Judgement Days

I don't know who's been handling the job in recent years, but back in the day I used to help out judging the Manchester Festival's amateur film competitions alongside Norman J Warren, director of Inseminoid and Satan's Slave.

The field ranged from pitch-perfect recreations of 50s American SF on 16mm by the Spence Brothers of Northern Ireland, to Standard 8 efforts by cine clubs that moved along with the power to slow down time itself. But rarely did I see a film where the love didn't somehow shine through.


One of my favourites was an utterly unpretentious remake of Superman by a bunch of teenaged friends. Superman's costume was a bath towel added to his school uniform. Flight was achieved by cutting a figure out of a comic book and sticking it to the inside of a train window, then filming it as the landscape raced by outside. Howard and Theodore Lydecker would have been proud.