Magic, Myth & Mutilation: The Micro-Budget Cinema of Michael J. Murphy, 1967–2015

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Magic, Myth & Mutilation: The Micro-Budget Cinema of Michael J. Murphy, 1967–2015

Magic, Myth & Mutilation: The Micro-Budget Cinema of Michael J. Murphy, 1967–2015

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Longhurst and Efford, who played the farm handymen in Invitation to Hell, are again teamed here and rather good as ruthless criminals Mike and the slower Gary. Runnings times given are for the version included in this set, which in some cases is considerably shorter than the original screener length (therse are listed in the accompanying book) and any added introductory captions. In the wonderfully titled essay Balsawood Babylon, he considerably expands on what has been discussed elsewhere in this set and provides a detailed breakdown of Murphy's life and career.

The first segment of a three-part retrospective look back at Murphy's career reveals how Atlantis made him popular with his fellow pupils (yes, he made it when he was still at school) because it featured several scantily clad women, and how this led to him landing a trainee film director job at Elstree Studios. Yet after watching everything in this mammoth set, I was left with the suspicion that had he followed a different path, he might have done all three. None of which should take anything away from a release that I genuinely can't easily see anyone topping this year. It was because the idea of capturing stories on film and entertaining an audience was always something that completely fascinated me.Murphy says of the optical effects, "When it works, it looks good, but it doesn't always work," then usefully outlines why such effects are harder to pull off effectively on film than on video. There's more than a whiff of Beauty and the Beast to the fantasy folklore element that edges its way into the film and that may be real or the product of the troubled Helen's imagination, and it's she that provides the film with its emotional core. Despite this prolific output – a total of more than thirty completed films over a half-century, of which twenty-six survive – Murphy’s work remains rarely seen and little championed. The first script in this collection set out the standard movie rather than stage play format is spread over 131 pages.

But when two of the actors, Dave (Clifford Gardiner) and Rita (Nanda Adkin), nip upstairs for a quick one while their characters are off-stage, events take a particularly nasty turn. Having also started out on standard 8 film, moved on to 16mm, then VHS, SHVS, mini-DV and eventually HD, I recognised all of the technical touchstones here. He's charmingly self-effacing here, noting early on that the lines being delivered are "not the world's best dialogue" and later going the whole hog and describing it as "quite a weak script. Asked to create a making-of video to accompany the 25th Anniversary DVD release of Invitation to Hell and The Last Night, Murphy wittily chose the lowest budget option of just asking Sally Duncan and Phil Lyndon round to his back garden and filming them asking him pre-prepared questions. For me, the result fe els more like a sketchbook of interesting ideas for a more fully realised movie that was never later made than a completed work.The short story written by Murphy in his spare time that would form the basis of the 2001 version of Skare. It's likely for these reasons that there are a few glum looking exteriors in the UK-set 16mm films, but when the light is right, the film format really shines.

It's a testament to how much he was loved by his regular collaborators that Holding and Bunday both have to fight back tears to talk about their friend and regular collaborator.I enjoyed this so much more than I was expecting, and given the budget that Murphy must have been working with, he worked a whole series of small miracles here. Low-budget independent filmmaker Chris (Jonathan Whalley), leading man Mark (John Wright) and his older co-star Helen (Helena Zeffert) arrive in Greece to shoot scenes for their latest production. It's well paced and directed, and the fight scenes are far more convincingly staged than the ones in Murphy's previous films. Michael Murphy, after all, is also the name of one of Robert Altman's favourite character actors, one who had a prominent supporting role in one of my favourite movies, Oliver Stone's Salvador. In 2023, Indicator delivered the most unlikely labor of love in Blu-ray history with a sprawling ten-disc set comprising the 26 surviving Murphy films (mostly under the banner of the company he co-founded Murlyn), and a very comprehensive slate of bonus features shining a light on a fascinating and distinctive voice in homemade genre cinema.



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