The debut feature by London-based artist Jamie Shovlin, Rough Cut explores the re-making of a 1970s exploitation film that never was.
At its dark heart is Hiker Meat, an archetypal 1970s slasher movie imagined by Shovlin, complete with hitchhiking heroine and a group of teens who disappear one by one. Having created a full screenplay, score and prototype for Hiker Meat, Shovlin filmed the full trailer of a non-existent movie. Rough Cut, a film-within-a-film, serves to both deconstruct and pay homage to the exploitation style.
»The thing I like about exploitation films is not really their subject matter, it’s that at a certain point in time people got together and made them with extremely limited means. They actually had the drive to make The Sinful Dwarf (1973), a terrible, terrible film, or Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973). It’s crazy but I’m really happy there are people that want to make things like that exist.« (Jamie Shovlin)
Jamie Shovlin
Born in 1978 in Leicester, UK. Having studied painting at the Royal College of Art, London, Shovlin has exhibited throughout Europe and authored a number of articles on art. The London-based director is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory.