By Nia Edwards-Behi
I know, I know, I’m lazy (editor’s note – no she bloody well isn’t, she’s written 11 full length reviews and another round-up in the past 10 days). But watching 21 films in five days inevitably means that my brain forgets a lot of the detail to some films, even when I do take notes. Or, there are some films that I just plain didn’t think much of. Or, there are the films during which I may have slightly dozed off and so can’t really review them properly. There were a lot of late nights, I should note, and some of the films below I wish I’d slept through, so that I might have had the energy not to fall asleep during others.
Charlie’s Farm (Chris Sun, 2014)
Charlie’s Farm is a film I’ve somehow heard mention of quite a bit, but I knew little about it. I knew it was a slasher, so I had few expectations when I sat to watch it. I saw both Tara Reid and Bill Moseley pop up as names in the opening titles – now, I like Bill Moseley, but this did not fill me with hope. It was difficult judging the tone of the film from the opening scene, which actually reminded me of the opening to House by the Cemetery. Was this an intentional reference? Was this going to be an entertaining parody? Well, it turns out, no. It’s just a boring old slasher. The rigidity with which the film sticks to formula is painful to watch, but, on the upside, it does boast some impressive effects work, which makes the kills and gore entertaining enough.
Two girls and two guys head into the Australian outback for a camping trip. Natasha (Tara Reid) is bringing her friend Melanie in a hope to hook her up with her own boyfriend’s boorish friend (yeah, you know how this goes). The boys have planned the trip and unbeknownst to the girls, they’re camping in an abandoned farmhouse, where some year previous, horrible murders happened. Rumour has it that Charlie (Nathan Jones), the child who saw his murderous parents finally killed by the local townsfolk, still inhabits the house, with murderous intentions of his own. Surprise! He does indeed, and so our group has to fight for their lives on Charlie’s farm.
Bored yet? You should be. The characters are all extremely one-dimensional and unlikeable, particularly the boorish Nick-Frost-a-like Donkey (Sam Coward), who I think we’re meant to find funny. Bill Moseley is wasted, as usual, as Charlie’s rapist-murderer dad, and the flashback sequences are unnecessarily unpleasant (for me, anyway). I know it’s a horror film, but there’s something about the tone of these flashbacks that just screams being grim for the sake of it – girl getting tortured? Better have some boob on screen and some throwaway references to rape! Maybe I’m just predictable in the things that I dislike in a film; maybe it’s just lazy filmmaking.
The script is painfully bad, with quite a few unintentional chuckles raised from the stilted dialogue. Despite this, the film is, sadly, not so bad that it becomes entertaining. It’s simply boring. There is one moment that I genuinely enjoyed, and that’s a particularly gruesome death scene. It’s such an amusing death that it almost made up for the utter awfulness of the rest of the film – but not quite.
Ultimately, not even having a beer in hand saved Charlie’s Farm for me. A more deftly knowing tone might have made the film an enjoyable parody, but as it stands the film is merely the same old stuff we’ve seen countless times before – and sadly, not even impressive effects work can save that.
Wyrmwood (Kiah Roache-Turner, 2014)
Here’s another one that a beer in hand should have helped, but sadly Wyrmwood is one of those films I’m going to have to be all against the grain about (indeed, our own Quin has very different feelings about it). This is a film that’s been receiving a lot of praise since its premiere at Fantastic Fest last year, but I can’t say that I found anything particularly inspiring about it. It’s impressive as a debut film, I suppose, in that it is ambitiously staged and well-put together, but it didn’t entertain or move me in anyway. Now – I might just be getting boring. The crowd I watched this film with lapped it up completely, and seemed to love every daft moment of it (the BIFFF crowd is a notoriously vocal one, so you definitely know when a film’s going down well).
So, why didn’t I like it? I found the narrative to be extremely derivative. For all the neat little twists of the particular world Wyrmwood inhabits, it wasn’t enough for me to detract from the fact that the narrative plays out the same as many other zombie films before it. The zombies themselves, again, despite having a few neat twists on the nature of their undeadness, look and behave the same way as any other fast-moving zombies in recent years.
The film’s meant, I think, to be funny. I didn’t find it funny, I found it forced and a bit boring. I can’t stress enough, again, that I seemed to be very much in a minority in this regard, as BIFFF’s raucous crowd cheered and laughed throughout. The characters are a particular brand of ‘funny bloke’ that I just find incessantly dull, so I guess that’s my problem rather than the film’s problem. Another element of the film that bothered me in particular was the film’s only significant female character, Brooke. She’s one of those ‘strong female characters’ that might punch a few zombies but otherwise spends the film either strung up by a mad scientist or as a plot device. Actress Bianca Bradley is clearly talented, and yeah, she looks good, but she’s ultimately wasted here.
All being said, I suppose Wyrmwood just wasn’t for me. Being surrounded by literally hundreds of other people who seemed to be really enjoying it made that much clear. For me, it just wasn’t distinct enough from countless other zombie films to hold my attention.
The Stranger (Guillermo Amoedo, 2014)
A strange man, Caleb (Ariel Levy) returns to a small town to try and find his wife. When he’s viciously beaten up he’s looked after by a local boy, Peter (Nicolas Duran). Peter soon learns that associating with Caleb puts him in grave danger, and bad blood, corrupt police and familial revenge throws his life into turmoil.
I wish I could say that The Stranger was a good film. There’s definitely a good film in there somewhere, but my feeling at the end of the film was one of disappointment. My biggest gripe was that the film was in English. This is a Chilean film, and I really wish it had been shot in Spanish. There are some awkward performances in the film that I can’t help but feel might have been down to the language. I could be wrong, but even so, I think I’d have found the film more interesting were it in Spanish and set in Chile, rather than in English and set in an anonymous town in Canada.
Having said that, Nicolas Durand’s central performance as young Peter is excellent, and I think much of the film’s success lies on his shoulders. Without a strong emotional core to the film its already over-stretched 93 minutes would have felt like even more of a drag. He’s the film’s revelation, for sure, and I hope it gets him much more work.
The narrative is not especially inventive, but there is a certain melancholy in the tone which makes it interesting. However, it does feel rather stretched, which is unfortunate. The secondary characters are a bit too stock to sustain interest, even though the central roles are well-played and developed. Overall I suppose I enjoyed watching The Stranger, so it might be a bit unfair of me to write so negatively of the film, but – I’m just not sure I’d really recommend it.
The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 2014)
The Midnight After follows a group of late night bus passengers who find themselves apparently the only people left in the world. I may have nodded off a bit during this one, even though I was watching it in a screening room, but in my defence it was the final day I was at BIFFF and so the cumulative lack of sleep can’t have helped. I’m not sure drowsiness was entirely the reason that the film seemed to make no sense whatsoever, but it probably didn’t help me understand things either. Overall, I think The Midnight After’s got something of a post-Fukushima commentary going on, but I found the narrative extremely difficult to follow, despite it being fairly easy to summarise. The film is enjoyable, certainly, but I have very little idea as to what was actually going on. There is one absolutely stand out scene, however, in which the group turns on one of its members who has been, shall we say, a bit (a lot) bad. That scene has definitely stuck in my mind and it is played out extremely effectively. This is definitely a film I’d watch again – properly, next time!
III (Pavel Khvaleev, 2015)
III is a very beautiful film. A very, very beautiful film. It’s just all a bit…well, dull. Very, very dull. The film’s biggest flaw is, perhaps, the lack of characterisation of its protagonists, so there’s no one to care for amongst all the beautiful imagery. Tristan’s recently reviewed the film, and I must say I whole-heartedly agree with his take on it.
The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D (Tsui Hark, 2015)
This is the second Tsui Hark film I’ve fallen asleep during at a festival (the other being Young Detective Dee and the Sea Serpent at Sitges last year), and I’m bloody annoyed that I did. This is a spectacular film, so the big screen is the place to see it, and I liked what I saw – but I guess I just needed the sleep. Sorry, Mr. Hark!