Dr. Sebastiano’s outrageous bag of nasty (1978)

Shifty Italian doctor with talon like fingers stuffs bin bag full of cockroaches, seals the opening and throws it to the ground; claps with child like glee as it convulses and rives across his kitchen floor like a giant cellophane worm.

***


A three hour extravaganza of unforgettable imagery, incredible menace and a great central performance from the film’s soul performer: Mr Poperdolpolis.

Circumlocution (2001)

Kensuke’s got a problem –a big one.
Graduated top of his class, with honours; women wanting to sleep with him, men wanting to watch women sleep with him.
Kensuke had everything –until it was all taken away by the jealous magical elf living in the soft, damp pocket of flesh encompassing his arm pit.
‘With every word you utter,’ it warned, blood red lips curling into a devilish smirk. ‘-the fouler you will grow…’
Now - hideously mutated into a lumpy green, puss ebbing, sore plastered monster – it’s up to Kensuke to negotiate the release of a group of Swedish hostages from an enraged businessman with a vibrating chicken knife and nothing left to lose.
The catch?
Kensuke can only express himself through a single word, a word chosen by the jealous elf for the repulsion and rejection it will rain upon the discourser: “Anus.”

***


Mainly known for holding the Guinness world record for most uses of the word “anus” in a motion picture (598 times)
The young actor cast to play Kensuke went through a grueling ordeal in order to transform himself into the creature for the movie, over half our budget went towards dental and cosmetic surgery – at his request – in order to attain an as of then unheard of level of authenticity. Unfortunately due to budgetary constraints, the necessary funds were not available to reverse the work he underwent - last I heard the poor fellow grew so stigmatised by his appearance that he shunned society and now chooses to live in an abandoned section of the sprawling New York subway where he has been linked to the cannibalisation of three homeless people –the police are too afraid to investigate.
Redemption, that’s what Circumlocution was all about in the end, redemption.

Hoppers in the Field (1963)

France. Oh it seems like a nice place: cheese, wine, châteaux and le beuf a la cart.

Oh it all seems very nice.

But have you been there?

Has anybody?

Has anybody ever actually been there?

Frank’s your average kind of guy: an ex-marine, looking for a holiday, a chance to blow off some steam and forget the war.

But little does Frank know that as the sole passenger of that international flight, as he leaves that plane, as he steps foot on that cold, damp, refuse spattered soil…

The war has only just begun.

‘Hoppers in the field’ depicted a nation of Lovecraftian creatures, silently toiling away against a backdrop of grey skies and brown fields, their every move dictated by a gigantic hive mind trapped within a hideously swollen body resembling a transparent plastic bag filled with lard - planted miles deep beneath the French capital of Paris.

Frank’s gruelling fight for survival is still, to this day, one of my favourite films, but as with all true art, it has its detractors.

Slammed as racist by the French, lauded as the first true ‘Survival Horror’ by today’s critics, I leave you with this: If it was okay to depict the English as backwards, slavering rapists in the seminal ‘Straw dogs’ by Sam Peckinpah, why not depict the French as a race of semi amphibious creatures toiling away to unearth their ungodly master?

A DOP I once worked with, a true "film Geek" and therefore utterly dispassionate, once told me that slasher films work by tapping into the audience's psycho-sexual fears; fear of sex, intimacy, penetration, they work -he claimed- by holding up a mirror to the auditorium and forcing those watching to question their own insecurities and relationships.
Freudian Rubbish. I laughed in his face.
Slasher flicks work because they provide the audience with the two things they truly crave: lashings of blood, and an erection.

ah, beautiful opportunism from the days before all this "PC" garbage.

Complex mutant hero spiders!

Complex mutant hero spiders: Heroes in an exoskeleton, arachnid power!

Dastardly nuclear power station owner “Filthy Fingers” dumps a barrel of radioactive waste into the insect house of the New York zoo where it comes into contact with four lovable white tale spiders.
The secret of the Goo transforms them into mutants with super strength, and, together with their friend and mentor –a terrified talking fly called Peter, they set about protecting the innocent and fighting crime!

***

Early 90’s, retarded, pizza swilling reptiles named after famous artists fight a man dressed up as spiky toaster named after an office appliance. We really were at that point.
So someone came to me, asked me to pull something from the hat, something to get the kiddies money, the advertising, products and endorsements –I pulled CMHS.

Initial reactions to the concept were great, we were given the go ahead for a pilot, but alas, it was not to be.
Due to budget constraints and the lack of sufficient CGI at the time, we were forced to use claymation as the sole method of animating our arachnid heroes –pictures this; a plasticine torso along with muscular human legs, attached to the very real and riving body of a small white tale spider (its abdomen buried within the plasticine) The results were, to this day, utterly horrifying.
The images captured resembling a soviet period stop frame animation depicting the cruel and agonizing death of some ungodly creature, its spider legs shriveling up, body folding into a little ball, hanging lifelessly above those disgusting swollen pectorals… it still haunts me.
Production was shut down on CMHS after three days due to our animation director (May he rest in peace) being bitten by one of the white tales, which, unbeknownst to me, carries a sort of flesh eating venom.

The Compulsion (1997)

Tagline: Try as you might, you cannot hide from The Compulsion.

People are afraid to leave their houses. There is a curfew in action. The number of attacks is increasing with each day.

FBI agent Cindy Hassles is put in charge of what will transpire to be the most horrifying job of her life: protect the queen of England on her visit to New York.

But it was not to be.

Flying through the air like a string of milky phlegm, our villains gelatinous discharge shoots across her majesties face like a hot onslaught of silly string, left riling, tendrils of glutinous man muck clinging between her royal fingers, the queen asks one thing of Cindy: “Stop that man.”

Now, going rogue and risking her career, Cindy descends into the gritty underbelly of the New York homeless scene in a desperate attempt to stop the near mythical Seagull-Man before he can attack again.

***

I wrote The Compulsion shortly after watching “Silence of the lambs” A fairly decent story, but lacking in the necessary thrills and spills to make it a true classic.

The compulsion is then, a thinly veiled remake, my gift to the masses, a contemporary thriller exploring themes of sexual addiction, mass hysteria and loyalty.

The shooting of the movie was fairly straightforward with the exception of our casting choice for Seagull man, who, in a shocking violation of the elderly lady cast to play the queen, revealed after one take that the prosthetic penis was in fact perfectly real, and that the onslaught of fetid mayonnaise he had splashed across her face was as genuine as it was sticky. He promptly escaped from the set, his long trench coat flapping openly as he vanished out the fire exit, guffawing like a deranged pervert.

He was replaced.

Again, as with my modern masterpiece; the Cowboy and the Quadruped, the censors didn’t take so well to the subject matter. We were unable to secure a theatre release, however The compulsion enjoyed considerable success on the VHS market, where is has been adopted – to my disgust – as a sort of “instructional manual” on the art of surprise sexual humiliation, Again, as with TCATQ we have garnered great success in Japan.