ADENOIDS [Excerpt]
BUCK IN FUDGY 002
An edit of moments from a no-budget Hi-8 video epic from 1994. A transvestite agent is shot.
An international assassin (Sarsenet) leaves the ‘spy game’ after his partner (Arbo) turns loony tunes. Sarsenet hides out in a commune run by an old college friend turned counter culture guru (Weird Beard). Meanwhile, Sarsenet is slapping old men in the park, arguing with deadbeats, and getting knocked out by winged girls whilst Arbo is out for revenge.

'Imagine Hal Hartley meeting Seijin Suzuki with little story, no-budget, great music and a blaze of technical incompetence. Pop art colours and a super funk soundtrack.'
BUCK IN FUDGY MAGAZINE

ADENOIDS - Director Notes
[taken from the DVD release - January 2007]

'He's got a bullet in his pistol with my name on it...it's a long bullet'
SARSENET

I started to think about making a film around 1993. I was investigating 1960s and 1970s cinema on regular trips up to the West End and was taken with the new American Independent Cinema of Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. These films felt more relevant to me. Growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s the EVENT™ Movies of the time seemed a million miles away from my
experiences in the outskirts of South London. I didn’t regularly come across man-eating sharks or intergalactic foes unless, of course, I missed my bus stop and ended up in Thornton Heath.

In March 1994 I saw a couple of films at the Seijin Suzuki retrospective, 'Branded to Thrill' at the ICA, London. His inspired, occasionally plotless, delirium made me think that I would like to give this filmmaking lark a go. Around this time Charla Films had made 'Crooked Pins & Bent Syringe' which was similarly deranged and reached its 40 minute running time because of regular musical interludes. The budget was under £50.

Inspired, I decided to put together a longish film made up of a sketchy plot and a few memorable moments, the sort of things I was enjoying in the playful, ingenious films I was regularly watching, moments that weren’t born out of character arcs or plot but were miniature spectacles within a larger story…a young woman playing a viola on a park bench whilst a man
randomly slaps, kisses and punches passers-by…that sort of thing.

In the summer of 1994 I moved up to Nottingham and began piecing together some 'quickfire, ironic witticisms', cheesy wisecracks and assorted daftness. This was my script. I had no idea what I was doing. I corralled all the under employed deadbeats, stoners and students who lived in Radford Boulevard and booked them in for 2-3 hour slots over a weekend. We hired a Sony Hi-8 camera, tripod, and microphone from Intermedia in Nottingham for the 'jobless' rate of
£22.50 and began a 72 hour stint of trying to operate the equipment. I knew little about framing a shot, shooting for continuity or directing actors. None of the 'actors' had, as far as I know, any experience but with sterling help from, the relataively experienced Charla we managed get everything filmed.

Some months later we hired Intermedia’s £10 a day, bottom of the range edit suite for a 3 day edit. The Soundtrack was dubbed in from audio cassette with much of the music coming from radio shows I had recorded. After a few days of synchronised button pushing, lever pulling, coffee slurping and blackberry flapjack munching we emerged with Adenoids. Mastered on glorious VHS (it was a few quid cheaper than the S-VHS option) the total budget was around £75 and a large bag of bananas.

In late 2005, two of the actors, Buta & Karen, sat around a little TV, drinking wine whilst looking back on a film that they hadn’t seen for a decade. They added their commentary to this DVD. Blessed with crisp digital versions of most of the soundtrack music I remastered the audio but, alas, could do nothing with the marked, over saturated, glitchy images.
Forget the Quality, feel the width. MARV