By Kit Rathenar
Read Part 1 of Kit’s BSIFF report here.
SATURDAY, 26 October
Halfway through the festival, and this morning took an academic turn with one of the lectures that BSIFF likes to sprinkle into their programme. This one, entitled “Crucifixes, Cadavers and Demons”, was presented by freelance horror lecturer and journalist Dr Karen Oughton. Billed as “a study of religion and devilish dealings in horror film”, I certainly can’t fault this particular presentation for its entertainment value: delivered by a corsetted and top-hatted Oughton stalking the stage with Shakespearian flamboyance, this lecture provided a fast-paced and informative review of the commonest religious tropes used in horror cinema. Effectively this was a look behind the curtain, a reveal of how scriptwriters and directors use our own psychology and cultural backdrops to play on our fears, and there was plenty of insightful commentary offered here with examples ranging from The Wicker Man to Burial Ground, Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (yes, really) and a Pakistani film titled Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground), which Oughton used to showcase religion as a source of horror in an Islamic cultural context, a fascinatingly brief glimpse that definitely inspired me to want to watch more horror from other cultures than my own. Well worth attending; I envy those fortunate enough to have Dr Oughton as a regular lecturer on their courses, and I very much hope the BSIFF will invite her back.
Moving from the intellectual to the frankly daft, the first film of the day was the eighties classic The Monster Squad, the heartwarming tale of a gang of horror-loving kids who find themselves facing off against a team of old Universal-style monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Gillman – set on taking over the world in the name of Evil. I’d never seen this before but had had it highly recommended to me by “Necro” Neil of Necronomicon fanzine, and it was everything I’d expected: silly, funny, charming, entertaining and with some wonderful heartstring-tugging moments. A feelgood classic for any horror fan with a surviving inner child, especially perhaps the older ones among us.
Following this was another classic, but this one of a very different flavour. I’m a huge fan of John Carpenter, so the chance to see his They Live on the big screen was not to be passed up. Like so many classic dystopian social-commentary films, Carpenter’s tale of an ordinary man who discovers that the world around him is being run by shadowy forces of fearsome reach and power still feels horribly relevant today, despite being a quarter of a century old. Roddy Piper as Nada turns in a memorable performance as one of Carpenter’s typically macho heroes, especially in the infamous six-minute fistfight that forms a visual high point of the whole film; I love Carpenter’s outrageously over-the-top constructions of masculinity, and Nada is a classic example. They Live also has a fantastic ability to terminate and stay resident in your psyche, which for me is the benchmark of a really great unsettling film. I came out of the cinema, wandered into the foyer… and realised I was wondering which of the festival-goers and staff around me would be aliens if I had the right glasses on. And sure, I laughed at myself, but the very fact that the thought occurred to me speaks volumes for the quality of Carpenter’s filmmaking here.
In an amusing segue, Roddy Piper featured in the next film as well, but here the context was very different. Cody Knotts’ Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies is a film that I’m honestly amazed it took this long for someone to make. After all, the traditional zombie movie requires a reasonably sized group of people in an isolated setting, a horde of undead extras, and as many high-tension fights, chases and crisis situations as you can cram into the plot. To make the living faction pro wrestlers – who have a plausible reason to all be together in a random large building, and already possess the necessary instincts to hit someone with a chair first and ask questions later – seems, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a no-brainer.
And indeed, this film is in every possible way exactly that. Casting a scattershot array of pro wrestling stars – all playing themselves – from the veteran likes of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan to such more recent icons as Matt Hardy and Olympic legend Kurt Angle, Pro Wrestlers vs Zombies is unapologetically a wrestling fan’s film. If you don’t know and love wrestling, you will be completely at sea here, and the flimsy plot, dubious scriptwriting and chaotic acting and direction are unlikely to provide much of a lifebelt. But if you do love wrestling, you’ll recognise and laugh at so many things in this film that it’s impossible not to enjoy it. The absurd plot twists, the tendency for everyone to get terribly dramatic and shout at each other with minimal provocation, and the outrageous physical violence are exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a vintage WWE or WCW show. And of course all the (many, many) fights are as dramatic, brutal and exhilarating as they ought to be – I’ve often wondered why more cinematic fight choreography doesn’t borrow from pro wrestling, and this film is a case study in why it should. If you’re a wrestling fan and you like zombies, see this film, because while it’s anything but serious art, it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it gloriously.
Worn out by all that excitement, I failed to make it out on Saturday night and therefore sadly missed the Vampires Ball. For anyone wanting to look them up, though, the bands were AlterRed, Scandacross, Symfony, and Victorians, and all the feedback I heard claimed that it was a fantastic night. The costumes in particular are traditionally a highlight and I’ve seen some truly stunning photos from this year, so if you’re planning on going to the next one, do prepare accordingly!
SUNDAY, 27 October
I, however, wasn’t to be seen again until Sunday morning when I arrived for a screening of Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx, which is terribly British, terribly seventies, and… well, mostly just terrible, to be honest. Following the tragic deaths of his second wife and grownup son in a boating accident, scientist, psychical researcher and photography buff Sir Hugo Cunningham becomes obsessed with the desire to identify the mysterious entities that can be seen on photographic images of the dying; these turn out to be the so-called “asphyxes”, psychopomps of sorts that unite with a dying person’s spiritual essence and apparently consume it. He then starts trying to trap asphyxes with the help of his adopted son Giles, and descends rapidly into a deranged quest for immortality whose exact motivation is never wholly clear. By halfway into this movie the entire theatre was snickering, as the characterisation and scripting grew too absurd for anyone to endure with a straight face; outrageously hammy, far-fetched and implausible, and generally reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Frankenstein cinematic heritage. I was half expecting a hunchback named Igor to wander into the plot with no explanation required. One element of this film that I did like was the asphyxes themselves, hideous half-formed creatures that can only be seen and trapped by a specific type and frequency of light – despite the limitations of early seventies special effects, these writhing, screaming little horrors are authentically unsettling enough to stick around in your nightmares for a while afterwards. Mind you, so will the rest of this film, but very much for the wrong reasons.
As vintage British filmmaking goes, though, I felt I could do a lot better after this by heading upstairs for my first visit of the weekend to Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite. A small room set up with a projector, screen and a mere score or so of chairs, the Suite seemed to do a slow but steady trade throughout the festival, with its schedule of fifty or so vintage B-movies almost all receiving some minor attendance. I hadn’t had the opportunity to check it out until now but I made the time at this point, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to catch Hammer’s full-colour feature version of the legendary Quatermass and the Pit.
Which, predictably enough, I really, really enjoyed. The effects may be old and the sets and atmosphere of the film partake strongly of the classic BBC sci-fi tradition, but like They Live, Quatermass and the Pit has utterly failed to date in its insights into the politics of power, the limits of military authority and competence, and the pros and cons of transparency in public affairs. When mysterious skeletons and a strange metallic artefact are discovered during the extension of a London Tube station, the authorities involved make all the same mistakes that we’d expect to see now, and the infighting, politicking and self-interest at play are depressingly familiar. But since this is a classic film and not a modern one, we’re given a ray of hope in the form of the redoubtable Professor Quatermass, who strides through the chaos taking a determined if extremely Old British stand for science, reason and the best interests of mankind; one of those courageous, intelligent, capable altruists that the cinematic world seems to be very short on these days. While it’s a relatively low-key film by modern standards (despite the ending having been revised by Hammer from the BBC original to add bigger explosions), Quatermass and the Pit remains a classic of eerie, intelligent horror SF that can still leave a viewer wondering: what if? What if we found something like this? What if the history of the world really does contain something this anomalous, this utterly bizarre? What would it mean, and how would we deal with it? And that’s what SF at its best should always do: make us question what we know, and contemplate what we’re going to do with the things we’re going to know in future. Quatermass and the Pit achieves that and much more. Still a classic.
I took a break at this point and didn’t attend the annual awards ceremony in the afternoon, but here are the results as posted on the festival site after the event:
Best Film – Gwai Wik / ReCycle
Best Short – Killer Kart
Best Director – James Hart – Ascension
Best Male Lead – David Long – Pieces of Talent
Best Female Lead – Lexy Hulme – Lord of Tears
Best SFX – Thanatomorphose
Best Screenplay – Vampire Guitar
Audience Award – Lord of Tears
By the time I returned to the Pavilion the main room was playing host to the 1880s Night event, with live bands and a wide range of performers and entertainers, but I elected instead to go and catch the final couple of films. First up was The Pyramid, an experimental Italian project consisting of four short narratives that link to form a single whole centring on a mysterious artefact: a small decorated pyramid that seems to act as a vector for unimaginable chaos and horror. Each short has a different director, though it’s obvious that all four were shot in very close cohesion with each other as the story continues seamlessly through the transitions between them.
When presented with a small, shiny object with moving parts, a seeming will of its own, and the capacity to draw horror into our world from another dimension, it’s pretty much impossible not to mentally return Hellraiser as a frame of reference, and indeed, The Pyramid doesn’t seem at all abashed about paying homage to Barker’s legendary creation. Opening segment “Ritual” in particular has a very Hellraiseresque, sensual body-horror keynote that makes for uncomfortable but enthralling watching, as the pyramid first makes its way into circulation through the hands of an unfortunate young documentary-maker who buys it from a curio stall while filming at an Italian arts festival. Since the opening credits depict the pyramid against various apocalyptic historical backdrops, hinting that this artefact and its power have been responsible for everything from the crucifixion of Christ to the atrocities of the Nazi death camps, at this point I was hoping for the story to blossom into something worthy of this ambitious set-up. Second segment “Dream Door” remains low-key, however, as it follows the pyramid into the hands of a young cleaner who picks it up from the hotel room floor in the aftermath of the first story and thence on to her boyfriend, a struggling artist. Here the focus is on the emotional collapse between two people as they struggle to fit their lives around each other’s conflicting needs, and the pyramid’s influence only seems to accelerate a fall that was already coming. From here, a sequence of tragic events leaves the pyramid lying out in the open to be found in the third segment, “Pestilence”, by a group of teens out for a walk in the woods.
It’s at this point that The Pyramid begins to lose momentum. Transforming humans into ghoulish minions, the pyramid’s evil starts spreading its influence further afield, but in doing so the film loses the intimate horror of the first two parts without successfully replacing it with anything on the scale hinted at in the credits. This is really just a routine, low-budget zombie apocalypse, and doesn’t offer any of the heights and depths of true soul-scarring evil it needs to possess if we’re to accept that the pyramid might really have been responsible for any of the legendary atrocities it’s been connected to. Final segment “Apocalypse” attempts to pick up the pace by expanding the scale of the chaos and giving a more explicitly spiritual aspect to it, adding a plot involving a young woman about to give birth to a demon and an impromptu crusader order, but it still fails to come anywhere near fulfilling the paradigm it’s defined for itself. While there are things about this project that I liked, most of them are in the first part, and the rest doesn’t really come up to spec. A brave and ambitious attempt sadly undercut by a lack of vision – or possibly just a lack of budget.
Having sat through that, it was a relief to be able to unwind with the final movie of the festival, Hammer’s Vampire Circus. When a plague-stricken village is visited by a circus, at first the villagers are grateful for the distraction from their woeful state, but it slowly becomes clear that the circus is here for more sinister reasons by far than simply to fleece them of their remaining silver. This is a real extravaganza of escapism in the finest Hammer tradition, complete with stereotyped exotic gypsies and carnival atmosphere, a setting that owes less to history or geography than it does to some sort of collective unconscious of horror cinema, and an erotic charge that’s quite subdued by modern standards but still manages to convey a reminiscence of the frisson it would have induced in a more tight-laced era. While it’s very much of the time and falls rather short of modern ethical and ideological standards in places, this is a great film to simply relax and enjoy the visual spectacle of, and an excellent choice of feelgood sendoff for the festival.
In closing, an excellent event that I wish I’d been able to attend more of, marred only by the fact that the Pavilion’s cinema isn’t the best – the sound system tends to muffle and distort, making it a challenge to pick out key lines of dialogue at times, and the fact that it’s a digital system running off DVDs and Blu-Rays provides far too many opportunities for things to screen in the wrong aspect ratio. But if some suitable technical skill could be brought to bear this could all be ironed out, and I’m hoping that by next year this will be the case. I’ll certainly be going along to find out…