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Reviews
Pareidolia (2023)
"Jesus on a dog's bum"
That's how Carolyn Pickles succinctly and economically explains 'pareidolia', the trick of the mind which forms familiar images out of the abstract as your ever-industrious braincells attempt to make sense of the world around you. Another character refers to human protective instincts and how we are conditioned to spot evil even when it may not be there - for example, if a caveman thought he'd seen a menacing feral feline beast about to pounce from a tree limb, he'd turn and run, not looking back to even consider whether the creature was illusory.
Director Aaron Truss and his scriptwriter dad Aiden have brought these primal fears screaming into a modern setting in a truly unsettling short movie, based around the titular concept, which will disturb you via its stunning sound design (please do experience this under the most souped-up hi-tech sonic conditions you can) and its remarkable ability to have you simultaneously focusing on the scary unfolding drama while searching all around the frame, wondering whether that blurry beer pump in the background or a combination of shapes on a wall or a bit of machinery might just resemble a taunting or dangerous face.
Producer Stuart Morriss has specialised, in the recent past, in reviving the careers of old telly and cinema favourites from decades long gone - and in less skilled hands this approach can sometimes feel like mere stunt casting or a sad reflection of former glories, but you can always tell that Stuart works his players hard, and that they respond in turn, clearly appreciating being presented with meaty and significant roles, 'something to get your teeth into' as opposed to a simple gimmicky walk-on and a couple of seconds of fleeting audience recognition. The likes of Pickles, Graham Cole, and Diane Franklin grasp the chance to impress one more time, and throw themselves into giving their all and properly enhancing the production. Younger viewers for whom the sight of these old stagers may be meaningless might instead just wish to ask how frightening 'Pareidolia' is, yet even they will satisfyingly discover that it holds its own alongside the best and more expensive/expansive shockers that Hollywood or Netflix are currently offering.
Roberta Lane (2021)
Rabbit, rabbit
A touching little fragment, this low-key fantasy from director Darren Perry showcases his trademark focus on English greenery once more, this time as a backdrop for a concise tale of the lightly supernatural. Eschewing shocks for something more subtle, the film is simple but well-paced, nicely directed, and particularly impressive in its imagery and framing - shots of the male lead positioned within an arc of leafy branches, close-ups of the talismanic stone animal which may or may not act as a portal between our world and that of the dead. The storyline may be a familiar one but bears repeated telling, and while there is insufficient room within a ten-minute span to truly detail any relationship between the characters, a connection and a sweetness is conveyed nevertheless. A change of pace for Darren, and a welcome one.
Cold Caller (2020)
Shear Terror
Just about everything has been done in screen horror, and most new productions offer variants on past ideas rather than anything truly original. So filmmakers have to rethink, have to take another tack. Darren Perry's experience as a director of horror shorts extends back decades, and his love of the genre as a fan stems even further - it all shows, and his expertise as both a moviemaker and a keen viewer enables Darren to find that distinctive angle.
The sketchy and over-familiar plot of his new offering Cold Caller comes as little surprise, though Darren's own horror knowledge and eye for a creepy image or situation lends a little freshness. Where this one excels, however, is in the establishment of mood. The film, though only eleven minutes long, dares to take its time, dares to brood and linger and creep around its location, at once recognisable as a suburban garden but also as a place of unease. Like Matthew Holness' acclaimed Possum, Cold Caller appears to be staged in a little pocket of madness, a bubble of shadows and things eerie, which happens to be positioned somewhere just around the corner from 'normality'. The title character doesn't even feature until more than halfway through, and neither does dialogue - instead, we become lost in a netherworld tenuously connected to our own. Perry's camera leads us, roaming and zooming with a tantalising agony, focusing on nature and darkness and ambience and the chop-chop-chop of an incessant pair of shears; nothing 'happens', but the creation of a foreboding and a dread is staged so effectively. So few would-be horrormeisters have the nous to carefully take their time in this manner, even in features - to witness this approach in something as brief and basic as Cold Caller comes as a revelation.
The Journey (1993)
Trunk terror
'The ultimate experience in blood curdling horror'! According to the end credits, at least. That's actually rather underselling this quirky little short from Darren Perry, very productive low budget filmmaker at a time when few people in Britain seemed interested in horror, late 80s/early 90s (how things change!). Sure, it could be taken as an effectively gory knife-murder item, and we've all seen a million of those - but the killer's mysterious background and motivation are pretty unique! Perhaps this fits into the subgenre of 'ecological horror', then - but again, not in a conventional way. It's a 'nature fights back' tale with a spin, in that nature has a little helper on this occasion. Notably skilled camerawork, good use of location, care and attention paid to the sound (frequently a pitfall at this level of moviemaking), and the originality of the storyline lifts it above much of the competition. If you look for imagination and weird, oddball concepts in your horror, and if you are a fan of this area of amateur/go-out-and-do-it production, this is well worth your attention.
Reflected Visions (1996)
Short sharp shocker
The 1990s were barren times for horror cinema in Britain. Features were being produced, but at a lower rate than any time since the war, and even those that did lurch into cinemas or on to the shelves of video rental outlets received scant critical attention. It's an era that is unlikely to be 'rediscovered' and reappraised by a future generation of film scholars, and even if someone were to make the attempt, they'd have a job convincing many about the merits of BEYOND BEDLAM, SPLIT SECOND, or THE REVENGE OF BILLY THE KID.
As ever, though, there's an alternative history to be written. Delve between the cracks, and you'll find a thriving, industrious, imaginative hive of activity on the UK genre scene of the post-HELLRAISER, pre-millennial years. If it couldn't emerge from poorly-funded, ill-thought-out full-length production, then the grand tradition of our country's film talent scaring/shocking/surprising unsuspecting viewers would instead be sustained by a swarm of young, independent, often amateur or semi-pro moviemakers dabbling in the world of the 'short'. Most of the best British horrors of the 90s ran under 35 minutes, kick-started by Alex Chandon's untamed gorefests BAD KARMA and DRILLBIT, with Paul Cotgrove's GREEN FINGERS neatly rounding off this flurry of exciting mini-mayhem at the decade's end with a classy old-fashioned frightener based on an R.C. Cook short story.
Darren Perry has produced a number of lively and always highly watchable shorts over the years, and has recently made available an expanded half-hour version of his 1996 offering REFLECTED VISIONS. Though it may appear technically deficient to modern eyes, swayed by 4K and HD and all the rest, REFLECTED VISIONS is in fact fairly typical of the nature of British horror at the time, in terms of its look and general ambience. Darren knows his vintage horror better than most, and via his canny use of that dependably eerie location Black Park in Buckinghamshire (so familiar from Hammer vampire pictures and much more) he offers a link to past glories. His plot too harks back to a previous age - that of the 'supporting short', required by the cinema chains to bolster cinema programmes, with micro-shockers running between 20 and 40 minutes often propping up the latest Clint Eastwood or John Travolta vehicle forty years ago. Many of these now sadly neglected items compensated for rather slender plots with lashings of atmosphere, weird experimental soundtracks and camerawork, non-linear structures, and what is perhaps best termed simply as 'the unexplained'; and REFLECTED VISIONS, erm, reflects every last drop of that unique essence.
It offers what appears, deceptively, to be a standard and minimalist set-up pitching a young couple against one another, as attempts to patch up a failing relationship on a day in the countryside seem doomed. So far so soap opera. But Perry and co-writer Jason Pyke begin to mess around with the fabric of time and the inside of people's heads (on screen and off), and before we know it, those 'visions' promised by the title loom into view as new characters - one unknown to us, the other familiar - enter the drama, possibly from a temporal distance despite occupying the same physical space.
All-the-rage gore effects come into play via a rough-and-ready fight scene and a jagged broken bottle, but this seeming concession to the Fangoria crowd (especially in this longer 30-minute cut) is very much in keeping with the manner of violence you might have experienced in a cinema-exhibited horror short of the slasher heyday. Darren is sufficiently aware not to overstep the bounds, but to offer just enough of a bloody spurt or two for the sake of effect; the subsequent use of a classic macabre image, a hooded supernatural apparition looming from the greenery, balances everything neatly and indicates that the filmmakers here have feet comfortably planted in the gothic as well as the savage.
Does confusion reign from this point in? Well, this type and form of horror never set out to make it easy for an audience, and again Darren and team recognise that. Expertly mixing the psychotic, the psychological, and the supernatural, they leave you to make up your own mind about 'what happens' during the finale, and are so very confident that they even propose the possibility that 'it was all a dream' before pulling that well-trodden rug out from under us. The informed viewer, who understands and appreciates this particular area of British genre cinema, knows that they are expected to put in a bit of work and that there are no definitive answers or explanations in this brand of fractured terror. I wish that I could toy with time myself and head back to a period where, impossibly, I could somehow watch this on an Odeon Screen 3 billing supporting a cheesy American or Canadian imported slasher flick circa 1980.