The Redeemer Son of Satan! (1978)

Constantine S. Gochis' The Redeemer Son of Satan! (1978) broke from what little norm there was for the pre-Halloween (1978) slasher movies by stirring in a spot of the popular devil movies that were running neck and neck with slashers at the time in the race for the public's affections, the effect of The Exorcist (1973) still being keenly felt at the box office.

In a disjointed and often quite disorientating series on interlocking flashbacks, we meet three men and three women who are travelling to their old school for a class reunion. By the time they arrive, the janitor has been murdered and the six (who all represent one of six deadly sins - the killer, presumably, is the seventh though it isn't made clear) are soon being stalked by a psychopath who may turn out to be the devil himself. The film is bookended by scenes of a young boy emerging from a lake and heading for a nearby church (the preacher turns out to be the killer - don't worry, that doesn't really spoil anything for you) and at the climax being taken back there.

Of all of the post-Texas Chain Saw Massacre/pre-Halloween slashers, The Redeemer (also released as the thuddingly to-the-point Class Reunion Massacre) is undoubtedly one of the weirdest. It's dreamlike atmosphere, sluggish pacing and fragmented narrative often make it more of a chore than it needs to be. It also doesn't help much that if the victims are meant to be sinners (and to be honest they seem to be fairly mild sinners at best), then who is it that we're supposed to be rooting for in the film? Gochis effectively removes audience identification by suggesting - as was often the case in the more puritanical of the slashers - that the victims deserve everything they get. Indeed, The Redeemer is almost unique among slashers in that the viewer is expected to side with the killer all the way - and one can't shake the uncomfortable feeling that we're simply witnessing the religiously fuelled wish fulfilment fantasies of either the writer William Vernick or, more likely, Gochis at work. The film makes heavy weather of its Christian symbolism and frequently gets bogged down in religious diversions, particularly in the early stages which are at best ponderous, at worst simply unwatchable.

Very little is explained in Redeemer which is no bad thing. This isn't the sort of horror movie where you're spoon fed answers from frame one though a little clarification of some of the more obscure moments would have been appreciated. Like who the boy in the lake is meant to be. And there's some nonsense with a set of double thumbs that the boy seems to transfer to the preacher only to get back again at the climax.

Buried away in this intriguing mess are some nice scenes, carefully and thoughtfully shot, and Gochis manages to create a creepy atmosphere with no discernible budget to speak of. But the confused and confusing structure, uncertain tone and almost prudish moralising render it all but unwatchable. It remains of some minor interest for predating the Seven Deadly Sins based stalk-and-slash mayhem of the infinitely better Se7en (1994).
KEVIN LYONS

Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers Part 2

The last of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV

The second disc of the BFI's excellent Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers release kicks off with some of the work of the British producer Cecil Hepworth, including one of the most famous of all British silent shorts, the action packed Rescued By Rover (1905), directed by Lewin Fitzhamon. This tale of daring canine rescue is incredibly accomplished for its day - it's a wonder that in these early days with such technically primitive equipment at hand that Hepworth and Fitzhamon even attempted including the eponymous hero hound - even today, animal actors can bring a seasoned director out in a cold chill.

Fantasy is represented in the Hepworth section by Fitzhamon's That Fatal Sneeze (1907), in which a young boy's revenge on an old man leads to disaster. The boy doses the man's clothes with sneezing powder causing a sneezing fit unlike any other - the man first wrecks his room, causes mayhem in the local town and eventually sneezes so hard that he spontaneously combusts!

The British Cricks and Martin and American Kineto Company offerings pass by with no discernable fantastic elements, bringing us neatly to the Pathé brothers. As with disc one, the fantasy centrepiece here is a lengthy, hand-coloured French fantasy, Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs (1905), clearly inspired by George Méliès' 1901 version of the same story. The Pathé's take on the story is in beautifully hand-stencilled colour (watch it and wonder for a moment at the patience, dedication and man hours needed to achieve the stunning effect seen here) and with some gorgeous and elaborate backdrops.

Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (1906) is in a similar vein, but this one boasts some excellent optical effects and once again those painted backdrops are stunning. The interior of the tomb is particularly brilliant, allowing the brothers to dolly sideways along its entire length - no big deal in these days of computer controlled cameras and Steadicams, but imagine the technical difficulties involved here and the craftsmanship used to overcome them. The genie is also a wonderful creation, actually quite creepy when he first appears.

Both Aladin (which boasts a massive cast) and Ali Baba end with elaborate tableaux, designed specifically to show off the Pathés genius with set design and mechanical special effects. Much smaller scale is their earlier dream fantasy, Reve et realite (1901), a remake of the George Albert Smith film Let Me Dream Again (1900) included on the first disc.

The Pathé section comes to a close with Magic Bricks (1905), a relatively lightweight and straightforward trick film, just an excuse really for lots of Méliès-like illusions. It's technically very well done but rather dull by their own standards.

It's back across the Atlantic for the next section, from the Edison Manufacting Company, which kicks off with a group of Scotsmen dancing in slow motion in It's Scotch (1898), the first known advertising film. Much more interesting is The Great Train Robbery (1903), the extraordinary Edwin S. Porter film that made full use of every cinematic trick known at that time. In fact, there's little here that isn't still being used every day on film sets around the world and The Great Train Robbery could easily stand its own against any modestly budgeted action film made today. It features some hand coloured sequences, though they're not as elaborate as the later French films, and the final shot of a bandit levelling his gun at the audience and firing is justly famous.

The last film of any real interest on disc two is Porter's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), another trick film and one well known to genre fans thanks to its inclusion in just about every book ever written on the subjects or horror and fantasy in the cinema. It's certainly a very clever film - there's an excellent, woozy representation of drunkenness achieved by superimposing panning shots - but it's rather crude compared to the more flamboyant and technically adventurous films being made by Méliès at the same time.

Overall, Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers is a wonderful release, one highly recommended to anyone interested in the earliest days of the cinema. The quality of the prints inevitably ranges from the adequate to the really rather shoddy, but after all these years, it's a miracle that any of them have survived at all. The disc comes with a commentary track but to be honest it's a bit if a disappointment - film historian Barry Salt knows his stuff but has very little to say about the films, usually relaying a short anecdote at the start if each film, then saying nothing else at all until the next short starts.

But that's a minor grumble and this excellent disc should keep your early cinema needs nicely sated. You can pick up a copy from Amazon by clicking here - it comes very highly recommended.
KEVIN LYONS

Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers Part 1

The seventh of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV

Back in 2005, The British Film Institute released Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers, a two disc collection of some of the earliest surviving examples of film making from Europe, the States and the UK. Over the next two weeks, I'll be looking at what's on these discs that may be of interest to EOFFTV visitors - and there's certainly plenty of that!

The first thing you notice while working your way through disc one is that the word primitive only really applies to a very few titles in this collection. There's a technical proficiency in some of the more ambitious films that no doubt startle many contemporary viewers with pre-defined ideas of what silent cinema should look like.

At first, disc one seems to following some sort of chronological patterns (though that gets a bit muddled later on) so it's only right then that it kicks off with a selection of shorts from the Lumière Brothers. Most of these extremely early examples are simply shots taken of everyday events (workers leaving the Lumière factory, a baby being fed, the famous Arrivée d'un train en gare à la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) which had viewers screaming in terror as the titular train pulls into the station) but there are some examples of the experimentation that oozes from every pixel of this DVD. Demolition d'un mur (1896), for example, is a simple shot of workers demolishing an old wall - but at screenings, projectionists would then reverse the film, amazing audiences when the wall appears to rebuild itself. And Le jardinière et le petit espiègle (1895) is the first known film shown to the general public to feature a fully staged fictional situation - in this case, the much copied and spoofed vignette of the naughty boy standing on a hosepipe so that the user gets sprayed in the face when he examines the nozzle to see what's wrong.

These "slice-of-life" shorts offer us a glimpse into a time as alien to us now as any futuristic thriller, a time when men all wore hats and gallantly tipped them at any passing cameraman, a time when fires were put out by brave fire-fighters aboard horse drawn (and in some cases, hand drawn!) fire engines.

The first treat for lovers of fantastic cinema comes in the shape of the inevitable Georges Méliès film, in this case a lengthy extract from Le voyage à travers l'impossible (1904). The first shock is to find it in faded but still impressive hand-tinted colour. The second is the realisation of just how technically advanced film-making had already become - this was made less than a decade after the earliest Lumière films, yet already Méliès had perfected techniques that would stay in use until the advent of the digital age. He made stunning use of sets, tinting and mechanical effects to enhance the story, a massive undertaking for its time.

With their breathtaking invention and epic scale, it's the films of Méliès that mark the real birth of cinema, the first flowering of the new art form's true potential. Even now, Le voyage à travers l'impossible is impressive and compelling viewing and there are genuinely moments here that will still have you wondering how he did that.

The rest of disc one of Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers is devoted to early British filmmakers. Birt Acres is represented by a very poor condition clip from Rough Sea at Dover (1895) and is fairly representative of the kind of work this little known British pioneer produced. Like the Lumières, he specialised in filming whatever took his fancy, making little or no attempt at creating a narrative.

More ambitious were the films of R.W. Paul, an electrician and scientific instruments maker whose body of work is represented here with a collection of shorts dating from 1898 onwards. Paul had collaborated with Acres in the design of their own camera and built the first specialist film production studio in the UK. He widely credited with being the true father of the British cinema, being not only a producer but also a distributors and ardent publicist for the fledgling art.

In one of Paul's shorts, The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), we see one of the earliest examples of cinema starting to reference itself, as a country bumpkin visits a travelling film show and is initially amused by the images of pretty young girls, then terrified by a train arriving, not at La Ciotat, but at some unidentified British station.

The disc also includes Paul's famous The '?' Motorist (1906), an attempt to "do a Méliès", a charming "trick" film that lacks the technical polish of Méliès but is endearing all the same with its tale of a motorist and his passenger who run over a policeman, drive the side of a building and do a few circuits of the rings of Saturn before crashing back to Earth!

Next up comes another great legend of early British cinema, George Albert Smith, one of the many film makers based in Brighton on the south coast and the one who more than most embraced fantasy subjects. His genre contributions here include the rather bizarre Let Me Dream Again (1900) in which a man drinks and smokes with a woman dressed as a clown, wild revelry for the time, which turns out to be a dream - he subsequently wakes in bed with his nagging wife. It became the norm in these early days for films to be remade fairly quickly, sometimes by the same producer (they would shoot another version of the film when the original negative was lost, damaged or simply wore out) and often by rival producers looking to emulate the original film's success. On disc two of Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers, we'll find a remake of Let Me Dream Again in the shape of the Pathé brothers' Reve et realite (1901).

The best of the Smith shorts on offer here is the last film he ever made, the ambitious comedy Mary Jane's Mishap (1903). The titular character is a not terribly bright scullery maid who tries to get a fire going with paraffin with predictably tragic results. Her grave (complete with the words "rest in pieces" engraved on it!) is visited by a group of women who are startled to see Mary Jane's ghost return to life and frighten them away before doing a little dance. Mary Jane herself is played by Smith's wife.

The rest of disc one contains only one further film with fantasy material, but there's still much to enjoy with offerings from the Sheffield Photographic Company, Haggar and Sons, Bamforth and Co (including The Biter Bit (1900), one of many variations on the Lumières' Le jardinière et le petit espiègle (1895)) and the grandly named Williamson's Kinematograph Company Ltd (which includes the famous The Big Swallow (1901) in which an angry man is so upset at being filmed that he swallows the man and his camera whole!).

Had the BFI just left things with this one disc, it would still be an extraordinary achievement. But they chose to dredge up even more long unseen treasures from their vaults for a second disc. We'll be looking at the contents of that one next week as well as looking at the DVD itself.
KEVIN LYONS

La cabina (1972)

The sixth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

When it turned up on British television in the mid 1980s, La cabina was something of an unknown quantity. It was shown during one of BBC2's much loved (and still very much missed) Saturday night horror double bills and has since gone on to earn something of a cult following among British fans in particular.

Like all of the best short films, the story is simplicity itself. Told with virtually no dialogue, it tells the tale of a man who stops off a telephone booth on the way home from dropping his son off at school. He finds that the phone itself is out of order and that he's trapped inside the booth, unable to open the door again. Several passers-by try to help but to no avail - then the phone company's truck arrives and the man's nightmare really begins...

It's the climax that everyone who has seen the film remembers the most, particularly the genuinely unsettling final shot which I simply can't describe here in case you get the chance to see it (I shouldn't encourage this, but it's easily available as a torrent - try Googling for it). Suffice to say that it is truly terrifying and disturbing.

Quite why La cabina hasn't turned up on DVD somewhere is a major mystery - yes, the marketing of short films is difficult but someone somewhere should have the wherewithal to put together a compilation of classic horror shorts and La cabina really would be the jewel in its crown. In its native Spain, it was a huge hit but has since suffered the fate of all too many short subjects and has simply faded away into obscurity, remembered only by a handful of devotees who were lucky enough to catch it on one of it's very rare TV outings.

Writer/director Antonio Mercero works miracles with a slim narrative and the bare minimum of locations. The mounting feeling of unease and rising panic that the unnamed protagonist (well played by José Luis López Vázquez) is brilliantly conveyed and the claustrophobic interior of the telephone box itself is much more effectively used than the similar location in Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth (2002).

Mercero piles on details to make La cabina a carefully crafted and textured film that adds increasing layers of absurdity and paranoia as the protagonist's fate becomes ever more hopeless. This helps immeasurably in making the shocking final shot work so well, opening up one man's frustration, fear and torment into something much larger and far more sinister.

What's most astonishing about La cabina is the amount of detail that people who saw it all those years ago seem to be able to recall, such was the impact it had. You can guarantee that, in the UK at least, any conversation about those wonderful Saturday night double bills (you always knew that Summer was over when they ended) will inevitably turn to much excitable reminiscences of this marvellous short - the only reason that more people here didn't have it on tape was that it was actually shown as a last minute replacement filler when a televised sporting event over-ran. It genuinely is one of those truly unforgettable experiences it seems.

Of course in these days of mobile phones, the real horrors of La cabina will be lost on younger viewers for who trips to phone booths are becoming increasingly something that only happens in old movies. But surely no-one would be immune to the terror evoked by that final sequence. Do whatever it takes to track down a copy of La cabina and prepare yourself for one of the strangest and most breath-taking short films you'll ever see.
KEVIN LYONS

Screamtime (1983)

The fifth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Something slightly different this week in that we're looking at - technically - a feature film. In 1983, Screamtime limped out on video around the world, an incredibly grotty omnibus film set initially - and for no good reason - in New York, where layabout bums Ed (Vincent Russo) and Bruce (Michael Gordon) steal a pile of video cassettes from shop owner Kevin Smith (no, not and hightail it to a friend's apartment for an evening of illicit viewing.

What they end up watching are actually three short British films made earlier in the 1980s by Michael Armstrong and Stanley Long. The films all had limited theatrical releases in supporting slots but hanks to the vagaries of the video distribution system couldn't be released as they were so had to be re-edited into this frankly rather dull omnibus film.

The first film to be released, in January 1981, was Dreamhouse which actually appears second in this compilation. It follows the exploits of Tony (Ian Saynor) and Sue (Yvonne Nicholson), a newly married couple whose new house is apparently infested with mice. But when the bath starts filling with blood and the power refuses to work properly, it soon becomes clear that we're back in Amityville Horror territory. And who's that young boy who rides around the garden on a bike, then promptly vanishes into thin air? After much skulking about in the dark witnessing strange visions and the intervention of a dotty medium, an answer is provided in the final moments; after Sue suffers a nervous breakdown, a new family moves in and Tony is murdered by an escaped killer, events witnessed psychically in advance by Sue.

Though cliched and old hat, Dreamhouse at certainly very watchable. Director Stanley Long (working under the Americanised pseudonym Al Beresford for the compilation version) mounts one or two quite creditable, if minor, shock scenes, but it must be said that the construction is all over the place; the vignette is far too long and leisurely to do the material justice, though the ending is a genuine shock. Dreamhouse got a second theatrical release just before Screamtime was released in 1983 when it turned up supporting The Evil Dead on its initial UK release.

Chronologically, the next film to be released was That's the Way To Do It released in November 1982, sometimes known as Killer Punch. Born loser Jack Grimshaw (the excellent Robin Bailey from The Mouse on the Moon (1963) and Blind Terror (1971)) whose Punch and Judy business is failing, his wife Lena (Ann Lynn, from The Black Torment (1964)) is threatening to run off to Canada and his troubled and troublesome teenage step-son Damien (Johnathan Morris, better known to British TV viewers as sensitive Scouse poet Adrian Boswell in the inexplicably popular sitcom Bread (1986-1991)) is just being plain obnoxious and disturbing. The latter comes to a sticky end in a strange but effectively staged bit of business on a beach after he threatens to torch Jack's beloved puppets, and Lena is battered to death in her own bed. Anyone who's seen Dead of Night (1945) or possesses even a modicum of cognitive ability will have sussed that Jack has flipped out and assumed the identity of his Punch doll to do away with his appalling family.

Over-familiarity with the basic premise really prevents this first tale from ever getting airborne, though there's some sickly comic mileage to be had from scenes of a maniacal Punch doll beating a policeman to death while screeching "That's the way to do it!" However, the material is so bland and unoriginal that it ends with Jack falling to his death while pursuing the heroine across a rooftop.

But Robin Bailey gives an excellent turn as the deranged Jack and there are some genuinely surprising jolts along the way, making it the best of the three films. Armstrong's script offers absolutely nothing new but it does it with some panache and Long keeps things ticking along at a fair old pace.

Finally there was Do You Believe in Fairies?, released in February 1993 and by far and away the worst of the batch. David Van Day, former singer with pop group Dollar, stars as Gavin Martin, a down-on-his-luck motocross racer who finds employment with eccentric sisters Emma and Mildred (Dora Bryan and Jean Anderson) as a gardener/handyman. Initially, Gavin dismisses the old dears' ramblings about fairies as the result of creeping senility, but when he leads his friends on a nocturnal raid on the house to steal the women's horde of jewels, he discovers that not only do the fairies exist, but they're a rather nasty bunch to boot.

A daft idea is rather blandly brought to the screen by Long who doesn't really seem to warm to Armstrong's script this time as much as he had in the first two films. Van Day is hopeless in the lead role (his acting career was as short-lived as his music career with Do You Believe in Fairies? being his only big screen appearance) buy Bryan and Anderson are charming as the dotty old sisters whose affable senility hides a much darker secret. Its biggest liability, besides Van Day, is that the special effects just don't cut it.

A mixed bag then, but certainly all worth watching - though sadly their only official release was on the Screamtime video, now sadly unavailable. They were almost the last gasps of a once-noble art, the British horror short that vanished altogether later in the decade as patterns of cinema distribution and presentation changed forever.
KEVIN LYONS

Return to Glennascaul (1951)

The fourth of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Only one film in the short film showcase this week, but it's such a gem that it needs no support. Hilton Edwards' Return to Glennascaul (1951) is a wonderfully creepy ghost story, very old fashioned perhaps, but all the better for that. This often overlooked 23 minute vignette features Orson Welles in bookend sequences as himself (it was shot while Welles was a taking a break from the gruelling filming of Othello (1952)) recounting "a story that is told in Dublin," the literally haunting tale told to him by a hitchhiker he picks up, Sean Merriman (Michael Laurence).

Merriman claims that while he was driving down the same stretch of road one night, he came across two mysterious women (Shelah Richards and Helena Hughes) looking for a lift. He dives them home to their mansion named Glennascaul, where he is invited to join them inside. Although the mansion seems idyllic, Merriman is uncomfortable, makes his excuses, and leaves. But when he returns for his forgotten cigarette case, he's in for a shock - Glennascaul is now deserted and it turns out that the women he spent time with have been dead for years...

Irish horror films are a rare commodity, making Return to Glennescaul all the more important. To modern eyes, it may seem a little stilted, too reticent for its own good, but those with a taste for the more restrained school of horror, the one that values atmosphere over gore, a creepy sense of dread over in-you-face action, will find much to enjoy in it.

For a start, it looks gorgeous, thanks to the beautiful black and white photography of Georg Fleischmann (who, curiously, doesn't seem to have done anything else) and the measured, stately direction of actor Edwards, whose only directorial credit is Glennascaul. Edwards spins some genuinely eerie moments from the thinnest of material (he also wrote the script), particularly in the mansion which seems, at first sight, to be the perfect residence but which gradually becomes more oppressive and sinister as the film progresses. The film sounds amazing too, thanks to the glorious solo harp score written and performed by Hans Gunther Stumpf.

The weakest element of the film is Edwards' script - the story is serviceable enough, nothing Earth shattering, just an unapologetically old-fashioned ghost story designed to do just the one thing - creep you out. But it's often let down by some feeble humour, particularly the ill-advised in-jokes about Welles and his work on Otheloo, which probably meant less than nothing to audiences at the time. The ending too is a bit of a damp squib, but these are minor quibbles - the overall effect is chilling enough to overlook such shortcomings.

One of the film's greatest assets of course, is the redoubtable Welles. Though his presence in the film is limited, his familiar mellifluous tones are perfect for the role of the somewhat sceptical listener. He appeared in the film as a favour to two of his fellow Othello stars, Edwards and Glennascaul's producer Micheál Mac Liammóir, founders of the famous Dublin Gate Theatre. He no doubt welcomed the respite from the rigours of Othello and certainly seems to be enjoying his chance to lighten up a little and make something that is, essentially, a lightweight but hugely entertaining piece of cinematic fluff. His presence has given the film the longevity it deserves (to be honest, it would likely have been forgotten by now had he not been involved) though it has also given it a reputation it doesn't quite deserve. To be sure, it's a wonderful film, but it's far from the great classic that it's been hailed as in some quarters.

Return to Glennascaul is currently available on Region 2 DVD as an extra on the Macbeth (1951) disc which you can pick up from Amazon (also available for rental - see below) and all the usual online sources.
KEVIN LYONS

Amazon

The films of Studio 4°C

The third of eight weekly articles previously published in the now defunct Short Film Showcase feature at EOFFTV.

Until very recently, anime production house Studio 4°C was completely unknown to me, just one of the seemingly endless parade of animation studios churning out masses of anime each year. Thankfully, further investigation suggests that there's a lot more to this lot than meets the eye. Established in 1986, Studio 4°C -the temperature at which water is at its densest, fact fans!) was set up by Koji Morimoto (director of segments in Robot Carnival (1987), Memories (1996) and The Animatrix (2003) as well as animator on Golgo 13 (1983), Akira (1988) and Majo no takkyûbin/Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)), Eiko Tanaka (production manager on Majo no takkyûbin) and Yoshiharu Sato (key animator on several Studio Ghibli tites).

Their aim was to make anime with a more offbeat feel and to that end have employed the peculiarly Japanese style of "superflat", a postmodern approach which, to be honest, I don't really think I understand (you can find out more about it here) but which results in some of the most unusual animes I've seen in a long time.

Several of the team's short films have been gathered together in various collections and it's one of those, the bizarrely titled Sweat Punch, that we'll be looking at this week. Sweat Punch comprises four shorts, Higan, Professor Dan Petori's Blues, End of the World and Comedy.

The 8.5 minute Higan has only the slightest of storylines and relies heavily on that great staple of anime, giant fighting robots knocking the crap out of each other. There's absolutely nothing new in terms of story or themes here (you wouldn't really expect much in such a limited timespan) but the visuals are stunning. Most of the story takes place in a pitch black nocturnal forest, the action picked out in the muzzle flash of the fine collection of heavy artillery on show and the sort of room shaking explosions that you only ever see in anime. There's a genuine feeling of suspense as the two hapless robot pilots pick their way through the tress trying of find and destroy the tanks that are attacking them and there's a realism and fluidity of movement rare in all but the very best anime.

However, it is just a vignette, looking for all the world like an eight minute slice taken from a much longer film and it probably isn't the best place to start exploring the work of Studio 4°C - unless of course you're an unrepentant fan of hardcore mecha action, in which case, this one will be right up your street!

One of the first things you notice when you dive into the world of Studio 4°C is that there's no house style as such - each film looks very different to the next and the styles can range from the realistic to the stylised to the completely bizarre. End of the World looks so dissimilar to Higan that you'd never know that it was the work of the same production house.

At a rock concert, Yuko meets the strange Kazumi who claims to live in space. She offers to let her stay at her place for the night and that's when things become completely mad - Kazumi transforms Yuko's television set into a lo-tech fighting machine, disappears into a space/time portal and ends up in another dimension fighting jelly-like creatures and eventually bringing about the destruction of an entire existence...

I've watched it four times now and, blown away by it though I am, I honestly can't tell you what the hell it's all about. The ending is particularly strange, a metaphysical finale that suggests that it all may have been a dream, but then again.... well, who knows?

What makes End of the World such an enjoyable experience however is, once again, the visual style. The alternate dimension is presented through a fine gauze of television static while the "real" world is all sharp 2D animation and CGI sets. It's a strange mix, but an effective one.

The closest you may have come to the strangeness of End of the World is probably the Aeon Flux animations, with its similar mix of inexplicable events, strange creatures and youthful female assassins. But even that doesn't come close to the oddness that oozes from every pixel of End of the World.

Not well liked by all anime fans, End of the World is still worth 11 minutes of your time, if only for the surreal landscapes of the alternate dimension (where enemies of the female creator of that world are crucified beneath giant flying crosses and the landscape seems to consist of one continuous, post-apocalyptic desert.

Now as for Professor Dan Petory's Blues... Dear God, this has got to be the oddest thing I've seen in ages, and just recently I've seen some seriously strange stuff. I can guarantee that whatever your preconceptions of anime might be, this will challenge any and all of them - it begins with a mostly out of shot couple arguing about whether or not they should get married (animated in a beautiful and decidedly non-anime style) before we get to meet the eponymous Professor Dan Petory - a CGI animated hand puppet who delivers a series of mind-rottingly bonkers lectures on why UFOs fly in zig-zags and why the Earth looks blue, all interspersed with singing routines from The Soybean Sisters, a boxing bout and an astronaut drifting around in orbit...

Then we get a TV interview with UFO witnesses (conducted by a man in a pink bunny suit), a man discussing why live gigs are better than listening to recorded music then back to the Prof for some nonsense about horoscopes.

I swear to God, I'm not making any of this up! At the end, everyone exclaims "I understand!" but I'm damned if I do. I have no idea what this was supposed to be about, what point it was trying to make nor indeed why I enjoyed it so much. Completely and utterly mad whichever way you look at it, Professor Dan Petory's Blues is certainly unique.

It's also an astonishing compendium of just about every animation style you can imagine - there's pixillation, traditional 2D animation and CGI, all blended together (sometimes in the same shot) to bewildering effect. Forget trying to work out what it's all about (it probably isn't actually about anything) and just lap up the unremitting surrealism of it all.

Finally, we've got the strangely titled Comedy - and don't go expecting a barrel of laughs from this one. Instead prepare yourself for one of the most beautiful and haunting animes you'll ever see.

Set in the Black Forest, it follows a young girl and her attempts to find a mysterious swordsman who only accepts certain types of books for his services and who she hopes will help save her village from the advancing English army. The dialogue suggests that the story is set during the war between the Irish and the English, but the invading English troops look like futuristic cyborgs, giving the film a pleasing sense of dislocation.

Of the four films on offer this week, Comedy is undoubtedly the best looking. Filmed with a muted colour palette that's almost monochrome in places, making marvellous use of depth of field effects and steeping the whole thing in a soft-focus, ghostly atmosphere, it really is a marvel to behold. Characters are more angular and sparsely defined than most anime figures, the music is genuinely haunting and the storyline, though slim and perhaps too odd for many, is perfectly serviceable, if rather subservient to the images.

If this is a representative sample of what it is that Studio 4°C are up to, then I for one will be on the lookout for more of their work. Though at times they trade in anime clichés, they tend to give old ideas a neat new spin, possess a strange but likeable sense of humour and at least guarantee that you'll never be able to guess what's coming next from them. I strongly suspect we'll be back for more from Studio 4°C in weeks and months to come.
KEVIN LYONS