Plantation

Next on the docket is an odd little item from the early '90s that should have gone straight-to-video and was likely made with the intention of using it to fill NEW RELEASE shelves, which in those days were the equivalent of streaming services filling themselves with junk so as to have some kind of consumer product available. Nothing really changes, except on a surface level.

Using the post-Civil War US South as a theme but made by a British studio on backlots off the motorway, pop culture legend has it that Christopher Lee was going to appear as a favour to someone or other until he read the script and was so disgusted by the premise that he pulled out right away. And this is the man who appeared in 1994's Funny Man, a film so bad and incomprehensible it's a legend in itself.

The plot is that a group of stereotypes from US teen movies (jocks and sluts and one good girl, basically) arrive in their "hot rod" (which looks suspiciously like a Morris Minor spray-painted red and with a paper-mache jaguar stuck to the hood) at an old plantation (which in exterior shots looks suspiciously like an abandoned British farmhouse probably owned by the director's grandmother). The main stud is played by Yorkshire lad Steve Whitman, who sadly died of AIDS-related complications three years later.

Thankfully the film doesn't require anyone to affect an American accent, they just sort of talk in an RP English voice inflected with occasional surfer-isms (you haven't lived until you've seen regular soap actor George Duckworth, who's played villains in everything from Corrie to Brookside to Hollyoaks, shout "totally radical, dude!" at a storeroom full of kegs. Or, rather, you have).

The final girl is played by Sandra Munn, given the imaginative character name "Stacy". The film opens with the kids riding up to the "plantation" and telling a ghost story about how it's haunted by a slave who managed the other slaves in running the house. This personage is the antagonist (yes, really; the '90s hadn't yet caught up with basic human decency) and is called Biggles (Garrett Sykes), a name presumably plucked at random from the writer's reading, Biggles being the name of a pilot in old British pulp stories.

The writer/director is Michael Farnsworth, an odd footnote in film history. He was raised in a matriarchal pagan commune into which his father, a butcher from Liverpool, had been inducted after falling in love with Michael's mother, a one-time exotic dancer. The two of them died in a rented garage when Michael was fifteen. They were sat in the front seats of their car with a hose on the exhaust filling the vehicle and garage with gas.

Farnsworth seemed happy to address this tragedy, ascribing it to his father having been a cuckold who decided to commit a murder-suicide and so drugged his wife's tea before arranging everything. Michael didn't seem to carry trauma from this event, and after a year in state care (he refused to stay in the commune) he inherited a large amount of money from the dissolution of what by then had become his late father's chain of butcher shops. Farnsworth would end up funnelling this money into his film career.

An occult enthusiast who owned a library of leatherbound tomes by Dennis Wheatley, Aleister Crowley, and other old white men to specialise in pagan lore, he once claimed to a horror zine that he decided his film's plots by communing with an Ouija board. His personal board, engraved with an image of the Devil as a ram, was all that was found in his car when he disappeared near Beachy Head, never to be seen or heard from again, in 1999, two days before the turn of the millennium. If he killed himself, no trace of his remains were ever found. He was 49 years old.

A gassed-up car and suicide implication involving a couple appears in the film, as Stacey explores the plantation's garage and sees a ghostly white couple in the spectral gas that fills the cloistered air. The couple is hippy-ish, he with purple sunglasses and afro, she with a floral bandana in her hair. (The suggestion is that they owned the plantation as a residential home before the ghost of Biggles drove them to suicide in the year of Woodstock.)

Biggles, the ghostly head slave in a butler’s outfit, is played by the wonderful aforementioned character actor Sykes, who deserved better than trash like Plantation but elevated it nonetheless, much as Vincent Price and Lee did their less-than-stellar horror films. Sykes was also an activist and supported the Mangrove Nine protest against police harassment in 1970.

Although he doesn't get many lines beyond such idiotic and racialised imprecations as "go down to hell with my ancestors' bones, you children of the Confederacy!", his booming voice and stentorian figure are a huge boon to Plantation. His glaucose eyes, like two white marbles, loom unhealthily between the dead hippies with what MR James called "the stony grin of unearthly malice". He appears in a lot of the gore scenes, including a moment where Whitman falls from the rafters with a noose around his neck and his eyes gouged out, a Union flag carved crudely across his broad chest, above the epithet DIE YANKEE SCUM; don't ask me why the vengeful slave-ghost that later on will decry the Confederacy is here mad at the North. Farnsworth was a character, but he wasn't a great artist. (Duckworth and an actress who isn't listed on iMDB are boiled naked and alive in a cauldron.)

Anyone who knows anything about slasher films doesn't need to be told what happens at the end or would consider it a spoiler if I said. It's all in the formula, and this is one of the most formulaic genres of all, to the point where Quentin Tarantino said that when he started making a slasher pastiche with 2007's Death Proof he ended up turning it into a car chase picture midway through because he found the slasher's rules too restrictive.

Suffice to say that after much bloodletting and death, our Final Girl escapes and hitches a lift from a man we do not see, in one of those non-endings common to junk films, shot from on high and at a distance so that all it depicts is Sandra Munn limping towards another Morris Minor (this time un-disguised) as it pulls up inexplicably outside the "plantation", and then chariots her away. Director Farnsworth doesn't even bother with overlaid text explaining anything. Just like his life, Plantation ends in idiot mystery and is filled with bad ideas.

If you stick around to the end of the credits, however, it closes on an image of the Devil as a ram that was engraved (as aforementioned) on Farnsworth's Ouija board, and imposed on top of that is a message that remains inexplicable to this day: WE LOVED YOU, SON. AND WE FOUND YOU.

This screen only appears in copies of Plantation produced for home viewing after 1999. It’s supposed it came about as an editor’s tribute to Michael Farnsworth, but no-one really knows.