Not content with having a horror film festival, Romford now has a film festival – which also features a lot of horror. I turned up for just the one offering, Chad Ferrin’s Unspeakable: Beyond The Wall of Sleep.
Ferrin is a prolific director, and no doubt too busy to attend what was described, I think, as the world premiere of his film. As were a lot of other people. Which only made me feel more privileged as I sank into one of a number of available seats. Imagine, a world premiere in Romford! Of a film not made in Romford.
U:BTWOS is American, an adaptation of a very short H.P. Lovecraft story. I’m not sure Lovecraft would have approved – I doubt he would have approved of any film adaptation of his work but in this case it is hard to imagine the author getting through the first scene without making immediate plans to return to the grave.
A new prisoner, Jim Fhelleps (Corey Shane Love) arrives in a jail, having been arrested for sexually abusing his daughter, and is immediately offered a cock to suck by an old lag (Brandon Kirk, who bears a distracting resemblance to Boris Johnson). Fhelleps rips this cock off with his teeth, having hallucinated (?) the proferred penis and his own as snaky alien creatures with sharp teeth, then starts babbling up at the roof, or the sky beyond it.
This is all being observed by other prisoners, and guards, and the resulting hysteria is hardly dialled down by Ferrin’s fast-cutting and tinting of the (black and white for this 1993 flashback) footage with blood-red splashes where applicable.
In the present day, Edward Furlong plays Ambrose London, a scientist who has invented a machine that can screen people’s dreams, and who is hoping that Fhelleps the penis-ripper will make an interesting subject. Tracking him down to an asylum where he is kept in an underground car park, he finds a man with two distinct personalities, unless maybe it’s three, since one of the personalities is seemingly the spirit of a man (Joe Slater) from a hundred or so years previously who had himself been possessed by an alien.
Moving from Fhelleps to Slater he undergoes physical changes (glowing blue eyes and Sir Les Patterson’s top set of teeth) and is now played by Robert Miano. Having encountered him, London is soon having nightmares about, for example, his baby being eaten and when he does eventually venture into the patient’s dreams and cosmic visions, he awakes from the experience to find that the lunatics have not only taken over the asylum, they have turned into gut-munching zombies.
At some point – it’s really quite hard to remember – it is I think explained that the alien came to earth originally in order to have recreational sex with another visiting alien, in human form, but the mutant penises made this awkward when the other host, as it transpired, was also male – basically you just got penis wars.
I mean, you’d have thought they might be able to work something out with all their starry wisdom but apparently not – same-sex encounters (at least between males) are just cosmically unacceptable. Though incest and child abuse are OK – the other alien, it seems, is now housed in Fhelleps’ daughter, which is why he was arrested for abusing her in the first place.
So, on escaping from the asylum, Fhelleps/Slater (and, moreover, alien) goes off to rape his daughter with his monstrous penis, in front of the altar of a church (since she is now a nun). Lovecraft’s alien from the original story was, I recall, rather high-minded in comparison. If humourless.
London catches up with Fhelleps/Slater, and shoots him, then is next seen in a straitjacket talking to an increasingly manic Japanese doctor (Bai Ling). Finally, if London isn’t imagining all this (or I’m not) an apocalypse seems to have befallen the earth – CGI creatures float above the smoking city.
Somewhere between clunkily self-aware (in a Sharknado kind of way) and impressively bonkers, this channels the Stuart Gordon take on Lovecraft along with some of David Lynch’s weirdness and goofiness – the dual nature of Fhelleps/Slater looks like a nod to Laura Palmer’s abusive father Leland (and his demonic alter ego Bob) from Twin Peaks.
It has none of Lynch’s style though and about as much in the way of a unifying tone as a speech by Donald Trump. There’s a sense that Ferrin has not yet found a convincing way of channelling his excitable imagination. Maybe that’s just as well, as were he to do so effectively I am quite prepared to believe that (if Trump doesn’t get there first) he might open up some sort of gateway to a genuine apocalypse.
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