Schmollywood Babylon

Dyke Hard (Bitte Andersson, 2014)

How to describe a movie like Dyke Hard? Hmm. Let me tell it like this: Dyke Hard is the best 80's martial arts musical since Miami Connection!

(Also, I'm actually in this movie. But my scene was deleted and parts of it is in the end-credits. But that fact have nothing to do with my opinion about it!)

With that out of the way; recently I reviewed Faust 2.0 and mentioned how complicated it is to review movies people you know have made. But my motto is this: if it's bad, just be politely quiet and look the other way...and if it's good, great, awesome etc: just scream it out as loud as possible.

Now let's me get serious here: Bitte Andersson's Dyke Hard is a genuinely great movie, made with tons and tons of passion. Here's the story:

After the egocentric and way too difficult lead singer and guitarist Riff (Lina Kurttila) ditches her band and befriends an evil billionaire, Moira (Josephine Wilson), who want to restart Riff’s career again, the rest of the band - the not always so bright Bandito (Alle Eriksson), the chain-smoking Peggy (Peggy Sands) and absurdly self-controlled Scotty (Maria Wågensjö) goes on a road trip to find a new goal with their lives. But shit hits the fan and they’re trapped in a ghost house, gets accused of murder and ends up in a brutal prison - and finally, maybe - at least trying - to get into one final music competition which might kick start their career again. On their way they makes friend with martial arts expert Dawn (Iki Gonzalez Magnusson) who inspires them to go on to reach their dreams! But will the evil Moira put a stop to their plans? And will bartender-turned-prison guard Buck Blossom find his true love? These things and many more awaits you in… DYKE HARD!

I know for sure the director of Dyke Hard, Bitte Andersson, is a big fan of Miami Connection and it's visible. But what Bitte and her team brought with them is foremost a very healthy message that everyone is valuable. There's really no bad people in Dyke Hard - misguided maybe - but never evil. That leaves you with a feeling of complete happiness afterwards, like when you're on shrooms. Not that I never tried that, but hopefully you all know what I mean.

It's hard making a movie and toying with badness and still make it a fun, real movie. Troma have succeeded from time to time, so Astron-6, and Dyke Hard is so amazing in its lovingly homages, references - and spot-on comedy performances from the whole cast. But I've seen so many filmmakers try and never been able to reach that goal.

The band, Dyke Hard, reminded me a lot about old-school comedy groups, each member with their own personality and style. It gets very broad from time to time, but that's also the charm with it. Nothing is small here, everything is big, bold and colorful. Sprinkled through the movie is also a bunch of awesome musical numbers, in different styles. My favorite one - but it's hard to choose - is the romantic and My Little Pony-esque neon-shining showstopper with Buck Blossom (Alexi Carpentieri) and The Beast (Peter Ahlgren), which is very hard to describe!

But the movie is carried on the backs of the wonderful troupe of actors playing the band: Lina Kurttila, Peggy Sands, Maria Wågensjö, Alle Eriksson and Iki Gonzalez Magnusson. They’re all fantastic, but my personal favorites - if I must choose two - goes to Maria Wågensjö as Scotty, which is a comedy genius. She’s right out from The Three Stooges - and the vulnerable, sensitive character of Peggy, played by Peggy Sands. It means a lot when the actors really becomes their character for the duration of the movie and never strays from that path. It’s dedication. Alexi Carpentieri as Buck and Josephine Wilson as Moira is also wonderful...oh, everyone is wonderful. Really, it’s impossible to dislike this movie!

Another fine thing with it is that it keeps the pace all through the story. It's easy to settle down in some less funny, more boring, simpler scene - but that's for lazy filmmakers. Bitte Andersson and her team, among them visual effects supervisor Martin Borell and cinematographer Alexi Carpentieri, makes every scene full of life, humor and just when it's about to be boring, Dyke Hard moves along to the next set-up and it's full speed again. 

Dyke Hard delivers so much passion and heart into the tired Swedish film industry, since many years rotten to the core. Dyke Hard is the injection it needs. This movie doesn't judge people, it dares to change the unwritten heteronormative and conservative rules about who's allowed to be funny or awesome in front of the camera, which is "it" with this movie. It fucks around with expectations and conventions.

Oddly enough Dyke Hard turns out to be, in the end, a powerful statement of love, solidarity and 80's soft metal. Oh, and with a dash of wacky jokes, slapstick, nude ghosts, a Lloyd Kaufman cameo, bikers, martial arts, parkour, gore, male strippers and the nastiest asphalt face plant I've seen in quite a while!

Dyke Hard is out in cinemas and VOD now in Sweden. Troma handles the distribution in the U.S., what I understood - so beware everyone in the rest of the world; it's soon your turn...

Faust 2.0 (various, 2014)

I generally stay away from reviewing movies people I know have made, with a few exceptions of course. Why? Because sometimes you’ve just watched a movie you hate and now you feel obliged to both be honest to the audience and still be kind to your friends. So it’s a double edge and most of the times I just watch the movie and then ignore to write a review of it, because sometimes it’s better to be quiet. Faust 2.0, or Killer App as it once was called, involves a lot of people I know - so it took a couple of months for me to actually watch it, because I knew I had to write a review of it anyway. A typical First World problem ;)

The Devil (voiced by legendary Swedish actor Per Ragnar) have come up with a good way to infect our souls with his evilness and that’s through apps. And this is the story of five of those apps, and the poor people who took the fateful decision to download them.

First out is Robert Selin’s Bad News. A young woman, the daughter of a famous journalist, have scored one of her first jobs - as a journalist. She’s gonna work the night shift and this during a time when a nasty serial killer is roaming the streets of Stockholm. But her boss gives her an app that will help her in her research. It uses amalgamated technology and she can see stuff that no one else can see, but what is really going on? Will the things she see lead her to the killer, or is there something more sinister going on? Bad News isn’t bad at all, no pun intended, it’s a stylish and maybe a bit too abstract in it’s storytelling and the acting is very, very stiff. But I like it and it triggers that famous imagination in my mind, I wanted to see more, I want to know more.

The next story is Johannes Pinter’s InspirAPPtion and it tells the story of a horror writer with a writer’s block. His agent (or what the hell it is) gives him an advice, write or he’s fucked. And boy, in that moment an ad pops up on his phone, an app for creative people. It will help him to construct a story just by adding a couple of key words to the system. He does that and seconds later a woman runs up to his house and asks for help, and then shit hits the fan! It’s a great idea, but it’s an underwhelming episode. It also feels a bit sloppy and not especially thought-through. It never dares to go all the way, and in the end you just wonder how the fuck that app could inspired anyone to anything?!

The man behind this anthology project is Nicolas Debot, who’s also a well-known distributor here in Sweden. In his story, See Alice, we meet a man sitting in an hotel room - feeling a bit horny, so he uses an app to connect with a young and hot woman who shows up at his door faster than he could expect. She brings him to a club, The Hellfire Club, and then things starts to go wrong. I know Debot’s fascination for nudity and this one is packed with flesh, and the obligatory dick-shot, and I like it. Not just the dick-shot, but the atmosphere of the story. The twist isn’t that strong or far out, but the story works. But hey, that guy playing the lead is not especially good. Which is what drags it down a bit.

Moral Call is an interesting episode, directed by Allan Gustafsson. It’s set in the corporate world of a weapon manufacturer. When the news hit that the company have sold weapons to countries who uses it to deliberately kill innocent citizens an app shows up, starting to affect those using it, bringing the victims into their own lives. This is the best part, and with some really fine acting by Katharina Bothén and Per Burell. It feels big and serious and uses Stockholm in a great way. The ending is abrupt and it takes a few moments to realize what happened, but I think Gustafsson handled it very well. A surprisingly political episode...which leads us to the next...

In The Discreet Charm of the Internet Troll, Micke Engström creates an uneven but still quite effective showdown with the internet trolls of Sweden. A woman starts seeing things when connecting to an app, a demon or some kind starts telling her, inspiring her to do stuff, write stuff and at the same time she’s mourning her husband who dumped her. But things starts to get out of hand and it doesn’t end well. I’m not totally sure, but I think what we have here is a wonderfully brutal diss of Sverigedemokraterna, the Swedish neo-nazi party (neo-liberals refuse to call them that, but even if you put makeup on a pig it’s still pig). So even if it’s a bit all over the place, it dares to spark some controversy. Me like.

Faust 2.0 was good. It’s not the best anthology movie I’ve seen, but it’s far more ambitious than some of the other reviews I’ve read claims it to be. It’s quite far from the comic book style the American anthologies often brings up. And for you who’s curious of Sweden it’s a pretty good way to at least see how Stockholm looks during the night ;)

Faust 2.0 is out on DVD and blu-ray here in Sweden, with English subs and a reversible cover in the same language.

Insane (Anders Jacobsson & Tomas Sandquist, 2010)

Horror film in Sweden is so rare you can’t call it a genre. From time to time something appears - and the chance of a fiasco is 99.9 %. I’ve of course seen it all, I can’t step away from the horrors of Swedish horror - and I’ve actually committed one or two crimes myself in the genre. But enough about that and instead focus on 2010’s Insane, which came and disappeared quickly. Which is a pity, because it’s probably the most entertaining slasher to have been made in Sweden - if you not count Mats Helge’s Blood Tracks. Nothing is more entertaining than a group of glam rockers stuck in the mountains together with a band of inbreeds.

In Insane we meet David (Lars Bethke) who runs a lonely motel somewhere in the woods. He takes care of the guests and cooks food...he do everything. Including maybe murdering them also! A few days after a woman disappears from the motel, her sister shows up and starts to make her own investigation. But something is not alright, and soon she finds out that there’s a madman running around, dressed in a black rain coat and a gas mask… and a long, sharp knife.

While the story is nothing special - it’s actually more or less a rip-off of Psycho, including a couple of the twists and turns - it’s probably the only Swedish horror film that tries to be a commercial, sellable product! It feels a lot like a late 80’s slasher, including the nice score by Göran Florén and the colorful sets. I like how a certain pattern is reoccuring during the whole movie, pre- and post-credits, which makes a nice visual frame to the story. The location, a real motel not in use, looks great and gives a lot of production value to the movie.

It’s not bad at all actually and the directors, Anders Jacobsson and Tomas Sandquist, does a good job building up suspense, setting up cool murder set-pieces and creating an atmosphere which feels more American can Blood Tracks could have wished for! It’s a slick production. It was also gorier than I remember it to be, even if most of the kills happens directly off-screen and we only see the bloody aftermath or sharp objects sticking out from human flesh. But there’s a nice head crush and a few other gory details to look forward to.

How about the acting then? It’s not bad. The movie is partly dubbed by actors fluent in English - and everyone, what I can hear, speaks fluent English without Swedish accent, which is extra fun when people (= swedish fanboys) complains about the accents! ;) It’s like Sandy Mansson, who plays a nurse in Camp Slaughter and in one review got criticized for her Swedish accent. The thing is of course that Sandy is 100 % American. People always find things to complain about. While I think Bethke is good, David Lenneman is even better. He’s the most relaxed and laid-back actors of the bunch and does a fine job with the sometimes stilted dialogue. Lenneman’s other claim to genre-fame is as the character “Update” in John Carl Buechler’s 2003’s The Thing/Alien rip-off Deep Freeze.

Looking at it again I think it’s a decent, very good-looking slasher, shot for very little money. The effects are gory and graphic, the score is good, the acting decent. The directing is great...that leaves us with the script. I don’t mind the Psycho-esque ripoff-ish story but the last half of the movie feels a bit fragmented, like it looses the touch with the story line. There’s two kills I really don’t understand involving characters that has no need to be in the movie. But that’s nothing really, we’re talking a slasher movie here, exploitation. Entertainment. And that’s what Insane came to the world to give us, the power of not being bored. It’s out on DVD in Sweden and on blu-ray in Germany, both looking excellent. What I’ve heard the German blu-ray has an earlier, slightly different cut of the movie also - but it was so long since I saw the Swedish DVD so I can’t compare and tell the difference.

If you find it, buy it and support the indies.

A Joe Sarno double feature: SS Operation Wolf Cub & Sacrilege!

Two years since... Allena (Markus Widegren, 2013)

Two years ago Markus Widegren and me made ALLENA, a short film (13 min) starring me and Mats Huddén. Mats is a fantastic professional actor who started his career in Mats Helge Olsson productions and in another film spent 90 minutes planning to murder Modern Talking's Thomas Anders! I'm sorry to say he didn't succeeded.

ALLENA is a low key thriller with a serial killer theme. It's shot very down to earth, simple and with focus on the story and not fancy camera moves. Here's what the critics think:

Cinezilla
Tellusfilm.com
Trash Film Addict

Just now Cult Movie Cavern shared it and wrote on their Facebook page: "Excellent and atmospheric serial killer themed short written by the super talented Fred Anderson and Markus Widegren. It has an English subtitle option. Fred (Ninja Dixon) also has an incredible cult film blog at http://fredanderson.typepad.com/"

We're very proud of it! It's one of the few productions I'm proud of and I wish I could do something similar again.

It have English subs of course. If you dig it, share it! Thanks!

Allena (2013) from Anderson & Widegren on Vimeo.

Res Aldrig på Enkel Biljett (Håkan Alexandersson, 1987)

Res Aldrig på Enkel Biljett means literally Never Travel on a One Way Ticket and is one of the darkest and most bizarre movies made in Sweden. You might say it’s a bit too arty farty and - hold on to your horses - pretentious, but everything is according to plan. If you enjoy the works of Roy Andersson, but wants it even darker and more brutal, this might the film for you. Based on the book Kyss Mej Dödligt (Kiss Me Deadly) by artist, actor, author and provocateur Carl Johan De Geer, who also wrote the script, this is basically a twist on the old sci-fi concept: everything you live in is a hoax, and you better not try to be happy - because then the shit will hit the fan. Titles who belong in this subgenre is, just a few examples; Soylent Green and Logan’s Run.

Mikael Samuelsson (who in Sweden is mostly know as the dude playing the Phantom in the Swedish performance of The Phantom of the Opera musical) is The Investigator, who could have been a happier man in another time and world. Now he’s sitting in his rotten one room apartment/office, hoping there will be a new case to solve. And avoid paying the rent to his landlord. Slowly he’s getting deeper into a new mystery, a conspiracy! The Amazing Hassan, a former magician, is now an scientist and claims to have invented a teleporter - and on the other side of what that teleporter brings people, a new world will meet them. But is that really true? Or is it just a way to exterminate the poor to get more space for the rich?

What Res Aldrig på Enkel Biljett completely lacks is happiness. People are moving slowly through brown, dark and dirty environments. Everyone with some kind of naive hope there’s a solution to their suffering. The Investigator, still having some hope, works his way through layers of depressing melodrama and constantly under the threat of getting killed by assassins. This is an absurd film with a VERY dark twisted humor and a beautiful sadness. The narrator tells the story short and concise, sometime stopping at small details in the story, like he deep inside, without showing it, drools over the suffering and unhappiness.

The locations are all - except a little bit at the end - cramped and claustrophobic, almost organic in a way. Like the moist and the dirt have take over this glorious former earth. Alexandersson and De Geer also sprinkles a lot of disturbing scenes all over the movie, with it’s fair share bloody violence and a striking sequence towards the end - which is a part of the great conspiracy and belonging to the twist of it all. The ending is very down-beat, but somehow there’s hope… well, maybe not, but on a personal note; I like it when people find their own solutions and do what they want to get some peace of mind.

Res Aldrig på Enkel Biljett is something so rare as a Swedish post-apocalyptic film. It’s awesome, and it’s a must see for those who enjoy the arty parts of genre cinema. But what Alexandersson and De Geer proves here is that you don’t need mutant barbarbarians in remodeled dune buggies to make a post-apocalyptic film in the eighties.

The film is out on a Swedish DVD (not sure if it’s OOP or not), which amazingly enough have English subs! If you can find it, get it! It also, on a bonus disc, have several rare short films by these two gentemen - most of them also with a strong sense of dystopian future.

The same day as I posted this review I visited and art exhibition with the works of Carl Johan De Geer, which also included a couple pf artifacts from the movie. He also signed by DVD, of course ;)

The miniature model built when designing the burial chamber at the end.

The doors and some wall-stones belonging to the burial chamber.

 

The nice 2-disc DVD, signed by De Geer, released some years ago by Noble Entertainment.

Mannen från Mallorca (Bo Widerberg, 1984)

For the genre fans outside Sweden Bo Widerberg might be best known for his sensational and violent 1976 cop thriller The Man on the Roof, in my opinion THE best movie ever to come from Sweden, an ultra-realistic, satirical and very spectacular story about a sniper who takes revenge on the government - especially the police force. Like always, Widerberg is a radical and the story isn’t black and white, there’s a lot of grey zones in his masterpiece. Eight years later he’s back with Mannen från Mallorca (The Man from Mallorca), which never reached the same international fame, but you can be sure it’s of the quality. Loosely inspired by a sex-scandal (which also inspired Mikael Marcimain’s 2012 drama-thriller Call Girl) a few years earlier, where some high ranking politicians was said to be involved in a prostitution ring, Mannen från Mallorca might be our best (not many title to compare with though) conspiracy thriller.

Inspectors Jarnebring (Sven Wollter) and Johansson (Tomas Von Brömssen) is the first men to arrive at the scene of a robber and Johansson follows the robber, but loses him inside a school. The robbery itself is just a routine case, but when some of the people involved - directly and indirectly - starts to die, our heroes slowly understands they’re dealing with something bigger. They suspect a staff of the Swedish secret service, SÄPO, to be involved - but when he suddenly has the best alibi ever they understand there’s something even more fishy going on…

To quote someone on IMDB: “The best political thriller you never heard of”, and it might be true - at least for you outside Sweden. While it’s a quite famous film here, it’s still in the shadow of The Man on the Roof, and that’s a fucking pity. I would even say the acting is more even in this film, with very solid performances from Wollter (for the international audience known for his part as the old viking king in The 13th Warrior) and Von Brömssen. Håkan Serner, who also ruled in The Man on the Roof, plays a similar part here, and he’s brilliant. Ernst Günther’s part, Dahlberg, was suppose to be played by Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt, but his health at the time prevented that - but Günther is great also - like a mix between a bored bureaucrat and a walrus. You’ll understand when you see him. As always Widerberg also casted some odd people in supporting parts - Hans Villius, a famous TV-host and speaker as the perverted politician, the, at the time, famous magician Johnny Lonn as a some shady government henchman and of course Karin Bergstrand, Widerberg’s neighbor, who also played a confused old neighbor in The Man on the Roof! And lets not forget Ingvar Hirdvall, who played the sniper in The Man on the Roof, playing a similar, anonymous - but extremely cold and evil - man in this one.

The script never answers all the questions it raises, but it also gives the movie a sense of uncomfortableness. You never know who will turn against you. At the end one the most skeptical characters suddenly starts believing the conspiracy theory and one of the believers - it’s hinted - tries to plant disbelief in another character. The ending is chilling in it’s simpleness. A few words and you understand how big this is and how much this small - in comparison - scandal affects the Swedish society. It always gives me goosebumps.

Rumour says David Fincher got some inspiration from Mannen from Mallorca when directing Se7en. I don’t know so much about that, but there’s two excellent chase scenes - a bit more realistic because it’s a Swedish production, but enough thrilling to compete with international productions. I really hope someday someone will buy the rights from SF and give it a proper DVD- or blu-ray release. Olive Films have bought a lot of Widerberg’s films to release on blu during 2014, including The Man on the Roof, so lets hope those will sell well and give them a reason to release more Swedish films from the time when Swedish film still was worth watching.

Stockholm Stories (Karin Fahlén, 2013)

Lets get one thing over with, I work quite close to director Karin Fahlén, she’s actually sitting one meter from me right now - but if I didn’t like Stockholm Stories I just wouldn't have an opinion about it. That’s me, I rather stay quiet and say nothing instead of giving constructive criticism ;) But the truth is, Stockholm Stories is a damn fine dramedy, one of the best Swedish movies in quite a while. And this comes from a dude who usually dislikes modern Swedish cinema.

Based (kinda) on a short story collection written by actor Jonas Karlsson, it’s not totally wrong to say it’s a Swedish Short Cuts. There’s a lot of haunted personalities floating around in Stockholm, and all of them are somehow intertwined with each other. We have the stiff government secretary who one day spots his name on an envelope inside a car. He can’t stay away from this mystery and starts to investigate who’s car it is and gets obsessed (which is a kind word, he’s more or less a stalker) by the woman who wrote it, an even more anti-social and strange woman who happens to have a pointless beef with a comedian over a delicatessen basket he stole from her. Nearby we follow a stuttering young man who fights with a conservative father who want to control his life, include the girl he meets - who happens to be the lover of a certain politician and also the sister of a young and naive writer who want to get out of his father’s shadow. And the rest I leave up to you. You get the point.

There’s a lot of emotions going on in Stockholm Stories, and thankfully everyone and their story is tied together in the end - not necessary for the best of the characters, at least if you see it a traditional dramaturgical way. I’ve always felt that there’s more good ways to end a movie than with total happiness, sometimes a bit of bad luck can be happy in it’s own twisted way.

Director Karin Fahlén and screenwriter Erik Ahrnbom carefully avoids the clichés - just the detail with the naive writer actually NOT being especially talented is a brilliant idea, because that’s probably a lot more realistic than him being a brilliant writer like his genius, dead father. Now he’s just a pretentious wannabe who just wanna get published by all means necessary. A nice pretentious wannabe, but still. Cecilia Frode, who plays Jessica, almost makes an alien character, totally unattached to the society around her, with odd (and fantastic) clothes and a talent for starting fights just because she can’t let it go.

Another favorite character is Peter Carlberg, who plays the conservative father. With eyes so empty (imagine the eyes of a shark) and so emotionally disturbed I instinctively started to hate him the first time I saw him. This in contrast to Pia Halvorsen, who plays his wife - also excellent - but a bitter-sweet, humorous sadness, walking the line between comedy and true drama. I could watch a whole movie with these two personalities - and their stuttering son of course, played by Filip Berg.

But the true star of the show is Karin Fahlén, who tells the story with steady hands and perfect pace. I adore how she deliberately stays at a distance from her characters, visually that is. Kinda lurking far away, almost spying at them -. and gradually comes closer the further the story goes. She shows a part of Stockholm we rarely see, far from the typical yellow picturesque houses and landscapes with famous landmarks place in the middle. There’s no Globen, or Town hall… no castle or the typical churches. It gives as more realistic view of the south of Stockholm (“Söder”) than before, not the usual tourist footage we’re treated with in millions of other movies shot in this wonderful town.

Stockholm Stories are far away from what I normally review at Ex-Ninja, but this is one of those Swedish movies that needs a boost at the box office. It’s released tomorrow Friday in Sweden, go and see it in the cinema and thank me afterwards. I promise you’ll like it! 

Ten years of Camp Slaughter: "Fluffy" remembers the shooting of a Swedish cheapo classic!

Richard Lidberg as Bunnyman and me, directly after my death!

Tonight it exactly ten years ago since I went to the premiere of Camp Slaughter. I took my boyfriend at the time, David, met up with my brother and his daughter, got together with my co-actors and the filmmakers for a good night's fun. That didn't happen.

For you who's not Swedish and not aware of the lack of horror films in this country this means nothing to you, but for me it was a living nightmare. I auditioned for Camp Slaughter maybe a year before, something like that. I was very nervous and the only thing I could remember was that the script described my character Fluffy as a "enormous, fat guy" or something like that. I know I'm fat - both then and now - but it still felt hard to read. I could somehow connect with Fluffy. I saw him as a closeted gay guy, obviously having a hard time meeting girls - and probably also boys. If he survived that night of terror he would probably have come out from the closet and started a new life far away from his shallow friends.

I still have the shirt and sandals ;)

During the meetings leading up the the shoot there was never any notion of us making a masterpiece, or a Swedish version of Halloween, Black Christmas, Friday the 13th etc - titles the distributor Sandrew Metronome tossed around in the marketing and on the cover. That's just absurd! The only titles that came up was stuff like Slaughter High, Friday the 13th part 5 etc etc. You know, the cheese that came during the end of the slasher era, the tackier and sillier movies at the end of the eighties. That was the plan and it was shot like that.

Another rumour that floated around like a turd in a swimming pool was the budget. The director mentioned sometime that if we had made the movie with a normal budget it would have been around two million kronor. Soon that was a fact. And oh boy, they used it against us. The budget was approximated 100 000 kronor (around 15000 dollars) and no one got payed what I know. That's absolutely nothing, not even today, for an advanced shoot like this.

One of the strongest memories from this time was how many marshallows I had to eat. There's outtakes where almost pukes because I've started to hate them so much. That was the thing with Fluffy, he loved these terrible candies more than anything. I also have one of the best kills in the movie, which is fun. I first gets stabbed in the throat and then get my head cut off. My body is later hanged up-side-down in a nearby tree. This was a lot of fun, except the tree-thing. I refused - because of my high anxiety to go up in the tree and I remember someone else from the crew had to double for me. They later didn't use that shot and instead I laid down on a green screen and they added me up in the tree through the work of digital magic. The other kill scene that's really good is when Erica Carlson gets stabbed to death in the van. It's not graphic, but it's brutal as hell!

The cast: Annika Marklund, me, Erica Carlson, Sofie Norman. Robert Arlinder and Christina Luoma.

I'm not sure how long the whole shoot took, but I spend around two weeks on set - one week actually shooting, and then I spent almost one week just hanging around because I had nothing better to do. It was a decent cast, for example Erica Carlson from the highly acclaimed Fucking Åmål (aka Show Me Love) from 1998 and Robert Arlinder who worked with Lars Von Trier in Dogville, he was the body double for Jeremy Davies. Also, in smaller part, you can see Sandy and Michael Mansson, veterans in movies, theatre and dance (including Abba - the Movie!). Christian Magdu has some kind of Hollywood career now, for example Illeana Douglas Easy to Assemble, a web series that aired betweeen 2008 and 2011. The only one with a real, cool career is  Sofie Norman - just check out her filmography! It was just me that got nowhere. 

Me trying to kiss an unconscious Erica Carlson.

In all fairness, I'm terrible in the movie. My Swenglish is not of this earth! If I could choose I wouldn't had tried out for the part, but one good thing is that I actually got a very good friend in the talented producer Anneli Engström - we're still hanging out from time to time! That's something! And I'm a MUCH better actor today, take a look at my official acting page!

The infamous add from the distributor.

It seemed like the critics first got the joke, the "thing" with the movie, what I've heard about the press screenings. They laughed at the right places - but more or less every review after was gave it the lowest rating possible, sometimes not even a rating. The distributor - it actually got a small release in cinemas - used the bad reviews in their marketing, trying to have fun with it, but it didn't work out. I mean, we're living in a country completely lacking humour, so it doesn't surprise me.

The time after the release was very disturbing. People, even the friendliest ones, suddenly saw it as their goal to be as mean as possible. It bullying, nothing else than that. It echoed my own time from school, which was hell - so I've stayed away from Camp Slaughter as much as possible afterwards - not to be reminded of the shit we all got. It's not a fantastic movie, but for what it was and considering the budget and time spent making it it's not that bad. It looks quite good (even if the director's experiments with the ratio wasn't that successful), it was probably among the first movies who tried to evoke the spirit of the eighties, the grindhouse feeling some might say, stuff that Ti West much later did with the masterful House of the Devil. With another director and a sharper script it could have been something - oh, and a slightly talented actor playing Fluffy. The production itself went very smooth. The producer did a fantastic job helping the movie, actors and crew, through a very tight schedule - and it's mostly because of her the final result become better than it should have been.

Something few people seems to aknowledge is how Camp Slaughter actually gained respect on the film market - to that degree that the production company got a job producing Stinger, the non-official sequel to the less rotten Tail Sting. But with the budget used - which was sooooo low - it's a miracle in its own way. Thanks to a good producer of course.

During the shoot of The Haunting of Camp Slaughter.

I participated in the DVD with two things. I did a commentary together with cast and crew, which was fun. I remember how the producer had to stop us because we were a bit to honest about a part of Stockholm which I even today was packed with inbreds and white trash - and I love white trash, I'm one myself. I also directed and edited a silly featuette about the real life hauntings the set was plagued by. Some fun stuff there, but if you look at it today it's amateurish. I shot new scenes for that little documentary, as a Criswell-style host sitting in his chair during a dark, stormy night. Not sure everyone got that joke.

Nowadays Camp Slaughter (not to be confused by the American movie Camp Slaughter that came in 2004, aka Camp Daze) is trapped in-between rightsholders and will never be able to be released again. I highly doubt it anyway. The two DVDs in existance - the Swedish release from Sandrew and the English friendly disc directly from the production company - are both extremely rare. If you find them, grab 'em!

Swedish DVD.

International DVD.