persona: The Talented Mister Impey

Jason Impey is one of today’s most active self-funded filmmakers from the UK.

Born on February 26^th 1984 in Northampton, Impey had felt a passion for film-making from an early age. His first exercise in film was a short “Split Second”, made when he was just ten years old and named after “Split Second” with Rutger Hauer. Several other shorts followed and at the age of sixteen Jason Impey enrolled on a film-making course in Bedford college.

SICK BASTARD:

Beginning of 2006 saw Jason complete his first feature film, “Sick Bastard” – homage to Andreas Schnaas’ infamous “Violent Shit” films. Impey intentionally shot the film on an SVHS camera to give it that special fuzzy video look. Set mainly in the woods, this gritty picture presents us a string of increasingly violent and bizarre encounters of various innocents with the titular character – an escaped mental patient. “Sick Bastard” can actually be confused for a film made in about ’93, until one of the characters whips out a very modern-looking Motorola mobile! The film was distributed on home video in such countries as USA and Russia and to this day remains one of Impey’s better-known works.

HOME MADE and beyond:

A string of other horror-themed films followed, with Impey making an average of 2-3 films per years using mainly his own private funding: “Home Made 1 & 2” - a trashy and violent fake snuff saga, “Troubled” – an odd mixture of Dogme’95 aesthetics and gore, “Tales of Terror”, “Zombie Village” and others.

While working on a zombie short “Revenge of the Dead” Jason Impey met fellow filmmaker Kemal Yildirim, his exploitation soul-mate. The two have collaborated numerous times since and are running “Exploitation Pictures” together.

Jason Impey loves retro aesthetic, so his digital films often feature sequences shot on actual film and most scripts have sly references to 70’s-80’s exploitation classics.

The trouble with censors: TORTURED (2008)

Impey’s most epic and challenging project to date has got to be “Tortured” – a nasty rape-revenge film in the vein of “I spit on Your Grave”.

Shot in less than a week for just a few thousand dollars, “Tortured” is a modern-day grindhouse film. When it was screened in London on the double-bill with Yildirim’s giallo “Penance”, several people walked out the cinema in disgust at foul dialogue and graphic scenes. Knowing the draconian laws of BBFC, Impey never even attempted to release “Tortured” in the UK, realizing that they would have literally cut the film to shreds. Still, “Tortured” ran into trouble with censorship when submitted for a home video certificate in the States. All the graphic sexual violence had to be removed, resulting in about 10 minutes’ worth of cuts. The cut version was re-titled “Escaped Convicts” and is due to have a release in a matter of weeks.

I have recently received a screener of Impey’s latest production – torture porn called “Tormented” and will review it soon.

Apart from making films, Jason is also a huge collector of rare films and memorabilia, the Video Nasties being his favourite items.