Indie Spotlight: Colin - Review

I remember back in 2009 reading about Colin in a UK newspaper and coming away intrigued.  After finding success at a number of festivals around the world it became a critical hit at the Cannes Film Festival and found itself being released into UK cinemas with writer/director Marc Price transformed into the poster boy for zero budget film-making almost overnight.   Celebrated for the fact that it was reportedly made on the sort of nano-budget that wouldn’t cover the cost of a family trip to the cinema I made a mental note to check it out when the opportunity presented itself.

Fast-forward to 2014 and a couple of days back I announced on Twitter that once a week I intended to ask my followers to recommend a movie for me to review with the first suggestion out the gate the winner.  I was aware that this was an idea that could explode in my face if someone decided to maliciously offer up an Uwe Boll movie or something similarly unbearable.  But this week some kind soul took mercy and suggested Colin.  This was fortuitous for two reasons.  1. I already owned the special edition DVD but hadn’t taken the opportunity to watch it yet.  2. The movie is really good.

What we have here is an existential zombie film.  The movie opens with the eponymous character arriving at a friend's house with a bloody hammer clenched in his fist.  Outside the sound of gunfire, screaming and explosions fill the air.  Clearly this isn’t a typical English afternoon (if you come from a particularly rough area feel free to disagree).  It soon becomes apparent that he’s been bitten and to add further injury to insult he is attacked in his kitchen by his best friend who has joined the ranks of the living dead and proceeds to bite our "hero" on the back of the neck before himself suffering an intense cranial battering with the aforementioned hammer.  Colin proceeds to pass out and when he awakens he’s a card carrying revenant.  So begins a tale that despite being created on a budget most big movies would waste on a pause between takes has been made with a great deal of love for the genre and more than a few smarts.

Colin himself is less a character and more a mirror held up to the rest of society.  He shambles from one vignette to the next somehow surviving calamity after calamity and as the camera follows in his shambling footsteps we see the world around him and how different facets of humanity deal with a zombie apocalypse.  And it’s mostly grim.  Most of the human beings who cross his path are less human than he is despite him being a flesh eating, increasingly decaying wreck.  In terms of narrative it’s very episodic but nonetheless gripping once you acclimate yourself to the often languid pace.

I was especially impressed by the performance of Alastair Kirton as Colin.  The focal point of the entire movie and with the added burden of having practically no dialogue he is nevertheless a wonderfully somber presence throughout.  We've sympathised with zombies before; most notably Bub from Romero's classic Day of the Dead.  But I don't recall any movie where one of the undead was the centre of attention for the entire duration.  Kirton exudes restraint and delivers a subtle performance without which the movie would have fallen apart within the first five minutes. 

Another area where the movie shines is in the music.  Assuming we believe that the movie only cost £45 to make (do we believe this?) it’s simply astonishing that Colin comes complete with a wonderful, melancholy, almost post-rock soundtrack that provides the perfect sonic backdrop to the story that unfolds.  This movie has been described as moving.  Well a lot of the depth of feeling that can be found here is down to the music.

What Colin doesn't deliver in big budget spectacle it more than makes up for by taking one great idea, a cheap camcorder, a laptop and some obvious talent, not to mention the generosity of all the people who worked for nothing, and from those elements forging something that negates entirely the idea that money is a crucial part of making a worthwhile movie.  I believe that given the right circumstances and with the right people on board inspiration can blossom in the face of adversity and/or a meager budget.  It's alchemical. Turning very little into something with substance.  In recent years we've been subjected to a deluge of cheap, straight to DVD zombie movies most of which are the reverse of this theory.  In the face of this, gems like Colin become essential viewing for horror fans.  If only to remind themselves that there's life in the undead yet.

Steve's score:

Intro to Horror: Sam on Zombie Flesh Eaters

In this series our writers will be exploring what got them into the horror genre and which films (or books) they would recommend as a grounding in the genre for those who are just beginning their exploration.  First to confess all is AOTD's Film Editor Sam Inglis.

I grew up as a big movie fan from the age of ten or eleven, but came to the horror genre late.  My first interest in horror arose not through movies but through the news.  When the James Bulger case made the headlines it appalled me both because of the crime itself and because the perpetrators turned out to be just a year younger than me, but even aged eleven I could see that blaming a film (Child's Play 3) for the crime was stupid.  This led, over the next few years, to an increasing interest in censorship and the banning of films, which obviously meant horror films.

My parents, however, were pretty strict and though I must have seen a few over the years their ban on my watching unsuitable films was remarkably effective for a long time (and when I did finally begin to secretly overturn it I went to Showgirls first, because that came out on tape when I was 15 and promised a lot of boobs).  I only really began to discover horror films properly when I left home, which also happened to coincide with the beginnings of the biggest liberalisation in BBFC history and the first time release of some of the 'video nasties' that I had heard so much about.

My Intro to Horror

ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (Lucio Fulci)

I'm sure I had seen horror films before this one, but Zombie Flesh Eaters (which I initially saw on a slightly cut VHS I got from a second hand shop where I was living in Whitstable) was the first to really make me sit up and take notice of the genre and particularly of its more extreme end which is what I, to some degree, now specialise in.  My interest was piqued by the cover (see left) but also by the fact that the film had been banned and was not, in 1999, yet available in its uncut form in the UK.  Censorship was the initial catalyst for my interest in horror and that interest in censorship and this entry point continue to power my love of the genre to a great degree.

Being able to buy the film was no sure thing.  At 18 I still looked annoyingly young and could easily have passed for about 14 (I mind this less now that I'm 32), so going up to the counter with something with an adult certificate was always a gamble, but the guy at this shop didn't, I suspect, much care how old I was, so getting the film was relatively simple.  I think I had seen a couple of zombie films before, including the original Dawn of the Dead, but I had never warmed to them. This time, however, I was grabbed immediately thanks to the style of Lucio Fulci's filmmaking.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (which also goes by the names Zombie and Zombi 2) opens with a striking image of a corpse being shot in the head, before cutting to a deserted ship floating on the Hudson River.  The scene that unfolds on this ghost ship shows off many of Fulci's strengths.  There is a sense of foreboding as the cops explore the boat, looking for signs of life, along with some nice gross out images, and then a well realised and brutal zombie attack, complete with great effects courtesy of Gianetto DiRossi, one of the great masters of effects make up.

On this first viewing and subsequent watches up to when the Blu Ray came out and revealed for the first time what an incredible looking film Zombie Flesh Eaters really is, I essentially viewed it as a fun piece of gory hokum.  It works brilliantly on this level, and is an ideal gateway drug for someone looking to get into extreme horror (which is something I'll explore further in the second part of this article).  I found it hard to see what people would find all that offensive about the film, what with its ludicrous plot about voodoo zombies eating the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the tongue in cheek performances of British actors Richard Johnson and Ian McCulloch in the leads it seemed hard to take the gore all that seriously.

Fulci is also, I suspect, winking at the camera at certain points.  In these terms one scene sticks out, in which Auretta Gay goes swimming and encounters a shark, which is then attacked by a zombie.  This scene has no bearing on the plot, seeming instead to exist simply because somebody thought that a scene of a zombie ripping a chunk out of a shark would be cool.  They were right.  It is cool.  All of the effects scenes were cool and if anything the fact that they were sometimes frustratingly incomplete on this VHS meant that I was even more sucked in, even more determined to see the complete versions and dig deeper into this kind of movie.  The most annoying moment came with the famous splinter in the eye gag, which cut away JUST as Olga Karlatos' eye was about to be speared.  In fact this scene works just as well in its censored or its uncensored version.  In the former the horror of that image is left off screen and unimaginable, in the latter it is fully and brilliantly realised in one of the most memorably disgusting images in the video nasties.

My first viewing of Zombie Flesh Eaters was conducted through the fog of the three curses of the VHS era; pan and scan, censorship and poor image quality, but still I could see a real filmmaker at work, someone with technical chops and a real identity and inventiveness behind the camera.  Sure, it's a silly film, but it's executed with verve and style and even when it's a bit rubbish (the dialogue scenes) it's never less than fun and engaging.  I've seen better films – several of them Fulci's  – in the extreme horror genre since, but Zombie Flesh Eaters will always have a special place in my twisted little heart, because it's the movie that started it all for me.

In the next Intro to Horror I'll be recommending 10 essential extreme horror films that can serve as a jumping off point for people who haven't explored it before.