Funny Man – review

A weird, wonderful and quintessentially British treat, says Sloame Ocean

The titular Funny Man

FUNNY MAN (1994)

DIRECTOR: Simon Sprackling

COUNTRY: UK

RUNNING TIME: 90 mins

WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Monty Python, League of Gentlemen

AH, the horror-comedy: so rarely scary, so rarely funny. When done well, we get a film as sublime as AnAmerican Werewolf in London.  When done badly, the scares lack bite and the jokes fall flat.

One rare exception to this rule is Simon Sprackling’s subversive 1994 debut, Funny Man, a uniquely British film that mixes scenes of splatstick gore with an utterly twisted sense of humour.

The film opens with a prologue in which coke-snorting record producer Max Taylor (Benny Young) wins the keys to Callum Chance’s (Christopher Lee) ancestral home in a game of poker. Taylor wastes no time in deciding to move his family into the place. However, shortly after arriving, Taylor’s wife (Ingrid Lacey) informs him that she has no intention of living in the house and, as she’s ‘too rich to be unhappy’, Taylor acquiesces.

He informs her that as soon as his brother Johnny (Matthew Devitt) arrives with their possessions, they can be on their way. Johnny turns out to be a failed guitar hero fated to spend his days lamenting what could have been and operating a removal business.

On his way to the mansion, he picks up four hitchhikers: the Hard Man (Chris Walker), a misogynistic northerner; the Crap Puppeteer (George Morton), whose specialty is a politically correct version of Punch and Judy; the Psychic Commando (Pauline Black), a tarot-card reading Jamaican and finally, Thelma Fudd, (Rhona Cameron) a bird-watching nerd who bears an uncanny resemblance to Velma from Scooby-Doo.

As Taylor’s family kills time waiting for Johnny’s arrival by exploring the house – a wonderfully eerie location strewn with joker and other assorted playing card imagery – they come across a game room. One quick spin of a wheel later and the Funny Man (Tim James), a kind of demonic jester, emerges from the structure of the house itself and begins a murderous rampage that will occupy the remainder of the film.

The sub-genre to which Funny Man bares most resemblance is the slasher: one by one a group of characters is stalked, isolated and killed by a homicidal maniac. But the rules of the slasher typically require that we have at least one character with whom to identify, in most cases the Final Girl of Carol J Clover’s seminal discussion of the genre, Men, Women and Chainsaws. Yet in Funny Man, there are no real hero figures for us to get behind. The only viable option comes in the form of the Psychic Commando and while she comes closest to disrupting the Funny Man’s antics, she ultimately proves no match for him.

As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well

As such, Sprackling offers us no choice but to root for the Funny Man himself. Sure, he’s a violent killer, but he’s a lot more charismatic than Jason Voorhees ever was and he gets the funniest lines here. Fortunately, Tim James is more than up to the job that the role demands of him: his performance is an anarchic thrill. Whether he’s casually strolling the corridors and grounds of the house, hunch-backed and endowed with an over-sized phallus, or dressed in drag performing a most alarming striptease at Club Sexy’s Psychedelic Wig Evening, James is a delight. As the film progresses, the Funny Man dispatches the rest of the cast in a number of remarkably creative ways,  while directly addressing the audience in a manner that makes us complicit in his actions.

Reviews at the time of the film’s original release compared it to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an analogy which makes complete sense: the humour is undoubtedly British and more often than not, surreal. More significantly though, once the Funny Man appears, the film soon settles into something of a sketch-show rhythm. As with any such effort, not everything here works, but when it works, it works well.

Its ambitions are occasionally betrayed by its low budget, the film drags at times and the final 15 minutes are somewhat anti-climactic. Nevertheless, James’ gleefully manic performance more than makes up for these shortcomings and a willing audience will find much to enjoy here;  Funny Man is an irreverent treasure ripe for rediscovery.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – review

In the age when zombies were a new film phenomenon, Sloame Ocean finds a European classic brimful of originality and brutality.

From a time when men were men, and zombies were…well, lots of things

THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE (1974)

DIRECTOR: Jorge Grau

COUNTRY: Spain, Italy

RUNNING TIME: 95mins

WATCH IT IF YOU LIKE: Ceremonia Sangrienta, What Have You Done to Solange?, Lucio Fulci

WE live in a world populated by the undead. Ever since the unholy triumvirate of 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake hit cinemas in the early 2000s, zombies have been everywhere. This proliferation means the zombie template has been carved in stone. Zombies want to eat you. If you’re lucky, they’ll eat all of you. If you’re not so lucky, chances are that their bite will soon have you reanimated as one of them. Oh, and if you want to kill them, shoot them in the head.

Back in 1974, however, the world was a far more innocent, less zombie-ridden place. Night of the Living Dead (NOTLD) had been released only six years previously and its sequel, the original Dawn of the Dead, still lay four years in the future. Critically, things were much looser and there was still room for a film like Jorge Grau’s masterclass in creepy atmospherics, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. The movie borrows the basic notion of the dead returning to consume the flesh of the living, while riffing on that idea in some genuinely original ways.

One aspect that this Spanish/Italian co-production does share with NOTLD is its attitude towards its protagonists. George Romero’s film works in part because his characters are believably flawed and the same is true here. The film begins with George (Ray Lovelock), a London-based dealer in esoteric objets d’art, leaving the big smoke for a weekend in the countryside. While filling up with petrol, his motorcycle is backed into by Edna (Cristina Galbo) who seems to exist in a near-constant state of nervous exhaustion.

Upon learning that his ride is going to be out of commission for the next few days, George virtually kidnaps Edna, demanding that she drive him to the town of Windermere. Edna reluctantly agrees to do so, although George insists that he does the driving. Before long though, Edna is begging George that they attend to her wishes first: she is here to visit her heroin-addicted sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre), and must get there as soon as possible.

When George stops to ask for directions at a local farm, two things happen: he discovers an experimental piece of machinery being tested in a field – the aim of the equipment is to destroy unwanted insects and parasites. Meanwhile, back at the car, Edna is attacked by a man who fits the description of Guthrie, a local ‘loonie’ who drowned a week previously. Could the machine have anything to do with Guthrie’s return from the dead…?

Neither of our two ‘heroes’ is immediately likeable: George is all brash 1970s machismo, while Edna seems like she might pass out at any moment. Eventually George and Edna make it to Katie’s cottage, arriving immediately after her husband, Martin (Fernando Hilbeck), has been dispatched by Guthrie. With this murder, the third central character is introduced, a police inspector played by Arthur Kennedy.

This figure allows Grau to launch a pointed attack on the establishment that Kennedy represents: he is a vicious thug, only too ready to physically assault George when he steps out of line. In many respects, Kennedy’s antagonistic attitude and his refusal to believe that George and Edna are innocent of any wrongdoing poses as much of a threat as the zombies; if a central theme that runs through zombie cinema is the idea of a previous generation returning to devour youthful vitality, arguably Kennedy is on the side of the flesh-eaters here.

Grau transforms scenes of pastoral beauty into something far more sinister

One significant way in which this film is very different from Romero’s original zombie trilogy is the fact that the action takes place across a variety of settings: once Romero’s zombies are up and stumbling, it isn’t long before a siege is underway, whether it takes place in a home, a shopping mall, or an underground bunker.

Here though, the action switches from location to location on a regular basis, with Grau knowing exactly how to extract the maximum from the film’s environments. Much of the praise Grau has received over the years for this film centres on how he shoots the landscapes of northern England, transforming scenes of pastoral beauty into something far more sinister. The photography is accompanied by an excellent score by Giuliano Sorgini, ranging from the funky opening track, John Dalton Street, to the throbbing synths that add texture to many of the scenes.

However, it wasn’t atmosphere and music that earned this film its place on the Department of Public Prosecution’s list of so-called video nasties back in the early 80s. Be warned, there are several moments of graphic violence here which compete with anything in the works of either Romero or Fulci. And of course, no European horror film from this era would be complete without questionable dubbing choices and a plot which is rarely logical.

If you’ve got a taste for this kind of film already, then you’re probably aware that for the true genre-phile such concerns are negligible. And for the uninitiated looking for some undead action from a time before the omnipresence of World War Z and The Walking Dead, some advice: just sit back and surrender yourself to the atmosphere of this underrated zombie masterpiece.

The Signal – review

In a genre littered with ponderous remakes and cliches, Christopher Devlin is pleased to find that horror can still find innovative ways to scare.

Mya in The Signal

THE SIGNAL (2007)

DIRECTORS: David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry, Dan Bush

COUNTRY: USA

RUNNING TIME: 103 mins

WATCH IT IF YOU LIKE: 28 Days Later, Sightseers, The House of the Devil

IT can be hard going for lovers of the horror genre. So often they are trapped between the straitened margins of Hollywood horror – as pumped out by Lionsgate, et al – and the scrappy, often unwatchably amateurish indie scene, which can be a slog to pan through and sift out the rare gems.

As such, when I watched The Signal on the Horror Channel last year, it was far more in hope than expectation. I’ve become wary of films shown there that were made in the last few years, especially ones with a cast of unknowns and no pre-approved “buzz”, having sat through more unmitigated shambles over the years than I care to count.

The film itself seemed to toy with these low expectations. It begins as a cheap-looking thriller in which a shirt-and-tie psycho hunted young women through a forest, the film’s name smashing into the scene on a red title card as he brandishes a hammer.

But then the image began to skip, and distort, and eventually was washed out in a storm of colourful, kaleidoscopic static. It then abruptly cut to a young couple in a messy bedroom being awoken by this image on their TV.

Immediately, the feel was different. The camera work was loose and intuitive, the acting believable, the pace unhurried. It was bracing to see such confidence and, frankly, competence, and having been wrongfooted, I was hooked.

The couple have to part, with the girl, Mya (Anessa Ramsey), forced to return to her husband, despite the protestations of Ben (Justin Welborn) and his talk of the life they could lead if they escape their obligations – and the ominously named city of Terminus – to start afresh. That this one scene constitutes the on-screen majority of a love story which forms the emotional core of the film, and does so successfully, is testament to the economy of the writers and directors.

This doesn’t mean that there is impatience to rush headlong from one set piece to the next. The Signal is as much about ideas and atmosphere as it is about bloodletting and shocks (though these arrive in quantity before too long). The economy means that there is a trust placed in the audience to absorb the themes and emotions, without resorting to reams of exposition and wasted running time.

You may have seen above that I pluralised writers and directors. That’s because this film has a wicked trick to play. That initial cut from creaky backwoods slasher to subtle scene of domesticity is employed to set the audience up for a game of exquisite corpse, a surrealists’ favourite. The three writer-directors helm one third of the film each, picking up strands the previous filmmaker has left for them and applying differing approaches to the same single narrative.

The Signal pinballs from tense to funny to mournful, yet the divergent approaches are not so jarring as to derail the movie

The first story concerns the TV static that woke up the couple. This spills out of every radio and telephone, broadcasting a signal which drives ordinary people to murder. As Mya makes her way back to her overbearing husband Lewis (A.J. Bowen), the eerie tension and rantings of her neighbours quickly and shockingly escalates into a corpse strewn hallway patrolled by a hulking figure slashing throats with hedge trimmers. This first act, by David Bruckner (V/H/S), is a tense, violent survival thriller, teasing out the eeriness and confusion of navigating a society without rules and totally devoid of trust. Sure, it’s a familiar subject, especially in the wake of 28 Days Later, but it is effective and shocking in execution.

Jacob Gentry’s second section shifts the action abruptly into a blackly comic, violent farce which still brims with menace. It also mines uncomfortable laughs with droll performances and bizarre non-sequiturs that the confused victims of the signal, including the wild-eyed Lewis now gate-crashing a truly bizarre New Year’s Eve party, spout while they are wracked with hallucinations and murderous paranoia. It’s a high-risk act of tonal plate-spinning which Gentry (director of the tacky MTV guilty pleasure My Super Psycho Sweet 16 movie series) pulls off with aplomb. The pace is slowed significantly, and the mood darkened still, for Dan Bush’s final act, reflecting on the carnage and returning us to the central story of Ben and Mya. His approach is more mysterious and more wearied, in contrast with the onslaught which preceded it.

The unusual nature of the The Signal’s creation keeps the audience fully engaged, not allowing it to settle in to a predictable narrative groove. It pinballs from tense to funny to mournful, yet the divergent approaches are not so jarring as to derail the movie as a single viewing experience.

As a film-making exercise which could have easily fallen into indulgence or disjointed shambles, the movie’s success lies in crafting something unique from recognisable elements, and something wholly satisfying from individual, diverse moments of brilliance. This is no small achievement, considering the additional difficulties of working at such a low budget, which it copes with creatively and admirably.

Above all, it provides encouragement that trawling through the morass of seemingly indistinguishable indie-horror titles can still, occasionally, yield something special, and, vitally, that the genre still has surprises to offer.

Christopher Devlin can also be found at http://quilllicker.blogspot.com/