Eyes in their Stars

Stephen Murphy (makeup effects); Morag McKinnon (director); Kiyoyuki Murakami (translator/sound recordist); some pie (comestible). 

So, my friend Kiyo, visiting from Japan, left on Wednesday. Last time he visited and left I got bushwhacked by sudden emotion, which would probably have happened again, except for the comedy relief he thoughtfully supplied. “Thank you for your hospitality, and… thank you for everything you did to me,” he said, as he got into the cab, then sat down, missing the seat and landing on his arse on the floor. “That was a good one, wasn’t it?” he remarked, cheerfully.

I always found these space aliens, from the Japanese WARNING FROM SPACE, completely adorable in the movie stills I saw. With Kiyo departed and myself in nostalgic mood, I shoved the disc, a gift from composer Matt Wand, into the Panasonic and let ‘er rip. 

A ready-made Fever Dream Double Feature, the disc consists of both WARNING FROM SPACE and the uncannily similar THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE, an Amicus production that likewise features astronomer heroes, meteors that land in formation, extraterrestrials that take human form, and plot twists that shift the invaders from hostile to sympathetic and (sometimes) back again.

The other film BEYOND SPACE (the moon is beyond space? That’s a conservative estimate of the size of the universe, isn’t it?) resembles is another British UFO flick, THE BODY STEALERS. But that one, a Tigon production, is beyond dull. Despite being shot by the talented John Coquillon (WITCHFINDER GENERAL, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID) it contains only one striking shot:

A body worth stealing.

The Amicus effort is a lot more interesting, thanks to occasional wisps of inventiveness from director Freddie Francis, and excellent production design in the aliens’ lair, and even in the astronomers’ HQ, where a psychedelic floor painting livens things up. Francis was generally a weak director, at least compared to his brilliance as a cinematographer, but he could rise to the challenge when a film offered him something of visual interest to get his teeth into. Oddly, here and in LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF, it’s the photography that often lets things down, with awkward transitions from day-for-night to night-for-night, something that NEVER works (honourable exception: THE PROFESSIONALS, shot by Conrad Hall). 

Robert Hutton is our hero, a stiff bit of imported American timber, whose characterisation consists of (a) driving a vintage car, like Jon Pertwee in Doctor Who, and (b) having a metal plate in his skull, which turns out to protect him against alien possession. This results in an endearing bit where Hutton’s pal, Zia Mohyheddin, must fashion a brain-shield out of golf trophies and spend the rest of the film looking hilarious. Things like this keep the film going: most B-movie scifis are painfully lacking in ideas, seeming to equate creativity with expense. This one throws in a new novelty just often enough. A senior security guy from the secret service suddenly contract freckly plague — apparently by telephone. Staggering from the phone booth, he dies in seconds and immediately infects the doctor who rushes to his side. The delirium of the pace is dreamlike, aided by the surreal intensity of the doctor’s performance: we think of dreams as slow and floaty, but this sequence captures the abruption and ellipsis of dream-narrative very well. 

The biggest mistake is probably the casting of Michael Gough as “the Master of the Moon”. Stressing every other word and thrusting his head about like a querulous chicken, Gough is very much on form, but when he has to convert back to being the human being possessed by the M of the M, he plays “Arthur Grey” in exactly the same manner, which leaves the ending in a terrifying limbo. Does this mean that all the humans possessed by the invaders are permanently strange? Are we doomed to become a race of Michael Goughs? Look around you! Can you be sure it isn’t already happening?

WARNING FROM SPACE isn’t quite as full of surprises, but does switch genres in midstream, from invasion film to disaster movie. The starfish eyeball people from beyond infinity turn out to be warning mankind of a terrible threat, a comet (resembling a sun, in fact) on collision course with Earth. Cue lots of shots of screaming civilians evacuating Tokyo, apparently unaware that the surrounding countryside is still technically Earth. 

It’s all decent entertainment if you’re as mentally twelve as I am, although maybe the film could have actually gotten by with fewer ideas. I would have been quite happy to just watch the starfish guys wandering about Tokyo, trying to buy beer or chat up the locals. When you have aliens as delightful as this, plot just gets in the way. Instead, the alien leader transmogrifies herself into a celebrity lookalike, travels to Earth, is washed up in a lake, and is quickly suspected of being what she is — her tendency to leap six feet in the air while playing tennis, and to teleport through plate glass, as well as the fact that she’s the doppelganger of a famous cabaret performer, tending to promote suspicion.

Also, because of the period it was made in, the colour process and the settings irresistibly recall Ozu’s late work, although director Koji Shima throws in the odd Dutch tilt, which is surely enough to disbar him from the transcendental style lodge.

The film was pan-and-scanned, the colour was faded, and the dialogue was dubbed (English dub by Jay Cipes, who married Edgar Ulmer’s daughter Arianne — and I think that might be Arianne’s voice playing the alien leader). So arguably I haven’t actually seen this film at all. But if I’m about to mutate into Michael Gough I don’t suppose it matters.

Snow-globe from beyond space.

The Woman in Red

Light posting this week, since my friend Kiyo from Japan is visiting. Happily, his trip also coincides with a visit from our chum Stephen Murphy, special effects makeup artist extraordinary, so a get-together in grungy local pub The Phoenix was swiftly organised.

Woman in Red 1.

From left, Stephen Murphy, who transmogrified Jude Law in SLEUTH and decorated the goblins of HARRY POTTER: Kiyoyuki Murakami, who translates STAR WARS literature for Japan (and who was delighted to find that Darth Floyd/Pink Vader T-shirt); lady in red Fiona Watson, screenwriter and muse (“I look like the dwarf in DON’T LOOK NOW!”); Brian Robinson, screenwriter, rodent-frightener and excellent blogger.

When Kiyo’s around, I see the world through fresh eyes: things that seem normal enough, like the information centre for Polish immigrants, of whom there are many hereabouts, suddenly pops out of the landscape because it’s called Planet Poland. And Kiyo’s use of language also makes me hear things differently. He arrived Wednesday evening, having been traveling “for fourteen years”, so he was quite tired. The job was to keep him conscious until nightfall in order to get his body onto British time. I remembered when I first went to New York, and my friend Comrade K blew my frazzled mind by screening Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE (I hadn’t seen any KK at that point), so I whipped out a disc of KKurosawa’s RETRIBUTION which Comrade K had sent me, figuring a tired Kiyo could better follow something in his native language.

Woman in Red 2.

But as devotees of the mysterious KK know, “following” is perhaps the wrong word for what you do when you join his audience. Or maybe it’s the right word, more right than it usually is: you enter the labyrinth and sift through the traces of the departed auteur, trying to make sense of the spoor and property damage left in his wake, pursuing a filmmaker who often seems far ahead of you. Those who like their films simple, unambiguous and tonally consistent are likely to find KK talented but undisciplined. The truth is, his particular discipline leads him to depart from the traditional templates which allow us to watch without thinking.

RETRIBUTION begins with its title, which is probably the last straightforward thing that happens, but even that straightforwardness is deceptive. “It’s not really called RETRIBUTION,” observed Kiyo, reading the kanji above the English subtitle. “It means MORNING, or THE SHOUT,” he went on. Japanese is an interesting language. “No, not THE SHOUT… THE SCREAM,” he concluded. 

Now, in this Wes Craven-smeared age, I can see why the distributors might shy away from using the S-word, but it’s definitely a shame, since that original title would have provided a clue to one of the film’s visual motifs —

This woman in red is the film’s avenging ghost, who pops up when least expected and causes numerous citizens to meet watery graves. Salt watery graves, to be specific. (“Frolic in brine / Goblins be thine,” as the subtitles of RINGU sought to assure us, in perhaps the most benighted couplet in subtitling history). Her dress, so brilliantly coloured and so flat in its colour, reminded this former art student of something, and the Japanese title was enough to clinch it —

This is the closest match I could find, but there are other less obvious visual cues in Edvard Munch’s prints and paintings, in the way he uses a brilliant slab of colour to puncture and destroy any sense of perspective. As Riona Hazuki drifts through the frame in her searing red dress, floating as if mounted on a camera dolly, the brightness of her costume cutting her off from the surrounding reality, the creator of that other celebrated Scream is irresistibly brought to mind.

Incidentally, where does that floating on a dolly idea come from? I’ve used it myself, in my short film CLARIMONDE. The earliest dollying ghost I can name is in William Castle’s THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, but in Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BETE he does mount Josette Day on some kind of trolley so he can trundle her through the Beast’s mansion. In this case, the purpose behind the effect is to make the environment strange, rather than the character.

We all enjoyed RETRIBUTION quite a bit, it’s spooky and disconcertingly funny and very creative. It’s almost a straightforward genre piece  compared to something like CHARISMA, but there are plenty of moments when you feel you might be losing track.  Which is good. And Kurosawa produces humorous effects and almost-humorous effects in surprising ways. My favourite was probably when depressed cop Kôji Yakusho interrogates a female suspect on a patch of waste ground — yanking a dusty, discarded office chair from a heap of rubbish, he sits on it and faces her, transforming the vacant lot into an impromptu interview room.

Edinburgh, 1828…

Thanks to actor Ricky Callan for posting this one of YeTube (the Scottish YouTube).

I really wanted the credit “book and lyrics” on this one but somehow didn’t get it. Makeup FX supremo Stephen (SLEUTH) Murphy conceived the idea for a musical about Edinburgh’s best-loved mass-murderers (they didn’t really rob graves, they found it easier to manufacture their own corpses) and I volunteered to write it with alacrity.

The first voice you hear is that of Ronnie Corbett, the little Nazi in the original CASINO ROYALE, who lives outside Edinburgh. I’m afraid we wrote a less vulgar version of the script in order to secure his services, which he gave out of the goodness of his heart. Once we’d recorded his VO we stuck all the swearing back in.

Ricky Callan plays William Hare, with Sandy Nelson (Mel Gibson’s brother in BRAVEHEART!) as William Burke. Stephen Murphy directed, handled most of the producing, oversaw the special makeup requirements, and wrote the score.

It’s all shot on location except for Burke and Hare’s rooming house, a little set built in Edinburgh College of Art’s boxy wee TV studio. And the front door of same, which is a miniature (as becomes clear when it’s destroyed — we shot the destruction in slow motion but not slow enough).

Apart from my writing services, I appear as an extra in the hanging scene (far left at 7:57, wearing a wig and pulling a funny face) and did a fair bit of editing on it. Editing dance is tough, especially when you have no coverage (not incompetence, just a limited budget) and everything must be cut to the music, and the choreography is differently timed from one shot to the next.

Another problem was a camera malfunction during the hanging scene — the sound had no firm synchronisation with the picture. So I synched (or “sunk”, as we say) the middle of each shot. As the shot starts, it’s slightly out-of-whack, but just as the audience starts to notice, it goes back into step with the image. Then it starts to drift out, but just as the audience becomes aware of it, we cut to the next shot. Genius.

That was a strange day. Pretty much the start of the shoot, the biggest scene (building a gallows outside St Giles Cathedral on Edinburgh’s High Street, with buses going by in the back of out-takes) and as we set up the news came in of the school shooting in Dunblane. Some anonymous asshole member of the public saw fit to castigate us for our bad taste in filming a death scene on this terrible day,as if we’d planned the events to coincide.

Other locations: the graveyard at the start (I thought it was important to show B&H failing as resurrectionists, even though there’s no evidence they ever tried it, but most people associate them with grave-robbing) is Greyfriar’s Churchyard, resting place of William Topaz McGonagall (the world’s worst poet) and the famous Greyfriar’s Bobby. It can also be seen right at the start of Robert Wise and Val Lewton’s THE BODY SNATCHER, in a travelogue shot swiftly followed by a studio mock-up.

The dark alleyway is Advocate’s Close, I think. While scouting all the narrow side-streets off the Royal Mile, we found the more spacious close that serves as our main street scene. It had very few modern features to hide, and was a cul-de-sac which we could completely take over.

Stephen and Mhairi, his producer, managed to get some fairly posh place to serve as Dr. Knox’s house, and a disused bar which could easily be rendered 19th century — in fact, since the modern fixtures had been stripped out, that’s basically what it was.

Morag McKinnon, director of forthcoming feature ROUNDING UP DONKEYS, cameos as Bess the prossie. As soon as she heard there was a character of that name, she wanted to play it. I seem to recall writing a series of completely foul couplets before settling on the relatively innocuous ones used. It was worth it to make people laugh. Stephen wanted to have naked corpses on slabs, to “enhance the production values,” so Morag was induced to denude. Both Stephen and I regretted it in the end, since the combination of nudity, death, and rude humour maybe touches on the uncomfortable.

Here’s one of my pal Simon Fraser’s drawings for the end creds, which deserves to be enjoyed at fuller resolution than YeTube can supply:

Simon is a successful comic book artist and illustrator of high-class lesbian pornography.

And here’s the actual death-mask of William Burke:

Whatever you think of our little playlet, (sharp-eyed observers may spot swipes from homages to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher and Dylan Thomas’s The Doctor and the Devils) I can assure you that our version really is one of the most historically accurate accounts of the B&H affair, with only the omission of the killers’ wives, and the precise circumstances of their arrest, being somewhat at odds with exact verisimilitude.

Oh, and the singing.