By Stephanie Scaife
Read part 1 of Steph’s FrightFest round up here.
Day three of FrightFest started with The Hypnotist, a Swedish crime thriller directed by Lasse Hallström (Safe Haven, Dear John) and based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Lars Kepler (husband and wife duo Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril). A horror film festival may seem like an odd place to find Hallström on the line-up, better known for his saccharine romantic dramas, but The Hypnotist provided an adequate dose of Nordic noir even if it was overly long and may have suited better to being converted into a two-part television drama. The story centres around Stockholm police detective Joona Linna (Tobias Zilliacus) who enlists the help of famous hypnotist Erik Bark (Mikael Persbrandt) to aid him in the investigation of the murder of a family, where the only survivor is the now comatose teenage son. A lot of the twists and turns are well signposted and I was left with a few questions regarding some rather poorly explained plot devices, but the performances were strong, particularly from Lena Olin as Bark’s long suffering wife; and the cinematography was suitably frosty, making the most of the Swedish landscapes. Overall though, I found it to be fairly derivative and quickly forgettable.
Next up was Bobcat Goldthwait’s bigfoot found-footage movie Willow Creek, which I really enjoyed and you can read my full review here.
Following on from that was Hammer of the Gods, which for me was by far the worst film I saw all weekend, and it now has the dubious honour of being the first film that I have ever walked out on in the cinema (and I’ve sat through some tripe in my time). When you’re spending fifteen hours straight in the cinema sometimes the desire for food and daylight wins out over a dire Viking romp that wouldn’t look terribly out of place on the Syfy Channel. Any semblance of historical accuracy was thrown out of the window and the actors seemed to be making up dialogue in a bid to out-swear each other, not to mention that the budget had been stretched to within an inch of its life, and half a dozen actors on a cliff in Wales does not an epic battle make.
Thankfully, the next film I saw was Christoph Behl’s fantastic post-apocalyptic love story The Desert which proved to be a definite highlight and you can read my full review here.
Saturday proved to be one of the strongest days of the festival and in a bid to avoid R.I.P.D. I decided to check out The Borderlands instead, and although apprehensive of yet another found-footage film I was pleasantly surprised by this low-budget British offering that does that very rare thing of managing to balance humour with genuine scares. Some weird shit has been going down at a local parish church in the West Country and Vatican inspectors Deacon (Gordon Kennedy) and Mark (Aidan McArdle), along with their AV technician Gray (Robin Hill), have been sent in to investigate. Kennedy and Hill have a great rapport together and provided the requisite number of laughs for The Borderlands to be a successful comedy whilst the creepy goings on create a palpable sense of dread (a prank played by local kids in particular sent chills down my spine). Although perhaps let down in the closing ten minutes or so, The Borderlands is a fantastic British horror film and I’m looking forward to seeing it again.
Saturday came to a close with E.L. Katz’s brilliant Cheap Thrills which proved to be the real audience pleaser of the weekend, and you can read by somewhat gushing review here.
Sunday proved to be perhaps the most frustrating day with a mixed bag of films that either didn’t particularly deliver or were disappointing in one way or another. The day started with Missionary, directed by Anthony Di Blasi whose first film Dread I’d always found to be slightly underrated; however here we have a pretty straightforward stalker movie, very much in the vein of Fatal Attraction or the likes, where as the audience you are increasingly frustrated by the actions of the main protagonists, where between them nobody really manages to do anything sensible and increasingly worrying behaviours are overlooked until it’s too late for all involved. In this instance we have single mother Katherine (Dawn Oliveri) falling for Kevin Brock (Mitch Ryan), a Mormon missionary ten years her junior, only to discover he’s actually a crazy sociopath with mommy issues hellbent on ensuring their happily ever after, no matter what it takes. After the first twenty minutes of the film I could have told you exactly what was going to happen for the remainder, which only added to the frustration and boredom.
In Fear is a fantastically taught no-budget British thriller that sees Tom (Iain De Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) get waylaid in the English countryside en-route to a music festival. This is the first feature from television director Jeremy Lovering and it’s an effective exercise in creating tension; even the actors didn’t know what was going on and the dialogue is largely improvised, so to say too much would really be to spoil this film. In Fear works best with knowing as little as possible going in, and even though it loses its way slightly towards the end as it falls foul of one too many genre tropes it is well worth a watch and one of the strongest, most unexpected British indie films of the year.
The winner for most walk-outs of the weekend goes to Dark Tourist (or The Grief Tourist as it was known up until very recently), a slow burning psychological thriller that follows Jim Tahana (Michael Cudlitz), a night security guard who spends his vacations visiting the sites of famous crimes and murders. His most recent trip sees him travelling to a small town in California to visit the crime scenes of Carl Marznap (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an arsonist and mass murderer. On his trip he is befriended by local and long-suffering waitress Betsy (a welcome return to the big screen from Melanie Griffith) and becomes motel room neighbours with prostitute Iris (Suzanne Quast). Dark Tourist is a real slow burner, which unfortunately serves only to create boredom rather than any palpable sense of tension, and when the final pay off comes it will leave a nasty taste in your mouth. Jim it would transpire is more than just your casual grief tourist and his own childhood traumas and quickly deteriorating psyche come into play in an explosive, not to mention exploitative, manner. I can’t really talk too much about what really bothered me about the film as it is a major spoiler, albeit one clearly sign-posted throughout, but I will say that this depressing, dull and ultimately nasty film really has very little going for it besides the central performances all being very strong. It’s a shame because for a while I thought it showed some real potential to do something interesting with its transgressions, but instead it proved itself to be deeply unpleasant.
The Conspiracy provided yet another found-footage film, and one that I really struggled with. Perhaps it just sent me over the edge of my already waning tolerance for the subgenre, or perhaps I had just spent far too long in the cinema by this point, but I ain’t gonna lie… I dosed off during this one. It’s a relief then that I am able to point you in the direction of Eric’s review from its screening at Fantastic Fest last year, which you can find here.
The Last Days then provided me with perhaps one of the most frustrating film watching experiences that I can recently recall. From sibling writer-directors David Pastor and Àlex Pastor (Carriers) comes this intriguing Barcelona-set apocalyptic melodrama. The premise is fairly simple, if not a little farfetched, whereby the world’s population is inflicted with a sudden and crippling dose of agoraphobia meaning that everyone ends up trapped in the building where they are after the onset of the condition. Marc Delgado (Quim Guttiérez), who is stuck in his office where he had worked as a computer programmer, embarks on a mission with his onetime boss Enrique (José Coronado), travelling underground and through buildings in a bid to track down Marc’s pregnant girlfriend Julia (Marta Etura) and Enrique’s sick and elderly father. It’s an interesting premise and our travelling companions strike up a reluctant friendship that I found myself sufficiently invested in; there are also some nice touches such as a fight in a church with a bear that has escaped from a local zoo, and warring Mad Max style gangs occupying a shopping mall. Where The Last Days falls flat though is with its ending, something so saccharine and overtly sentimental that it’s like wading knee deep through syrup. We were warned beforehand that the ending would divide people, those who love it and those who hate it, and I was firmly in the latter camp. I like my post-apocalyptic movies to be unapologetic misery-fests (think The Road, The Mist or if I really want to suffer Threads), and the unbelievably and unrealistically happy ending to The Last Days left me feeling cheated by one of my favourite sub-genres.
The final day of FrightFest started with Dark Touch, an Irish set psychological horror from French writer-director Marina de Van (Under My Skin). I found Dark Touch to be intriguing initially, but the more it reveals the more ham-fisted it becomes, ultimately ending on a rather silly note which didn’t sit particularly comfortably with me considering the child abuse narrative. Niamh (Missy Keating) is a young girl with a dark secret and after her parents and baby brother are killed during a mysterious accident she is taken in by long standing family friends Nat (Marcella Plunkett) and Lucas (Padraic Delaney) who are so wilfully blind to the obvious signs of trauma and abuse that she has suffered that it’s almost laughable. I think what I struggle with when it comes to films like these is creating a symbiosis between serious subject matter and the trappings of working within the realms of the supernatural, which so often can unintentionally come across as a bit daft. Carrie is a fine example of how this can work, but Dark Touch elicited more than snickers from the audience during scenes that weren’t intended to be funny, and overall I found it to be disappointingly mediocre.
The final found-footage film of the festival came in the form of the World Premiere of Banshee Chapter 3D which proved very popular with the audience, although I myself struggled to sit though yet another pseudo-documentary offering that was also in 3D (two of my least favourite things), and any genuine scares that there may have been were overshadowed by my inability to stop fidgeting. Banshee Chapter actually doesn’t have anything to do with Banshees, but it does have a lot to do with writer James Hirsch (Michael McMillian) going missing after ingesting DMT-19 (a variant of Dimethyltryptamine that is supposedly impossible to come by) whilst researching a novel. Soon James’ old pal turned journalist Anne Rowland (Katia Winter) has teamed up with a counter culture aficionado and novelist Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine doing a regrettable impersonation of Hunter S. Thompson) to try and figure out exactly what happened to her friend. Cue much ruckus, noise and the inevitable headache caused by the combination of 3D and shaky camerawork. I wish that filmmakers would realise that simply injecting a VERY LOUD NOISE every ten minutes isn’t an instant recipe for making something scary.
Thank goodness then for Snap which proved to be the first genuinely interesting film of the day for me and if you can believe it, a psychological horror set in the world of underground dub-step music and social work. From directors Youssef Delara and Victor Teran, Snap focuses on painfully shy and introverted Jim (Jake Hoffman) who spends most of this time hauled up in his apartment creating music to drown out the sounds of his constant companion Jake (Thomas Dekker), who is quickly established as the vitriolic and downright offensive manifestation of the voice in Jim’s head. One day Jim meets Wendy (Nikki Reed), an intern working for Kevin (Scott Bakula), a social worker and an old friend of Jim’s. He is instantly smitten and the pair form a short-lived and awkward romance. Things predictably turn sour as Wendy’s rejection of Jim brings out repressed childhood memories and triggers a serious schizophrenic episode, turning him from sweet and shy into a crazy stalker. Snap is a smart and edgy thriller that is only slightly let down by its shock ending that feels a little tacked on, but otherwise I whole heartedly recommend seeking this out.
I chose to skip Odd Thomas on the basis that I’d already seen it, and although it’s a cute and quirky little film that I quite liked I wasn’t sure exactly how it fit into the FrightFest line-up, as although it has it’s darker moments I see it to be more of a family-friendly movie and conversely not something you’d generally read about on the pages of Brutal As Hell.
The penultimate film of the festival was Jim Mickle’s awesome re-imagining of We Are What We Are which I liked very much and you can read my full length review here.
The final FrightFest film of 2013, and also the last film ever to be screened in the Empire Leicester Square screen 1 (before it undergoes a massive refurbishment), was Israeli crowd-pleaser Big Bad Wolves from Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado (Rabies). A violent and twisting revenge thriller with lashings of pitch black humour, Big Bad Wolves is full of surprises and it never quite ends up exactly where you expect it to. Miki (Lior Ashkenazi), a disgraced cop and Gidi (Tzahi Grad), the father of a murdered girl take revenge on mild mannered school teacher Dror (Rotem Keinan) whom they suspect to be the killer. Perhaps one of the smartest and most suspenseful films I’ve seen in recent years, it is only a matter of time before Big Bad Wolves falls foul to an American remake as is the likelihood with anything faintly original that isn’t in the English language. The universal acclaim that the film has received speaks wonders for its widespread appeal and hopefully it will be picked up and secure an international release because I for one can’t wait to see it again, largely because as it was the twenty-third film I’d seen in the space of four and half days and my concentration was waning, but also because it’s always so refreshing to see something so unexpected that lives up to the hype.
As sad as I was for FrightFest to be over for yet another year, I was also slightly relieved to be able to get more than four hours of sleep a night and to eat a meal that didn’t consist of junk food and an energy drink. Then again August Bank Holiday weekend wouldn’t be quite the same without the constant hangover, sensitivity to daylight and lower back pain caused by one too many hours spent in a cinema seat. Current trends of year proved to be *yawn* the found-footage film and a plethora of dead animals – I counted 4 dead dogs, 1 dead cat, 1 dead bear, 1 dead goat and a flaming sheep.
My top 5 of FrightFest 2013:
1. Cheap Thrills
2. We Are What We Are
3. 100 Bloody Acres
4. The Desert
5. Willow Creek
Until next time…