‘Colin’ and the rise of the real indepenent Aka How to make a zombie movie for £45 and take it to Cannes.

Every aspect of every media format that you know is changing. The playing fields have been levelled and now each and every one of us with the skill, determination and imagination, can be anything we want to be. The dinosaurs are dying and we’re being given our chance at last. Whilst this may sound like ridiculous self help claptrap, panic not dear friends, I have not lost it. I won’t be popping up on Twitter anytime soon, talking (or pretending that anyone gives a damn about) my ‘feelings’, so to avoid confusion, let me reiterate and we shall start again.

Whilst you are pissing your life up against a wall, taking the ‘What kind of bowel movement am I?’ quiz on Facebook, wondering why no one uses MySpace any more or, as aforementioned, using Twitter as some God-awful platform for 140 character based group therapy (Sorry, but you are all alone in this world kid, get used to it). The more industrious and less emotionally needy of us have been concocting, undertaking and executing some quite ingenious little projects.

I refer directly, to Marc Price, who is now being hailed as the Wunderkind of British cinema. How has he managed this? A tale of a blind dwarf’s struggle to become a UK citizen in the wake of his bunny rabbit dying from a government engineered strain of Myxomatosis? Something about a hunchbacked, illiterate single mother’s struggle to get to the shops and pay her TV licence in the wake of the London riots? Something about an old woman’s struggle to get her jumper on, in the wake of it getting a bit nippy out?

No! Thankfully, and somewhat miraculously, it’s about zombies. Yup, flesh eating, drooling, unstoppable reanimated carnivores rising from the grave and trying to bite you on the willy. Infection spreading, metaphorically heavy, plague ridded pus buckets. ‘But’ you cry, ‘We have seen zombie movies, in fact, over the last decade, the zombie movie has taken precedence as the horror movie of choice after the atrocious debacle that was the postmodernist horror movement that almost killed the entire genre.’ To which I would reply that you have a very valid point. There has been somewhat of zombie overkill (no pun intended) since the early 2000’s. As a lifelong zombie fan, this was a development that I greeted with mixed feelings. This however, is a zombie movie that was made for £45.

Yes, for £45 Marc Price wrote, directed and edited ‘Colin’ a zombie movie told from the perspective of a zombie (A formula previously used in the almost unwatchable British movie ‘I Zombie’ several years ago.). Recruiting his actors and crew from Facebook and MySpace, he made it a collective effort which has achieved unprecedented results. Taking the film to Cannes and managing to pawn it, the movie looks set to create an entirely new sub genre of horror, the intelligent ‘no budget’ movie.

I have seen dozens of movies made by groups of friends for no money, but as a rule, they are generally pretty terrible. Even a few thousand pounds of a budget will usually produce something with less production value than an Iceland advert (Well, I suppose all that cocaine and tranquilisers that they need to shovel down the ‘face’ of their company probably eats up their proposed expenses). ‘Colin’ however, looks like it makes the most of its grittiness. Shot on DV and edited in Adobe Premier Suite, this has been a labour of love for Price, which is clearly going to pave the way to an illustrious career in cinema.

With the interviews that are included and the sinking feeling in your gut that you have probably wasted the entire day today, I would strongly advise that you sign out of the half dozen tabs you have open and go do something constructive with yourself. Just make sure that you keep checking back here, eh? Seriously though, Neil Gaiman isn’t going to answer your ‘tweets’, nor is Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross, they’re busy people and they probably don’t give a damn about you and what you ‘think’ anyway. When the future clearly belongs to us, when we have this shot at attaining whatever dreams we may have lurking at the back of our damaged, ADD riddled minds, why the hell aren’t we out there taking the chances and doing the work? To the future people, see you on the red carpet; I’ll be the one peeing in the punch and being politely asked to leave.

For the official ‘Colin’ Website, Click HERE

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