No posts for a while, due to a few extenuating circumstances - 1) Christmas, 2) going away to America, 3) being up to my neck in writing a new script, 4) being completely talked out about 'Mum & Dad' and 5) a virulent stomach bug that passed through my family like a soul-possessing demon made of vomit. Charming, I know.
For anyone looking for some of the press reaction to 'Mum & Dad', I've been maintaining a library of scans and links on the film's
Facebook fan page, where there's also details about upcoming screenings of the film. It's been strange, having the film out there in the public. We've had some great reviews, but some people have HATED it. I got called a 'nitwit' by the Daily Mail (but then, if we'd got a great review from them, then I'd figure I'd been doing something wrong...), The Times found it 'bonkers', Metro called it 'a work of staggering bad taste' (hey, in
some quarters that would be considered a recommendation...) and Little White Lies called it 'a vile piece of masturbation' (they've
changed their tune.) Some of what people were complaining about concerned the idea that the film was 'based on the story of Fred and Rose West'. Despite me saying,
whenever I was asked, that I didn't base it on anyone's story, it all just came out of my own head (better out than in, I always say), it seemd to become one of the 'facts' about the film. Weird.
But, to be honest, the negative reviews were in the minority, so I could deal with that (although they did upset my Mum a bit), especially as they didn't seem to harm sales of the DVD, which have been really good so far. It was very strange going into shops and seeing it on the racks, like here, a couple of weeks ago, in HMV in Oxford Street.
Or even in the airport, on our way to the States.
(Although my favourite sighting was a few days ago in a WH Smith's in Nottingham...
...sandwiched between Tinkerbell and Sleeping Beauty, which, as the father of a five year-old girl, pretty much sums up my existence at the moment). It was also strange to find ourselves walking along Oxford Street and seeing posters for the film, when we didn't know they were going to be there. Still, it did provide for some cheesy photo ops.
Now that we've had the UK release, the focus has moved on to the American one. A few weeks ago the film had it's US premiere at
Slamdance in Utah. The festival is held at the same time as the Sundance festival, in the same place, Park City, a small ski resort town near Salt Lake City. Lisa and I both got the chance to go over for the screening - a long old hike, but really worth it for the experience.
On the flight on the way out there we met
Damon Wise from Empire magazine, who was probably
the first person to write about the film following the press screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival. He was heading over to cover Sundance, and gave us some tips on getting by in Park City.
We were staying at the ski resort, a couple of miles out from the main street. It was, as you would expect from a ski resort, very cold and snowy, but also beautiful.
(Yeah, we were moaning about the freezing weather conditions and snow weeks before it was cool...). It was about -10 some nights up where we were staying, and although it didn't snow while we were there, it was very very cold. So cold, that they have actually built permanent outdoor fires to warm your toes on while you're out in the street.
(And so cold, that it routinely created THE PERFECT MURDER WEAPON!)
Slamdance takes place at the Treasure Mountain Inn, a hotel at the end of Main Street.
The set-up for screenings at the festival is admirably (and in keeping with the low-budget, independent ethos) ramshackle - there's no actual cinema, instead there's a video projector and screen put up in a couple of the conference rooms, with a few risers with chairs on them for the crowd.
(This means that screenings can be a bit more active than normal - we watched a film with subtitles on which meant that you spent about 50 per cent of the time ducking and weaving your head around to see past the people in front.) It's a great festival though - with a real sense of identity, and a great team of people behind it.
As we had a friend out in Park City (Sol, who exec-ed 'Mum & Dad') who had a film showing at Sundance - Alexis dos Santos'
Unmade Beds, screening at the lovely Egyptian Theatre
- we got a couple of passes to allow us to get into some of the Sundance buildings. (No screenings though - trying to get hold of tickets for anything was like trying to source hen's teeth and rocking horse poo combined). Sundance is a bit more spread out - some of it is housed on Main Street, while a lot of the screenings take place about a mile away, in and around a group of hotels, where most journos, critics and filmmakers hang out.
Main Street itself is where you tend to see the odd star though. I saw a third of Ashley Judd's head, caught a glimpse of Mariah Carey
(who seems to be a tiny orange growth attached to a pair of enormous black-clad security men) and a mobbed Robin Williams
all of which was trumped by Lisa, who stood next to Robert Redford in a bar.
Our screening was late on the Sunday. We found out when we got to Park City that there are regulations about where you can put your posters and flyers (you can't just hand one to someone in the street, you have to do it as part of a conversation). There were a few boards specially designed for this purpose dotted along Main Street, which were inches thick by the end, as people stuck their own posters over others.
We had only brought a stack of postcards, some badges and some enormous quads, so our presence on the boards was either subtle
or decidedly emphatic
We had a good crowd for the screening and the film played well, with a great Q and A afterwards. (I didn't stay in for most of the screening, but this meant that I was allowed the opportunity to observe a slightly grumpy
Ron Jeremy retrieve his suitcase from beneath the desk we were sitting at). I was worried that the film might be too British, but it seemed to travel fine and people got the humour. One woman asked me if I had been worried about screening the film - which includes a Christmas-themed quasi-crucifixion - in the highly religious State of Utah and I had to admit that I hadn't even thought about it. After living with the film for so long, some of the more contentious elements of the story now seem, weirdly, almost cosy.
It would have been great to have stayed longer, but our flight was booked for midnight the next day. I only got to see a few things - including a great documentary called
Graphic Sexual Horror, about an extreme BDSM website called Insex and the man who created it (I met the directors, Anna and Barbara at one of the Slamdance events and had a great chat about the film - and about the prospect of whether it could ever get a release in the UK, due to the
newly passed law banning the possession of "extreme pornography". They also gave me a T-shirt with the film's title on, which should cause a stir at the next parents' evening.) I also got the chance to meet up with MyAnna Buring, who I worked with on my short film 'Deliver Me' back at the end of 2006. She was out there with a whole gang of people from a film called
City Rats, which she worked on and which was also showing at Slamdance. It was great to see her again - she's done quite a bit of horror now - including 'Doomsday', 'Freakdog' and 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' - although 'City Rats' is completely outside the genre and she's great in that too. One of the producers, Dean Fisher, was also someone we'd met through
Microschool (albeit with a different project), and it was good to see him again, too and to meet the rest of the crew. (Although we didn't envy them their living quarters - about 5 of them were squeezed into an RV together with minimal heating. Makes my teeth chatter just thinking about it.)
On the way back (after nearly being killed by an overly chatty, mobile phone-using, sleep-deprived taxi driver, who pretty much fractured her arm just before setting off on the hour long journey to the airport along dark, mountainous icy roads) we missed probably
the most significant day in recent American history. But then the flight was empty and I got to sleep (finally) across four whole seats, so, hey, I guess it all evens out in the end.
For Lisa's version of the whole of the above (and more) go
here.. I'll try and be back sometime before the end of the year...
(This means that screenings can be a bit more active than normal - we watched a film with subtitles on which meant that you spent about 50 per cent of the time ducking and weaving your head around to see past the people in front.) It's a great festival though - with a real sense of identity, and a great team of people behind it.
- we got a couple of passes to allow us to get into some of the Sundance buildings. (No screenings though - trying to get hold of tickets for anything was like trying to source hen's teeth and rocking horse poo combined). Sundance is a bit more spread out - some of it is housed on Main Street, while a lot of the screenings take place about a mile away, in and around a group of hotels, where most journos, critics and filmmakers hang out. 
Main Street itself is where you tend to see the odd star though. I saw a third of Ashley Judd's head, caught a glimpse of Mariah Carey
all of which was trumped by Lisa, who stood next to Robert Redford in a bar.
(which also features us - or rather a bloody, hanging Lena - on the cover). We've also kept the film going on the festival circuit, with another couple of screenings at the Northern Lights Film Festival in Newcastle and Gateshead next week. Lisa and I are also going to be on a panel about How to make a low-budget horror. 
- means that we get entered for the Golden Melies, which is presented at Sitges next year, and is contested by the films which have been awarded the Silver Melies by each of the members of the European Fantastic Film Federation. If that means that there is even a slim chance of us getting a trophy of a grumpy moonface with a rocket sticking out of it, I'm there. The festival have posted up the Jury's comments on the programme, including their reasons for choosing 'Mum & Dad' here.
even if he was faced with my specially-grown-for-the-night Beard of Evil.
(who seem to be haunted by a tiny ghoul...)
with Jeanie previewing the look she'll be wearing for our wedding next year.
I interviewed Mark in front of an audience for our 'What Are You Scared Of?' spot, where we ask people to talk about the formative horror moments in their lives, the moments that have really frightened them. Mark was terrific - very entertaining and charming, and we showed a clutch of clips from 70s Doctor Who ('Terror of the Autons') to Hammer House of Horror, Carry On Screaming and the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas. These last clips were especially relevant, as Mark is just finishing three of his own Christmas Ghost Stories - a horror anthology spread over three nights leading up to Christmas called 'Crooked House'. He brought us a short trailer to show and it looks great. I can't wait. Talking to Mark about Carry on Screaming, he told me that it was one of the formative experiences in the lives of all of the League of Gentlemen, having all watched it one Bonfire night in the 70s. When he said it, it brought back my own memory of the same night - I burnt my hand on a sparkler and was allowed to sit up and watch the film as some sort of comfort. Pain, shock, horror and comedy all melding together in my little brain...
Also on Saturday, we had a screening of 'Mum & Dad' which was unexpectedly nerve-wracking for me. It was weird showing it at Broadway, especially as a load of people I knew were in the audience. It felt a bit like dropping your trousers at a christening. Afterwards I got some good feedback from some and some perturbed looks from others, which I've come to expect as par for the course with this film.
(basically Wii tennis on a big screen, except you get to play as a variety of horror characters - a werewolf, a vampire, Freddie, Jason, Sadako amongst others).
and actor Shaun Dooley, who I last met at FrightFest, where he was promoting 'Eden Lake'.
They were all really nervous as the film hasn't really been seen before, but it went down really well with our crowd, who gave them a great response at the end.
Well, I'd go and see it. At least it didn't say 'contains mild peril'...
I did get my festival pass though, complete with alternative spelling of my name:
The film, like everything else at the festival, played in its original language with Spanish and often Catalan electronic subtitles, and got a big cheer when the title at the start 'Mallorca, Spain' came up (in fact, audiences were very vocal throughout the whole festival, cheering and clapping loads). After the film, I had a couple of hours to kill, so I walked down to the beach, where I had a bit of a paddle
and basked in the hot sun. When I say bask, I mean squinted uncomfortably, obviously.
I couldn't get any other tickets for the evening films, so went for a meal - the festival gives guests a load of food vouchers to spend in local restaurants, and though it was tricky trying to find anywhere that did anything remotely vegetarian, I ended up in a great place where the staff were really attentive and the food terrific, all pomegranates and walnuts and gorgonzola and African chocolate cake and stuff. After that, I headed over to the Retiro cinema to see if I could get in to see JCVD, the new film with Jean-Claude van Damme playing himself - an ageing action star caught up in a bank heist. I managed to flash my badly-spelled laminated pass and get in, where the cinema was packed. (It was the same in Germany - Jean-Claude must have one hell of an international fan club...)
Before the screenings started, I had to stand up at the front - being the only filmmaker present - and do my normal intro spiel, which was translated by the guy introducing the films. Again, the crowd were great, cheering the allnighter, my introduction, the mention of the budget and a few points in between. Then the first film started - '100 Feet' ('cheer!') by Eric Red ('big cheer!) - a story about a women who is tagged with an electronic device so that she can't leave her house, after being released from prison for the manslaughter of her physically abusive husband, who was also a cop, whose partner is now in charge of her case and hates her for it. I'd heard some mixed reviews of the film (but then I've heard some mixed reviews of my film, so who knows...) but I really enjoyed it - it was solid genre fun, with some good scares, a couple of great set pieces and decent effects. The crowd loved it too, cheering wildly at the most gruesome death in the film. After that it was 'Acolytes', an Australian film about a trio of teenagers who stumble across the dumping ground of a serial killer, then track him down - and start to blackmail him to kill the bully who's been hounding them. Although it started slow (and a group of lads in front of me were, by this point, cheering everything - each credit in the opening titles, the first shot of a girl running, a close-up of a butterfly - until the rest of the audience told them to shut the fuck up), it had a good set-up and some nice moments of 'River's Edge' style teenage callousness, but by the end it had got a bit too twisty-turny for its own good (and by this time it was 4 in the morning, so not the best time to be trying to retrospectively tie plot points up together). Still, I enjoyed it. 
and read another book. After Pynchon last time, I went for something pulpier, namely this:
(Complete with trashy 70s cover, designed to make you look like a sleazy misogynist whilst reading.) I first read 'The Killer Inside Me' about 10 years ago and it's always stayed with me. It's a great, brutal, twisted story about a small-town deputy called Lou Ford (from whom this band took their name) who presents a face to the world of being a slow-witted fool, while hiding 'the sickness' inside. Hey, Stanley, what do you think about it?
Yeah, me too. After finishing the book, I got to thinking about how it'd work as a movie, and when I got back I looked it up, to find that there was a version of it made in 1976, starring Stacy Keach (which sounds like pretty great casting to me) - which was a bit TV-movie-ish, but also that there is another version currently in development. Part of me really wants to see it, while another part of me hopes it never comes off so that in my fantasy career, I get to buy the rights and do it. Hey, maybe JCVD would be interested...
