Rating: C+
Dir: Aimee Stephenson
Star: Kate Vernon, Steve Parrish, Tim De Zarn, Sidney Sidell
a.k.a. Grave Matters
This is certainly an oddity. While officially a British production, it oozes sweaty American-ness from every pore. It’s kinda noir, but with a large helping of horror from the start. It takes place almost entirely in a single location: the rundown shack, near some kind of ghastly industrial facility, inhabited by Christine (Vernon) and Mick (Parrish). While they may have loved each other once, there’s barely a trace of that present now. They spend all their time together abusing each other: verbally, psychologically or physically. It’s not pretty to watch. Then, a dead body turns up in their back yard. Mick, out on parole, won’t call the cops and convinces Christine to bury it there.
Naturally, it doesn’t help the tension in the house, and the mix of anger plus firearms inevitably proves a deadly combination. Christine kills Mick and adds his body to the backyard grave. However, the respite proves only temporary. Mick’s ghost (? – I’m presuming here; alternatively, she’s a loony) shows up to torment Christine, invisible to everyone else. Then a police officer, Coveleski (De Zarn), shows up on the doorstep, looking for person who became their first corpse. Christine’s behaviour under his questioning increases his suspicions that something is up, although obviously, the reality is not quite what he suspects. On the other hand, Christine realizes the cop is more interested in finding the corpse than the killer, odd behaviour in a lawman.
I’m not even sure of the year this was made. The above is the IMDb date, but the print has two other copyright dates: 1996 and 2001. It appears in the IMDb under the alternate title, under which it was released on DVD; Tubi has it as what appears to be the original one. This was Stephenson’s only feature: according to M.J. Simpson (who dug into it far deeper than I could), she was killed in 2002, following an accident in Peru when fireworks blew up the bus on which she was traveling. Simpson also reckons this might be the first British horror film directed by a woman. And Stephenson was one of the models on the cover of Roxy Music’s Flesh + Blood album. So there’s that.
Oh, the film? I’d almost forgotten. It punches above its weight in terms of its limited resources, yet didn’t manage to stick the landing for me. I felt there were too many loose ends, with questions left unanswered, and Stephenson more interested in atmosphere than narrative. Personally, there’s also a limit as to how long I can watch couples bickering: this surges past that, after about ten minutes (it only runs 75), and keeps going. Things improve after Mick’s death – not that it really stops them arguing, given his rapid return. But the noir elements intensify, and it’s here the movie is at its strongest. It might have been interesting to see where Stephenson went from here. Sadly, South American pyrotechnics robbed us of that opportunity.