The days go on with regularity until suddenly there is a change. Time to thaw out the Contrast after a winter of disco-tense. Two months off from djing. No journal entries. Barely a twitter.

What have I been up to? Giving my ears a rest. And my twin loves of course. The new album is taking shape, many new tracks on the go. You can hear slices soon when I get back on the djing circuit in March. And I’m on the 5th draft of my film script. M. Night Shyamalan said it wasn’t until the 5th draft of The Sixth Sense that he *SPOILER* realised that Bruce Willis’ character was a ghost *SPOILER END*. I can now understand that. It’s like I’ve only just realised what I’ve been trying to say with it during the last two years of work.

The plan is to balance my time and energy between music and film more than ever before. The duality of man.

End Transmission…

I was gonna say this is the best British horror film since The Descent but making such a nationalistic categorisation is pretty hard these days. The first on screen title tells us this film is funded by the National Lottery but then we hear American accents and see Florida street signs. Edgar Wright had a similar problem in trying to write a list of his favourite British films of recent years, a lot of his first choices turned out to be more American in origin than British. But here at least we have a British writer/director using mainly British money, he’s just telling his tale with an American backdrop (actually, The Descent had that same setup too, ah go figure). Regardless of national distinctions, this is still an unusual and well made horror film. But it poses quite a challenge for the marketing team and critics as the film hinges on some major twists that make it hard to talk about the film without spoiling. I feel the trailer reveals too much for one thing and would not recommend watching it if you feel at all inclined to see this film. If you want a pithy summing up of it, think The Shining meets Primer. On a boat.

Home & A-slay

First we had Guy Pearce of Neighbours making Memento, now Melissa George, formerly of Home & Away, makes Triangle. What is it with Ozzie soap stars and one-word headfuck movies? Here she takes the lead as Jess, a single mom who takes up an offer to go on a sailing trip with five people she barely knows. In the Bermuda triangle. Never wise in a horror film. The boat capsizes in a storm and the survivors seek refuge on a huge ship that mysteriously appears. It’s deserted and Jess and the gang start wandering around the spooky corridors, eventually getting picked off one by one by an unseen assailant. Now so far, so every-third-horror-film-made-in-the-80s. However, the game gets raised here not just by some great camera work and a mostly likeable (or at least unpunchable) cast but by the timewarping, structural gymnastics that kick in. Again, hard to talk about without spoiling the fun of it all but suffice to say, you need to keep your wits about you ala Memento. There’s a bit too much running around dark corridors and screaming for my liking, I think it would have been more interesting to play up the black humour and absurdity inherent in the temporal disfunctions but it still works really well and has a few cool tricks up it’s sleeve. It manages to transcend the genre trappings and come up with something a bit different from what you’ve seen before.

After his debut Creep and then Severance, Triangle represents a quantum leap for writer/director Chris Smith. I liked those earlier films but here he’s really getting to grips with the camera and a directorial vision is starting to emerge. The title sequence and the ending in particular are very well constructed, the framing and cutting pulling together in a way I would have liked to have seen more of during the main part of the film. The whole thing was made for a pretty low budget and he makes it look a lot more expensive, it never feels like a cheapie-quickie horror flick. I’m now very much looking forward to his next movie, a blood soaked medieval adventure apparently.

Ironically, the main issue I have with the film is The Shining connection. There’s just a few too many references to it (yeah, I know, this coming from the guy who made the Racing Green video!). Let’s see – the ship is a virtual stand-in for The Overlook Hotel with art deco interiors and even a ballroom. Shit gets real in Room 237. Melancholic 20s music echoes through the corridors. Numerous shots of mirrors showing characters doubled. A character writes the same phrase over and over on sheets of paper. Messages written in blood seen through a mirror. The first named character in the film is a Jack. And a few more. The problem with all this is that no greater point seems to be made other than they must really like The Shining. When people make allusions to that film, it’s frustrating that they only take from the surface of it and rarely make the kind of wonderfully rich subtext Kubrick did. But thats why he’s Kubrick. Maybe I just pick up on all this because I’m such a Kubrick fanboy (see previous post for evidence) and most people won’t be bothered by it at all. I would still definitely recommend checking this movie out, it’s a nautical mile ahead of the remakes-of-superior-foreign-or-70s-horrors and torture-bore movies of recent years.

TRIANGLE is out on October 16th in the UK.

In a case of life imitating art, this posh shop in London has used the same line as the eerily elitist manager of the Overlook hotel, Stuart Ullman, did when telling Wendy Torrance about past guests of the hotel…

Stuart Ullman: Four presidents, movie stars… 
Wendy Torrance: Royalty? 
Stuart Ullman: All the best people.

Way to go ‘ad’ people – you’ve invoked a demonic, genocidal, patriarchal force in your attempt to hock some threads to wannabe socialites. Well, actually, if the glove fits…

But thankfully it was just a garbage truck adorned with a severed mannequin’s head. This got me thinking, however, about just how scary the Child Catcher was (is!) and how most things that scared me as a kid were the supposedly family-friendly things whilst horror films and the like were enjoyable larks to me. Maybe this is due to the fact that every corner shop or newsagent I went into to buy my 10p mixture and packet of Garbage Pail Kids stickers was guaranteed to have a video rack sporting titles such as Driller Killer, The Corpse Grinders, Microwave Massacre and Pinnochio. Ah, the bliss of the unregulated! Most of the Hollywood studios were scared of home video and so didn’t release their big titles on it (The Shining (da na!) being a notable exception) which meant that the early boom of the VHS market was left to enterprising indy labels who put out whatever they could get their mitts on – usually cheap horrors and kids films. Great combo when you’re six.

Of course, my Dad didn’t let me watch most of the so-called video nasties until I was at least ten but there was plenty of normal stuff I watched as a kid that in retrospect was far more disturbing:

1. The Child Catcher – Has to be top of the list. Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but the Child Catcher was a much scarier villain than anything Bond had to face and in fact looks more like a creation of the Chapman Brothers! In this clip Benny Hill faces a Gestapo like interrogation at the hands of the CC who threatens to turn his teeth into a necklace.

2. Watership Down – Beloved rabbit snuff cartoon. Just watch the trailer which even feels like a straight up horror as it sets you up with a false sense of security and then BAM – Fields of blood. Slow motion shotgun death. Bright Eyes.

3. Safety Education Films – These well meaning but disturbing government produced films were shown in school assemblies. One particularly vivid short was informing you of the dangers of playing by electricity pylons – “Darren, there’s a ball by that pylon. Hey, someone’s had a go at this fence. That’s it, Darren… Darren?.. DARREN!”

4. The Theme Tune to Pebble Mill – I don’t know why but the theme tune to this early 80s daytime chat show would send me running out of the room screaming. I can’t find a clip of it, thank goodness, but heres one of Morrissey on the show maintaining a tight grip on his artistic integrity.

5. Willy Wonkas Acid Boat Trip – Centipede crawls across woman’s face. Chicken gets head cut off. Giant lizard. Gene Wilder has an ‘episode’.

6. Early Disney – As suggested by HayleyEve, Pink Elephants on Parade from Dumbo. I had totally forgot about this part of the film, maybe I blanked it out on purpose! The middle part of this sequence sure is freaky, something about the horror of repetition perhaps. And of course, Pinocchio, which is full of joyously disturbing scenes like this one.

Can anyone think of other unintentionally terrifying gems?

A trick played by many hotels is to make the lobby look as good as possible to lure you in and then once you’re checked in, they hit you with this…

You can’t see it here but there’s actually four rows of industrial lights on the ceiling. Now, I have a fetish for fluorescent strip lighting as much as the next guy but this really felt like some laboratory test room merely simulating living quarters. Like the coffee cups were glued down and the view out the window was just a painting.

It was kinda awesome really. Somehow they managed to make every element of the room completely clash with every other element.

And that’s an adjoining door to another room. Just as I was about to drift off to sleep at around 4am, I heard a roomful of guests arrive next door. I couldn’t help but hear their conversations which thankfully were rather amusing.

Voice 1: So, what do you wanna do? You wanna call some escorts? You want some pussy, man?

Voice 2: Nah, nah, man.

Voice 1: Come on, tell me what you want. You want some pussy in here?

Voice 2: Nah, I’m alright, man. I’ll just have another drink. They’re no good round here, I would only get some escorts if we were in Kazakhstan.

I’ve yet to see the official comparative study on the quality of international escort services but word on the street is Kazakhstan is the shiznit!

Now where's my ticket...

I had a sense of deja-vu and then remembered this shot from The Making of The Shining…