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Making the UK Action Movie Ten Dead Men

For their follow-up to Left for Dead, independent filmmakers Ross Boyask and Phil Hobden weren’t prepared to let a little thing like money stop them making something bigger, bolder and bloodier than their debut feature. Working with an extremely low budget and shooting over eighteen months in the cast and crew’s spare time, Ten Dead Men is a testament to the pair’s commitment to delivering one of the UK’s most vicious action films.

With the film recently released on DVD, director Boyask and producer Hobden talked to Combat about wringing every stunt they could from their tiny budget…

How did you approach making Ten Dead Men different from your previous work?

Ross Boyask: Left for Dead was very ‘comic-book’ and had a fun, happy-go-lucky approach. Ten Dead Men is more like its brooding older brother. I think this partly came from wanting to make a slightly darker film.

Phil Hobden: Action and horror have both gotten more violent over the last few years and, from a producer’s point of view, the blood and guts opens it up to the gore fans as well as action. Not wanting to make it sound like a ‘product’ but from the start we were very aware of the market that 10DM would have to compete in.

Did that also influence the action sequences you wanted to include?

PH: Action is a genre you can’t cut corners on. Your money needs to be on the screen. I wanted some key set-pieces that could be done for the money we had but that would also add value for buyers and the people watching it. The cage fight, banger race and Parkour sequences where all must haves in my eyes so Chris [Regan, screenwriter] had a few to write in. There are always things you want to do that you can’t. The biggest was a helicopter landing. No matter how hard I tried we couldn’t get one for the money we had.

Was the style of fighting and weapons used also decided early on?

RB: The main focus for each action sequence was “how does this scene serve the story”? The idea was that the characters would use whatever is at hand - from an ashtray in the toilets to a discarded bottle. We did not particularly use traditional martial arts weapons, except in a few shots. The aim was to keep the action grounded in some reality, but also to inject some style with the occasional flashy move.

How did the low budget effect the rehearsal time for the more complex sequences?

PH: Some of them are more raw because of the lack of time put into them. You don’t have working hours on an indie film, just goodwill hours, and they can get burnt quickly so you have to be careful how far you push people. The cage fight was rehearsed in under two hours and shot in even less than that. All whilst the arena was being set out for their biggest ever event - and the promoter was in the ring with us acting alongside our team!…

Continued on Combat Magazine

Held over the weekend of May 21-24 at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, Terracotta was a festival designed to satisfy cult movie fans while also piquing the interest of casual cinema-goers who had just stumbled out of yet another poor J-horror remake at one of the nearby multiplexes. ‘The idea was to have something for everyone and to counter certain perceptions about Asian cinema that Tartan Asia Extreme helped create in people’s imaginations – that Asian films are all horror stories about long-haired ghosts’, Festival Director Joey Leung told Electric Sheep.

Instead of bringing over the latest predictable gore-fests, Leung presented a more intimate line-up, handpicked from Asian festivals, to offer a balanced representation of the region’s output. Some choices could be considered obvious – the manga smash hit Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (2008) or the slick Korean heist thriller Eye for an Eye (2008) – but these were matched by some quirky gems that would otherwise not be available in the UK. For example, has anyone seen a Malaysian zombie movie? OK, has anyone seen a Malaysian movie? Thought not, but Terracotta screened one, right after Hong Kong’s martial arts throwback Legendary Assassin (2008).

Entitled Zombies from Banana Village (2007), it was easily the weirdest film at the fest. Full of commentary and in-jokes about Malaysian life, it is a return to the socially conscious zombie movies of the old days, featuring a team of slackers in a remote village trying to fend off shambling brain-eaters. The film is predominantly a comedy with schlocky effects and a nostalgic Scooby Doo vibe – the beginning even spoofs the opening of Police Squad.

Johnnie To’s Sparrow…

Continued on Electric Sheep Magazine

The original Transporter was conceived by Luc Besson in 2002 with a simple remit; launch Jason Statham as an unlikely action hero for the new millennium by throwing him into some flashy car chases and getting him to wrestle in oil under the direction of legendary stunt co-ordinator Corey Yuen. Despite being met by critical indifference the film went on to bank $44 million worldwide. 2005 saw director Louis Leterrier deliver a sequel that went so far over the top it almost escaped the Earth’s gravitational pull, defying nearly every law of physics, but it cemented the series’ reputation as the ultimate guilty pleasure and made $85 million. So it’s another 3 years later and guess what…

The cynics out there may regard Besson’s series as a calculated get-rich-quick scheme designed to line the French producer’s pockets. They are films defined by testosterone-fuelled action set-pieces, unapologetic in favouring bangs over brains with a hero who is kept deliberately non-complex, a mercenary who lives by his own rules and focused only on getting the job done. But in today’s market the action genre is now a very different one. It’s a world where the hero suffocates the enemy with a newspaper and has a good cry afterwards, a world of consequence and moral angst. After Bourne and Bond rewrote the rules, is there still room for a bald do-gooder who “never opens the package”?

Helmed by Olivier Megaton, Transporter 3 is as subtle as the director’s surname. Thankfully, it avoids the current trend for dark realism and continues the franchise’s brazen disregard for peaceful solutions. After Quantum of Solace decided to take everything far too seriously, making the mistake of thinking that complicated now means good, the market deserves some diverting entertainment and Transporter 3 arrives as something of an antidote. The film returns to the grittier elements of the first instalment, cutting out the excessive ridiculousness that made the second almost a comedy, and puts the character of Frank Martin back on track as an actual Transporter rather than a babysitter.

The film opens with Martin enjoying retirement in the South of France with regular series companion Tarconi (François Berléand) but, as well all know, retirement is a serious mistake for the action professional. So it’s not long before Martin’s forced into another job and finds himself driving the uncommunicative Valentina (Natalya Rudakova) to Odessa in Ukraine. In terms of story it’s the most comprehensible with screenwriters Besson and Robert Mark Kamen setting up their story of evil businessman Johnson – played by Prison Break’s Robert Knepper – blackmailing a government official early on and don’t worry about trying anything too clever. The main focus is on Martin reunited with his beloved black Audi although this time round there’s an added catch – if he gets more than 75 feet away from his vehicle a bracelet will splatter the Stat Man across Europe.

If you’re thinking of Rutger Hauer’s Wedlock you’re not far off. It’s a gimmick…

Continued on Combat Magazine

Hong Kong star Jackie Chan reteams with director Stanley Tong in a mess of a movie that tries to get away from the pair’s lighter action films such as First Strike and Rumble in the Bronx. Unfortunately the decision to blend an epic storyline with a dumb adventure one means that the tone is all over the place and ropey special effects detract from Chan’s trademark ingenuity.

The modern portion of the film follows an archaeologist, Jack Chan (stretching Chan’s acting skills to the limit), who keeps having dreams of being a General saving the Emperor’s concubine (Hee-seon Kim) - a story which is also played out in the film’s bloated 2-hour running time. Chan’s mate convinces him to help hunt for the secret behind an anti-gravity invention (what?) and he gradually learns about past lives…

Continued on Combat Magazine

Smells Like Comedy Jim, But Not As We Know It

In broad terms you could describe Fine, Totally Fine as a slacker comedy. The loose plot focuses on two wayward twentysomething friends who’ve done little to fulfil their potential as they head for the big 3-0. But you can forget about the bawdy end of the genre – no dick jokes, reefer madness or road trips here. Fujita’s approach is quite the opposite. He keeps things slow and thoughtful, cultivating laughs from situations tinged with surrealism. It’s definitely not a film about youthful exuberance, but about reconnecting with reality after the heady freedom of early adulthood.

Fine – such a complex word. It’s what everyone wants to hear when they ask, “So how are you?” “Fine”, comes the reply. They’re not doing good, they’re not doing bad, they’re just getting on with things, great. But it’s a word that hides everything, that avoids the issue of what’s really going on. And so it’s frequently used by director Yosuke Fujita’s trio of characters to gloss over their rather lacklustre existences as they coast through life, helplessly caught between youth and finally growing-up.

The basic plot follows the lives of two childhood friends – Teuro (Arakawa), who works in his father’s used bookshop but really wants to build the world’s scariest haunted house, and Hisanobu (Okada), who has a job with a tie and everything but is still desperately lonely. As Teuro’s father gradually becomes more withdrawn, the pair both fall for a strange young woman, Akari (Kimura), who has trouble holding down a job yet is a gifted artist.

In a way, Teuro is a bit like Simon Pegg’s Tim in Spaced. He drifts between jobs with no real ambition and his room is filled with horror movie junk which he doesn’t really know what to do with. But while Tim had plenty…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Over just four days, Joey Leung hopes to dramatically change your perception of Asian cinema. With his specially selected program of 13 films from all over the Far East, Leung’s Terracotta Festival is an ambitious attempt at breaking the stereotype that Asian films are all just about extreme horror, guns and spooky ghosts.

One recognisable name in Terracotta’s program is Oxide Pang – the Hong Kong director responsible for The Eye (2002). But the film of his that is being screened isn’t yet another sequel to that notorious horror franchise. The Detective (2007) is a much more restrained film about a young gumshoe searching for a missing girl in Bangkok’s Chinatown and shows his strength as a director without having to rely on flashy visuals.

Similarly, Johnnie To is best known for his crime thrillers but Terracotta will give audiences the chance to see the director working on a different level in the light-hearted 60s-influenced crime caper Sparrow (2008): ‘Everyone keeps saying the end is like Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)’, says Leung, ‘It didn’t do well in Hong Kong but film fans can appreciate the stylistic and artistic picture he’s trying to paint. That’s the point of a festival – to unearth films that might not be commercial.’

As well as art-house ponderings – also showing are Kim Ki-duk’s surreal Dream (2008) from Korea and Taiwan’s Keeping Watch (2007) about the strange reconnection of two childhood friends – Leung is making sure that action fans are also provided for in his intriguing cross-section. The festival is set to open with a bang thanks to Korea’s heist thriller Eye for…

Continued on Electric Sheep

Smells Like Dr Strangelove for the News 24 Generation

Radio gaffs, porn expenses, leaked information, these things never happen in politics right? Wrong, and Armando Iannucci sticks the knife into the corrupt underbelly of world politics and gleefully twists it in this wickedly funny satire on the lead-up to the Iraq war. With politics reduced to meetings and nibbles, and spin doctors sexing-up intelligence reports with snazzy blue folders, In the Loop is worryingly close to real-life headlines and embarrassments. Eviscerating politicians is nothing new, but Iannucci cuts through with such wit (and foul language) that this is simply one of the best British comedies in years.

Armando Iannucci might not be the best known name in British TV but he damn well should be. The brains behind the likes of The Day Today and I’m Alan Partridge, Iannucci’s synonymous with biting comedy and he’s lost none of his edge in this big screen cousin to TV series The Thick of It - his BAFTA winning swipe at government incompetence.

Fans will be glad to hear that Peter Capaldi’s venomous spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is once again covering anyone who’ll listen in his trademark bile. Mostly in the firing line is the bumbling Minister Simon Foster (Hollander) who makes the mistake of calling the possibility of a war with an unspecified Middle Eastern country “unforeseeable” in an interview. This single word means he’s suddenly a pawn in a struggle between UK and US powers both trying to advocate a war no-one wants.

Foster’s constant flip-flopping is the core of the movie as he seeks to increase his profile but without really committing to anything. Equally inept at dealing with his flat-cap wearing constituents – Steve Coogan worrying about a collapsing wall – as he is with global politics, Foster is almost unbelievably useless, like Mr Bean Goes to Washington. Thankfully, Hollander perfectly captures his twitchy Napoleon…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like It’s Oh So Quiet

Singapore’s cult director Royston Tan swaps the raw furiousness of his first feature film 15 for a much more measured follow-up. Based on his early mornings making 15, Tan’s 4:30 dwells in a melancholic half-light as two characters struggle to connect. Little action and long takes might not be to everyone’s tastes but it’s an incredibly emotive experience that captures the isolation of loneliness magnificently. In a world of more, more, more, Tan taps into the dark night of the soul with just two actors and a camera.

Anyone catch Gus Van Sant’s Gerry? If you did you’ll remember it was a meandering drift through the desert with just two characters where nothing much really happens. It’s what a director would call ‘meditative’ cinema and if you found Gerry interminable you’d probably define that as pointless and boring. But if you prefer your film experiences to be something of a trip that break out of the usual confines of scripts and scenes then 4:30 offers similar and a lot more besides.

While Gerry didn’t seem to meditate on anything – it was just weird and inexplicable – Tan’s themes are more recognisable. The film centres around the time of 4:30am when a young Singapore schoolboy, Xiao Wu (Li-yuan), prowls around trying to occupy himself while his mother is away on business. The only other tenant is ‘uncle’ Jung (Young-jun) who is alcoholic, depressed and constantly failing to kill himself.

Obviously the film isn’t a barrel of laughs as Tan explores the quiet agony of loneliness. There’s very little dialogue and even less camera movement as Tan lets the relationship between his two characters unfold gradually. Xiao Wu’s looking for a father figure and takes a strange interest in Jung, frequently…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like the Opposite of Tango & Cash

This exhaustively researched and authentic account of two of Denmark’s most famed World War 2 freedom fighters demonstrates the brutal side of heroism. It’s certainly not as divertingly entertaining as recent boys’ own adventures like Valkyrie, but what it lacks in fireworks it makes up for in complexity. There’s plenty of sex and violence in there but director Madsen, rather resolutely, sticks to the cold reality of waging a secret war where the commanders are as mysterious as the enemy and never really gets into the skin of the two enigmatic characters.

Set in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1944, the film begins with the redheaded, and worryingly young, Bent (Lindhardt), codename Flame, getting ready for what he’s best at – assassinating targets for the Holger Dansk resistance group. He goes to the address, knocks on the door and shoots someone in the face. It’s not pretty, it’s not glamorous, but it’s what he has to do for his homeland.

Madsen treads a fine line between reverence of his subjects and dealing with the realism of the situation. His central theme is whose side are these guys really on when there is no frontline? Supposedly the intelligence is handed down from London through their contact Winther (Mygind) but Flame’s paranoia begins to get the better of him, especially after flirting with a possible agent, Ketty (Stengade). With everyone so secretive and guarded, the film’s greatest strength is in slowly, painfully, picking apart the myths that can spring up around heroes when the reality is much murkier.

While Flame is the deadly loner, his driver Jørgen/Citron (Casino Royale’s Mads Mikkelsen) is a guilt-ridden mess torn between supporting his family and fighting oppression. As a bookish idealist, it’s Citron’s story which is the most interesting against Flame’s more…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

I was very glad to see Slumdog Millionaire thrash the amazingly boring Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Oscars. Not just because Slumdog was a British film, but because it was full of energy and had bags of enthusiasm for film as a storytelling medium. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the best film’s ever – the device used to link questions on the gameshow to flashbacks was a bit clunky – but the crisp editing and manic shooting style took the viewer on a rollercoaster through Mumbai’s slums and rich history. Danny Boyle more than deserved his Oscar - his best, most original film since Trainspotting.

By comparison, David Fincher’s Benjamin Button was like a death row inmate on a slow, inevitable trudge towards the gas chamber. It has no interesting story except the quirky notion that its protagonist starts as an old man and gets younger – not that anyone makes a big deal about this or tells the papers. Perhaps because it’s set in the Deep South where weird stuff like this seems to happen on a daily basis (see Forrest Gump and Big Fish for further case studies).

In terms of the special effects, it’s amazing. How they got Brad Pitt through the various stages of the aging process is seamless but at the same time it’s like the actor had no idea what was happening at the time – it’s like he stood around on set and everything else was painted in later. He really does absolutely nothing. Even when you think it’s going to get exciting when the war comes along he spends nearly all of it creeping around a hotel with Tilda Swinton. When Forrest Gump did nothing, amazing things still happened to him. The point being that even the bluntest tool in the box has a place in world history – it was the American Dream for absolutely everyone.

If the point of Benjamin Button is to say that even the life of someone truly unique is as boring and pointless as everyone else then bravo, mission accomplished. What’s even more astonishing is that Fincher is behind it, the genius behind Fight Club and Seven. Zodiac took place over a long timeline and managed to be swimming in character detail and richly researched facts. I can only imagine his interview for the directing gig went something like this…

PRODUCER: So it’s about a guy who ages backwards. He starts off as an old man but dies a baby. We’ve got Pitt lined up for the role, he wants to play every age of the character.

FINCHER: Sounds like a challenge.

PRODUCER: Exactly. That’s why we came to you. The guy who made the camera fly through the handle of a kettle, who tracked a shot through someone’s brain to the barrel of a gun.

FINCHER: Thanks, but in this case you ask the impossible.

Fincher gets up and heads for the door.

PRODUCER: What’s the matter Fincher? Chicken?!

PRODUCER’S ASSISTANT: Buckbuckbuckbuckawwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

Fincher freezes. His hand is almost on the door handle but he draws it back…