straightforward. It’s crap. It doesn’t work. It’s badly executed, has no logical place in the movie and no pay-off. The flick works better without it.

But that’s a 36-year old screenwriter writing those words, and every time I even think about the subject the 11-year old that I used to be starts crying. And I can’t live with that.

So, the campaign for a director’s cut starts here.

And you can stick the rubber Suicide Squid back into Red Dwarf whilst you’re at it.

Fake Blood on the Lens

2010-04-21T11:30:00.002+01:00

Got some live stuff coming up.

I'll be presenting a short workshop about the low-budget horror industry. This is part of the Southend Film Festival (http://www.southendfilmfestival.com/)and should be good fun. 12pm at Southend Central Library on 1st May. Free to get in, first come first served. It's gonna be like a cut down version of the full Fake Blood on the Lens show, which can next be caught at.. Oh, more of that later.

The workshop is followed by a special one-off screening of The Devil's Music over at The Dixon Studio (next door to the Palace Theatre) in Westcliff, Essex. The show's at 2.45 and I'll be around for Q&A, tickets are only £2 from the Palace Theatre box office (or via http://www.thecliffspavilion.co.uk/ as soon as they update the film list.. We're a replacement for 'Grave Tales' on the original listings)

Then, there's the full Fake Blood on the Lens show taking place at 7pm, 17th June as part of the Southend Festival (different to the Southend Film Festival.. I know it gets confusing). Not sure of prices or tickets yet, I'll let you know closer to the time.

BDT - The First Review

2010-04-01T10:45:00.001+01:00

And the first review of Bordello Death Tales, courtesy of the esteemed MJ Simpson, hits the web:

BORDELLO DEATH TALES REVIEW

Bordello Death Tales screening

2010-03-31T12:47:00.002+01:00

Saturday rolled around, and we had the first screening of Bordello Death Tales. We held it in a seriously unconventional venue, (Gallery 491 in Leytonstone), which had a giant paper-mache squid suspended from the ceiling in the screening room.

Myself, Jim and Al were interviewed by a film crew from Gorezone (for inclusion on a future covermounted DVD), including a section where I was interviewed by a rotting puppet cat. The cat also had a little puppet cock poking out from underneath its Megan Fox t-shirt; a detail that's bound to occur to me when I'm sitting in an old folks' home one day, and prompt the staff to think that I've finally gone off the deep end.

The screening was pretty terrific, and crowded enough that I actually ended up having to stand through it (seeing as I missed the scramble for seats as I was onstage with the other two introducing the movie!). I'm sure that a review or two will crop up soon enough. I know I've sung the praises of the flick before, but it really is pretty damn funky, with something for every type of horror fan.

Of course, Hellbride hit DVD in the UK this week too. Good to see it on shelves across the country. I've been keeping an eye out for print coverage but I'll probably miss some; any of you folks out there spot some coverage in a mag I might have missed drop me a line via Twitter and point me in the right direction.

House on the Witchpit writing still going well. Cannot wait to shoot the damn thing, but it still might be a while.

Big week approaching..

2010-03-24T09:32:00.002Z

On Saturday, Bordello Death Tales gets played before an audience for the first time. It's a movie that's been hovering in post-production for far longer than we ever intended; we'd intended to do it pretty quick and dirty, and anticipated locking some time towards the end of 2008. Buuuut, things get polished, then tweaked, then changed, and the whole process took an awful lot longer than we'd intended.

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, screening a movie for the first time is always a strange experience. As a filmmaker, you'll have seen the movie a million times before, but you've never truly seen it until you've seen it with an audience. Every tiny flaw that you thought you could get away with suddenly looks absolutely massive. Every scene that you felt you'd cut down to the bone could suddenly use another 40 seconds cut from it to really make it zing. Oh, the wisdom of the filmmaker watching his movie with a crowd for the first time. If only he could go back and tell his previous self the things he's learned. At least this time I've got two fellow filmmakers enjoying the same experience; because BDT is, of course, the child of three fathers we all get to worry equally. I've never had anyone to share the experience with before.

In other news, Hellbride finally hits UK DVD on Monday. You can go and pre-order a copy off Play for a meagre £2.99 by clicking on the lovely cover below. Go do it now, it's okay, I'll wait.

There, back now? Good. Hope you enjoy it. It's been interesting to see the reactions we've been getting from the UK reviewers as opposed to how the flick went down in the US. There are new reviews springing up daily.

Elsewhere in my ridiculous life, I've been asked to make a couple of festival appearances over the next few months. The first will be at the Southend Film Festival, where I'll be talking about low budget horror on Saturday May 1st. Not quite sure what people are going to want to hear; if you've got any ideas or requests feel free to hit the contact buttons.

I'll keep you posted as to how the screening goes.

Rock on,
Pat

What makes a band a band?

2010-03-08T13:49:00.002Z

I love the band Pop Will Eat Itself. Always have, always will. Their 1989 album 'This is the day.. This is the hour.. This is This' was the first album I ever bought with an 'explicit content' warning sticker on it; I can remember walking up to the counter and not actually knowing whether or not the shop would sell it to me as I was under 18. It felt like contraband, and, God, I loved that album. Within a week of owning it I knew every word.

The years went by, and I went to see PWEI a whole bunch of times. By the time I saw them in 1996, it was clear that something wasn't quite right anymore. Founder member Graham Crabb had quit, and one night in Hammersmith I saw the remaining members play the shortest set I'd ever seen them play, heavy on new material which sounded like it was lacking inspiration. For the first time, they didn't look like were enjoying themselves, and I wasn't very surprised when the band called it a day not long after.

In 2005, the band played a series of reunion gigs with all members, including Graham. The gig I saw in Shepherd's Bush was possibly the best I'd ever seen them; they sounded fantastic. It was one of those gigs where you can buy a CD as soon as the set is over, and I still play that CD pretty regularly. It's a pretty perfect memory. There were various suggestions afterwards that the band were working on a new album. Little taster snippets were put online and sounded good, but it soon became apparent that the project wasn't really going to fly after all due to scheduling commitments.

All of this led to the creation of a band called VileEvils, from the ashes of the PWEI reunion. They were pretty damn good too, and I ended up doing a video for their single NoFear (leaning fairly heavily on unused material from the shoots for TrashHouse and KillerKiller). Here it is:

VileEvils were due to release their first album at towards the end of this month, but.. Suddenly, a press release. One that starts like this..

dPulse Recordings has announced today the opening of a new chapter in the storied legacy of Pop Will Eat Itself - one of the most influential names in the history of electronic rock music – as Graham Crabb, the band’s principal songwriter and co-lead vocalist, ramps up with a new era for the PWEI legacy.

With a string of Top 40 UK and US hits, Pop Will Eat Itself rose to prominence fueled by Crabb-penned tunes such as ‘There Is No Love Between Us Anymore’, ‘Bulletproof’, ‘RSVP’, ‘Get The Girl, Kill The Baddies’ and many, many others.

With the new Pop Will Eat Itself single ‘Axe of Men (2010)’ currently making its rounds on DJ and radio promo worldwide, Crabb and PWEI will release a new album in summer 2010. That album will include tracks originally planned for the now-cancelled Vile Evils album Vive Le Vile Evil, which was scheduled for release by dPulse Recordings 23 March.

With news of this announcement, Graham Crabb and long-time collaborator and PWEI member Adam Mole have mutually and amicably disbanded their project Vile Evils, effective immediately.

There's more at http://pwei.info if you're curious.

So, this summer I'm going to get to go and see PWEI, except that there won't be a single person on the stage who was also on the stage at that Hammermith gig in 1996. Soooo.. What makes a band a band?

Another of my favourite 90s bands, Carter USM, also amicably disbanded in the late 90s. Many years later, they played a series of gigs under the banner "Who's The Daddy Now?", the encores of which consisted of both founder members of Carter USM (Jim Bob and Fruitbat) onstage, playing Carter USM songs. They billed themselves as the only covers band to contain all the original members. So was that Carter USM? Or not Carter USM?

(Incidentally, I also directed a video for one of Jim Bob's solo singles, which is below if you haven't already seen it..)

Is a band a statement of intent? A specific collection of human beings? Presumably like the 2010 version of PWEI, the versions of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins currently touring both only have one member in common with their previous incarnations. The current line-up of The Wonder Stuff also caused quite a bit of controversy when first unveiled, but that's a whole other story.

I love music an awful lot, and I'll support the new version of PWEI just as I supported the old one. In fact, I'm rather excited at going to see them. I've just never quite been able to shift this question as to what makes a band from my mind.. Maybe the Sugababes will provide us all with an answer, as they argue it out in court.

Hellbride UK

2010-01-26T12:53:00.003Z

It looks like Hellbride is coming out in the UK.. Well, it went through the BBFC this week, anyway.

BBFC rates Hellbride 15 uncut

I had no idea that it was coming out, so I haven't got any details just yet!

Barely Legal

2010-01-19T12:38:00.001Z

I saw a late-teenager (probably around 17 or 18, I reckon) get asked for proof of age when buying a 12 rated DVD last week. The kid was indignant and angry, but ultimately caved and showed some ID.

Whilst travelling the States in 2002, I saw a 55 year-old woman get refused alcohol in a San Francisco comedy club because she didn't have ID with her.

On a similar tack, I got asked for ID buying a bottle of wine a couple of years ago. 33 years old I was at the time (as I indignantly told the woman behind the counter; "I'm the same age as JESUS!") and it was the first time I'd been asked my age buying alcohol since I was 17.

All of these examples are utterly fucking stupid, and I worry that they're indicative of a growing culture where using your judgement is seen as a dangerous and unneccessary risk. If you seriously aren't comfortable enough with your judgement that a grey-haired, not-particularly-well-preserved woman can be served alcohol, I'm really not comfortable with you doing ANY job whatsoever. It comes down to the old argument that by operating like a machine and insisting on ID for everyone, you are potentially stopping a single 17 year old getting served. And that's got to be a good thing, right?

Bollocks. Here's my two pennies; cash 'em in for the currency of your choice. Drumroll..

An age restriction system works better when it leaks. When it is flawed. When 17 year-olds occasionally get served beer in pubs and get into 18 movies. Because if you're a 17 year old in an environment that you're not meant to be in, there's at least a chance that you'll shut up and keep a low profile. That you'll hang back and see how things are done. If you know that if a particular bartender notices you you'll get thrown out, you'll avoid drawing too much attention to yourself. You'll blend. You might even take it relatively easy on the booze intake. Your introduction to the adult world is gradual and subdued, since you know you don't really belong there yet.

If, on the other hand, every age restriction works 100%, by the time a kid hits his 18th birthday he's got a massive sense of entitlement backed up by absolutely no experience whatsoever of the environment that he's entering. He walks in, flashes his newly minted ID, never learns any sort of bar etiquette, gets shitfaced and falls over or starts a fight. He knows that he won't be ejected until he's done something actively bad, and never learns the ropes because he doesn't need to.

Movies work the same way. I fondly remember my first underage 15 at the cinema (Good Morning Vietnam) and my first underage 18 at the cinema (Misery). I sat in the darkness, terrified that the usher would suddenly click and think 'Hey, that kid looked a bit young', hunt me down in the darkness and throw me out. So I sat through the movies in silence, and.. Guess what? The habit stuck. I went from being a kid who yabbered in movies to being an adult who knew to shut the fuck up as soon as the certificate hit the screen. If I'd been robbed of that experience, if the first time I'd sat in an age-restricted movie I'd have been brimming with a sense of my entitlement to be there, maybe that process of growth would never have happened or been severely delayed.

Every time a supermarket increases the age at which you 'might' be ID'd, for the good of us all, it breaks my heart a bit. The woman who ID'd me for the wine was essentially arguing that maybe, just maybe, I might possibly be 25 and just have aged horribly badly. Her sign told her that if customers looked under 25 they must show ID to prove they were 18. Therefore a 33 year old has to prove that they're not 17. Or a 55 year old has to spend her comedy night without a glass of wine. Madness. Not only that, but by boosting the ages of 'forbidden fruit' to 21 (as most States in the US have) they are introducing another element into the mix in the shape of cars. In the States, a kid might have been driving for 5 years by the time they get served in a bar. By that time they're reliant on cars and unfamiliar with their alcohol limits; another recipe for disaster, especially in a country like the US where it's hard enough to be a pedestrian in the first place.

I vote for a return to people using their judgement, and if the odd kid gets through a few months underage it might actually end up improving things in the long run.

Basically I just want teenagers to shut up in cinemas, and I'm willing to try anything.

My name's Pat Higgins and my conscience is clear.

Post-Christmas Avatar Blues

2010-01-15T15:38:00.000Z

Well, it was a nice Christmas and New Year. Highlights included Rage Against The Machine getting to the Christmas Number One (which was mainly fun because it demonstrated the very public breaking of a pre-determined narrative, and proved that we actually still have a say in popular culture) and the 3D overload that was Avatar.. I walked out of it feeling like I'd just seen something incredible, but the next day couldn't quite shake the feeling that if I'd seen it in 2D on a small screen I'd have been mocking it quite a lot. If you haven't seen it yet, *please* check it out on the big screen in 3D, if only so when you inevitably see it in a smaller, flatter, rather more flaccid form in the years to come you can feel a little bit embarrassed about just how much you liked it.

The Devil's Music also finally came out on DVD, of course, which was great. From the feedback I've received so far, folks seem to be really digging the disc.

We've also been looking around for a decent screening venue for the cast and crew screening of Bordello Death Tales, prior to letting critics look at the sucker. I always feel that cast and crew should see a movie first.. The idea of a critic seeing a flick before one of the cast does just feels wrong somehow, but this screening has been a long time coming. Hopefully not much longer. The problem seems to be that all the venues are either too big or too small; there are a lot of screening rooms with 35-odd seats, there are a lot of cinemas with 300-odd, but there aren't all that many with around 80.

And, of course, the writing continues. In an ideal world, we'd do another back-to-back shoot in the summer of 2011 the same way that we did in the summer of 2006, but I sadly can't see the money coming together so I'll have to flip a coin..

2009 - What I've seen this year

2009-12-30T12:47:00.003Z

OK, so I'm going to see Avatar 3D tonight, so I'll be editing this post to add that onto the end. Largely because the idea of finishing my list of movies seen this year with 'The Christmas Clause' really doesn't bear thinking about.

Here it is: The complete and unedited list of stuff I've seen this year, together with a reductive and pointless mark out of five. I've avoiding listing my own stuff, since that's a pretty pointless exercise and I've probably seen each 'going concern' movie countless times in various states of editing. I've also refrained from marking movies where I know people concerned reasonably well, because conflict of interest and yada yada yada.

But basically, here it is. It's going to be long.

Have a brilliant New Year.

January 10th
Friday the 13th Part III - **/5
All The Boys Love Mandy Lane - ***/5
Bring It On: In It to Win It - **/5

January 11th
Alien Abduction: The McPherson Tape - ***/5
Lake Placid 2 - **/5

January 17th
Slumdog Millionaire - ****/5
Shrooms - */5

January 18th
Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud - ***/5

January 19th
Breakfast at Tiffany's - ****/5

January 21st
My Bloody Valentine (3D version, 2009) - ***/5

January 23rd
Twelve Monkeys (3rd viewing) - *****/5

January 24th
Milk - ****/5
Frost/Nixon - ****/5

January 27th
The Reader - ***/5

January 29th
Blade Runner (The Final Cut) - *****/5

February 1st
The Wrestler - *****/5
Wanted - ***/5

February 3rd
Creatures from the Abyss - **/5

February 6th
The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers - **/5

February 11th
Revolutionary Road - **/5

February 13th
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (3rd-ish viewing) - *****/5
Tokyo Gore Police - ****/5

February 14th
Tropic Thunder - ***/5

February 15th
Happy-Go-Lucky - ****/5

February 16th
Rachel Getting Married - ***/5

February 18th
Doubt - ***/5
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - ****/5

February 19th
Zombie Strippers! - **/5
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (4th-ish viewing) - ***/5

February 20th
Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise (2nd viewing) - ***/5

February 21st
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (2nd viewing) - ***/5
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning - **/5

February 22nd
Iron Man - ****/5

March 2nd
Eyes Wide Shut - ****/5

March 7th
Watchmen (Imax) - *****/5

March 14th
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster - ***/5
Diary of the Dead - **/5

March 15th
My Date with Drew - ***/5

March 18th
The Magnificent Seven (4th? viewing) - *****/5

March 19th
The Onion Movie - ***/5

March 22nd
Be Kind Rewind - ***/5

March 23rd
Grease 2 - **/5

March 25th
Little Shop of Horrors (1986, 8th-ish viewing) - *****/5

March 28th
Fast Food Nation - ***/5
Elvira's Haunted Hills - **/5
St Trinians - **/5

April 1st
Stand By Me (5th-ish viewing) - *****/5

April 14th
My Name is Bruce - ***/5

April 18th
Let The Right One In - ****/5

April 20th
Pineapple Express - **/5

April 25th
9 to 5 - ***/5
Sydney White - **/5

May 2nd
Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain - ***/5

May 6th
The Orphanage (2nd viewing) - *****/5

May 10th
Zombies Zombies Zombies - **/5
Superhero Movie - **/5

May 11th
Star Trek (2009) - ****/5

May 12th
Midnight Cowboy - ***/5

May 15th
The Gingerdead Man - **/5

May 23rd
The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust - ***/5
Son of Rambow - ****/5

May 24th
Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation - ***/5

May 27th
Drag Me to Hell - ****/5

May 30th
Five Across the Eyes - **/5
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay - ***/5

May 31st
Small Town Folk - ***/5

June 4th
Twilight - ***/5 (Mini review at http://tinyurl.com/p5wqs8 )

June 6th
Candy Stripers - **/5 (Mini review at http://tinyurl.com/nbdp7d )

June 7th
Onechanbara: The Movie - ***/5 (Mini review at http://tinyurl.com/o2refa )
The Doll Master - ***/5 (Mini review at http://tinyurl.com/mupct6 )

June 8th
Alien Apocalypse - ***/5

June 10th
Ghostbusters (??th viewing) - *****/5

June 13th
Psycho Beach Party - ***/5

June 14th
The Hangover - ****/5

June 16th
Burn After Reading - ****/5

June 17th
Sleepy Hollow (2nd viewing) - ****/5

June 19th
Hairspray (2007) - ****/5

June 20th
Ghoulies (2nd viewing) - **/5
Ghoulies II (2nd viewing) - **/5

June 21st
Ghoulies go to College - **/5
Troll - **/5

June 25th
Shaun of the Dead - (3rd viewing) *****/5

June 28th
The Incredible Hulk - ***/5

July 3rd
Made of Honor - **/5

July 4th
Mamma Mia! - */5

July 5th
Casablanca (??th viewing) - *****/5

July 10th
Star Wars (??th viewing) - *****/5

July 14th
Megaladon - */5

July 21st
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - ****/5

July 25th
Prom Night (2008) - */5

July 31st
Quadrophenia - ****/5

August 1st
Over Her Dead Body - **/5

August 3rd
Doomsday - ***/5

August 8th
Anvil: The Story of Anvil - ****/5
American Teen - ***/5

August 9th
JCVD - ***/5

August 13th
Shark Attack 3: Megaladon - ***/5 (For entertainment value)

August 15th
Inglourious Basterds - *****/5

August 16th
Skinwalkers - **/5
Creature from Black Lake - **/5
Shark Attack - **/5

August 17th
Tomorrow Never Dies (2nd viewing) - ***/5

August 18th
Teeth - ****/5

August 19th
Crocodile 2: Death Roll - **/5

August 23rd
(500) Days of Summer - ****/5
The X-Files: I Want to Believe - **/5
Friday the 13th (2009) - **/5

August 27th
Donkey Punch - ***/5

August 29th
In The Loop - ****/5
Role Models - ***/5
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus - **/5

August 30th
Crank: High Voltage - ***/5

August 31st
Zombie Women of Satan - (Not rated as I know people involved)
The Final Destination (3D version) - **/5
The Descent: Part 2 - ***/5

September 1st
Adventureland - ***/5

September 5th
I Love You, Man - ***/5

September 7th
Demon Slayer - */5

September 8th
District 9 - ****/5

September 13th
True Romance (3rd viewing) - *****/5

September 16th
Gone Baby Gone - ****/5

September 19th
Sleepaway Camp - ***/5

September 24th
Religilous - ***/5

September 25th
Sex Drive - ****/5
Dead Snow - ****/5

September 26th
Bring It On: Fight to the Finish - */5
What Just Happened - ***/5
He's Just Not That Into You - **/5

September 27th
Gran Torino - ***/5
The Boat That Rocked - **/5

September 28th
Ghost Town - ***/5

September 29th
The Bachelor - **/5
Rope - ****/5

September 30th
Psycho (1960, 4th-ish viewing) - *****/5

October 3rd
Colin (2nd viewing) - Not rated as I know people involved

October 5th
The Wave - ***/5

October 6th
Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (?th viewing) - *****/5

October 10th
Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers - **/5

October 11th
Eraserhead - (3rd? viewing) - ****/5

October 12th
The Foot Fist Way - ****/5

October 13th
The Blair Witch Project - (4th viewing) - *****/5

October 15th
Coraline - ****/5

October 17th
Doghouse - (Not rated as I know people involved)

October 18th
Up - *****/5

October 20th
Cloverfield (2nd viewing) - ****/5
Zombieland - ****/5

October 25th
Eden Lake - ***/5
The House Bunny - **/5

October 26th
Trick 'R Treat - ****/5

November 3rd
Quantum of Solace (2nd viewing) - ****/5
Road House (2nd viewing) - ***/5

November 7th
Saw V - **/5
Bad Biology - ***/5

November 10th
The Shawshank Redemption - (?th viewing) *****/5
Jennifer's Body - ***/5

November 18th
Before Sunrise (3rd viewing) - *****/5

November 23rd
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People - **/5

November 26th
Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope - (?th viewing) *****/5

November 29th
The Notorious Bettie Page - ***/5

November 30th
Paranormal Activity - ****/5

December 1st
The Princess Bride (?th viewing) - *****/5

December 4th
American Pie (4th-ish viewing) - ****/5

December 8th
The Breakfast Club - (?th viewing) - *****/5

December 12th
American Pie presents The Book of Love - **/5

December 14th
American Pie presents Band Camp (2nd viewing) - ***/5

December 15th
Edward Scissorhands (?th viewing) - *****/5
Where the Wild Things Are - ****/5

December 21st
A Christmas Wedding - */5

December 22nd
The Christmas Clause - */5

December 30th
Avatar (3D version) - ****/5 (*****/5 for spectacle)

December 31st
Shark Attack 3 (2nd viewing) - ***/5 (for entertainment)

Back to the writing board

2009-12-14T11:44:00.002Z

So, House on the Witchpit.

I've been messing around with the screenplay since about 2002, and it has changed a lot. The first draft was a fairly cheerful horror comedy; heavy on the sexy witches angle and up to the eyeballs in debt to Warlock in terms of structure. That first draft is pretty close to TrashHouse in terms of tone, and if I'd have shot it when I intended to (around 2005) it would probably have fit reasonably nicely into my output.

Times change, things move on. House on the Witchpit is no longer a frothy horror comedy; the only function of the screenplay is to scare the living shit out of the viewer, and it skews pretty goddamn dark. Then again, I like to think I've come a fair way since TrashHouse too. I hope my movies are getting more interesting and less easy to categorise, and the new-look HotWP fits into my later stuff pretty well.

Writing about bleak situations is a strange sensation for me. I'm a generally pretty upbeat kind of guy, and I feel somewhat detached from the jet-black sentiments that I seem to be capable of pouring onto paper (and then transferring onto the screen from there). I can't work out if I feel better or worse to 'let them out' or whether they end up tainting my day; hanging around after me like an evil cloud. Either way, the words seem to want to hit the paper, so I let them. But how dark do I seriously want to let this go? People who ultimately plonk their arses down in front of House on the Witchpit will be expecting a horror movie. They're watching it to be disturbed or creeped out, at least to some extent. But how serious are they about that?

In other words, just how dark do horror movie viewers want their horrors to get?

I'm intrigued to check out von Trier's AntiChrist, which seems to have taken the idea of how far to push and really run with it. I've heard all sorts of mixed opinions, from those who consider it the most effective horror of the last decade through to those who find it utterly laughable. Now matter how far I take HotWP, I can't see myself going to the visual extremes that von Trier has gone. But emotionally? How far is too far?

And, ultimately, am I willing to let go of the part of me that ultimately just wants my viewers to have fun? Because if you're going to deny them fun, you'd better have a damn good reason for it.

Decisions, decisions. I'm extremely proud of the script, though, and hope I make the right choices.

TDM DVD, Christmas approaches..

2009-12-12T15:10:00.003Z

First things first, my advance copy of Lono Entertainment's US release of The Devil's Music turned up this week. It's out in the US on December 22nd. Chucking my copy at my Xbox 360 seems to suggest that the disc hasn't actually been region locked, which is rather great news for those in the UK who have checked out the movie via IndieMoviesOnline..

(cue blatant plug..)

Watch The Devil’s Music online free

..and are eager for a special edition DVD. For those in the US, the DVD will be your first chance to check the movie out, and I really really hope that you dig it. Lono have done a fantastic job; the special features are great, (including two terrific Easter Eggs for those who enjoy hunting things down!) and give a whole different perspective on the flick. So here's the link.. (Aw, come on, you KNEW another plug was coming..)

THE SPECIAL EDITION DVD!! ORDER FROM AMAZON NOW!!

Right, that should have sorted out all of your Devil's Music needs for the festive season. What else do I have to tell you wonderful cats about?

(This is possibly a diversionary tactic, as Pip is currently out buying a Christmas tree, and I really should be getting all the other decorations down from the loft. But I don't fancy doing that just yet, so I thought I'd chat to you lot instead)

Bordello Death Tales inches ever closer to being actually seen by people. It really won't be long now, I promise. And it's well worth the wait.

Went to see New Moon during the week, and probably shouldn't discuss my feelings about it for fear of alienating a whole bunch of Twilight fans. I also really hate pouring scorn on things that make people happy But then again I don't really think that Twilight fans are my particular demographic anyway, so hell with it.

New Moon is a terrible film. Terrible in a way that few films manage, and certainly one that makes the first movie in the series look like a masterpiece. From the CGI pantomime bears who pass for werewolves through to the frankly jaw-dropping Council of Vampire Stereotypes, this is a rotten flick. But the thing that makes it stand out from the pack, the thing that truly raises it (or sinks it) to a new level of terrible is its total lack of any sort of humour. There is, if memory serves, a grand total of one line which is meant to be funny in some way, and even that is a sort of quasi-funny line (it's a 'put the dog out' riff in reference to the werewolf). The audience at the screening I was at fell upon that line as if it were some kind of life raft; they hooted, laughed and howled, because the rest of the flick hadn't given them any chance at all to do so. At least not deliberately. You can laugh at the movie, but you can't laugh with it because it contains no sense of humour whatsoever.

Having said that, I emerged from the screening in a great mood. Films as entertainingly bad as New Moon don't come along very often, and I didn't feel shortchanged of my cash.

Elsewhere in sequelville, I checked out American Pie presents The Book of Love, which is number seven for those of us counting. It's much what you'd expect, but it also contains a sequence which cheerfully wanders out of 'gross out' territory and into 'massively disturbing'. It plays like something from a Takashi Miike movie, and the happy music over the top makes it worse. Pip had fallen asleep by this point in the movie, and I briefly wondered whether I had, too, and was actually dreaming. You'll know it when you see it.

Oh, and for anyone who's not yet following me on Twitter, you can do so over here

Right, better go get that stuff out of the loft.

Rock on,
Pat

If you're in the UK..

2009-10-30T19:02:00.002Z

Go and watch The Devil's Music!

Now!

And spread the word by any means necessary! Twitter, Facebook, IMDB, whatever.. Our movie is in your hands.

http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/news/the-devils-music-premiere-301009

(If you're in the US, don't worry.. The rather awesome DVD will be along on December 22nd!)

Paranormal Activity: You Do The Math

2009-10-27T15:44:00.002Z

So, is it a good thing or a bad thing for those of us on the tiny-budget side of the Hollywood wall that Paranormal Activity just took the number one box office slot in the US, beating the likes of Saw VI? Given that PA allegedly cost $15,000, mightn't this reignite interest in micro-budget movies that have more to offer in the way of plot, scares and so on than their big-budget counterparts?

Haven't got a clue. My gut tells me that various executives will be scrabbling around looking for other movies to pick up that are exactly like PA. My gut feeling expands on this notion to suggest that, once there are no more micro-budget flicks to pick up that are exactly like PA, they'll pick up a bunch of other stuff and simply market it to look exactly like PA. Then they'll note that the numbers are dropping, conclude that people aren't interested in micro-budget chillers any more, shrug their shoulders and go off and make Saw VII.

The great, grand point of course is that the public didn't flock to PA because it was cheap. They went despite the fact it was cheap. Because it appeared to offer something a bit new. Something a bit different. Something that hadn't been focus-grouped.

I haven't actually seen Paranormal Activity at this point, I hasten to add. I hate making sweeping statements in a blog and then later finding out that I hate the movie in question. I'm assuming I'll like this one. It looks stripped down, lean, scary.. Everything that I very much doubt that Saw VI will be (wouldn't know.. I gave up at IV, which I think showed remarkable staying power all things considered).

Oh, and before I forget, everyone in the UK should point their browsers towards http://www.indiemoviesonline.com next Friday. Hopefully, you all know why.

Rock on,
Pat

Streaming Zeroes and Ones

2009-10-24T21:35:00.002+01:00

I'm typing this blog entry listening to Marilyn Manson's The High End of Low on Spotify. I never bothered to pick up the CD when it came out because I'd been underwhelmed by his previous one, plus it happened to come out at the same time as a load of other incredibly good music. But then this evening, I suddenly remembered it. I tapped a few keys, and within seconds I'm listening to it on Spotify. The whole album. Free. In the hour before, I'd been listening to the wonderful new album from The Mountain Goats. Also on Spotify, and also free. OK, so there are short ads every few tracks, but they're only about 10 seconds long and pretty unintrusive.

Is this the way the music industry is likely to go? Or is it just one more means of distribution? There are already murmurings that the Spotify business model leaves artists out of pocket, or that the free version might be unsustainable, but right now it's certainly something that works for me. I won't be abandoning CDs or paid MP3s from Amazon just yet, but Spotify's a pretty cool new way of checking stuff out that I'm curious about.

Naturally, this is a subject close to might heart right now. The Devil's Music will be available, free, in HD, across the UK only for online screenings starting on Friday, thanks to the amazing folks at http://www.indiemoviesonline.com. This is our first venture into these brave new distribution methods, and I'm ridiculously excited. IMO have been fantastic with the launch of the flick.. Hopefully by now you've seen the full page ad on the inside back cover of this month's Total Film, and there are more ads to follow in other publications. They've given the flick a great big marketing push and hopefully thousands upon thousands of people will see the movie over the coming weeks.

Is this the future of film distribution? Time will tell, but it sure looks promising. In the meantime, hope you all enjoy the film. Be sure to let us know.

The Daily Mail & Howard the Duck

2009-10-19T16:58:00.001+01:00

So, Jan Moir spouts a bunch of homophobic garbage and people final notice that the Daily Mail is a foul, grubby little paper which spreads hatred via innuendo. Everybody goes to the PCC to register their dissaproval, then suddenly notices that the PCC's chairman is actually Paul Dacre who (drumroll) is also the editor of the foul, grubby little paper in the first place. People really haven't been paying attention, but it's nice that they're finally joining the party.

I got to the party early. I was setting out dips and drinks before everyone else arrived. Because I got a crash-course in how the Daily Mail operates at the tender age of 12, when the wretched paper in question gave my parents the impression that I was interested in bestiality. Yes, it's the second rant about newspaper fact-checking this year, and with apologies to EE Cummings; here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called pure dark hatred of the Daily Mail.

I wasn't the coolest 12 year old going. I was vaguely awkward and vaguely weird, but I was just beginning to fashion myself an identity all of my very own. That identity, unsurprisingly, was based on movies. I loved 'em, and I realised early on that by going out on a limb and loving the movies that nobody else loved, by paying attention to those poor, confused, malformed little flicks that everyone else seemed determined to kick into the gutter I could stand out from the crowd at school. Whilst they sung the praises of whatever flick had just hit the local Odeon, I'd sing the praises on a straight-to-VHS Charles Band movie that I'd rented. And people would listen, and laugh, and I'd be the Movies Guy, which was a damn sight better than just being the guy who was always picked three-from-last for every sports team going.

One afternoon after school, I went to see Howard The Duck with my mate Dan Rice. HTD had been a horrible flop at the US box office, to the degree that it was retitled on these shores as Howard:A New Breed of Hero and the advertising campaign (rather brilliantly) went to absurd lengths to conceal that the hero was a duck. We saw the late afternoon showing at a fantastic cinema in Westcliff called the Classic (which was knocked down and turned into a fucking Halfords some years later) and there were only two other people watching the movie. Evidently, Howard was repeating the egg he'd laid Stateside. I loved the movie. It was horribly misjudged and hugely embarrassing, so I naturally told everyone who cared to lend an ear how wonderful I thought it was.

That Saturday morning, I awoke to hear my parents discussing something in hushed tones. When I entered the room they fell silent. Then, very cautiously, my Mum started to ask me about 'that duck film'. I sensed that something was horribly amiss, and my eyes fell onto the copy of the Daily Mail that lay on my Mum's bedside table. Apparently, a schoolteacher had taken a class of 6 year-olds to see Howard, and had marched them all out at 'bedroom scene'. She had then written to her favourite shitrag vocalising her disgust, and the Mail had responded by detailing various events from HTD with all traces of humour or context carefully removed. So my parents now thought that the film that I had been championing all week was, not to put too fine a point on it, a duck-fucking movie. No matter how much I protested that it 'wasn't like that', the mud stuck.

That time, as a 12-year old, I crumbled. I took back my support for the movie and felt an odd shame every time the title was mentioned. The Mail took something I'd loved and turned it into a source of embarrassment, something that made me feel awkward and sad. For years, I persuaded myself that Howard The Duck didn't exist; if it didn't exist, I had nothing to be embarrassed about.

Weird the way these experiences shape a man. The whole Howard The Duck incident taught me a lot of things. It taught me that context is all-important. It taught me that just because it's okay for Lea Thompson to want to fuck her son in Back To The Future, that apparently doesn't mean it's okay for her to want to fuck a duck in Howard The Duck (Seriously, what was her agent thinking? Fear of typecasting?). But most of all, it taught me that the Daily Mail has a special mirror of lies which can turn whatever it reflects into something foul and ugly.

There, i made it through the whole blog without mentioning the whole 'they supported the nazis' thing.

Dammit.

Ad in next month's Total Film..

2009-10-10T17:15:00.002+01:00

KillerKiller: A look back at filming

2009-08-19T23:44:00.000+01:00

Bad Journalism

2009-07-31T11:07:00.002+01:00

Y'know sometimes how a story or a situation can just sit in the back of your mind all week? Well, it's been one of those weeks. In this case, the thing that's been pinging around my cranium for the last few days has been this article from the Guardian.

It's the worst piece of journalism I've seen in a while, and whilst two of those comics who have been misrepresented have been afforded a right-of-reply (Richard Herring's can be read here and Brendon Burns' can be read here) this is still too little too late in my book.

I've long been troubled by the idea of how the press can deliberately misrepresent a person, and to take an avowedly and outspokenly anti-racist such as Herring and use out of context quotes to portray him as the opposite is fundamentally depressing but nothing new.

Here's a fun game to play. Take a look around your house, and see what items could be misrepresented in some way by the tabloids were you ever to stand accused of a crime. Granted, my own house is full of a great deal of amassed paraphernalia from years of shooting straight-to-DVD splatter movies, so I have a head start. I've got an awful lot of bloodstained wedding dresses, gimp masks, surgical tools, cheerleader outfits and chainsaws sitting in my loft, which would pretty much mean that the tabloids would hang me without trial if they ever found the need to. But what about beyond that? Ok, let's have a rummage through a typical loft.

What do we have here?

"Films feature full-frontal footage of naked children, and real-life death and mutilation"

That'd be Superman: The Movie, Good Morning Vietnam and JFK..

"Publications featuring underage sexualised nudity"

That'd be back-issues of the tabloid newspapers themselves (!) from a few years ago before they raised the minimum age for Page 3 from 16 to 18.

"Audio recordings detailing mutilation, rape and murder"

That'd be the Eminem albums.

"Books detailing black magic rituals"

Harry Potter stand up and take a bow.

It sounds like I'm exaggerating for comic effect here, but I'm really not. The cumalative effect of listing a whole bunch of stuff completely out of context is a very powerful thing. If I'd never heard of Richard Herring prior to that article on Monday I would, frankly, have assumed that he was at best an idiot and at worst a fascist. The fact that he's actually one of the best stand-ups in the country and has strongly held and frequently articulated anti-racist views makes the article both incredibly irritating and also rather dangerous.

I still can't work out Brian Logan's motives, and in a way I'm past caring. If it was an article in the Daily Mail I'd be able to shrug it off easier (frankly, if you read that piece of shit and expect it to be anything other than incoherent lies then you deserve everything you get), but The Guardian turns up on my mat most mornings, and I'd credited them with a little more. Not a lot, just a little.

As Beck once so beautifully put it..

"Don't believe everything that you read,
You get.."

(Coughs.. Squints at lyrics sheet)

"..a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve"

The Devil's Music Release

2009-07-24T16:32:00.002+01:00

We're delighted to announce that The Devil's Music has signed with the excellent Lono Entertainment for US DVD release. Check out Lono's homepage at http://lonoentertainment.com/ and, while you're over there, order yourself a copy of James Eaves' fantastic movie Bane which Lono are also distributing.

We're hoping that the DVD will hit in time for Halloween, so I'd best stop typing this blog and get back to preparing our delivery list.

Hopefully we'll be making an announcement regarding a rather unconventional UK release in the next few weeks.

Colin and the BDT rough assembly

2009-06-03T10:11:00.003+01:00

It's been a pretty amazing few weeks for our buddy Marc Price, who headed out to Cannes to promote his fantastic £45 epic Colin and ended up everywhere from CNN to The Sun. He was also all over TV that weekend. It's a fantastic example of what can happen in this crazy world of tiny budgets and big ideas..
Back at Jinx, we had the pleasure of sitting and watching the rough assembly of Bordello Death Tales last week. It was a cool experience and a really unusual one; it's not often that a filmmaker gets to sit down and watch a movie that he's directed a third of, yet hasn't seen the rest. I love the flick to bits. It's got a real energy to it, and hopefully delivers more or less everything genre fans are looking for. I can't wait to see it with a festival audience.

Hellbride Release Hits..

2009-05-12T09:59:00.003+01:00

..and it's great. The DVD came through my door last week, and Midnight have done a terrific job on it. The movie has been remastered from the HD source and looks brighter and cleaner than any of the screeners. The extras are all good fun, including a commentary with myself and my esteemed DoP Al Ronald. It also hasn't been region locked, so it'll play in more or less any player that you put it into. This one's a must-buy, kids, so point your browser to;

THIS AMAZON LINK RIGHT HERE!!

..and pick up a copy now!

Elsewhere on the web, there's a new interview with me over at;

I LIKE HORROR MOVIES INTERVIEW

which is the first one I've done in a little while. Any other horror sites or blogs wanting to run interviews in support of Hellbride, get in touch and I'll be happy to help.

I've been trying to sort of the remastering of KillerKiller for a potential BluRay release.. It'll hopefully happen, but there just aren't enough hours in the day at the moment..

Release Strategies

2009-04-29T11:14:00.002+01:00

As I've blogged about previously, the industry is in a state of flux and release strategies are changing all the time. New business models are cropping up all over the place; I humbly direct your attention through to Indie Movies Online who are offering free, streamed flicks (including Jake West's wonderfully splattery Evil Aliens) whenever you want them. Other folks have been grabbing the digital bull by the horns, and offering flicks in varied digital formats as well as burn-on-demand DVD.. (invest a few quid in Rob Pratten's MindFlesh or Al Ronald's Jesus vs the Messiah to check out cutting edge indie distribution).

Soooo.. Where does that leave us?

Well, Hellbride's going the traditional route to DVD but will also be avaailable for download within the US at least.. (URL to follow next update). We've been looking at the possibilities of initially launching The Devil's Music in a download format, but.. but..

To be honest, it's kind of scary. There's a comfort zone with DVD. It's an established format and we kind of know what to expect from it. The idea of taking the leap of a download/burn-on-demand release for a movie like TDM is slightly daunting; it's a great flick and we don't want to compromise the release in any way. We won't need to make a decision for another few months regardless; we want to give the Hellbride release room to breathe before unleashing TDM on a home format. But the decision will have to be made. And how long are tangible formats actually going to stick around for?

Hellbride Artwork

2009-03-10T18:56:00.003Z

As the release date for Hellbride draws closer (May 5th, or May 12th depending on where you read it. I have no inside information either way), I thought you might dig a look at the artwork..

Don't forget you can preorder over at Amazon by following this funky link right here.

Hellbride BTS

2009-01-16T18:49:00.000Z

He shoots, he scores..

2009-01-15T22:00:00.002Z

The 'he' in question being the mighty Phil Sheldon, who has worked on the scores of all my movies since KillerKiller. This evening, I sat down with Phil and listened to his work thus far on Vice Day, (which, for those who haven't been paying attention, is my chapter of the forthcoming Bordello Death Tales).

It's a weird, dark art; the ability to accentuate, compliment and bring to life the images onscreen with sound palettes and music. Many times, I've gone on about how much I like scores that are a little counter-intuitive (the aforementioned KK score being my favourite example; instead of going for doom-laden bass, Phil opted for sparse acoustic guitar and completely changed the feel of the movie in a way that I absolutely loved). For Vice Day, Phil's opted for stabs of accentuation and some recurring motifs for the two main characters, along with the occasional wig-out for when onscreen action demands it. Watching the segment through with his rough work was a joy.. It brought a couple of moments that had felt a bit flat vividly back to life, and has filled me with a fire to raise my game on the final edit to wring every ounce of tension, sexiness and horror out of the final segment that I possibly can.

Music and sound is so vital. It's an area that I've been guilty of neglecting at times during shoots, leaving sound crew to work with twitchy equipment and insufficient set-up times, or simply hoping for the best under impossible conditions, (the KK shoot, with wildly varying dialogue volumes from different directions in an impossibly echoey environment, must have left our long-suffering sound man Magic weeping into his cans). Tonight was a vivid reminder as to how the audio is every bit as vital as the onscreen images, and I'm determined never to let the area go neglected again.

Can't wait to hear Phil's final version, and I'm itching to get back to the edit suite with a renewed enthusiasm for the project as a whole.

A great evening, all told.

Running up to Christmas..

2008-12-18T10:20:00.003Z

Having a fun last couple of weeks before Christmas, mixing festive preparations with post-production on BDT. I delivered the mid-cut of my story over to our composer Phil last week, which is always an exciting turning-point in post. I love seeing what he comes up with; sometimes he ends up heading in a fairly counter-intuitive direction. Innumerable lesser talents would have scored KillerKiller with doomy chords, but Phil opted for a fragile acoustic melody which utterly altered the vibe of the flick for the better. We've chatted a little about possible directions for the BDT chapter, but now it's really a case of waiting to see what he comes up with whilst I sit and tweak shots here and there and gently edge the mid cut towards being a fine cut.
I think the other guys are at around the same point as me with their own respective post-production schedules. Can't wait to see the three fine cuts assembled as a movie sometime early in 2009. Be weird sitting down to watch a flick that I've only been a third responsible for.
Had another great review for The Devil's Music over at HorrorNews.Net (click 'reviews' and we're in there).
Fairly well prepped for Christmas, I reckon. We've got a good number of family heading over this year, and we've been trying to work out how to actually fit everybody in. Festive vibes definitely kicking in. And on that note, I'll take the opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas. Although knowing me that'll probably mean that I'll end up doing another blog entry this week and then have to do it all over again.

Peace n love,
Pat

Photos and Chainsaws

2008-11-20T16:17:00.005Z

What you are looking at is the official image of the three directors from Bordello Death Tales. Handsome bunch, aren't we? (Left to Right: Al Ronald, myself, Jim Eaves). Weird to have 'official' photos, which seem to end up getting used over and over again for ages.

The black & white photo that's probably at the top of this blog, for example, (although may not be if you're reading a reskinned version within another site) is bloody ancient. It was actually a publicity photo from back when I was doing stand-up rather than directing horror movies. I was thinking of getting a new one but, frankly, who the hell do I think I am? I haven't stuck a photo onto my IMDB page either, and can't quite work out whether I should or not. On the 'not' side.. I'm a writer/director, so why the fuck should anybody actually care what I look like? On the 'should' side, most of the directors that I like best have carefully cultivated a public image, complete with wardrobe gimmics, and so I sort of feel like I can get away with it. Plus, let's be honest, I'm an attention junkie. If I wasn't an attention junkie I'd have never got involved in movies, let alone my prior stint in stand-up.

One of the reasons I've been thinking about photos.. The chainsaw from TrashHouse finally made its way back home to the Jinx office the other week. And it's almost impossible to resist the urge to pose with it. It's a hulking great thing, damn heavy and really looks like it means business. And I keep thinking, hey, maybe I can find an excuse to pose for a publicity photo with that sucker. I know it's pathetic and sad. But I make horror movies, for God's sake, so of course I want to pose with chainsaws. Maybe a chainsaw in one hand and a camera in the other. In an urban wasteland. Like I'm in Mad Max.

Please note; I think I'm safely into the realms of self-parody now. But when I look at the chainsaw I'm not too sure. The other odd thing, of course, is that I'm terrified of it. As an object. Even though it doesn't work any more, there's a part of me that feels like it's going to splutter into very real and dangerous life at any minute (hence the amusing 'trivia' that someone added to my aforementioned IMDB page) and start ripping up everything in the house. I'm not an outdoorsy kind of guy, and my only frame of reference for chainsaws is from my own and other people's horror movies. I don't associate them with gardening. I associate them with unpleasantness, so much so that it actually feels oddly transgressive to have one in the house.

Oh, and before I sign off, I was rather pleased last week to notice this blog quoted extensively over on The Melon-Farmers anti-censorship site. I've read that site for years, and is was strange to be reading it and suddenly realising that I was reading my own ramblings.

Rock on,
Pat

The industry

2008-11-13T10:24:00.003Z

Hmm.. How do I dance around this subject? Is this something I even want to address? At the end of the day, what is the purpose of this blog? Am I basically just here to plug stuff, and say that everything's great? Because sometimes it ain't that great.

Because, as far as independents are concerned, the industry is broken.

A quick look around the shelves of my local Blockbuster (which, as a chain, has its own problems), reveals that very nearly all the straight-to-DVD horror on their shelves is put out by Sony or Lionsgate (oh, those tiny independents). Two years ago, when TrashHouse hit those shelves, there were at least a dozen distribution companies regularly putting out indie horror and getting decent distribution for it. Nowadays, they all seem to have either gone out of business or, at very best, gone into a kind of suspended animation whilst hoping to weather the storm. Companies are folding left and right; some of them, like Tartan, make headlines. Countless others have just quietly stopped putting out product and expired.

There will be a new system. It's not all doom and gloom. But the new major distribution system, which I presume will be some kind of complete video-on-demand package which will enable folks to watch any movie from any period straight onto their telly for either a monthly subscription or a per-movie charge, isn't here yet. It might be years away, and God knows whether it'll be indie-friendly or a totally closed loop.

So we're in a kind of limbo at the moment. The day a movie hits the shelves in a single territory it also hits the torrents worldwide, which can be fatal for an indie with no simultaneous worldwide release. There seems to be no way of making money on smaller movies. Obviously, the BBFC have done their very best to turn the knife by tightening their restrictions on things like commentaries, (which now have to be rated as a whole new work, thus adding vast amounts of money to the BBFC costs) and Behind The Scenes materials. Thus when an indie flick does manage to get out onto DVD in the current climate, it can't even afford to have the full extras on the UK disc which might actually persuade people to buy it. And without economies of scale working in it's favour, it's gonna end up costing the consumer twice as much as a 2-disc set of a blockbuster. For a vanilla disc. And the consumer, understandably, will vote with their wallet.

I've seen awesome movies that would have been snapped up two years ago fail to find even basic distribution. There are, of course, other options to be explored. There's a terrific blog over at Zen Films about their decision to self-distribute the movie MINDFLESH which is a really interesting read.. Tragically, though, the BBFC requirements as they currently stand would make a UK version of the Amazon Unbox scheme mentioned in the article completely non-viable. Thus driving yet more of our independent film business out of the country.

The whole thing's a total bummer for those who make and those who enjoy watching independent cinema.

Dammit, I've depressed myself.

Back to endlessly plugging my stuff next time, I promise.

Rock on,
Pat

Good Morning America

2008-11-05T13:29:00.003Z

And thankyou.

Not one for going wildly off topic on this blog, but watching the US election last night was a pretty amazing experience. Pip & I finally turned in at about 7am, after a bottle of bubbly and a couple of cigars. Here's to a bright and fantastic future.

Oh, and just to keep this post on topic, there's a new interview with me over on indieflicks.co.uk..

More Bordello..

2008-10-23T11:04:00.003+01:00

More coverage over at Fangoria (where their new site seems to sometimes glitch in IE for some reason; try Firefox if you have problems) where they also have some exclusive stills, including the first glimpse of Al's Stitchgirl chapter, which isn't actually seen in the teaser trailer..

Bordello Death Tales

2008-10-21T09:44:00.003+01:00

So, you may have heard that BDT is Bordello Death Tales.

The project went public over the weekend, with a teaser trailer, teaser poster and everything. You can check them over at our good friends at HorrorTalk. It's a really exciting project and it's great to see the way that it's coming together; three very different stories all kind of bound up together as one movie. I think Jim, Al and I have come up with something really interesting, and I can't wait to see the film all together.

In other news..

The Devil's Music won Best Independent Feature at the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester over the weekend. We're chuffed to bits.. Our first UK screening and we end up with a great award like that. Thanks to everyone involved!

Hellbride signs

2008-10-15T17:59:00.002+01:00

Hellbride has signed with those lovely folks over at Maxim Media/Brain Damage Films and should be hitting the US DVD shelves at the beginning of 2009, unless I miss my guess.

I've been insanely busy all week sorting out both the HB deal (completing a delivery list is always fun) and also dealing with post-production on the secret project, which I'm going to call BDT but can't quite tell you why yet. BDT was shooting last week, and is now wrapped apart from a couple of cutaways. I'm very excited about it; it's a very different project than I'm used to, but horror fans should certainly find it something to get excited about. It also gave me the chance to work with a few wonderful old friends again..

More soon. Sssshhhhh.

Secret projects again..

2008-09-11T11:05:00.003+01:00

See, I'm spending a fair bit of my time at the moment working on a secret project. Again. Last time around, this was The Devil's Music. This time around, it's not. It's.. Ah, no, can't tell you yet. But soon. Very soon.

We had a Jinx Gathering last week, when 40-odd folks from Jinx's ten year history (that's not ten years of moviemaking, but ten years of doing stuff with the brand identity of 'Jinx'. Years before TrashHouse, I was above a pub in Essex compereing the Jinx Comedy Club). It was bloody brilliant to see folks we hadn't seen in years and share a pint or two with them, and I hope we get to do it again before long. It's always good to touch base. I set out with the clear objective of alternating pints of lager with pints of shandy, and succeeded except for the 'pints of shandy' bit. Despite that, I managed to avoid getting utterly bladdered (although I realise these things are relative) and thoroughly enjoyed the evening.

On a non-Jinx front, the weekend before the gathering we went to see The Faint playing in a tiny little venue called Cargo. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that The Faint are one of the best live bands I've ever seen, and to encourage everyone to run off and check their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/thefaint and check out new single The Geeks Were Right. That's my plug for the day..

Oh, and we've got a final contract for Hellbride sitting on the office table, which we expect to be signing in the next day or so. I'll keep you posted.

Rock on,
Pat

A review from Kim Newman

2008-08-13T11:28:00.002+01:00

I've been a fan of Kim Newman's writing for a long time.. His book Nightmare Movies was one of the first overviews of the horror genre that I ever purchased, and I read it cover to cover more times than I can imagine.

A couple of years back, Kim Newman reviewed my first movie TrashHouse in this straight-to-DVD column for Empire. It was a brief but positive review, and felt like a real milestone.

Yesterday, we had a lengthy review, from Kim Newman himself, turn up for The Devil's Music. It's a really positive review, and scheduled to run in Empire as soon as we've got a UK release date. I obviously can't reproduce the whole review here, but he's kindly allowed us to run a quote from it over on the main site's page for The Devil's Music. It's over here.

Argentina...

2008-08-05T12:35:00.002+01:00

Found out that KillerKiller was released in Argentina last month too. Had no idea whatsoever. The title has been changed to the rather funky if slightly unoriginal...

Can't work out how to use the Argentinian order sites yet (they don't seem to have an Amazon) so haven't successfully ordered it to add to my 'international copies of my movies' collection yet. Anyone feels like pointing me in the right direction I'd be extremely grateful.

I've also been working on a project that hasn't been announced properly, so I'm never sure how much I'm meant to say about it. I'm sure I'll just blurt it out myself before too long; I've never been too good with secrets. Except The Devil's Music, which I was very proud of myself for how long I kept it to myself.

Oh, and there are apparently more midnight screenings of KillerKiller in certain UCI cinemas in Germany this coming weekend, so keep an eye out if you're in the country.

I'm sure I'll get round to doing a proper detailed blog again soon. But I'm sure you love these little updates in the meantime!

German Cinema Release

2008-08-04T10:05:00.002+01:00

KillerKiller somewhat unexpectedly hit German cinemas for midnight showing across the country at selected UCI theatres last weekend, which we were delighted about.

Oh, and the second part of the Micro Budget guide on Zone Horror is over here.

Lost Tales of Erika Spawn part 3

2008-07-19T00:30:00.000+01:00

Lost Tales of Erika Spawn part 2

2008-07-08T16:44:00.000+01:00

Lost Tales of Erika Spawn

2008-07-03T20:22:00.001+01:00

Too Far Back..

2008-07-02T11:46:00.002+01:00

Can't really regale you with many more tales from Cannes after all, since it's all a bit of a jumble without my notes to go from. Some of the memories are very pleasant (meeting up for the first time in years with our very own Lucy Sweet, Amber Moelter), some slightly less so (slogging around the Marche du Film for the umpteenth time) but I'm buggered if I can get them into any sort of coherent order so I'd probably best abandon the effort. It was a hell of an experience, though, and I'm sure I'll end up back there before too long.

Since returning, I've been hammering away on various projects. Some personal ones (my brother Colin got married the other week, and I cut them together a wedding video) some freelance ones (filming stand-ups and music videos.. Drop me a line if you're interested in my services for this sort of thing) and some company ones (sorting through our various distribution options for Hellbride and The Devil's Music.. There are certainly decisions to be made in the next couple of weeks). Also went to Glastonbury last weekend, which is kind of traditional for me (I think that was my 13th one).

I'm in the office all alone this week, since Pip's out on a shoot at Elstree. Well, I say alone. There are still the cats, who pop in and bother me whenever I'm doing something important that really doesn't benefit from loud mewing. Phone interview? George decides that it's time for a spot of loud mewing. Contract stuff? Buffy decides to howl like she's had vital parts of her reproductive system removed. Which, of course, she has. But that was ages ago, and she can't still be upset about it.

Oh, and the Zone Horror website are running my four-part guide to making micro-budget movies. The first chunk is over here.

Cannes and back again..

2008-06-03T17:20:00.002+01:00

Hi folks; sorry for the delay in posting about our Cannes adventures. I'm sure you've all been burning up with anticipation.

We drove to Cannes rather than flying; a jaunt across on the ferry, then a straight drive down to Lyon accompanied by various George Carlin albums. We crashed out in Lyon overnight, and then made the last leg of the journey into Cannes to arrive on Saturday 17th. Soon after arriving at our campsite (yes, we stayed at a campsite. Because we are indie filmmakers and thus poor. We were not the only folks emerging from tents in tuxedos, I can tell you..), we got a text from our friends Jim & Laura (who have just completed an absolutely cracking flick called BANE, which I demand that you check out as soon as you get the opportunity), suggesting that we meet them over by the accreditation booth. After duly picking up our passes we headed off to meet them; we stopped for some grub and a few beers and then headed off towards a beach party thrown in association with South African filmmakers. It was a lovely party that had obviously been carefully planned, but the torrential rain that evening kind of ruined the beach vibe a bit. I got cheerfully smashed on the free booze and chatted to filmmakers from all around the globe. We somehow made it back to the campsite at around 2am, (meeting a very chatty German editor en route, who helped us get the right bus stop!)

On Sunday, we met up with a UK screenwriter called Neth Knowles and went for a recce around the Marche as the bullshit levels in the air at the UK pavilion were hurting our ears. Made the decision to spend the day getting a feel for the place rather than approaching distribs/sales agents. At least sleeping in a tent had minimised my hangover.. We wandered into a buyers' screening of Reeker 2, (despite not actually being buyers), and I can happily report that its far, far better than the original. In the evening, we attended a little function at the Canadian Pavilion before heading out to meet the guys who made The Zombie Diaries, who were out drinking with our old buddy James Fisher from Hellbride. We all ended up at the Petit Majestic (merely a bar, but the main hangout for an awful lot of UK industry folks) where we met the team behind forthcoming Britflick Hotel Caledonia, who were extremely nice guys to chat to. The film sounds like it's going to be storming, too.

Monday rolled around, and it became apparent that it was time to hit the Marche proper. We'd got a list of companies that we were hoping to approach, and we made our way around all three floors of stands selling product from all over the world. The key word, of course, being selling.. Not all of them had the slightest interest in acquiring new stuff. We got some good reactions regardless; mainly from companies who were extremely tired of people coming up and pitching ideas or presales, and were relieved to see a finished film for once. I'll keep the companies that we had the most productive meetings with to myself, if you don't mind; never a good idea to discuss 'might happen' deals in public. There were certainly a couple of companies that impressed us a lot, though, and I hope we get the chance to deal with them in the future.

Cleverly, my notes regarding exactly what we did on a day-to-day basis run out at that point. I'll see if I can break down the rest and fill you in with the rest of our adventures on my next post!

KillerKiller International Releases

2008-05-09T10:05:00.006+01:00

Another new interview up at Cinescare, which should hopefully satisy your need to hear me go on about The Devil's Music for a while.

Been checking out the details of some of the international releases for KillerKiller. The Russian version is already out. The title has been translated to (roughly) Prison of those Doomed, and the slightly insane cover art doesn't have an awful lot to do with the movie but I kind of dig it regardless..

I'm dying to hear the Russian dub, I truly am. My copy should be turning up in the next few days, so I'll keep you posted. The German release, however, has gone for the slightly more traditional approach..

I've no idea how the DVDs will shape up otherwise (whether either of them are the widescreen version rather than the 4:3 crop, whether either of them have any good extras), but I shall keep you posted nonetheless.

As far as pre-production goes, I'm officially juggling three projects (BrainBath, House on the Witchpit and Strippers vs Werewolves). That should be enough to keep me occupied but isn't, however, the whole story.. There's another project that I can't really discuss yet because other directors are involved and its not my place to blurt things out before official announcements. And there's also the fact that I keep getting these crazy ideas for a Hellbride 2 which I can't seem to shift. Considering that Hellbride hasn't actually been released yet other than festival screenings, I should probably wait until the DVD is actually out before making any decisions about sequels.

I love sequels. Just because I haven't shot one so far does not mean that I might not do so in the future...

Reviews and brochures

2008-04-28T11:27:00.002+01:00

A big box of our Cannes brochures turned up from the printers last week. We're trying to get a Flash version online, but we're having a few technical hitches. Hopefully I'll be able to give you a link next entry.
We've been getting lots of great coverage and reviews... Check out the coverage at;
Cinescare Review
SexGoreMutants Review
SexGoreMutants Interview
Horrorview Review
Horror Asylum Review
Fatally Yours Review
Best Horror Movies Review
The MJ Simpson Review that I already posted
I've heard tell that there should be reviews going up fairly shortly on both Fangoria.com and Horrortalk.com as well. I should perhaps mention that some of the above reviews are a bit spoilerish, so if you want to check out the flick 'clean' you might want to click with care...

Getting ready for Cannes

2008-03-26T10:42:00.002Z

We've never been to the Cannes Festival before. We've had folks out there representing our movies, sure, but during the actual festival I've always been hunched over an edit suite or a word-processing package in our office.
This year, however, we're finally going. Our accreditation came through the other week and we've got our accomodation sorted, so all that remains is an endless list of things not to forget. We've been sorting out our publicity materials first and foremost, as I imagine we're in a fairly unique position as far as small UK companies go in terms of quantity of projects (four complete, three in development or preproduction) so we need to make sure that we're representing ourselves in the best way. We've been putting together a brochure that has a similar layout to the main Jinx Media website, but we'll need to get it to the printers fairly soon which seems a shame whilst we've still got great quotes for The Devil's Music coming in all the time.
It's a really weird time at Jinx Media; like whatever happens next is going to be different somehow. Bigger, quite possibly, but certainly different from what's gone before... Hey, without change life would get pretty boring.

First Review

2008-02-15T00:40:00.003Z

Always incredibly, incredibly tense reading the first review...

On MJ Simpson's website

And exhale ;)

The Devil's Music Cast & Crew Screening

2008-01-28T09:49:00.000Z

Last Friday we had the cast and crew screening for The Devil's Music at the BFI in Stephen St, central London.

Cast & Crew screenings are always slightly odd beasts. It's a room full of people who are a bit nervous. For most of the cast and crew, they're nervous to see how something that they invested loads of time and energy into, ages ago, has turned out. For them, it's like spending two months mixing the ingredients for a cake, then having to spend 8 months waiting for it to cook without being able to peek into the oven to see how its doing. For those involved in post-production, however, it's a different matter.

Take me, for example. Whereas other folk in the audience might have entirely forgotten about certain scenes, be unaware of other bits that were added as pick-ups and so on, I'm painfully aware of everything. And it's all so familiar, from months of editing and polishing, that I've completely lost perspective on the whole damn thing. I can't even hear the dialogue being spoken, let alone process it; all I hear is background noises, edit glitches and so on.

So there's all different kinds of nervous in the room. But its good nervous. Happy nervous. And Friday rocked the house in all kinds of ways. To watch the movie in a nice full screening room is exactly what I needed right now; this flick delivers the goods and our hard work has paid off handsomely.

The aftershow party is always a blur, and it's always tough to try and get to speak to and thank everyone. I woke up the next morning with a bit of a sore throat (3 cigars) and a bit of a sore head (an indeterminate amount of beers), trying to work out whether I'd managed to thank everyone. I hadn't, so if anyone I didn't manage to get to during those couple of hours is reading this, thankyou so much for making this flick happen.

Now to work out what happens next...

Locking/Not Locking

2007-12-13T12:46:00.000Z

The Devil's Music is close to locking. We're still missing some score elements and sound mixing, but the movie itself is perilously close to completion. So close, in fact, that a 'nearly done' copy left the office yesterday, heading out so as to sneak in under a festival deadline. Which festival, however, is something that I shall keep close to my chest; if they don't want us, I'm not going to give them free publicity!

Knowing when to stop tinkering on a movie is a real art. There are a couple of minor things I did to KillerKiller in the week before delivery that I really wish I could go back and undo; there comes a point where you lose perspective as an editor. You've seen the film so many times that you start to see any and all alterations as being positive just because they provide something new to look at. And I'm damn sure that I don't want that to happen with The Devil's Music.

When it gets to this point in post, I start chomping at the bit to get the movie seen. We've got our usual low-key cast and crew screening scheduled for next month, and I'm looking forward to people's reactions. It's a cracking flick, in my humble opinion.

First Teaser Poster

2007-12-06T17:18:00.000Z

FBOTL Video Blog

2007-11-26T18:15:00.000Z

If I were better organised, I do one of these every day. I'm not, so I don't. Here's one, anyway.

The indie movie life

2007-11-15T12:03:00.001Z

So, we've leaked the trailer for The Devil's Music, and we should be finished in post by around Christmas and hopefully hitting festivals shortly afterwards. I don't want to say a vast amount more about the movie just yet; there will be plenty of time for that later, (although those itching for a bit more Erika might wish to hit http://www.myspace.com/erikaspawnband ).

Heard recently that KillerKiller has been sold to Germany and Russia. Personally, I'm hoping for a dub rather than a sub, because I'd love to hear Richard Collins' already out-there portrayal of Perry dubbed into Russian.

A couple of folks have been asking when Hellbride is likely to hit DVD.. The answer is that we're planning to hang onto the rights until Cannes next year, where we can hopefully sign several different territories at once. So things might take a little longer, but it'll be worth it in the long run! As for TDM's release.. It's not flat-out horror, so we're looking at getting it shown in a few places that we've never approached with more straightforward genre fare. We've shown the mid-cut to a handful of test subjects and its getting big thumbs-ups. Which is always nice.

Secret Project Isn't Secret Anymore..

2007-10-12T15:56:00.000+01:00

Shock release of a teaser trailer!

Welcome to The Devil's Music.