Mail & Guardian        April 30 - May 6, 1999

"Pure Blood: A splatter movie with brains"

Director Ken Kaplan has made a zombie movie that mixes red blood and black humour.

Blood and laughter by Andrew Worsdale

Ten years ago writer/director Ken Kaplan at age 24 was in the formative stages of pre-production and major development on a movie called Fanus-Pure Blood. It was the end of the era of tax-break movies and there was a kind of smell that everything in the South African movie industry was about to blossom; that we'd be able to wean bucks to make local movies and not sit on the sidelines watching second-rate Schwarzenegger's like Michael Dudikoff pretend that Natal was Vietnam in American Ninja (name the number).

But it all fell through - the industry that is - and local movie-makers have languished for the past decade working in television, a couple of features have been made - the Schuster candid-camera type flicks and the black and white re-conciliation pics that reached their heights with the remake of Cry The Beloved Country and the confused all-the-issues in one basket comedy of Inside Out.

Now that Kaplan is 34 years old it's come together and Pure Blood has just finished shooting and if ever there was a different concoction for a South African themed movie this is the one - it's a zombie thriller filled to the capillaries with black humour.

Kaplan's intensely complicated and at times controversial characters that span the gap between air-brushed fact and comic book fiction. The story follows Fanus, a young cop, whose overwhelming desire is to be a member of the flying squad. But when he has a blood test for career advancement he unwittingly unleashes an old family curse that as the production notes says, "threatens to consume his soul."

Taunted by his elder brother Eugene, who was long assumed to be dead, and chosen as the successor by the "Generals" who are masterminds of a corrupt order trying to regain power, Fanus is caught in the madness and myriad power structures and realises that he's got to save the day. It's an ambitious and crazy screenplay and an off-the-wall concept that goes way beyond the confines of South African Mandela - Sentimental generated cinema. Sure it does touch on the notions of the TRC and of Death Squads and the like but in an entertaining generic almost Z-grade manner.

Kaplan says, " In the 80s we were all trying to deal with the politics of the day. At the time I wanted to make a film about torture. After researching about all the stuff about security police, I realised there was a very personal relationship between the torturer and the tortured. Frantz Fanon talks about torturing in Algeria and realised that there's a bond created between people on opposite sides of the electrodes." He admits he was also very influenced by filmmakers like schlock moviemaker Herschell Gordon Lewis who shocked US drive-in audiences in the 60's with some of the goriest movies ever made including Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs - one critic remarked that Lewis's uses of blood verged on the abstraction and Kaplan seems to be taking the same celluloid route with his movie - the unit used over 2,000 litres of 'blood' during production of the film.

"My favourite movie of Lewis' has to be Punch House Press," says Kaplan, "It's about a guy who owns a mattress factory and brings debutantes over only to plug them during the process of making the mattresses." Another obvious reference and inspiration are the films of George Romero whose Zombies:Dawn of the Dead and Martin, the former had a shopping mall engulfed by the living dead with a Bosch-like vision of a society consuming itself, while Martin had a modern vampire saturating himself amidst a blackly comic movie about vampire myths pitted against modern psychosis.

I found myself as a 'featured extra' as a zombie in Pure Blood and at the shoot at the once venerable Blue Room restaurant at Johannesburg's Park Station I spoke to several of the cast and crew. Danny Keogh who plays Fanus' brother Eugene said, "On reading the first 10 pages of the script, I thought oh my god not another semi-political movie. Then I got into it and by the end I really liked it. There's this great tongue in cheekness about the thing and I really hope we can do more humour in these kind of things.

In this movie there's a great commitment to character and dialogue. I mean I play a kind of P.W.BOTHA type character - someone who's aware that he's stupid but he's just got to believe in himself despite the odds."

Keogh and Marius Weyers who stars as the lead General begin a scene and the dialogue is completely indicative of the movie's style as Weyers confronts Keogh's Eugene amidst loads of smoke and says, "Remember Gene, remember the good old days - the smell of power was in our nostrils...We had magic drops that could kill our enemies without a trace. We had this land in the palm of our hands. We had free tickets to every rugby game.'

Weyers is also enthusiastic about the movie saying, "At first I didn't understand what the hell it was about, then I read it again and realised I was suppose to play such a nice arty character. The whole feel of the movie is new and there are too many people sitting on scripts these days that the industry is getting stagnant - we've got to be in a position to churn them out." As a measure of their faith in the project Keogh and Weyers took cuts in their salaries and top agents like Moonyeen Lee and Associates wavered their commission fees.

In fact the film has been made on an incredibly slim budget of R1.5 million and was shot on a breathtaking schedule of four weeks; but the day I was on set in Zombie uniform nobody seemed to be panicking despite the major set-up involving over 50 extras playing "generals" who come back from 'the dead' to start the new order. It was the 'money day' even though this movie is very self-contained as Line Producer Pierre Hinch said, "There's no such thing as a small movie, because either way you look at it it's got to come in at around 90 minutes."

For the production Kaplan brought in cinematographer Jonathan Kovel and Gaffer Scott Brinson both contemporaries of Kaplan's from his film studies at New York University. Kovel previously achieved acclaim for his lensing of Surrender Dorothy, Kevin Di Novis' acclaimed independent film that won several awards at Slamdance, the even more independent side-bar of the Sundance Film Festival. His work on that was on 16 mm in black and white and the grainy, almost primitive looking cinematography which led to an almost documentary feel to the twisted fairy-tale like feel of a plot that involved a co-dependent relationship between a waiter, a drug dealer and a heroin addict that involves transvestism and forbidden sexual desires.

With Pure Blood, Kovel is going for a bigger more lurid look, the film starts out fairly conventionally but as the story progresses things get more and more bizarre. As Kaplan says, "The film starts clean cut like an Attenborough film and ends up looking like an Ed Wood movie."

In the ten years it took to get the feature made Kaplan found himself as a director for hire making political documentaries like The Life and Times of Chris Hani, Countdown to Freedom and The Making of Sarafina, but he soon realised he wanted to be working on his own scripts and wanted to work in drama again, which he'd only done three times before, twice with The Hidden Farms and The Burden, while still at film school, and then for M-Net with the New Directions production of The Children and I scripted by Bekhisizwe Peterson.

As he down-sized the original script of Pure Blood for the new tight budget he says he had to "find a structure and style that was more entertainment driven, I wanted to make a story that was 'universal' and any small country can be overcome by some military junta and generals in-fighting. I wanted to move away from politics and deal with drama so I turned to Jacobean tragedy and plays like 'Tis Pity She's a Whore for inspiration and that has all the thematic elements of family betrayal, ascendancy and fascism - I mean that was the entertainment -the splatter genre of the 16th Century."

With R400,000 form the Department of Arts and Culture and matching investments from Anant Singh's Videovision and Revolution Pictures, the balance from raised through private equity investors, Kaplan has finally got his feature together, Megan Gill editor on the picture making her debut as head of montage after being an assistant on movies like Sarafina and Cry The Beloved country says, "It's great fun, but my god comedy is the hardest thing to cut."

It's great that a new style of local movie is being produced and despite the cost constrictions everyone seemed to be having a consensual 'gas-of-a-time' but the last words have to go to Kaplan, "The tight budget is do-able but I wouldn't advise it. It's a good way to lose weight quickly. All the same, anytime as a director you're given a budget and some film stock it's something to bow down and kiss the earth for." Amen.

South Africa's first truly indigenous zombie/splatter, black comedy should be on our screens within the year - in the meantime watch out for those blood transfusions.

Check out the Bioskope Pictures PURE BLOOD website for more information on http://www.icon.co.za/~bioskope/pureblood/

Above content courtesy of The Mail & Guardian.