It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive

by Mark Kermode

  And for the next ninety minutes I interviewed Linda Blair. And she was great. Funny, intelligent, self-effacing, full of quotable stories, always ready to laugh at herself, profoundly aware of her own limitations, and just genuinely really nice. Despite my wobbly start, she put me at my ease, and together we meandered conversationally through the highs and lows of her career. With no hint of self-pity she told me about the weird life she had led in the wake of The Exorcist, recalling how people would recognise her in supermarkets and run screaming into the street.’I was a normal kid,’ she said, ‘and I wanted to be pretty. But all people ever said to me was, “Wow, can you really spin your head around and throw up?”’ She talked openly about some of the less than splendid straight-to-video sleaze she had made in the eighties (‘we were filming Red Heat in a sewer and the camera tripod had one foot in the river of poop’) and even apologised for Savage Island – an Italian women-in-chains cheapie for which she had recorded wraparound intro-outro scenes which allowed the makers to market it (spuriously) as ‘starring Linda Blair’. Now she was branching out into comedy, and had great hopes for the forthcoming Exorcist spoof Repossessed in which she co-starred with her funnyman idol Leslie Nielsen, but which, heartbreakingly, would turn out to be utter pants. Hey-ho.

  As the interview drew to a close, I asked her what The Exorcist meant to her after all these years, and she shrugged and said, ‘Well, you know, there isn’t a day goes by that someone doesn’t ask me about that film. So to me, it’s like my left arm – it’s just there.’

  As we parted, she said that she’d really enjoyed the interview and hoped I wouldn’t write another one of those stories about her going mad and being sent to an asylum and her mother being struck by lightning. Then she gave me a signed photograph of herself, in a swimming pool, in an affectionate embrace with a dolphin. She looked really happy in the picture – presumably dolphins don’t care about the bloody Exorcist.

  ‘Oh, and my agent said something about you staying with some people called Tim and Jenny?’ she added.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I replied sheepishly.’Sorry about that, it’s just that —’

  ‘So I got these for them too!’ she said brightly, handing over two more photos of her and the friendly sea mammal for my hosts.’Send me a copy of the article!’

  Which I did.

  Back in London, I filed the interview for Time Out’s newly launched monthly magazine 20/20, where it made a good-looking double-page splash. She came out of the interview very well, and everyone in the office commented on how surprised they were by what a smart, self-effacing woman she seemed to be, particularly since they’d all heard that she went mad and wound up in an asylum after her mother got struck by lightning.

  I would meet Blair again in 1998 when filming The Fear of God, the first documentary I ever made for BBC TV. She remembered me (or at least she said she did) and seemed pleasantly surprised that the weird-looking befuddled hack she’d talked to all those years ago in the Riverside Café had somehow managed to carve himself out a career on camera with a reputable broadcaster.

  ‘So, I guess things worked out alright for you?’ she quipped gaily.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘thanks partly to you. You did me a favour all those years ago. You took the time to give me a really nice interview. And I did well out of it. It got some attention. It got me more work back in England. I ended up writing a book about The Exorcist. One thing led to another. And so now…’

  ‘And so now here you are!’ laughed Blair.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘here I am.’

  And, indeed, there I was.

  Chapter 5

  BAD MUTHA RUSSIA

  Russia. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  Eisenstein. Tarkovsky. Klimov.

  And Woody Allen’s Love and Death … sort of.

  It was 1992 and I was back in London, still filing for Time Out, but now also faxing copy to that aforementioned horror-obsessives’ handbook Fangoria magazine in New York. The former paid the bills and gave me enough of a profile to be able to wrangle my way into movie preview screenings, but it was the latter which fuelled my sense of fanboy pride. As a fledgling genre fan I had kept a pile of dog-eared Fangos under the bed where more well-adjusted youths would presumably stash drugs and pornography. There was indeed something furtively dirty about the double-page pictorial spreads of severed limbs and monstrous bodily mutations which packed each new issue of Fango. Whereas old-style horror mags like Castle of Frankenstein and Famous Monsters of Filmland had feigned disgust or disdain at the genre’s more lurid excesses, Fango embraced splatter with a refreshingly punky relish which echoed the battle-cry from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome: ‘Long Live the New Flesh!’

  The first article I filed for Fango was an interview with British star Charles Dance who had just played the male lead in Alien3 which had been severely compromised (i.e. ruined) by lumpen-headed studio interference. That article had earned me a Fango front cover but I had my sights set on something altogether more meaty: a substantial set report, perhaps, with a distinctly British flavour – something my better-established American counterparts couldn’t get their hands on. Such an assignment duly materialised in the form of Split Second, a sub-Alien low-budget rubber monster movie set in a waterlogged near-future London, starring Rutger Hauer (a legend thanks to Blade Runner), Kim Cattrall (latterly of the ghastly Sex and the City) and Michael J. Pollard, best known as ‘the weird one’ out of Bonnie and Clyde. The film was directed by Tony Maylam who had acquired cult status amongst British horror fans for helming the briefly banned but otherwise unremarkable ‘video nasty’ The Burning.

  Hauer was fun, having been around the exploitation block enough times to know the value of being polite and pleasant in interviews. Years later I would enjoy Hauer’s company more fully whilst making the documentary On the Edge of Blade Runner for Channel 4. Hauer, who stole that film out from under Harrison Ford’s nose, was terrifically candid, claiming that Ford had never got over the fact that ‘he thought he was playing the hero, but his character was just a guy who fucks a dishwasher and then falls in love with it’. Ford declined to comment.

  Kim Cattrall had just completed work on Star Trek VI and like Hauer knew the importance of keeping the geeky fans onside. The wild card, however, was Pollard, who gave me my first taste of a genuinely unusable interview. Having presumably been strong-armed by the producers to earn his keep by talking to the oiks of the genre press, Pollard agreed to spend fifteen minutes with my colleague Alan Jones (who filed for the more upmarket Cinefantastique) and me in his fantastically unimposing trailer. Thrilled to be in the company of a genuine star, we asked him about his role in Split Second as ‘The Rat Catcher’, only to be told: ‘I’m on the Madonna album!’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m on the Madonna album!’

  ‘You’re … sorry, what?’

  ‘I’m on the Madonna album,’ Pollard said a third time, before adjusting his voice to a high-pitched enigmatic squeak and barking: ‘Calling Dick Tracy!’

  I turned to Alan for support. He’d been in this game longer than I had. Surely he’d know what the hell was going on.

  ‘You mean … you’re on the soundtrack album to Dick Tracy?’ said Alan, clearly struggling.

  ‘That’s right!’ squealed Pollard gleefully.’Calling Dick Tracy!’

  And he was. Apparently a sample of his voice could indeed be heard ‘on the Madonna album’, providing one of the LP’s undoubted highlights. Beyond that we got nothing out of him – certainly nothing about Split Second. He was the Keyser Soze of unquotable interviewees.

  In the wake of the Pollard experience I learned that there really is no point attempting to interview actors about movies in which they aren’t really interested (publicists take note) and which they were presumably only doing for the money. Nothing wrong with that – we’ve all got to work, and with most actors out of work for most of the time no one can be criticised for earning an honest crust.
Personally I’ve never had any problem with people doing trash to pay the bills, and if they don’t want to talk about their trash, then hey, fair enough (although some of them are apparently ‘contractually obliged’ to do so). Conversely, Julian Sands once snapped at me on the set of the ultra-low-budget British bloodsucker Tale of a Vampire (which was ‘arty’ rather than ‘trashy’) when I joked that no one could accuse him of doing this film ‘for the money’. Knowing that I was from Fangoria – a publication of which he may well have disapproved – Sands scowled and replied tartly, ‘I don’t do anything “for the money”. Do you?’ I felt like saying, ‘Well actually yes, I hang around on movie sets like this in the middle of nowhere for hours on end just waiting and waiting in the hope that I can spend ten measly minutes talking to some actor who gets hoity with me because they think that they’re “above” anything as sordid as earning a living and don’t seem to realise that I’m just doing a job which will actually help their movie find an audience and possibly even make money.’ But I didn’t. Because I needed to be nice to him so that he would continue to speak to me and so that I could go home at the end of the day and file an interview with him for Fangoria.

  For the money.

  It occurs to me now that Sands’ fleeting offhand comment (which was probably utterly uncharacteristic and which he doubtless cannot even remember) may well have played a big part in my ongoing inability to appreciate his marvellous acting talents ever since, and to provoke me to mock him in public on numerous occasions in my role as an apparently unbiased film critic. In which case I owe him an apology.

  And vice versa.

  Anyway, back to Russia – via Italy. Sometime after filing the Split Second set report I got a phone call from Mariano Baino, an aspiring film-maker whom I had met before and been impressed by, for two reasons. The first was that he had made an admirably atmospheric short film entitled Caruncula, which was twisted and evocative in all the right ways (acclaimed horror novelist Ramsey Campbell called it ‘a small masterpiece of sustained perversity’) suggesting a burgeoning directorial talent. The second and equally important reason was that Mariano was actually Italian, which was to horror what being Dutch or Swedish was to porn. In effect being Italian was a qualification, a badge of honour to be worn with pride. While Britain had given us Hammer and America had given us The Exorcist, Italy had spawned the ‘gialli’, a stylish and lurid brand of screen thrillers which took their name from the ‘yellow’ cover designs of the pulp paperbacks which inspired them. From the maestro Mario Bava (who predated everything from Friday the 13th to Alien with stylish B-movies like Bay of Blood and Planet of the Vampires) to genre darling Dario Argento (whose films were bloody and beautiful in equal measure), Italy could rightly lay claim to having put the Art into exploitation cinema. Even Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (which featured unforgiveable scenes of animal cruelty) effectively prefigured The Blair Witch Project with its central morbid ‘found film’ motif. Add to this a string of die-hard weirdies like Aldo Lado’s Short Night of the Glass Dolls and Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? (both of which I would later proudly introduce uncut on Film4’s Extreme Cinema strand), and having an Italian driver’s licence became the equivalent of owning an all-access pass to the hearts and minds of the horror cognoscenti. Hell, we’d even forgive them for the misogynist dirge of Lucio Fulci’s loathsome New York Ripper, a film so staggeringly adolescent that even spotty male horror fans seemed embarrassed to praise it, resorting to carping on about Francesco De Masi’s ‘interesting’ score, as if this somehow mitigated the movie’s irredeemable awfulness.

  Mariano invited me and my colleague Nigel Floyd to meet him in Pizza Express by the side of the British Museum where he told us all about his upcoming first feature – a ghostly tale of terror entitled Dark Waters. It had been co-scripted by an English writer named Andrew Bark who had worked with Mariano on Caruncula. Apparently Bark’s original ten-page synopsis had been envisaged as an H. P. Lovecraft homage set in northern England with an American lead. But by the time Mariano pitched the movie to Nige and me the main action had moved to the Odessa Catacombs out in Ukraine, and the story centred on an English-raised girl returning to a remote island convent where her mother had died in childbirth, and which now harboured a dark demonic secret.

  Like so many charismatic film-makers, Mariano talked a really great movie. He brought the story of Dark Waters to life right there in Pizza Express, using storyboards and drawings to conjure vivid pictures of terror and amazement like P. T. Barnum’s cinematic heir. By the time he’d finished pitching the movie I was ready to remortgage my flat and finance the film myself. But there was no need. Miraculously, Mariano had secured the necessary backing thanks to an unfathomably labyrinthine series of connections involving punk rock and the conversion of roubles into dollars. As a teenager, Bark had been a big fan of black-garbed college kids turned pub-rock punk survivors the Stranglers, a devotion which had continued into later life. Somehow, through his membership of the international Stranglers fan club (who knew?) Bark had struck up a correspondence with a young Russian man, Paul Azov, who shared his passion for the band and who had fallen in with Siberian-born businessman Victor Zuev. Victor had set his sights on financing ‘the first Western film to be shot in Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union’ for reasons both artistic and fiscal. A low-budget film produced in Ukraine which could then turn a profit in the West would generate hard currency which was painfully difficult to come by in the former Soviet Union. Victor had apparently seen Caruncula at a festival in Russia and the unlikely trio were now engaged in a major movie undertaking which would never have happened if ‘Peaches’ hadn’t become a surprise Top Twenty hit back in the seventies. There were even wild rumours of Stranglers lead singer Hugh Cornwell performing a cameo role in the film, although this turned out (unsurprisingly) to be fanciful tosh. But the fact that the film was happening at all was still pretty impressive, and since these serendipitous beginnings, things had apparently moved on apace. Mariano had already held auditions in London for an English-speaking lead and had cast upcoming theatre actress Louise Salter, striking and elegant photos of whom were swiftly produced from a large brown Manila envelope. (Salter would later go on to have a small role as one of ten ‘Paris Vampires’ in the big-budget Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise bloodsucker Interview with the Vampire.) The rest of the cast had been selected from local talent in Russia and Ukraine, some of whom couldn’t speak English but who (we were assured) would learn the dialogue ‘phonetically’. It was to be a truly international undertaking; a Russian/Ukrainian horror movie, directed by an Italian, co-written by a Brit, starring an English woman, with a Baltic supporting cast (including a ‘Miss Russia’ runner-up!) and all made with an eye on eventual American distribution. What could go wrong?

  Being an entrepreneurial soul, Mariano had figured out that if he could somehow get Nigel and me out to Russia, then he could get valuable coverage for Dark Waters in a string of influential publications in the UK and US. Between us, Nige and I wrote for Time Out, 20/20, Fear, Fangoria and Video Watchdog, not to mention the radio reports we both now filed for the BBC. For our part, we’d get exclusive access to a horror-movie set whose location and backstory alone seemed guaranteed to provoke international interest. Even if the movie sucked the set reports would be unusual and therefore newsworthy. And Mariano had promised that at least some of the pictures would involve blood, so that would keep the Fango-reading gore-hounds happy. Plus, we’d get to have fun in Russia and Ukraine – a particularly big deal for me. For years I’d been parading around wearing the meaningless CCCP insignia (Yuri Gagarin badges, hammer and sickle earrings) which had become boringly fashionable amongst armchair student Trots in the eighties – I’d even started hoarding copies of Pravda (which was now being reprinted in English) on the basis that it couldn’t be any more ‘biased’ than the Murdoch press which held Britain in its evil thrall. Yet what I actually knew about the former Soviet Union wouldn’t
fill the back of a small postage stamp, and here was a chance to gain some invaluable first-hand experience. More importantly, here was an opportunity to start any future political argument with the phrase ‘Well, having actually worked in Russia …’ or to pull out the cineaste trump card ‘In my personal experience of Soviet film-making in the post-Wall era …’ which I was not about to pass up.

  Oh, and the entry stamp would look really cool on my passport.

  I was sold.

  So, some time later, Nige and I found ourselves at Heathrow airport, boldly setting out on a journey which would take us to Moscow, Odessa, and then on to Feodosiya on the Black Sea, with impressive Cyrillic screeds duly emblazoned in red ink upon our passports. The first leg of the trip went fabulously well, and we breezed through customs at Moscow airport despite my worries that the border authorities would take one look at us and put us straight on the next plane home. For several weeks I’d been studiously practising a speech which I would deliver in just such an eventuality, reassuring them that I was a bona fide British film journalist who had come here to report upon the glorious state of the glasnost-fuelled Russian film industry while simultaneously humming the chorus of the Internationale and striking an appropriately comradely pose – chin raised, back straight, with perhaps a sheaf of wheat draped over a muscular spanner-wielding forearm. But whoever was hiding behind the scary peaked cap at the customs desk never even looked at me, merely taking my passport and sliding it under an ominous blue light into which he stared for a couple of minutes while tapping away at a hidden keyboard, and then returning it without a word. Apparently I was in.

  Hooray!

  Nigel similarly went through on the nod, and we proceeded to the arrivals lounge where we were met by a man from the Dark Waters entourage whose name I cannot remember, but who I shall refer to as Ivan for reasons of stereotypical simplicity.