Phantasmagoria

I found the DVD of Phantasmagoria in HMV. It looked quite interesting as since it was only a fiver I thought I'd give it a go.

So, I took it to my Uni Dorm and we watched it together. Something we didn't know, this was distributed by a website that sells Underground Horror and porn films and this is part of the "Exploitation Collection" and was made on a budget of about 15p.

The film's sound levels are all over the place, there's a lot of wind noise which makes cuts obvious. The score is good, with a great synth backing at parts - occasionally ruined by the wind noise.

The directing is sometimes competent but mostly it's a lot of obvious cuts to similar angles.

The performances from Rachel Audrey are not great, she has the same tone for every line, Mari K is a lot better. All of the heavy lifting is done by the location filming and the grain on the footage.

Another thing we didn't realise is that Phantasmagoria is Twin Peaks fanfiction, made all the more strange that our house had just finished watching Twin Peaks the week before. How had I managed to find this film of all in there!

Funny to watch drunk at Uni, nonsense visual sequences with no depth, a lot of unnecessary nudity, good score with terrible sound mixing. There's also a few times where actors hit the camera and the cameraman's arm is in one shot. The behind the scenes Q and A reveals they weren't working with a script which is obvious.

This film isn't great, I'm surprised to have found it in HMV at all because I've seen better student films.