Feature Category: Article

By the time Adam Green made Hatchet in 2006, we’d grown out of the backwoods killer subgenre. Films such as Just Before Dawn and Madman had given way to shockers like Wrong Turn. Green’s movie brought the flavour of Friday the 13th and the slasher film and mixed in the mutant murderer in the woods aspect of The Burning while laying the foundation for a franchise that would delight gorehounds for years to come.

The secret of Hatchet’s success is in its simplicity and familiarity. We’re presented with a whole host of genre tropes and even some familiar faces, but what it does so well is deliver on all its promises.

From the get-go, when we see a pair of fishermen trying to bag a big alligator in a remote New Orleans swamp in the dead of night. The father and son (the former played by genre legend Robert Englund) soon fall foul to something unseen and monstrous.

Meanwhile, it’s the Mardi Gras celebrations in the town, and all kinds of drunken merriment are taking place. Beads are being traded for flashes of boob, and the whole city is having fun. Except for Shaggy lookalike Ben (Joel Moore) that is. He’s still mourning his split with his girlfriend, and he wants to see the real side of the Big Easy; he wants to go on a trip through the haunted bayou. He manages to convince one of his friends, Marcus (Deon Richmond), to come along with him, albeit against his better judgement. They call on the local tour guide, the Reverend Zombie (played by the Candyman himself Tony Todd, and yes, the name is a nod to Rob), but unfortunately, because of some ‘incident’ (he was sued for a health and safety issue), he has stopped taking groups out into the swamp. The Rev suggests they try further across town to Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, which turns out to be run by the less experienced but certainly flamboyant Shawn (Parry Shen). They’re in luck since he’s just about to leave with a motley group of tourists: an elderly couple, a porno filmmaker and his vacuous models (one played by Buffy’s Harmony, Mercedes McNab), and Marybeth (Amara Zaragoza, billed as the easier to pronounce Tamara Feldman). Marybeth has her reasons to take the tour, as she’s the daughter of the pair killed in the prologue.

As the group getting further into the swamp – ignore the shouted warnings of a local hick – they become stranded when the boat hits a rock, making it even more apparent that Shawn has little clue about what he’s doing or what he’s gotten his customers into. Walking through the woods, they come across an abandoned house; one that used to belong to the Crowley family. Marybeth knows all about the legend of Victor Crowley, the poor unfortunate child who lived there.

Suffering from a rare deforming disease, Victor was kept hidden away by his father (seen in flashback played by Kane Hodder, who also portrays the older Victor) but one night, a group of cruel kids threw fireworks at the house to scare the poor child. When his father Thomas returned to his burning home and hearing the screams of his son, he attempted to rescue him by chopping at the front door. Unfortunately, Victor was right on the other side of the wood and caught a hatchet to the bonce. Thomas died of a broken heart later, and since then people have been going missing, and the locals are convinced Victor haunts the area, still screaming for his daddy. The swamp area was sealed off and declared illegal to be in, which explains why there are no other boat trips!

As the group attempts to get to the main road and safety, they begin to meet some very gruesome ends, much to the delight of the audience, of course.

Although Hatchet is almost the definition of the slasher film, it wasn’t that genre that influenced writer-director Adam Green the most. “While I may have grown up on a healthy diet of all of the great slashers, my two biggest influences for Hatchet were actually not slasher films at all.  John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London and Tom Holland’s Fright Night were the two films that influenced Hatchet the most,” he told us. “The fact that those movies contained so much comedy made them massively entertaining, far beyond what audiences had come to expect from those subgenres. There may be nothing funny about Victor Crowley himself, and the violence/gore may be turned up to eleven, but Hatchet has a comedic edge that very few slasher films that came before it (intentionally) had.”

It was a slasher that influenced the look of Victor Crowley, though. Green describes the makeup design as a cross between John Merrick (the real-life Elephant Man) and Rocky Dennison (whose life was depicted in the Cher film Mask). He wanted the audience to feel the same shock they felt when they first saw the unmasked Jason come crashing through the window at the end of Friday the 13th Part 2. It’s a repulsion at how he looks, but within the Crowley story, there’s the empathy we feel for both Merrick and Dennison, too.

Slasher films had fallen out of favour, and Green was met with some resistance when trying to get it made initially. “The trend was leaning towards no more slasher-in-the-woods-type stuff. My reps basically told me that Hatchet wasn’t going to happen,” he explained, “I then got Kane Hodder attached and the producers, and I made a mock trailer. We made that trailer for literally $4. That’s what we used to get the horror community talking about the film and then it was a little easier to get the money to make it. So, I went to my industry connections and told I got the money to make this now!”

What Hatchet had was some bloody effective gory kills – all done with prosthetics and in-camera ingenuity. Audiences saw people being torn in two, hacked in half lengthways, a head being ripped open from the mouth backwards not to mention one being twisted like a bottle top, arms ripped off and gallons of plasma thrown over nearby trees to emphasis the carnage. We lapped it up.

Hatchet wasn’t a commercial success initially. Horror fans got it; it was a hit at all the festivals, and while it took a little longer for the rest of the film-watching public to latch on to the movie, it found an appreciative audience on DVD. It was a perfect storm; horror fans had been chomping at the bit for a new bogeyman to slice up screens, and having the hulking Hodder under the horrific makeup was a masterstroke since he was already known to fans for his portrayal of Jason Voorhees in four of the Friday the 13th movies. The home release benefitted from being released in both theatrical and ‘unrated director’s cut’, the latter containing an extra minute of that all-important gore.

Now, after over a decade, the terror is hitting UK TV screens as Hatchet finally receives a TV premiere courtesy of Horror Channel. Considering the station’s close ties with FrightFest over the years, it’s only fitting. It’s surprising, however, since the sequels have already been screened. Green is ecstatic, though, “I’ve always said that even though Hatchet may have world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, it was at FrightFest in London where Victor Crowley was truly born. FrightFest was ‘the screening heard around the world’, and the UK audience was so enthusiastic over Hatchet that every genre festival on the planet seemed to call asking to program the film the very next day. A decade and three sequels later, it’s about time that the film plays on Horror Channel, which feels like its natural home.”

And as we mentioned, sequels did indeed follow, much to the delight of fans. Hatchet II and III were released in 2010 and 2013, respectively. Scream Queen Danielle Harris replaced Zaragoza as final girl Marybeth and Parry Shen returned as an entirely different character. Green himself had already had these planned, however: “A major reason why the Hatchet sequels have succeeded is that they were planned out from the very start. In the first film, I actually showed some of the weapons that Victor wouldn’t actually use until the later films and I held back crucial elements of his mythology to be revealed later on down the road. Of course, it was also a risky move given that there was no way of knowing if I’d ever get to make the sequels.” The latter was only written by Green, however, but was still an entertaining gore-filled romp with his stamp all over it. The trilogy complete, everybody thought they’d seen the last of the hulking swamp monster.

Then in 2017, out of the blue, came a fourth instalment, merely entitled Victor Crowley. At that year’s FrightFest, Hatchet was originally listed as being screened in a special 10th-anniversary version with never before seen footage and extended death scenes that were cut from the film before it even hit the festival circuit. Just before the screening, however, it was revealed that it would be, in fact, a brand new Hatchet film getting its European premiere at the illustrious horror gathering (the world premiere happened a few nights before at Hollywood’s ArcLight Cinema at another event similarly advertised as an anniversary celebration.

The fourth film is set ten years after the trilogy with Shen’s character being the only survivor of the original carnage. The return to the swamp was in a way prompted by the sad passing of Wes Craven. It was another late legend, however, who initiated the process: “The reality that our idols are not going to be here forever was suddenly very real. You start asking yourself, ‘Well, what have we done that even matters?’ For months, I was really in a depression, thinking that nothing we’ve been doing really matters, that it can’t compare,” he explains, “Then, at Rock and Shock, which is a convention in Worcester, MA, I wound up being asked to moderate George Romero’s panel. After the panel, George said, ‘I know you’ve been going through a rough time, I know you’ve been taking Wes’ passing personally – you have to get over that, and get back on your feet.’ And as part of his pep talk, he had said, ‘So, where’s the next Crowley picture?’ And I said, ‘There isn’t going to be one, I’m done with that.’ And he pointed to this standing ovation in the audience, and he said, ‘You’ve got to understand, ’til they say it’s over, it isn’t.’ 48 hours later, I’m back in LA, and I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m typing ‘Ext. Honey Island Swamp. Night.’”

After over a decade, it’s hard to recall the impact Hatchet had on horror cinema. It took us back to the gory heyday of slashers while also driving forward with physical gore effects (Green’s no CGI rule is immensely rewarding) and giving us a new bad guy to be afraid of. The mix of scares and laughs is pitch-perfect and Victor Crowley, ever silent, is one of the most terrifying bogeymen of recent memory. Here’s to the next instalment!

HATCHET screens on Horror Channel on August 26th. Tune in on Sky 317, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.

In the latest issue of STARBURST, we take a look at the most terrifying creature known to man – clowns! With the release of Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, and IT Chapter Two, featuring the return of Pennywise, we take a look at our favourites and preview the movies.

Stallone is back in Rambo: Last Blood, the Henson Company’s classic story The Dark Crystal returns to the small screen in Age of Resistance, and in anticipation of the release of Crawl, we look at the world of killer crocodile movies – not to mention chatting to the director and star about the film.

We also chat to director Danishka Esterhazy about the horror updating of beloved kids’ TV show in The Banana Splits Movie, and composer Kristian Eidnes Andersen talks about scoring Lars Von Tier’s Antichrist.

Plus Horror Obscura looks at another overlooked shocker and you can get the skinny on cool card game Keyforge.

Plus all your favourite COLUMNS, NEWS, REVIEWS and much MORE from the worlds of SCI-FI, HORROR and FANTASY.

Most ‘normal’ folk know him as that nice Paddy off of Emmerdale on the telly, but to us, Dominic Brunt is a director of fantastic films – quite literally. His debut Before Dawn was a relationship drama set among a zombie apocalypse, and his follow-up, Bait, was a gore-filled, hard-hitting story of desperation when faced with debt collectors. However, his latest cinematic outing – hitting the Horror Channel in January – is an outrageously grotesque slice of surreal horror. Imagine if John Waters directed an episode of The Outer Limits that was written by Roald Dahl’s more sadistic twin. It probably still couldn’t prepare you for what you’ll be faced with. Surprisingly, though, it was Brunt’s wife, Joanne Mitchell, who came up with the story.

While Brunt’s previous films have had a grounded social conscience among the horror, Attack of the Adult Babies takes a less cerebral approach to ethics, politics, and the world order. Taking a leaf out of Alex Chandon’s book (the pair have worked together several times, and Dominic was a memorable cast member in Chandon’s superb Inbred), there are plenty of outrageous visuals, and sickening situations as the story unravels before our disbelieving eyes.

We spoke to Dominic and Joanne as the film was due to be released in 2017, and they told us that although Joanne wrote the story, they trusted Paul Shrimpton with the script, largely due to his work on the aforementioned Inbred. “I really like Paul’s way of working, and I know he can deal with that side of things,” Dominic explained, “Jo broke it down scene-by-scene and then we passed it to Paul. He stuck rigidly to the storyline; he changed some of the ending and the dialogue, he put a few jokes in, and he brought a fantastic pace to it and a shape that was far better than it had been.”

It was a step-up for the pair filmmaking-wise, as Brunt told us: “There was a lot of pre-production because there’s a large cast in this one. It’s set in a massive manor house, and we found one about called Broughton Hall [in Skipton], so we managed to live there and eat there, and we could get up in the morning and start filming and stop when we dropped.” The convenience of shooting and staying in the same place made the production much easier than the previous film, “Bait was twenty-six locations – it was a nightmare dragging these massive lorries and seventy-three crew around,” he continued. All this with only a three-week shooting schedule!

The film begins rather sedately, albeit interspersed with a grotesque nappy-wearing man being pursued by a sexy young nurse, while others get into their uniforms. We’re introduced to a nice family playing a board game. George and Sandra (Andrew Dunn, best known for TV’s Dinnerladies and Kate Coogan) seem to be attempting to coax Sandra’s son Tim (Kurtis Lowe) to get into the spirit of it, while Tim’s daughter Kim (Mica Proctor) is more concerned that her would-be stepbrother has been having a dirty rummage with her underwear. Suddenly, a pair of Eastern European thugs burst in and demand the group hit the deck. Despite being absolutely inept, they tell Sandra and the two kids to go to retrieve some documents from a nearby mansion, or George will ‘get it’. Although they’re terrified, they set off, leaving George in their home. Except it turns out, it’s all his planning, and the pair are even more incompetent than one could possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, at the mansion, a strange gathering is taking place. A group of ageing, overweight gentlemen are assembled for a weekend refuge. They are not getting pampered, though. Well, not in the normal spa way. Clad only in towelling nappies, they are given oversized milk bottles and begin guzzling at the teats. The nurses, all attractive, stocking-clad young girls are given strict instructions from the dominatrix-like Margaret (Sally Dexter) and her sidekick Clinton (Joanne Mitchell). The collection of men includes bankers, ministers, and other dignitaries and are played by the best of the grotesque. Brunt has worked with some of the men before; Seamus O’Neill is another Inbred veteran along for the ride while wild-haired comedian Charlie Chuck (Woof! Bark! Donkey!) appeared in the director’s Bait, but new to the team is Laurence R. Harvey, versatile star of The Human Centipede sequels amongst other cult offerings. They may look unusual to start off with, but once they commence feeding on the milk, am even more outlandish physical change begins. They grow porcine-type snouts and, worst still, start to soil their nappies.

This is the reason they are there: their excrement feeds the machine that perpetuates their wealth. Literally. Only, rather than a nuts-and-bolts thing, it’s an ancient alien that lives deep underneath the house. It’s an interesting concept (and beautifully farfetched) and is just crazy enough to make the rest of the film appear normal.

What follows is a gloriously wild ride in which the family attempt to escape not only the marauding head nurse and her chainsaw-wielding colleague but the riled adult babies who are upset that their Masonic-type ritual has been interrupted.

By the time the movie reaches its climax, there’s enough gore to please any horror hound and more shite than Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence put together. If you can stomach that, you’re in for a treat. We’re also treated to several different styles of filmmaking: a vintage cartoon sequence, for example, illustrates the pig’s greed, Alex Chandon weaves his visual magic for a psychedelic trip into the creature’s mind, and a brilliantly over the top sequence animated by Claymation master Lee Hardcastle comes out of nowhere.

In today’s political climate, the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ has increased exponentially. It actually makes the powerful, well-to-do occupants of the retreat rather believable. Some of the most influential figures in the world act like man-babies a lot of the time (there are a few, like a certain president, who seem to behave no other way), so it makes sense that they’d want some place where this can be indulged to the most grotesque degree. However, this is not a perverse fetish. They are there for a reason, and that reason perpetuates their wealth.

Dominic elaborated on what he wanted to do with the film: “I wanted to tell a wider story about the banking system and the people in charge and the corrupt politicians and MPs and people in authority who seemingly have the power to tell us and everybody else what to do,” he told us, “whereas they’re actually human beings, too and more often or not they are where the stories are.” The situation is so ridiculous that there had to element of humour in there, though, “It’s all to do with poking fun at that, not being too serious, trying to make a political point but putting it across satirically because nobody wants to listen to a political point any more, certainly not over an hour and a half in a film.” And although there’s a serious point behind it all and some wry comedy, it’s not played wholly for laughs. “It’s not a Shaun of the Dead-type thing,” Brunt said, “there’s humour in there, but it’s not presented as humour. Everyone plays it absolutely straight. In tone, it’s a bit like The Lobster, where everything’s very strange, and the funny things are ignored; it’s not played for laughs at all.”

Brunt peppers the film with horror film references and tropes – some obvious (quotes from Night of the Living Dead and a line lifted straight from anarchic eighties show The Young Ones) and some surprisingly subtle – but it’s the screenplay’s unique take on modern living that raises the biggest smiles. Some very low brow but on-the-pig-nose humour comes from the hideously deformed wheelchair-bound elder (whose name is bleeped out in a high-level Pythonesque show of surrealism), who’s meant to be keeping an eye on the security of the place but ends up watching call girl-type shows (you know, the ones that are on the lower reaches of the Sky channels) on his laptop. His desk is covered in tissues (he… err… must have had a cold…) and at one point he’s seen putting the phone down just as the girl on screen breaks down uncontrollably. We’d have loved to overhear that conversation! While we’re on that seedy subject, there’s an intermission midway through (a nod to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, perhaps?) in which we see two very bored-looking models awaiting their calls, shaking their mobiles eagerly at the camera. Superb attention to detail there, Mr Brunt!

Fans of Dominic’s TV acting career will be pleased to know that, despite the big man not appearing in front of the camera this time (we do hear him doing a rather fine Alan Bennett voice, though), several of his Emmerdale alumni make appearances, but they are not token cameos, they also prove their acting chops (as well as showing how game they are). Nicky Evans (Shane Maguire in Shameless) also returns to work with the director (he played a key role in Before Dawn) as one of the utterly clueless Russian thugs in the opening who ends up with more than just a headache. Fans of Cannibal Apocalypse and the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will enjoy his demise.

We’ll leave the last word on why you should see the film to the director himself: “The image of an adult baby is great; big fat men running around dressed in nappies chased by sexy nurses in suspenders. That would carry me through an hour-and-a-half of any movie, to be honest with you!” If that doesn’t convince you to watch, nothing will.

ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES screens on Horror Channel on January 5th. Sky 317, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.

In 2010, Howard and Jonathan Ford wrote and directed a fresh take on the zombie film with The Dead. Set within the soaring heat of Africa, a survivor of an airplane crash attempts to find his family while the undead take grip of the country. It was a bold and exciting change of pace from what we were used to from the zombie subgenre at this point, debuting just before the behemoth TV series The Walking Dead hit screens in October, 2010. It was as bleak as a zombie movie should be and paved the way in 2013 for a sequel, this time set in India.

The Dead 2: India, like its predecessor, makes no attempt to explain the zombie outbreak, instead just puts us straight into the action. However, it’s a subdued affair, and like the first movie, involves a trek across barren land and dangerous clime as our hero, Nicholas (Joseph Millson), attempts to reach his pregnant girlfriend, Ishani (Meenu Mishra), 300 miles away in Mumbai. Nicholas is an engineer on the wind turbines, a job that comes in handy later on when he needs to get things working to aid him on his journey. Along the way, he meets a small orphan boy, Javed (Anand Krishna Goyal), who he saves from certain death when the boy’s village is overrun with the undead.

The film kicks off, however, with a stunningly evocative credit sequence that juxtaposes the bustling cities of India with the poor and litter-strewed slums; the camera floating past the locations creating an almost 3D effect. Our first taste that something’s wrong is when a passenger on ship from Somalia (a neat link with the first film) stumbles home feverishly after his journey, dazed having been ‘bitten by a mad woman’ before boarding. In such a densely populated city, it’s not long for his disease to spread, and soon the dead will be tearing the throats of the living and stumbling slowly across the continent.

Not only does The Dead 2: India masterfully play with tension and deliver some gory treats, it’s stunningly photographed by Jonathan Ford, on triple duties as well as co-writing and co-directing. The opening shots have a nightmarish quality and pays homage to the likes of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead beautifully. Effects-wise, the majority were done in-camera, with just a few CGI moments to smooth things over. Star Joseph Millson told reporters when interviewed at the film’s premiere at the Film 4 FrightFest in 2013 that he “had almost no idea what was coming on every bit of action,” revealing that despite the intricate script, the shock set-ups were as surprising to him as they are to the audience. The stunts were all him, too “I was black-and-blue; I have the scars and bumps and bruises to prove it – that was fun!” Millson had previously been best known for British TV series Holby City and The Sarah Jane Adventures but had actually worked with the Ford Brothers on his first acting role, La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats, directed by Jonathan Glendening. He actually got the role of Nicholas after contacting the brothers about a film he was helping produce. The director wanted to call the movie The Dead, but Millson had heard of another film of the same name. Realising he’d worked with the Ford Brothers earlier, he contacted them and asked if they’d change their name. Naturally, they refused, but it put the actor back on their radar.

According to Millson, the Ford Brothers shot the film over the course of a month guerrilla-style on location after the Indian authorities refused permission. Whatever the reality, the brothers managed to do so much that was thought undoable. It was big ask, especially considering the action scenes the brothers had set up in the script. Many of these were intended for the first film, but that was such a harsh shoot, they were shelved. Here, though, there are no such reservations as Nicholas uses a paraglider and a vintage motorcycle among other things to make his escape. The army were also involved, appearing in the film and allowing the use of guns. The big problem authorities would have is the showing of the complete offensive contrast of the situation in the towns – opulent living overlooking the poorest living conditions you could imagine. Co-director Howard Ford said of the situation: “We all had tourist visas but when we went under the radar alarm bells must have rung as people from the ministry would consistently turn up at the hotels and bed and breakfast places where we were staying. However, we always managed to stay one step ahead of them as we were travelling 300 miles every other day. On one occasion we could see the flashing lights of police cars in the distance coming for us, but we still managed to escape in the nick of time”.

Like the first movie, in between the flesh-eating carnage and boiling hot road trip, there’s a real heart and human story. Nicholas’ motivation is the love of his girlfriend and the hope that he can save his unborn child. His unlikely friendship with the orphan Javid also spurs him on to ensure he’s safe too. There are awful decisions to be made along the way, though. Particularly when Nicholas comes across a young mother and child trapped in a crashed car.

Although The Dead 2: India wasn’t as well received as its predecessor, it’s deserves much more of an audience. Everything about it: the cinematography (how could you go wrong with the stunning vistas and evocative surroundings?), the subtle and haunting score by Imran Ahmad complements the images perfectly, and has the most simply effective zombies since Romero’s corpses shuffled across the screen. It’s also chock-full of gore, with the undead tearing pieces off victims and open wounds aplenty.

You get the chance to catch The Dead 2: India when it gets a UK TV premiere on Horror Channel. The channel will also be screening another film written and directed by Jonathan Ford and featuring sibling Howard in a small role, Offensive (2016). Set in rural France, it follows a retired couple who move into a house inherited by the male’s father, who helped liberate the village from the Nazis. As outsiders, they are besieged by a bunch of local thugs who have been conducting a reign of terror in the area and could have been behind the death of the father. A cross between Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and James Watkins’ Eden Lake in both tone and brutality, it’s another one not to miss. A sort of geeky side note: the lead character (Bernard, the son of the war hero) is played by Russell Floyd, who was DC Ken Drummond in the much-missed TV series The Bill for three years during its heyday. Now don’t tell us we don’t educate you…

The Dead 2: India and Offensive bookend Horror Channel’s FrightFest season in August, which highlights some of the best films from previous years’ festivals. Other titles include: Attack of the Adult Babies, A Lonely Place to Die, All Cheerleaders Die, Martyrs (2015 version), The Green Inferno, Ginger Snaps, and more.

You can tune into the Horror Channel on Sky 317, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.