Fright Fest UK ’19: The Deeper You Dig

Burying a body is a lot like cat-sitting or implementing wage and price controls. It sounds easy, but it always turns out to be messier and more destructive than you expected. Kurt Miller is about to learn that lesson the super hard way when an accident leads to murder and a subsequent haunting in the Adams Filmmaking Family (John Adams, Toby Poser, and their daughter Zelda Adams)’s The Deeper You Dig, which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Echo Allen is a goth kid and an accomplished deer hunter. Her mother Ivy was a natural psychic. They would be quite the formidable horror movie duo, if it were not for the crisis of faith Ivy suffered several years ago. Lately, she has been faking readings for money, at the risk of generating bad karma for herself. Regardless, she still senses the physical and metaphysical peril that befalls Echo.

Tragically, a somewhat inebriated Miller ran down Echo while she was walking by the side of the road late at night. Instead of rushing her to the hospital, he finishes her off, with the intention of covering-up the incident. Yet, despite burying her body in the woods, Echo’s spirit starts haunting him and also reaching out to her formerly sensitive mother. Although not certain of Miller’s guilt, Allen finds pretexts for visiting the ramshackle farmhouse he is trying to fix up and flip, sort of like a maternal Columbo.

Deeper is about as DIY as you can get, but that rather suits this austere tale of existential guilt and supernatural dread. It shares the sensibilities of Dostoyevsky and Poe, but its heart and soul is buried in the backwoods hill country, where Americana is at its weirdest. The Adams-Posers are addressing some big themes, but they have crafted an intensely intimidate morality play. They also come up with some fresh and original ways to use Tarot cards.

John Adams (not the classical-minimalist composer, but he did write the film’s score) is riveting as Miller. He smoothly shifts from sinister to a guilt-wracked basket case from scene to scene. As thesp and co-writer-co-director, he makes Miller one of the most complex and fully developed genre bad guys in recent memory. Zelda Adams has a blast chewing the scenery as the spectral Echo, but she also develops enough chemistry with her mom, aptly playing her mom, to make their psychic link believable. Shawn Wilson also adds some memorable flair and heavy attitude as Ivy Allen’s psychic protégé, Del, in a pivotal scene.

This is our kind of independent filmmaking, because it is genuinely independent and refreshingly inventive. There is plenty of woo-woo creepiness, but it is firmly grounded in the Catskills region—so much so, you can practically feel the soil under your nails. Very highly recommended, The Deeper You Dig screens tomorrow (8/23), at this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Fright Fest UK ’19: Blood & Flesh

If you were acting in an Al Adamson movie, your career was probably in trouble. However, he somehow arranged for Nelson Riddle to pen the theme song to Hell’s Bloody Devils (it was originally conceived as a spy caper titled The Fakers) and Charles Earland composed a wonderfully funky soundtrack for his blaxploitation film The Dynamite Brothers. Adamson prided himself on his films’ profitability, but he never claimed they were great art. Regardless, he was mostly well-liked by his colleagues, so it is a shame he met a tragic end worthy of his exploitation films. Adamson’s career and premature demise are chronicled in David Gregory’s entertaining documentary, Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which screens during this year’s FrightFest in the UK.

Adamson was the son Victor Adamson, who at one-time had quite a career going as an actor and director of silent and early talkie westerns under the name Denver Dixon. His son Al took a shot at following in his footsteps, but quickly changed courses, believing he had an aptitude for helming horror and other assorted genres that featured gratuitous nudity and violence. The early years were a little rocky, but he had a great deal of success selling his biker and stewardess movies to drive-ins and grindhouses.

Along the way, Adamson employed a number of faded Hollywood stars, who had fallen on rough times. The great John Carradine was an Adamson regular, but even two of the surviving Ritz Brothers turned up in one of his later films. Unfortunately, he met a rather violent end. At this point, Flesh & Blood veers into true crime territory as it follows the investigation into Adamson’s disappearance and the grisly discovery of his body.

Frankly, it is impossible for a film to be dull when it can cherry-pick choice clips from the Adamson filmography. His co-stars included Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Russ Tamblyn (of West Side Story and Twin Peaks fame), Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones), Angelo Rossitto (the diminutive actor best known for Tod Browning’s Freaks and schlocky Lugosi movies like Scared to Death), adult film star Georgina Spelvin, and Gary Graver (who was Orson Welles’s loyal cinematographer during his final years).

So yes, there are plenty of exploitation elements in Gregory’s film, but it also provides a fascinating perspective on the exploitation movie business, at its peak. Yet, it is really all about Adamson the man and filmmaker, who emerges as a sympathetic (if somewhat roguish) figure well worthy of our time and attention. In fact, the film gets rather poignant during the third act, especially when covering Adamson’s devotion to his late wife and his own violent fate.

Adamson’s story is definitely worth telling, especially when it comes liberally illustrated by clips of such eccentric and outrageous cinema. It is just a shame he cannot enjoy the overdue ovation. Very highly recommended for grindhouse fans, Blood & Flesh screens this Friday (8/23) during FrightFest 2019, in the UK.