FILM ANALYSIS
To correctly analyse my film, It would be helpful to have
all of my stills, publicity materials etc to hand, but unfortunately, my laptop
which housed all of my work, including an original copy of my film analysis;
died and without the funds to be able to afford to retrieve my work and my
findings, I am having to write this again and submit this account without the
supplementary material.
But being able to reflect on this setback has allowed me to
think about the limitations and pratfalls that have dogged the production and
dictated the identity of this project.
Going back to when we were given the brief for this project,
I knew that I had to make something that was cheap. I simply didn’t have the
resources, talent or time to make something grand and spectacular looking. My
passion for horror films was something that inspired me to make something
trashy and raw. Although trying to think of a premise for a horror movie which
had not been done hundreds of time before was so frustrating that ultimately I
thought about making a documentary about a horror film that would be remembered
as being the most poorly executed, the most amateurish and the cheapest looking
film around. The documentary, which would be entirely fictional would use my
love of screenwriting and comedy to tell the story of how the film both failed
and succeeded.
The audience will be told the story through the accounts of
the two main film-makers who were responsible for its existence, the interview
segments would have the tone of Brass Eye and This Is Spinal Tap.
Working with my own deadlines led me to decide to rely on
myself and enlist the help of others when/if they were available on the day. My
availability towards the end of March would be restrictive and erratic, my own
personal practise whilst shooting would be loose and spontaneous, which I
think, found itself manifested in the fake movie excerpts found in the film. I
wanted the mise’en scene to evoke 80’s horror exploitation films, especially
the survival horror sub-genre which led to many cheap feature films becoming
notorious due to the “video nasties” phenomenon in the mid 80’s.
I researched films such as “The Evil Dead” and “Clerks”
simply because of the almost care-free approach to film-making. The former is
an exercise in initiative and the passion that can arise from it. A horror film
of considerable acclaim, the production notes and crew accounts told stories of
cameras mounted to planks of wood and cheap tricks with prosthetics. It was a
film that was made for next to nothing which was certainly a good film to refer
back to, when I would hit a creative wall, so to speak.
“Clerks “was again filmed on next to nothing, budget-wise.
The story was written where the director, Kevin Smith, worked, the cast and
crew were either friends or friends of friends, and the film was even edited in
the video-store location in which some of “Clerks” is staged. I really tried to
keep this film in mind whilst writing.
I knew I could use a farmland location because I had one at
my disposal, I knew it would be quiet, there would be amenities to hand and I
wouldn’t have restrictions on where I could shoot. The actors within the fake
film would be available, simply because they lived on the farm where I was
shooting. I was reminded of the lectures that we had early on in the year where
I was advised to not be limited by my surroundings and to try and integrate
them into my project, i.e.; writing a script set on a farmland and shot in the
dark to hide the less dilapidated and more “liveable” qualities of the
location.
When watching this film back, I originally saw it as a
simple comedy something that was simply an attempt to respectfully stand apart
from the work of my peers, I wanted to do something different. I loved comedy
and horror, so this was supposed to be a celebration of my love of film as well
as a showcase for the aspects of my previous practices that I thought I had
been successful. Really though, having watched the film again, it appears to
come across as a commentary on exploitation cinema and its treatment in the
80’s, which I mentioned earlier.
A really interesting documentary about the video nasties
phenomenon by Jake West touched upon the social, political and economic
struggles that come with the censoring of several horror/exploitation movies,
but for me at one point, someone tries to communicate the notion to the
audience that the once you got past the reputation that the video recordings
act gave these films, not a lot of them were any good. That, coupled with the
collectable releases on DVD and Blu-Ray of a lot of these titles, on specialist
labels and distribution companies, led me
to ask myself that after years passing and only scrappy footage,
bootlegged copies and word of mouth to fill the shelves from which they had
been taken, are any of these films actually any good?.
Certainly the constant glut of remakes and releases seems to
cheapen and de-mystify the notoriety of these titles and also manages to
attribute worth to something which in actual fact may not deserve it.
It was also a comment on my own practice, I have never
valued my work as anything special or notable despite the effort I have made to
change that. The film itself seemed to reflect my own attempts to do some quick
and cheap and I feel that it revealed my frustrations about my lack of
resources and my inability to really forge something new out a genre I claim to
know a lot about.
The screenings were a mixed bag, the jokes all hit the right
mark, in my opinion, although it was clear that due to my own insistence to
work alone for the most part, the film’s direction was muddled and detached
from itself. The ending, was
weak, which
was something I tried to fix in rewrites and editing, ultimately it remains,
improved, yet still a little flat, in a climatic sense.
