It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (22 page)

‘So, I guess things worked out alright for you?’ she quipped gaily.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘thanks partly to you. You did me a favour all those years ago. You took the time to give me a really nice interview. And I did well out of it. It got some attention. It got me more work back in England. I ended up writing a book about
The Exorcist
. One thing led to another. And so now…’

‘And so now here you are!’ laughed Blair.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘here I am.’

And, indeed, there I was.

Russia. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Eisenstein. Tarkovsky. Klimov.

And Woody Allen’s
Love and Death
… sort of.

It was 1992 and I was back in London, still filing for
Time Out
, but now also faxing copy to that aforementioned horror-obsessives’ handbook
Fangoria
magazine in New York. The former paid the bills and gave me enough of a profile to be able to wrangle my way into movie preview screenings, but it was the latter which fuelled my sense of fanboy pride. As a fledgling genre fan I had kept a pile of dog-eared
Fangos
under the bed where more well-adjusted youths would presumably stash drugs and pornography. There was indeed something furtively dirty about the double-page pictorial spreads of severed limbs and monstrous bodily mutations which packed each new issue of Fango. Whereas old-style horror mags like
Castle of Frankenstein
and
Famous Monsters
of Filmland
had feigned disgust or disdain at the genre’s more lurid excesses,
Fango
embraced splatter with a refreshingly punky relish which echoed the battle-cry from David Cronenberg’s
Videodrome
: ‘Long Live the New Flesh!’

The first article I filed for
Fango
was an interview with British star Charles Dance who had just played the male lead in
Alien3
which had been severely compromised (i.e. ruined) by lumpen-headed studio interference. That article had earned me a
Fango
front cover but I had my sights set on something altogether more meaty: a substantial set report, perhaps, with a distinctly British flavour – something my better-established American counterparts couldn’t get their hands on. Such an assignment duly materialised in the form of
Split Second
, a sub-
Alien
low-budget rubber monster movie set in a waterlogged near-future London, starring Rutger Hauer (a legend thanks to
Blade Runner
), Kim Cattrall (latterly of the ghastly
Sex and the City
) and Michael J. Pollard, best known as ‘the weird one’ out of
Bonnie and Clyde
. The film was directed by Tony Maylam who had acquired cult status amongst British horror fans for helming the briefly banned but otherwise unremarkable ‘video nasty’
The Burning
.

Hauer was fun, having been around the exploitation block enough times to know the value of being polite and pleasant in interviews. Years later I would enjoy Hauer’s company more fully whilst making the documentary
On the Edge of Blade Runner
for Channel 4. Hauer, who stole that film out from under Harrison Ford’s nose, was terrifically candid, claiming that Ford had never got over the fact that ‘he
thought he was playing the hero, but his character was just a guy who fucks a dishwasher and then falls in love with it’. Ford declined to comment.

Kim Cattrall had just completed work on
Star Trek VI
and like Hauer knew the importance of keeping the geeky fans onside. The wild card, however, was Pollard, who gave me my first taste of a genuinely unusable interview. Having presumably been strong-armed by the producers to earn his keep by talking to the oiks of the genre press, Pollard agreed to spend fifteen minutes with my colleague Alan Jones (who filed for the more upmarket
Cinefantastique
) and me in his fantastically unimposing trailer. Thrilled to be in the company of a genuine star, we asked him about his role in
Split Second
as ‘The Rat Catcher’, only to be told: ‘I’m on the Madonna album!’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m on the Madonna album!’

‘You’re … sorry, what?’

‘I’m on the Madonna album,’ Pollard said a third time, before adjusting his voice to a high-pitched enigmatic squeak and barking: ‘
Calling Dick Tracy!
’

I turned to Alan for support. He’d been in this game longer than I had. Surely he’d know what the hell was going on.

‘You mean … you’re on the soundtrack album to
Dick
Tracy
?’ said Alan, clearly struggling.

‘That’s right!’ squealed Pollard gleefully.’
Calling Dick
Tracy!
’

And he was. Apparently a sample of his voice could indeed
be heard ‘on the Madonna album’, providing one of the LP’s undoubted highlights. Beyond that we got
nothing
out of him – certainly nothing about
Split Second
. He was the Keyser Soze of unquotable interviewees.

In the wake of the Pollard experience I learned that there really is no point attempting to interview actors about movies in which they aren’t really interested (publicists take note) and which they were presumably only doing for the money. Nothing wrong with that – we’ve all got to work, and with most actors
out of work
for
most of the time
no one can be criticised for earning an honest crust. Personally I’ve never had any problem with people doing trash to pay the bills, and if they don’t want to talk about their trash, then hey, fair enough (although some of them are apparently ‘contractually obliged’ to do so). Conversely, Julian Sands once snapped at me on the set of the ultra-low-budget British bloodsucker
Tale of a Vampire
(which was ‘arty’ rather than ‘trashy’) when I joked that no one could accuse him of doing this film ‘for the money’. Knowing that I was from
Fangoria
– a publication of which he may well have disapproved – Sands scowled and replied tartly, ‘I don’t do
anything
“for the money”. Do
you
?’ I felt like saying, ‘Well actually yes, I hang around on movie sets like this in the middle of nowhere for hours on end just waiting and waiting in the hope that I can spend ten measly minutes talking to some actor who gets hoity with me because they think that they’re “above” anything as sordid as earning a living and don’t seem to realise that I’m just doing a job which will actually help their movie find an audience and possibly even make money.’ But I didn’t.
Because I needed to be nice to him so that he would continue to speak to me and so that I could go home at the end of the day and file an interview with him for
Fangoria
.

For the money.

It occurs to me now that Sands’ fleeting offhand comment (which was probably utterly uncharacteristic and which he doubtless cannot even remember) may well have played a big part in my ongoing inability to appreciate his marvellous acting talents ever since, and to provoke me to mock him in public on numerous occasions in my role as an apparently unbiased film critic. In which case I owe him an apology.

And vice versa.

Anyway, back to Russia – via Italy. Sometime after filing the
Split Second
set report I got a phone call from Mariano Baino, an aspiring film-maker whom I had met before and been impressed by, for two reasons. The first was that he had made an admirably atmospheric short film entitled
Caruncula
, which was twisted and evocative in all the right ways (acclaimed horror novelist Ramsey Campbell called it ‘a small masterpiece of sustained perversity’) suggesting a burgeoning directorial talent. The second and equally important reason was that Mariano was actually
Italian
, which was to horror what being Dutch or Swedish was to porn. In effect being Italian was a qualification, a badge of honour to be worn with pride. While Britain had given us Hammer and America had given us
The Exorcist
, Italy had spawned the ‘
gialli
’, a stylish and lurid brand of screen thrillers which took their name from the ‘yellow’ cover designs of the pulp paperbacks which inspired them.
From the maestro Mario Bava (who predated everything from
Friday the 13th
to
Alien
with stylish B-movies like
Bay of Blood
and
Planet of the Vampires
) to genre darling Dario Argento (whose films were bloody and beautiful in equal measure), Italy could rightly lay claim to having put the Art into exploitation cinema. Even Ruggero Deodato’s
Cannibal Holocaust
(which featured unforgiveable scenes of animal cruelty) effectively prefigured
The Blair Witch Project
with its central morbid ‘found film’ motif. Add to this a string of die-hard weirdies like Aldo Lado’s
Short Night of the Glass Dolls
and Massimo Dallamano’s
What Have You Done to Solange?
(both of which I would later proudly introduce
uncut
on Film4’s Extreme Cinema strand), and having an Italian driver’s licence became the equivalent of owning an all-access pass to the hearts and minds of the horror cognoscenti. Hell, we’d even forgive them for the misogynist dirge of Lucio Fulci’s loathsome
New York Ripper
, a film so staggeringly adolescent that even spotty male horror fans seemed embarrassed to praise it, resorting to carping on about Francesco De Masi’s ‘interesting’ score, as if this somehow mitigated the movie’s irredeemable awfulness.

Mariano invited me and my colleague Nigel Floyd to meet him in Pizza Express by the side of the British Museum where he told us all about his upcoming first feature – a ghostly tale of terror entitled
Dark Waters
. It had been co-scripted by an English writer named Andrew Bark who had worked with Mariano on
Caruncula
. Apparently Bark’s original ten-page synopsis had been envisaged as an H. P. Lovecraft homage set in northern England with an American lead. But by the time
Mariano pitched the movie to Nige and me the main action had moved to the Odessa Catacombs out in Ukraine, and the story centred on an English-raised girl returning to a remote island convent where her mother had died in childbirth, and which now harboured a dark demonic secret.

Like so many charismatic film-makers, Mariano talked a
really
great movie. He brought the story of
Dark Waters
to life right there in Pizza Express, using storyboards and drawings to conjure vivid pictures of terror and amazement like P. T. Barnum’s cinematic heir. By the time he’d finished pitching the movie I was ready to remortgage my flat and finance the film myself. But there was no need. Miraculously, Mariano had secured the necessary backing thanks to an unfathomably labyrinthine series of connections involving punk rock and the conversion of roubles into dollars. As a teenager, Bark had been a big fan of black-garbed college kids turned pub-rock punk survivors the Stranglers, a devotion which had continued into later life. Somehow, through his membership of the international Stranglers fan club (who knew?) Bark had struck up a correspondence with a young Russian man, Paul Azov, who shared his passion for the band and who had fallen in with Siberian-born businessman Victor Zuev. Victor had set his sights on financing ‘the first Western film to be shot in Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union’ for reasons both artistic and fiscal. A low-budget film produced in Ukraine which could then turn a profit in the West would generate hard currency which was painfully difficult to come by in the former Soviet Union. Victor had apparently seen
Caruncula
at a festival in Russia and the unlikely trio were
now engaged in a major movie undertaking which would never have happened if ‘Peaches’ hadn’t become a surprise Top Twenty hit back in the seventies. There were even wild rumours of Stranglers lead singer Hugh Cornwell performing a cameo role in the film, although this turned out (unsurprisingly) to be fanciful tosh. But the fact that the film was happening
at all
was still pretty impressive, and since these serendipitous beginnings, things had apparently moved on apace. Mariano had already held auditions in London for an English-speaking lead and had cast upcoming theatre actress Louise Salter, striking and elegant photos of whom were swiftly produced from a large brown Manila envelope. (Salter would later go on to have a small role as one of ten ‘Paris Vampires’ in the big-budget Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise bloodsucker
Interview with the Vampire
.) The rest of the cast had been selected from local talent in Russia and Ukraine, some of whom couldn’t speak English but who (we were assured) would learn the dialogue ‘phonetically’. It was to be a truly international undertaking; a Russian/Ukrainian horror movie, directed by an Italian, co-written by a Brit, starring an English woman, with a Baltic supporting cast (including a ‘Miss Russia’ runner-up!) and all made with an eye on eventual American distribution. What could go wrong?