It's Only a Movie by Mark Kermode

Author:Mark Kermode
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

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

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