jewbo23

Strange Tales

This film opens with a title card saying 'Award winning anthology of tales.' I want to know what award that was.

The Visitant.

A guy follows his kids voice and is attacked very mildly by some kind of ghoul type thing. This has something of a mood for the beginning of it. There is an absolutely amazing and inventive shot of the ghoul coming after him where it's clearly on something being pulled at speed by a car. It has something of an Evil Dead feel to it. With it's inkling of mood and the ghoul stuff, this wasn't a bad effort at all.

Desire. In a Public Dump.

All in silent, a guy walks about a dump and finds a book. This seems to make a woman in a white dress show up who then just disappears. He is then stabbed with a pitchfork. A picture of a gorilla appears from nowhere on a door, then cut back to the dump with a kid playing with a toy gun, running about who finds the book. The end. This was awful and really lazy. It's something you and a mate could come up with, shoot and edit in about half a day.

A Day in the Life of Snidley Carmichael: A Sadistic Comedy.

Now there's a mouthful of a title. This one is pretty arty. The look of it screams student into avant grade cinema. A guy in a field avoids unseen planes that play over the soundtrack, along with sounds of war. He gets into a shack, the door closes, end. Get out of here with this waste of film and effort. Dreadful.

Twilight Journey

This is another pretentious arty piece. I'm starting to think all of these directors were friends and these are all their student art films. This has a nice shot of a woman with a dog like mask on and there's some really striking animated segments in this. But what it all means? Who knows. The animation actually reminds me a lot of the old games Flashback and Another World. It all looks very nice, but doesn't do much with it.

The Crystal Quest

A dude dressed like he's in an Italian post apocalyptic film ventures down a more sci-fi looking hatch than his attire would assume. He's then on an Indiana Jones style adventure with snakes, a statue that opens it's mouth and a couple of pretty cool creatures. This was quite fun and again is mostly silent. I'm also going to assume none of these friends actually owned a microphone or at least just borrowed one for a day.

The Bus Bench

An old woman puts make up on. Some people sit on a bench. Amum and her daughter feed the ducks. Random footage randomly edited together. The most pretentious of a very pretentious bunch. Again silent.

A couple of the shorts hold a small amount of value, but it's mostly just dull and feels thrown together in half a day with minimal effort. There's a reason this is so obscure.

As this thing started and was clearly going to be an utterly embarrassing mess, I thought about how films like this not only get made, but get some kid of distribution. I made film many years ago that never got fully finished and have been planning to make another for many years. I'm plagued by the idea that I'd never be able to make something worth watching, so why bother. Then I see something like this and think, fuck it, why don't I give it another go. Then the strangest coincidence happened. A guy pops up in this film, who was actually in my unfinished film from all those years ago. A sign if ever there was one.

So onto this bloody thing. The entire thing was shot on green screen and then had CGI backdrops, monsters and even human actors added to it. It's basically a step above The Incredible Bulk. I found an interview with director W J Carter who talks about how this was both a budgetary and stylistic choice. Though why anyone would want to make this choice is beyond me. He also goes on to say "Total CG environments allow the viewer to become immersed in the world presented to them and accept it as 'normal'." They don't and it doesn't. At all. He also mentions in the interview, which is from 2016, that the film has been 9 years in the making, thus making that almost 15 by the time it came out. IMDB also mentions that writer, producer and director's dad Sidney Carter, sold his house to finance the film, which just genuinely makes me quite sad.

The CGI is somewhere between PS2 and PS3 level and horrible. The Story is as basic as they come and utterly forgettable. Acting is pretty bad, though the fact the poor actors had to do all their scenes in a room, presumably in the director's house, they can't be blamed too much. I know Daniel Jefferson, who was in my film, is a great guy and happy to work on this low to no budget stuff, so I can't say anything bad about him or any of the other actors. I don't like to say anything bad about the people who made it too as they obviously had ambition way beyond their budget and talent. From the interview, it seems that even making CGI as subpar as on show here was really time consuming and hard work, but it's near unwatchable in it's terribleness. I found an old Kickstarter that states that the film upto that point (in 2016) had already cost nearly £600K. That is a shameful waste of money as it is not on screen at all.

Stuck for something to watch, I decided to go to CG (if you know, you know) and pick one of the featured films at random. Something I had never done before but I guess the Gods were watching over me this night, as this piece of obscure trash turned out to be one of the greatest discoveries I have ever made. Lets start off by asking, just why is this film so unknown and under-seen? As of typing this, just 27 people (28 when I post it) have seen the thing.

It's set in a post apocalyptic world filled with mutants and humans coexisting. We follow Slangman "as in man of slang" the self professed most intelligent man on the earth. He wanders the desolate world, offering up his vas knowledge at a price. He meets a gut dressed in tartan who is mute due to having his tongue cut out and also an expert with a spear. He also falls in love and purchase an actress, who he decides he no longer likes after he finds out she was wearing a wig. The rest of the film is us following them as they wander around the world.

The tone of the film is something like Monty Python meets Bad Taste with some Alex Chandon like mutants, who for the budget, looks absolutely amazing. They are gooey, slimy and the designs are very well thought out. I loved one mutant who has a small head on the side of his face that's constantly drooling. We meet many a bizarre character along the way. A highlight for me were the Nowhere Men, who do resemble the Knights who say Ni a little, but are damn funny, and have a well edited demise.

The film is shot on dirty Super-8, which looks amazing and just helps to add to the already strange and filthy tone of the film overall. Everything it dubbed, which again works in the film's favour. This really should have gained a following and it's shocking to me that it didn't. I have to wonder if we would have gotten more from director B. Scott O'Malley had it have done better. He has another feature that I'll now be on the look for. If this kind of low budget, DIY trash is your bag, then if you never listen to me again, at least check this film out. It needs a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-Ray ASAP.