“All directors, at some point in their career trajectory, find themselves hanging on to a runaway train; despite best efforts, things turn to custard on a daily basis. More often than not, The Movie From Hell is a co-production. Foreign locals, fast money, giant egos, high pressure schedule – all make a volatile witches’ brew” – exploitation film director/spiritual advisor Brian Trenchard-Smith.
Okay. Your starter for ten. What do a 1972 Jamaican gangster
film, a 1981 Filipino midget James Bond impersonator action comedy, a 1975 Chinese
spy and cop and chopsocky film satire, and a 2026 Australian trash-moviemaking
mockumentary all have in common? Anyone? Anyone…? Nobody? I’m afraid I’m going
to have to hurry you. No answers? (Terminal buzzer rings) Too bad.
Well, I’m not surprised, really. You’re probably not antipodean anarchist art
attack filmmaker Andrew Leavold. Let’s face it, you’re definitely not. The man is completely unique, as is his eccentric,
idiosyncratic, excellent, outre output. Andrew writes, directs, co-produces,
acts in, and composes reggae songs for his newest slice of underground
flickershow illumination, The Taller They Come. The old cult films mentioned
above (sequentially The Harder They Come, For Y’ur Height Only, and The Man
From Hong Kong) are all deeply important inspirational components of TTTC,
which had its premiere at the Sydney Underground Film festival on 13/09/2026, to...much general confusion.
Sleazesploitation (just getting my use of the lazy, clichéd, teeth-grindingly awful ‘ploitation’ suffix out of the way rapido) Australian director Alby Wrangler (played by Andrew) flies to the West African country of Ghana to drop an exploitation bomb named Kill Whitey! The film is to be financed by a Kickstarter campaign, and Wrangler has flown to Africa on the strength of getting the cash needed. He has chosen Ghana because it’s the “wild, wild west where you can make a sensational feature for less than ten grand! No rules!”
Wrangler himself is going to play the vengeful “9-5 businessman, after hours killing machine” Whitey Brown. His fiancée, played by Alby Wrangler’s real-reel-life fiancée Chantalle Sant Peron, is kidnapped and sold into slavery. This is a nod to the crap 1979 slavery-chain-rattling Michael Caine film Ashanti. “So Whitey goes…full Tarantino!” as the Kickstarter trailer within the film puts it, kicking and killing his way through all and violently annihilated sundry.
Wrangler lands in Kumasi, a Ghanaian city (serendipitously
in the Ashanti region!), and meets rogue real-life anarcho-action filmmaker
Samuel ‘Ninja’ Nkansah, who is to co-produce the Whitey film. Wrangler is a
huge admirer of Ninja’s backyard-made, tokoloshe-crazy films. They see a
mutually beneficial symbiosis on the horizon: Ninja is Wrangler’s ticket into
the heart of Kumasi filmmaking, and Ninja sees more western exposure for his
films with the presence of this driven, chaotic Australian director.
Of course, things don’t turn out anywhere near as simple as
an untroubled international co-production. There would be no film if they did.
When Wrangler arrives in the scant Ashanti shanty town, the electricity cuts
off, and he has had no phone signal since leaving Melbourne. When the lecky
comes back on he then discovers, to his abject horror, that the Kickstarter has
fallen very far short of its total, gaining only $549 of the $10,000 (Australian)(I think) needed to
shoot. He phones home in a panic, and asks the adulterous Chantalle what
happened. “They saw the trailer,” she sneer-smiles, mightily unimpressed. There
goes her trip to Africa!
Or…does it? At his wits' end, Wrangler gets thrown a financial lifeline by a local drug baron/concrete salesman named Mister Fabulous. There is just one hitch. He will give Wrangler the money he needs to make a film, but not the production he came to Ghana to make. Fabulous is a big fan of the deceased reggae star Jimmy Cliff and, more specifically, his star vehicle, the aforementioned The Harder They Come. Fabulous wants to do a remake of the 1972 film, with a starring role in it for himself, naturally, but with the role Cliff played in the original played by a…midget named Gideon.
Up against the wall he is
currently banging his head off of, Wrangler reluctantly agrees. He flies Chantalle
out from Australia to co-star, and his friend and long-term cameraman, Coby, to
shoot. They start making the new, revised, film, Wrangler battering out the
script on the fly on a typewriter…and much comedic, bizarre, deranged,
hilarious, amusing, bemusing, occasionally slightly confusing film geek mayhem
ensues. This film is a fly-on-the-shitpile documentary document of the whole
hotel fire of a fake production.
Okay, so that’s a very basic summary of the film’s
underpinning exoskeleton. Beyond that, I cannot really explain things, because
it would give away too much of the, er, plot, insofar as there is one. And I don’t
want to do that, because this a great wee film, absolutely 100% well worth a
watch. Or two. It’s a film you have to watch more than once, because it’s so slam-packed
with gags and cultural references both ultra-obscure and mainstream that you
are just getting your head round one thing when the next is already pouncing on
you and tickling and punching your ribs before moving rapidly on…and on…and on.
Anybody who has seen Andrew Leavold’s previous excellent works documentaries Pub: The Movie and The Search For Weng Weng will know that his films are always deeply personal. TSFWW was about the Filipino kung fu midget Weng ‘Ernesto de Guzman de la Cruz’ Weng; Pub was about the excellent Australian punk artist Fred Negro. This film is like a composite amalgam of those two films, and is basically Andrew making a documentary about himself. The Taller They Come is a complete X-ray of the dingdingdinging tilting pinball machine contents of the director’s ever-moving brilliant brain. It’s genuinely one of the most personal films I have ever seen.
Only Andrew Leavold could have made this film. His life,
from living in the Middle East as a child, to owning Trash Video, an obscure
film haven for Melbourne cinematic misfits, to directing documentaries about
punks and midgets…little people…whatever the current PC nomenclature is…is...completely unique. As the trailer for Where The Buffalo Roam, the 1979 Hunter S
Thompson film put it: “They broke the mold before he was born.” And that’s this
director and, more specifically this production, down to a t-for-trash. And, of
course, I mean nothing mocking by saying this, at all. Andrew is one of a dying
breed of lone obsessive cineastes wading through blood, sweat, and beers to
produce his own idiosyncratic celluloid visions, “stood like a remnant from an
outbreak past” (The Germs), and he’ll take on all modern ‘personal’ and
codified ‘cult’ filmmakers and suck them in and spit them out effortlessly.
The Taller They Come is a terminal artistic point, of a
sort. Follow me on this. In 1978, Dawn of the Dead came out. It was a splatter cinema high water mark, setting off a gory tsunami that came to a full
blood-and-semen-ejaculating crescendo at the auto-erotic suicide ending of Nekromantik in
1987. Everything since then has been a pale irritating imitation of the
excesses of that seminal coagulated epoch. In the modern era, culture has been
democratised with the invention of the net.
When Andrew and I and people our age were growing up, we had
to watch either films on 16mm projectors on a wall at home, or VHS. Other
formats came later, of course, but in the late 70s/early 80s, no generation
like ours had ever existed in the history of the world, with easy sleazy
teasing access to action and comedy and science fiction and horror and
exploitation film excess at our sweaty teenage fingers on our home tellies. The
home video boom made film junkies out of people like us for life, digging
ever-deeper into that forgotten clamshell case pile of discarded non-AI slop.
It genuinely definitely definitively changed our lives forever.
This was no dilettante thing. It’s now a cliché to say, but
our degenerate generation had to hunt high and low for the next quick sick film
fix, trawl through video shops and bootleg lists for that rare elusive print of
an uncut German-language Mad Foxes, or a fully uncut Dawn of the Dead, or any
Jorg Buttgereit film you care to mention, etbastardcetera. It was great fun.
Now, of course, you can type a few generic terms into any search engine and
find pretty much any film you want uncensored very easily, for the most part.
Which is great, in a curio-revealing sense. But it’s also
boring, and new bland generations of spoonfed viewers consider themselves ‘trash
film fans’ and talk about the same crap, on the same few sites, publicly
singing from the same horror and exploitation and trash hymn sheet, jumping on the next online trend. I mean honestly, Neil Breen,
ho-hum, who cares? Total shite. We now live in a post-culture age, as has been
noted, and the golden era of obscure film fandom has long since been and gone.
Which is where Andrew’s new film comes in. This is the Final,
Ultimate Obscure Film Fan Production. Nobody can ever make a
cult-references-stuffed production after this one, including Andrew, because
the subject has now been done to death and boring beyond. I think this is a
tacky-jewel-bursting production that will be discussed for years to come online and off by the
real marginal film fans round the world, far away from the trendster
Sharknado-guffawing wanks. There has been a long-term trend of people trying to make wilfully ‘cult’ films and, of course, it hardly ever
works. They all have the same influences, and are pleased with themselves for
regurgitating some scene from some vaguely obscure B-movie.
The Taller They Come is not like this. At all.
It may be about obscure film fandom, but it’s more of an
exploration of a life of the director, an unashamedly proud exhibition of his
sleeve-worn tacky-cum-arty film freak roots showing. It’s a very public
struggle session Andrew is having with himself put up on the accommodating,
conspiratorial screen. It’s a summation and a transcendence, and on the screen
is absolutely where it deserves. Which may sound slightly pretentious, or at
least I hope it does. Andrew is exorcising, exploiting, and celebrating his
film-loving life up until this point, making a permanent cinematic headstone
for his own lifelong cinema geek tendencies.
“I am so far away from home right now. I don’t…I don’t even
know where the movie ends, and the reality begins. I don’t even know what the
movie’s about anymore. I mean, this is all just so pointlessly meta” – Alby
Wrangler.
This film is unique, slightly scary, hilarious, utterly
bizarre and very, very niche. I don’t think Andrew himself would even argue
that it’s not any kind of mainstream production. It’s for the Film Geek People
Who Get It, who always have and who always will. Film has become way too
self-referential now, a subject that Orson Welles was lamenting as far back as
1982. Modern filmmakers now have a library of films to easily access at their
fingertips. You do tend to get young filmmakers just tediously reproducing
imitations of what they are watching for their own wee freak chic geek clique
of like-minded online pals and certain-favoured-films enthusiasts.
They chortle and fart and snigger with attitude about how
they get some ‘hidden’ reference to one of the fave films of their genre ghetto
enclave (“Oh look! The Evil Dead mixed with Cannibal Holocaust mixed with Dawn
of the Dead! I’m sooo smart for
getting all that!”), but don’t ever venture out any further into the real world
beyond the reel one. The lack of lived-life experience shows up in the
productions a lot of the time. This is why I don’t really watch horror films
anymore, though I used to be a big fan of them when I was younger. Seen and written extensively about it all
before.
Which is where this film comes in. Andrew Leavold is one of
the most genuinely obscure film folk in the world. He lives, breathes, eats,
sleeps, and shits genuinely esoteric genre cinema, and has done for over four
decades. He’s more than earned the right to kill off the film reference
subculture with this capper epitaph production. He both wallows in obscure film
fandom and mocks it to Hell and back, realising the ultimate ridiculousness of
collecting minutiae and gravely-presented trivia from some pointless 1981
Swiss-German co-production.
There’s only so far you can take that meaningless thin-gruel
shite, and that subject ran out of shut-in bumpy road a long time ago. So TTTC
is putting a well-deserved bullet right through its long-overdue damaged brain,
but having a great laugh as it does so. You couldn’t put any more obscure film
refs into a film – and make it so personal, at that – taking yourself to Africa
and making a cliff’s-edge artwork. Subject’s “over, finished, done, gone out,” to quote
Anthrax. Truly the end of a late 20th century phenomenon.
You can find part two here: https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-very-tall-disorder-part-2-of-2.html
Comments
Post a Comment