Here's a treat – a chance to review a movie starring one of our friends at Film Gutter, and one of the regular contributors to Ginger Nuts of Horror! As well as being a fab reviewer and article writer, our very own Jonathan Butcher has starred in a short horror film by the name of Stuck. With all that said, how could I possibly pass up the chance to review it?


I've always been partial to a short film, and have watched some absolute doozies here at Film Gutter, from the dark and nightmarish to the weird and surreal. Stuck certainly leans on the bizarre comedy, and by keeping it simple retains a good sense of fun. No doubt it's made on a limited budget, but the idea and the script are imaginative and this was a pretty enjoyable experience all around.

Our story follows two friends and begins pretty innocuously, with one attempting to fix the sink – with a bit of builder's bum – and the other explaining his fun night on the town and taking a girl home. Unfortunately this girl made him put his member into some strange white powder, and his erection hasn't gone down for 24 hours since. When he goes to the bathroom to check out the situation, he realises just how painful and bloody his penis is, and comes out to beg his friend for help – but after an unfortunate slip the two find themselves pretty intimately intertwined...
 
I'm sure I can leave the rest to your imagination, but with the two unable to separate themselves – and with that pesky erection still refusing to go away – there's no sign they'll be able to extricate themselves and attain their freedom. What follows is pretty absurd but also somewhat disturbing, with various attempts to get away leading to a shocking reveal and a pretty dark finale.
 
At fifteen minutes this one doesn't stretch the premise, and the humourous elements are generally well delivered. The performances are solid, with some great deliveries – I have one absolute favourite line that I won't spoil here, but you might be able to guess it/spot it. It's decently shot, and many of the 'highlights' are presented with a slow-mo black and white look that enhances the effect each time. It's obvious the budget is tight but I don't really get a sense that it ever needed it – it's a two-hander, mostly located in one place, so there's not a huge amount you could spend it on in many ways.

Stuck is perfectly entertaining without necessarily being anything special, but there were enough chuckles to make it worth the time and if you like your humour sick and twisted you might just get a kick out of this one. Even better, it's free to watch on Youtube, so what the hell are you waiting for? Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNkg9oB_Zzw

RATING: 7/10. This is a movie I'd call 'light', although maybe years on Film Gutter have slightly altered my consideration of what makes a 'light' movie these days. But it's certainly one of the more entertaining entries of recent times, and it shoots by plenty quick without feeling like there's a whole lot left undone or uncovered. I'd say it's solid and tight, but both those terms might just carry an unfortunate connotation in this sense...

Dir. Jimmy ScreamerClauz, USA, 105 mins

It has to be said – watching horror on a regular basis does make you trawl through some pretty terrible movies. But you keep coming back, waiting and hoping for those glorious moments where a director absolutely smashes it out of the park and delivers horror at its very best – startling, original and impactful. We’re talking the likes of Martyrs, Flowers, Singapore Sling, The Woman and a handful more that you just know will stay with you forever, those rarefied movies that restore your faith in a genre that can be much more miss than hit.

Welcome to the club, Jimmy ScreamerClauz, because When Black Birds Fly has just earned its place among those movies.

We recently looked at ScreamerClauz’s second movie, Where The Dead Go To Die, which was bizarre and fascinating and featured what was – for me - one of the most disturbing passages in cinema with its final instalment, The Masks That The Monsters Wear. It was a singular and unique piece of work but certainly felt a little rough and ready in terms of its look and sometimes in the delivery of its ideas. When Black Birds Fly rectifies both of those things, delivering a smoother animation style and voice-over – while keeping all of the bizarre flavour – as well as focusing on a single, fascinating idea and exploring it to its fullest. Put simply, all of the promise of WTDGTD is gloriously delivered here.

Our story follows Marius, a young boy ‘born’ – in a mighty strange opening sequence – into a community called Heaven, which is watched over Big-Brother style by a religious icon called Caine. The only rule of Heaven is not to go beyond the wall, because evil waits on the other side. All of this is watched over by the masked, gun-toting figures of OSWA, a force put together to fight evil. The world-building is great – all the way down to the family watching tele-plays praising Caine and the shadowiness of the black and white world of Heaven is fantastic, only broken by the lurid colours of Caine’s posters and propaganda. Oh, and the blood, when that starts to arrive.

Of course, given that set-up, it’s not long before Marius and his friend Dotty discover a hole in the wall and are tempted through it by The Evil One, who lures them out disguised as an injured cat they want to help. The world outside of Heaven is an absolutely technicolour nightmare, and the contrast between that and our main setting is absolutely superb. The attention to detail on the background animation is genuinely great, in fact. From there we explore the strange backstory of God’s creation of man and woman, which looks absolutely fantastic and studies some incredible ideas.

There was simply no point at which I could take my eyes of this movie – I was absolutely transfixed all the way through, whether that was by the core concept and the dystopian landscape parading as ‘Heaven’, the strangeness of the imagery and visuals, the darkness of the plot, the inventiveness of the religious backstory… it all combines for a heady concoction.

When Black Birds Fly is everything that I look for in a movie – sharply original, visually unique, dark, brooding and so deep with ideas that it is bound to reward repeat viewing. I’d never genuinely have thought that an animation could have delivered something like this, but I’m certainly delighted to have found this one and the work of this director. As per WTDGTD, this isn’t likely to be for everybody, but it hit all the buttons perfectly for me. If you cross Adult Swim with your worst nightmare, then sprinkle a healthy dose of religious concepts on top,  you might end up with something like this.
RATING: 10/10. It’s been a while since I dished out top marks, but When Black Birds Fly is well deserving of it. Rarely can you say that ‘you won’t see anything else like this’, but in this case I can say it and mean it. Daringly different, deliciously dark and deceptively deep, WBBF demonstrates a unique director at the peak of his powers delivering what feels like his magnum opus. Not to be missed for any extreme horror fans out there.

Manos is truly a legend in horror history – made for a paltry budget of $19,000 by director Harold P Warren, it’s the result of a bet between Warren and a friend after he claimed that ‘making a horror film was easy.’ Forget the fact that HPW had no formal filmmaking experience, mostly used theatre actors rather than screen actors, had most of the crew working for free initially on a profit-share deal and the whole thing had to be shot 32 seconds at a time because of the limitations on the rented cameras. It sounds as though the shoot was anything but easy, and ultimately Manos absolutely disproves Warren’s point rather than proving it. Sure, he made a horror film, but unfortunately it’s one of most laughable, lamentable horror films ever made – in fact this one would probably not have anywhere near the infamy it does but for the popular Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode that brought it back into the public eye.

The story – such as it is – follows Michael, Margaret and their daughter Debbie as they search for a hotel evidently located in the middle of nowhere. Completely lost, with dark closing in, they reluctantly accept shelter at a creepy shack in the middle of nowhere with a guy called Torgo. I say guy – he’s apparently supposed to be a satyr, although apparently the prop legs he was supposed to wear were on backwards throughout the whole shoot and nobody ever corrected it. You really couldn’t write this stuff.

Anyway, Torgo keep referring to ‘The Master’, who has a marvellously creepy portrait in the house and a veritable bevy of wives that sleep in a very weird ceremonial circle, with Michael and Margaret seem nowhere near as perturbed by as one would expect when they discover it. The rest of the tale is a borderline nonsensical escape story, with Michael, Margaret and Debbie pursued by Torgo, The Master and his now-woken wives, They attempt all sorts of tricks to get away, most of which don’t make very much sense. In fact I found it so hard to follow in places I think I must have started zoning out, even though it sounds ridiculously simple in its conception.

Manos well deserves its reputation as one of the worst films ever made – the editing is atrocious, the acting is poor at best, there are all sorts of scenes that simply don’t relate to anything, the music is overbearing and horribly grating, the story – which should be impossible to make a hash of really – winds up feeling like it’s all over the place and worst of all, it’s just boring. That makes it unique among the ‘best worst’ movies that I’ve seen so far – even things like Black Devil Doll From Hell and Troll 2 you could laugh at the pure ludicrousness of and wring some enjoyment from. Unfortunately that’s simply not the case here – in fact I think Manos may be even worse made than those two.

I ummed and ahhed about whether to review this movie – after all, it’s only a 12A, and is anything from the most extreme thing you’ll see (and nowhere near the most extreme thing I’ve seen, rest assured). But I felt as though this one deserved the Film Gutter treatment because of its unique place in horror history and the cult reputation it has gained. Trust me, it’s not an experience that I took on for the fun of it…

RATING: 0/10. I’m not in the habit of dishing out bottom marks very often, so Manos: The Hands of Fate joins the elite club with Chaos and Unrated: The Movie in achieving nil points. Everything here is so horribly inept that you could only even set out to watch it out of morbid curiosity, just to see what all the fuss is about. With that said, it’s not anywhere near as much fun as some of its neighbours in the ‘worst movies ever’ club. Let this be a lesson – horror films are not easy to make, and it’s ever harder to actually make a good one, something Manos fails in spectacularly.
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As well as curating the Film Gutter series of reviews Alex Davis is also the organiser of some of the best writing based events in the UK such as Edge-Lit, Sledge-Lit and Other Worlds.  We have teamed up with Alex for a chance to win a pair of tickets to this years Other Worlds to be held on 

Saturday, October 6 at 9:30 AM – 6 PM at ​Nottingham Writers' Studio, 25 Hockley Lane, NG1 1FH Nottingham, United Kingdom

Click here to enter the competition 

Ah, Japan. Where would Film Gutter be without Japanese cinema, eh? There's every chance we'd have run out of material but for the proliferation of the strange, experimental and gruesome that has spawned out of the country over the years. Of course, that's not to say that there aren't many very fine Japanese films across all sorts of genres, but there seems to be a specialism in the underground and the extreme for sure.
 
Which brings us to Anatomia Extinction. One of the great things about there being such a welter of Japanese gore and splatter cinema is that almost everything is a surprise, barring a handful of particularly famous (or should that be infamous?) entries. So there's very little expectation one way or the other, which means that you can watch nice and neutrally and just take the movie at its own value. And at large, I rather enjoyed this particular shorter film.
 
Anatomia Extinction is set in a near-future Japan where there are huge problems with overpopulation and overcrowding, and our lead is pretty much an everyman (who remains unnamed) suffering the various stresses and strains of existence in that sort of environment. That is until he sees a dead body on the floor in the back corridors of the subway and then finds himself pursued by a dark entity that has a very special mission for him...
 
I say 'dark entity' because basically I'm still not eminently clear what the thing is. It's kind of a robot, and kind of a demon, and goes under the charming moniker of an 'engineer'. When the being catches our lead, he recruits our hero to be one of these engineers, with the goal of reducing the population. The backdrop of climbing murder rates, presented through a variety of news pieces, leaves little doubt as to how he is supposed to go about this. The implant given to him not only makes this quest impossible to ignore, but all too easy to carry out.
 
It's hard to ignore the inspiration taken from the likes of Akira and Tetsuo the Iron Man in the angles of dystopian future Japan and the fusion of human and machine, but there's enough that's likeable here in its own right that it stands up just fine on its own. The rat metaphor that runs throughout was an interesting one, highlighted by some research our lead does on rat behaviour in extreme circumstances. The visuals were generally fun – with some great fantasy/dream sequence moments – and the lead actor is pretty convincing in the journey from regular, mild-mannered guy to murderous, cyber-enhanced lunatic. The effects aren't always great but there's a degree of invention in here that appealed to me, and the central concept was interesting enough to perhaps have carried something a bit more substantial than just short of an hour. The time did whizz by watching this one, which isn't always the case even for something this slim. Sure, you can see it's low budget, but it was enough fun and had enough meat to it to carry it along nicely. It's not likely to live hugely long in the memory, but if you're looking for a decent way to spend an hour you could certainly do much worse.

RATING: 7/10. A pretty enjoyable surprise – some of these Japanese splatter films don't look great these days, some in having not aged well, while some others are simply terrible in conception and execution (see my review of Entrails of a Virgin as a reference there). Sure, this is a bit later than some of the swiftly and cheaply made movies that jumped on mid-80s Guinea Pig bandwagon, so maybe it's entitled to be a bit better. But for me there's a bit more going on beneath the surface that some of its ilk, and there's a bit of creative flair and imagination alongside a little splash of worldbuilding too. I wouldn't consider it an essential – I couldn't stick it up there with the likes of Audition - but it's a solid film for sure and should offer something for regular readers or regular viewers.