Resurrecting the Street Walker is set in London where the young & ambitious James Parker (James Powell) works as an unpaid runner for a small film production company called Portland Productions. While clearing out a basement storage facility James stumbles across some old cans of film containing an uncompleted horror film called 'The Street Walker' about a man who kidnaps, tortures & murders women. After some research James discovers that The Street Walker has no ending & convinces his boss to part fund the filming of a ending & then release it as a complete film, but the previous director committed suicide before finishing the film & James slowly starts to go crazy as the financial & critical success of The Street Walker takes it's toll. Eventually after numerous setbacks James loses it completely & this is the filmed document of his descent into madness as told by his friends, family, work colleagues & those who were there...
This British production was written, co-produced & directed by Ozgur Uyanik & is a very strange film that takes the 'mockumentary' to the extreme, while the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) & The Blair Witch Project (1999) featured documentary footage worked into a larger narrative involving the character's Resurrecting the Street Walker takes things to the next logical step & present the entire film as one long documentary complete with talking head interviews, fly on the wall footage, clips, & narration just as if it was one of those in depth documentaries you find on DVD's/Blu-ray's detailing the making of a film. The concept works quite well to be fair, I was surprisingly into it & the only thing that really doesn't work is the extremely predictable ending, I won't spoil it here but throughout Resurrecting the Street Walker I couldn't stop thinking why two central character's essential to the plot weren't featured in the retrospective interviews & why everyone else was referring to James in the past tense & I couldn't help but notice the obvious similarities between the character in Jame's new ending he was trying to shoot & that other person who is missing from the interviews. It's pretty obvious to be honest & I think most people will figure it out. Being a documentary certain things are skipped over like who locked the door from the outside, was anyone really killed during the filming of The Street Walker & just how did James manage to convince his boss he could film an ending without the original actor's & little in the way of a time frame but the concept is intriguing enough & different, we only ever see small isolated clips from The Street Walker film (again, like small representative clips of films in making of documentaries) which doesn't look very good anyway & quite why James thinks it will propel him to stardom, fame & fortune is anyone's guess. At only 80 odd minutes it's fairly short, there's a nice little intro featuring a brief history of the Video Nasty era in the UK complete with some classic & iconic video sleeves & while I wouldn't want to see it again I did actually quite like it for it's originality, quirkiness & short run time.
Resurrecting the Street Walker is put together just like a proper documentary, people are seen in interviews talking about past events & their feelings complete with their names in text introducing them. The fragments of The Street Walker film that are shown aren't that impressive, it's black and white (maybe to distinguish it from the main feature), it's obviously not shot on film & since only little clips are shown it's hard to care about it. There's no real gore here, there's a bit of blood splatter & there's a dead pigeon but otherwise this is pretty bloodless. The way documentaries are structured means that there's no real scares & things get a little predictable.
Obviously shot in London on video Resurrecting the Street Walker has a cheap look & feel which suits it's documentary style anyway. The acting is alright, everyone seems OK but no-one is amazing.
Resurrecting the Street Walker is an offbeat & odd little film that really does look & feel like a documentary, the problem documentaries are made to tell facts not silly horror stories & the structure of a documentary means the twist ending is far too predictable which left me with a slightly unsatisfied feeling inside. Not brilliant but quite clever at times & the makers really nailed the documentary feel, if your looking for something a bit different than you could do a lot worse.
This British production was written, co-produced & directed by Ozgur Uyanik & is a very strange film that takes the 'mockumentary' to the extreme, while the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) & The Blair Witch Project (1999) featured documentary footage worked into a larger narrative involving the character's Resurrecting the Street Walker takes things to the next logical step & present the entire film as one long documentary complete with talking head interviews, fly on the wall footage, clips, & narration just as if it was one of those in depth documentaries you find on DVD's/Blu-ray's detailing the making of a film. The concept works quite well to be fair, I was surprisingly into it & the only thing that really doesn't work is the extremely predictable ending, I won't spoil it here but throughout Resurrecting the Street Walker I couldn't stop thinking why two central character's essential to the plot weren't featured in the retrospective interviews & why everyone else was referring to James in the past tense & I couldn't help but notice the obvious similarities between the character in Jame's new ending he was trying to shoot & that other person who is missing from the interviews. It's pretty obvious to be honest & I think most people will figure it out. Being a documentary certain things are skipped over like who locked the door from the outside, was anyone really killed during the filming of The Street Walker & just how did James manage to convince his boss he could film an ending without the original actor's & little in the way of a time frame but the concept is intriguing enough & different, we only ever see small isolated clips from The Street Walker film (again, like small representative clips of films in making of documentaries) which doesn't look very good anyway & quite why James thinks it will propel him to stardom, fame & fortune is anyone's guess. At only 80 odd minutes it's fairly short, there's a nice little intro featuring a brief history of the Video Nasty era in the UK complete with some classic & iconic video sleeves & while I wouldn't want to see it again I did actually quite like it for it's originality, quirkiness & short run time.
Resurrecting the Street Walker is put together just like a proper documentary, people are seen in interviews talking about past events & their feelings complete with their names in text introducing them. The fragments of The Street Walker film that are shown aren't that impressive, it's black and white (maybe to distinguish it from the main feature), it's obviously not shot on film & since only little clips are shown it's hard to care about it. There's no real gore here, there's a bit of blood splatter & there's a dead pigeon but otherwise this is pretty bloodless. The way documentaries are structured means that there's no real scares & things get a little predictable.
Obviously shot in London on video Resurrecting the Street Walker has a cheap look & feel which suits it's documentary style anyway. The acting is alright, everyone seems OK but no-one is amazing.
Resurrecting the Street Walker is an offbeat & odd little film that really does look & feel like a documentary, the problem documentaries are made to tell facts not silly horror stories & the structure of a documentary means the twist ending is far too predictable which left me with a slightly unsatisfied feeling inside. Not brilliant but quite clever at times & the makers really nailed the documentary feel, if your looking for something a bit different than you could do a lot worse.
