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Festival Report: FrightFest 2015 (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Admin

By Stephanie Scaife

Click here to read part one of Steph’s FrightFest 2015 report.

Abner Pastoll’s Road Games was a pleasant surprise, an interesting UK/French production that is not (as I’d thought) a remake of the 1981 Jamie Lee Curtis film of the same name. Instead Road Games is about Jack (Andrew Simpson), an English tourist that finds himself stranded in rural France with little more than his passport to his name. Whilst trying to hitchhike to Calais, Jack comes across Véronique (Joséphine de La Baume), a fellow traveller and kindred spirit. They decide to travel together for safety as there have been stories of a serial killer in the local area. When Grizard (Frederic Pierrot) stops and offers them a lift Véronique is apprehensive but reluctantly agrees, he informs them that there is a strike at Calais so they won’t be able to get a ferry to England and offers to put them up for the night. Grizard lives in an isolated mansion with his American wife Mary (Barbara Crampton) who seems more than a little unhinged and things quickly go downhill for Jack and Véronique. Despite the fact that it’s fairly obvious where the narrative is going quite soon into the film, it didn’t necessarily detract from my enjoyment as the atmosphere that Pastoll creates is incredibly tense at times, and the twists the narrative takes to its somewhat inevitable conclusion are still intriguing because, although I knew where it was going, I never knew how it was going to get there. Simpson and de La Baume have great chemistry too, and both Pierrot and Crampton are as excellent as you’d expect. I think that it is so important when making a small, low budget movie that the script and the actors are good as so many of the films I saw at FrightFest this year fell victim to having neither of those things. Road Games though worked surprisingly well and it definitely works best the less you know going in.

I was looking forward to Inner Demon as it has been labelled as the next big Australian film since The Babadook; however, the only two things these films have in common is that they are Australian and both have a female director… it is a stupid comparison to make. The Babadook is of course a very good film and Inner Demon really is not. In fact if I’d been responsible for naming this film it would’ve been Inner Bore. It’s a shame really because it started out pretty well: Sam (Sarah Jeavons) and her little sister are abducted by demented couple Karl (Andreas Sobik) and Denise (Kerry Ann Reid) and driven out into the woods. Sam manages to escape, in an admittedly ingenious way, only to find herself trapped in the home of her captors. She takes shelter in their closet, which is where the majority of the film takes place, and yes, it’s as dull as it sounds.

Slumlord definitely wins for the most nausea inducing scene of the festival – I won’t spoil it but I will say that it involves a toothbrush. Written and directed by first time filmmaker Victor Zarcoff, Slumlord is about a creepy landlord, Gerald (Neville Archambault), who sets up hidden cameras all around his house before renting it out to unsuspecting couple Ryan (PJ McCabe) and Claire (Brianne Moncrief). Gerald is just about the most repellent character that you can imagine; sweaty, crazy eyed and monosyllabic, he sits watching his monitors surrounded by piles of used tissues and becomes so frustrated when he notices blind spots that he returns to the house to fit even more cameras. Thankfully this is not a found footage film and we only get the occasional glimpse through Gerald’s cameras at what he is watching. Another plus is that both Ryan and Claire and believable and flawed characters, and although at times unlikeable (Ryan in particular) they still manages to illicit sympathy. The main problem with Slumlord is that it is very slow and it covers very well-trodden ground that we’ve seen numerous times before so nothing is ever much of a surprise, and although the general ick factor is quite high it is mostly just a bit of a slog to get through; I definitely came close to nodding off a few times.

I was a little disappointed by The Nightmare as I’d heard good things about it and thought there was great potential in the subject matter to make a fascinating documentary. Directed by Rodney Ascher (Room 237) The Nightmare explores sleep paralysis and the experience of those who suffer from this terrifying affliction. Sleep Paralysis is a condition where you become conscious during REM sleep, when your body is paralysed to stop you acting out your dreams. During this state of waking it is very common to suffer from hallucinations such as the feeling of someone being in the room with you, and these episodes can last for a few seconds to a few minutes before you wake up. It’s not something I’ve ever suffered from myself, but a close friend has and the experience she’s described to me sounds terrifying. I think it’s an intriguing subject, and as the condition isn’t widely known it could really help those out there that may not understand what they’re going through. However, instead of speaking to a broad range of subjects, the documentary focuses on people who suffer from the condition that seem to have had little professional help, and who instead keep referring to demons, spirits, alien abductions and different dimensions. What we are faced with is a lot of very confused people who have found their solutions in religion and the paranormal, and who in turn pretty much just sound insane. There are no interviews with any professionals or doctors, or seemingly anyone who has successfully found a way to treat the condition. I found this to be a very biased documentary and I really struggled to take anyone seriously who describes themselves as having found Christ as a result of sleep paralysis.

From actor turned director Ruth Platt comes The Lesson, a micro budget (£28k) British thriller that was one of the surprise highlights of the festival for me. Fin (Evan Bendall) and Joel (Rory Coltart) are fairly typical teenage boys; bright, but failed by the education system and their negligent parents, they act out as a result of boredom and frustration. Their English teacher Mr Gale (Robert Hands) one day snaps and takes the two boys hostage before proceeding to “teach” them under the threat of physical violence. It turns out to actually be a pretty successful tool, and with a nail gun to the hand Fin is certainly quick to learn! For such a small film The Lesson is incredibly well written, and both Bendall and Hands are excellent in their roles; it’s a real credit to Platt as a filmmaker that she’s managed to do so much with so little. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its flaws, as some of the acting from supporting characters is patchy at best, and there are a few all too convenient moments and plot holes that took me out of the story. But overall this is a tense and surprisingly naturalistic (considering the subject matter) film that is well deserving of your time, and Platt is definitely one to watch.

Mark Murphy’s Awaiting, another low budget British offering, was perhaps troubled by immediately following The Lesson which was similar in scale but infinitely better. The always excellent Tony Curran is Morris, a reclusive psychopath who lives in a remote farmhouse with his daughter Lauren (Diana Vickers). After a car accident, businessman Jake (Rupert Hill) is taken in by this odd pair and finds himself in the centre of a rather bizarre family who aren’t too keen on him leaving any time soon. Morris has some funny ideas, not least of all the fact that they celebrate Christmas in September, complete with a tree and a dinner of roast pork. Insisting that Jake stay to celebrate Christmas with a promise to drive him to town the following morning they settle down for a meal and a few drinks, only for things to take a turn for the worst as Morris’ behaviour becomes more erratic and unpredictable. There’s definitely a good idea in there somewhere, even if the film does feel very familiar, and Curran and Vickers are both good as the bizarre father and daughter, but the major weak link here is Hill who is just awful as Jake; perhaps it’s the script, but I just found everything that came out of his mouth to be ridiculous, and the situations he was in also pretty unbelievable. After a fairly creepy opening Awaiting loses its way in the second half as it becomes painfully obvious what is going on, and you’re stuck watching Jake run around in circles trying to escape.

The last film I saw at FrightFest this year was Emelie, the first feature from director Michael Thelin, who is perhaps better known for directing live concert films. The entire film plays out over the course of a single evening, with Joyce (Susan Pourfar) and Dan (Chris Beetem) going out to celebrate their anniversary whilst a babysitter looks after their three young children. After having seen the genuine babysitter get kidnapped at the start of the film we know that the girl claiming to be Anna is someone else; in fact her name is Emelie (Sarah Bolger) and her motivations are unclear for the majority of the film, which works in its favour. Initially her behaviour is just a little odd, but when she shows the kids a sex tape of their parents and feeds their hamster to the eldest son’s pet python you get the idea that she’s pretty messed up. The acting is great, and all three of the main kids manage to avoid being too annoying, whilst Bolger is genuinely unsettling as Emilie. I think where the film falls flat is that there is no real sense of danger; this isn’t Michael Haneke after all, and nobody ends up particularly worse for wear by the end.

FrightFest 2015 was a very mixed bag for me, there were a few good films but nothing I’ll be rushing to see again, and for the most part I saw a lot of very forgettable films. As I’d said before, I feel that this is a combination of FrightFest falling victim to its own success, and also with the way the film industry works at the moment. There is no money out there anymore for midrange movies; everything either has to have a huge budget or a shoestring one. You either have the $20 million budget of The Conjuring or $1 million dollar (or even much, much less) movies like Unfriended, with very few in between. As a result you see a lot of films that have clearly been made for very little indeed. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I sat through so many films where it was just two or three characters in a single location that it has become almost as boring as all the found footage films from a few years back. As with The Lesson and Pod, a lot can still be achieved with limited resources, but overall I started to feel like I was seeing the same film over and over again. Having now seen the line-up for The London Film Festival my fears have been confirmed, and all of the strongest genre outings this year are now to be found there, with the likes of Green Room, Bone Tomahawk and The Witch all appearing on the schedule. From now on I think I may just pick a few choice films to see at FrightFest and focus more on the LFF. I’ve had a lot of fun over the years at FrightFest but as the line-up becomes weaker and more packed with films I just don’t really want to see, not to mention being inundated with titles soon to be released via Icon on the new FrightFest Presents label, I feel like the festival is more like a business than just a group of genre fans getting together for a weekend.

They Have Changed Their Face – Details on Cigarette Burns Screening, plus Q&A with director Corrado Farina

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Admin

By Tristan Bishop

I’ve been a fan of Italian genre cinema for around 25 years – every since I caught a TV showing of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday as an impressionable youth – and as such I tend to believe I’ve seen most of the best that the Italian golden age (around 1960-1986) has to offer. Very occasionally, however, a film will slip through the cracks – often due to it previously not having been available in English, and my understanding of Italian being very poor. They Have Changed Their Face (sometimes translated as They’ve Changed Faces – a title which I prefer) is one of these. Director Corrado Farina only made two feature films – One, the sexy, psychedelic comic book adaptation Baba Yaga (1973) is fairly well known to English-speaking fans due to a release by Shameless, but They Have Changed Their Face has previously remained only available in, I believe, Italian and German. Thankfully, Cigarette Burns, who have arranged screenings of all sorts of exploitation gems (often on original prints) are bringing this film to show on the big screen in the UK for the first time.

Alberto Valle (Giuliano Disperati) works at Auto Avio Motors on the tenth floor. On arriving one morning he finds himself summoned to his boss’s office, who informs him that the vice president has asked to see him, and that all his other meetings for the day have been canceled. Somewhat surprised, Alberto heads to the 19th floor, whereupon the Vice President takes him on to the 20th floor to meet the CEO. After asking him to pour himself a drink (surely a little early?), the CEO asks Alberto if he is able to leave straight away to meet the owner of the company, one Mr Giovanni Nosferatu (seriously, the warning bells should be ringing at this point) at his villa in the mountains. Alberto agrees, and sets off straight away. The villa is a little difficult to locate, however, and the locals in this forlorn, misty part of the world don’t seem to be keen on speaking to Alberto – especially when the name of Nosferatu is mentioned. However he soon stumbles across a strange, topless girl, who offers to give him directions to the nearest petrol station in exchange for a lift. On discovering the entrance to the villa, the girl decides to wait for Alberto as she has ‘fallen in love with him’.

Nosferatu’s villa is a strange proposition – from the outside a rundown mansion, but inside an ultra-modern (for the early 70’s), minimalist pad, surrounded by a huge park patrolled by voiceless men in tiny cars. Alberto is greeted at the door by Nosferatu’s secretary, Corinna (Geraldine Hooper from Argento’s Deep Red) , who takes care of Alberto (in more ways than one). When he finally meets Nosferatu, the company owner turns out to be a welcoming older gentleman (Played by Adolfo Celi, best known as Emilio Largo in Thunderball, who was astonishingly only 48 at the time) who is working on food technologies (‘I have invented gastronomic socialism’) and is keen to promote Alberto to the CEO of Auto Avio Motors – but at what price? And is that a dead body that Alberto spies in the grounds of the villa?

If you hadn’t already worked it out, Farina’s debut feature is a modern twist on the vampire story – but with capitalism instead of literal blood-sucking. On one hand the angry, paranoid message of the film is very much of the early seventies, but on the other hand there could be nothing more fitting with the mood of the world today than an anti-globalization parable – and it’s hard not to see the figure of, say, Rupert Murdoch in Celi’s portrayal of Nosferatu. That’s not to paint They Have Changed Their Face as just a sharp political satire however – it’s also a wonderfully atmospheric gothic horror movie. The scenes set in the mountains where Alberto is searching for the villa have a foggy, moody look that matches the most poetic moments of Georges Franju or Jean Rollin, whilst the bright whites of the interiors point more towards the stark science fiction of 2001 than the saturated colours of Mario Bava and his imitators. In fact the contrast between the old, mountainous world of mists and terrified villagers, and the gleaming technological ‘present’ serves to underline the themes of the film – that the monsters are no longer controlling us by traditional means.

Special mentions must be given to the performances of Celi – who gives a wonderfully bland yet menacing portrayal of total evil, and Geraldine Hooper, whose strange looks are convincingly bewitching, and fans of early seventies soundtracks will get a real kick out of the proggy, organ and choir heavy music by Amedeo Tommasi. But the film as a whole is quite unlike anything else you’ve ever seen – intelligent, creepy and, at times, wryly humorous, so do yourself a favour and get to the Barbican on the 16th September (tickets available here).

Read on for Tristan’s Q&A with Corrado Farina…

BAH: Hello Mr Farina. Since we’re discussing the first showing of They Have Changed Their Face in the UK, I wonder if you can tell me about the original release of the film. Did I do well? Did the critics like it?

Corrado Farina: The film won the Locarno Film Festival but really divided opinions. There was much negative criticism, especially from left-wing newspapers, which accused the film of making up problems and of substantial connivance with the “system”. In the cinema it was released, but did badly, and at the time no-one saw it. Only years later, thanks to VHS and DVD, it began to circulate among fans and gradually became a small cult.

BAH: The film steadily Has Been Gaining a cult reputation among English-speaking audiences on the Internet in recent years (despite it having never Been released in English before, to my knowledge). Have you been aware of this or is it a surprise?

Corrado Farina: It was a pleasant surprise, especially considering that no one has ever made a version in English.

BAH: Adolfo Celi is a familiar face to fans of European cinema, and gives a wonderful, subtle performance here. What are your memories of working with him?

Corrado Farina: Excellent. Adolfo was a very nice man and a serious professional, very well-known at the time thanks to the character of Largo (…from Thunderball) but he wasn’t afraid to take a project as “at risk” as ours. And that speaks volumes about his character.

BAH: Were you influenced by any other films or filmmakers making When They Have Changed Their Face?

Corrado Farina: Yes of course. Terence Fisher and Mario Bava first of all, but only for their first films. But the myth of the vampire was just a starting point to get to say my opinion on the contemporary world. Do not forget that we were in 1970, in the middle of protests, and I arrived from advertising – just like the star of “I’ll never forget what’s His Name”, (A Michael Winner film from 1967 starring Orson Welles and Oliver Reed) another film which at the time was seminal for me.

BAH: Both They Have Changed Their Face and Baba Yaga are very individual films, made at a time When most Italian film was either a spaghetti western, a giallo or a crime thriller. Was it hard to get such unusual films made?

Corrado Farina: Very, very hard. In fact they would not get made at all today.

BAH: Finally, Which is your favourite of your two feature films, and why?

Corrado Farina: In my opinion They Have Changed Their Face – it is rougher but also, to its budget and its meaning, more successful. Maybe because it’s my first-born, it is also what I love most. With Baba Yaga my intention was to go much further in the search for a common language for “film-comics”, and therefore I consider it only partially successful, a bit because of me and a little because certain graphics solutions would become possible only after years , thanks to computerized special effects.

BAH: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us, Mr. Farina!

Corrado Farina: You’re welcome, my friends! Thank you for your esteem to my movies.

THEY HAVE CHANGED THEIR FACE (Corrado Farina, 1971) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

Festival Report: FrightFest 2015 (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Admin

By Stephanie Scaife

Since I started attending FrightFest all the way back in 2003, it’s always been a real mixed bag – for all the awful to middling films you sat through, you were always guaranteed at least a few gems. Over the years these have included such titles as Oldboy, Wolf Creek, Pan’s Labyrinth, Let the Right One In, and The House of the Devil to name but a few. However, it’s beginning to feel like the festival has fallen victim to its own success, as the bigger its gotten, the overall quality has lessened. Held at ransom by sponsors and studios we’ve been inflicted with the likes of I Spit on Your Grave 1 & 2 (2010 & 2013 respectively), Inbred, Fright Night (2011), Hammer of the Gods, Sin City 2, Shockwave Darkside etc, all on the main screen with the best films of the festival tucked away in early morning or late night slots, and in the smaller discovery screens, where getting tickets can sometimes be tricky as there aren’t that many to go around. It’s a shame really that the days of seeing Guillermo del Toro and the cast of Hellboy on the stage at the intimate Prince Charles Cinema have given way to straight to VOD/DVD titles (often released days or weeks after the festival) on huge screens in a fairly soulless multiplex. I’m not sure what has changed over the years regarding the London Film Festival, but I understand that if a film is to be shown there then it has to be the first UK screening, and many titles which I would usually associate with FrightFest are now to be found at the LFF instead. Recently the likes of It Follows, The Sacrament, Under the Skin, Sightseers and Snowtown all premiered there, when in years past they would’ve been a sure bet for FrightFest. I don’t know enough about the industry to be 100% on any of this, but it just feels like FrightFest is missing out on the very best in genre cinema.

2015 was off to a depressingly shaky start with Cherry Tree opening the festival. David Keating had impressed with the Irish Hammer Horror film Wake Wood a few years back, so I was actually looking forward to what looked to be a female-centric witch fest, both things you don’t see often enough. I have to say, Cherry Tree just wasn’t very good at all. Faith (Naomi Battrick) is about to turn sixteen, and if that wasn’t bad enough that the school bullies are taking exception to her being picked to be on the hockey team and her best friend has a crush on the guy she likes, whilst her dad has terminal leukaemia. Bummer. However, when her creepy new hockey coach Sissy (Anna Walton) offers to make everything better Faith finds herself in a position that she can’t refuse. I have to say all of this happens rather quickly, leaving no time to really empathise with any of the characters, or understand why Sissy targets Faith, or why Faith is so quick to agree – it all happens in the matter of a day or two. Inexplicably for a film shot in Ireland with an Irish cast they all seem to be talking with incredibly posh English accents, and I’m really not sure why. But that was the least of my concerns when it came to this poorly paced, overwrought non-thriller that both tried to be funny and scary yet did neither, succeeding only at being sporadically silly but mostly boring. What the witches were doing and why was pretty much a mystery to me, and what the cherries or the centipedes had to do with anything is anyone’s guess. One to be avoided.

Thank goodness then for Turbo Kid, a New Zealand/Canadian co-production written and directed by François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. Originally a short for The ABCs of Death, T for Turbo, that didn’t make the final cut (instead going to Lee Hardcastle’s T for Toilet), but clearly undeterred they instead developed it into a feature. Think Tank Girl meets BMX Bandits with lashings of gore on a level with Braindead and you’ve probably got a pretty solid picture of what Turbo Kid is going for. It’s set in an alternate history where in 1997 the world has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by a sadistic one-eyed leader named Zeus (Michael Ironside) and his gang of BMX riding ne’er-do-wells. The Kid (Munro Chambers) is a loner that quietly scavenges the wasteland in search of items to trade for water and comic books, that is until Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) shows up and becomes his first and only friend. When she is captured by Zeus, The Kid sets out on a mission to rescue her armed with little more than dumb luck and a View-Master to protect himself; that is, until he comes across a turbocharged power glove that lets him blast his enemies into smithereens! Turbo Kid is really rather ridiculous, but with a sweetness and sense of humour that enables it to pull it off with ease, even if it does on occasion take the whole 80’s pastiche a step too far. This is the perfect film to watch with a group of friends and some beers – a lot of fun that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Next was Pod from writer-director Mickey Keating (Ritual), a super low budget slow burner that is essentially a two-hander between brother and sister Lyla (Lauren Ashley Carter) and Ed (Dean Cates). Lyla is off the rails, drinking and partying and generally not really looking after herself or giving a shit, when out of the blue her white collar brother Ed turns up on her doorstep asking her to stage an intervention for their other brother Martin (Brian Morvant), a reclusive and unhinged war vet that is living in their families lake house in Maine. When they arrive it soon becomes apparent that things are far worse than they could have imagined, as they are faced with a gun wielding, incoherent, ranting Martin who claims to have captured a “pod” in the woods. For the majority of the run time you’re never sure if there really is something in the basement or if it’s just the imagination of a madman driven insane by his time serving in the military. Considering that Pod looks like it was made for small change and the acting has a tendency to get slightly hysterical when not burdened by a clunky script, it’s actually pretty good. After I saw the film I looked it up online and I have to say the poster doesn’t do it any favours, making it look like an extra-terrestrial sci-fi, whereas whilst watching the film I didn’t necessarily get the impression that it was definitely something to do with aliens – it’s very oblique when it comes to what is actually going on. It also has perhaps the most intense don’t-go-in-the-basement scene I’ve seen in a very long time!

I think my favourite thing about FrightFest this year is the return to The Prince Charles, which is known as the spiritual home of the festival, as one of the Discovery screens. It’s been eleven, yes eleven, years since the FrightFest proper (excusing a few one off specials) has been located there and boy does it feel good to be back! Although I loved The Empire, you can’t really beat The Prince Charles, maybe it’s because almost all of my favourite FrightFest memories took place there, but I hope this is a tradition that will continue. This brings me to my favourite film of the festival so far, the admirably perverse Argentinian oddity The Rotten Link directed, written, produced, edited and starring Valentín Javier Diment (Memory of the Dead). Clearly a man of many talents. Gosh, where to start with this one… I’d be the first to admit that this won’t be for everyone but it certainly appealed to my sensibilities; think John Waters meets Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire. Set in a remote village that is so small there are only about 20 residents, so to say that they are close-knit would almost be an understatement. The film focuses on Roberta (Paula Brasca) who spends her time caring for her dementia-ridden elderly mother and her older brother who has severe learning difficulties, whilst also moonlighting as a prostitute for, well, pretty much everyone in the town. A local superstition comes into play however, turning everyone against each other and forever putting an end to their, frankly creepy, closeness. Incest, bestiality, witches, and excessive gore all come into play in this pitch black comedy, all played with a certain assured frankness that can only really be found in South American cinema.

Friday went from the sublime absurdity of The Rotten Link to the bewildering absurdity of AAAAAAAAH!, the directorial debut of Steve Oram (Sightseers). Now if someone handed the outline of this film to you you’d think they were having a laugh, or maybe just insane. I am still struggling to comprehend how it got made and how the cast were talked into taking part. First off, there is no dialogue in this film, none at all. For 80 minutes the cast communicate with each other in grunts, howls and screams, because even though these are people they sound and act like apes. This involves lots of pissing, pooping, throwing food and sex. What there is of a plot revolves around an alpha male played by Oram and his beta (Tom Meeten) who move into a new town and set their sights on taking control of a larger established group led by Julian Rhind-Tutt. This is the perfect example of a film that would make a great short, but stretched out to feature length it becomes tiresome and dull. Although very amusing for the first 20 minutes the joke wears thin very quickly and I spent the remainder of the running time wishing it would end. I suppose there is a reading that could be made regarding humans as being little more than apes, primal and egocentric, but overall it’s merely an exercise in tedium. If you ever want to see Julian Barrett redecorating with a Battenberg however, then this is the film for you.

I’d heard mixed things about Final Girl, the directorial debut of photographer Tyler Shields, but I actually kind of liked it. There isn’t much set up and the ambiguity may infuriate some. Veronica (Abigail Breslin) is taken in as a child by William (Wes Bentley) and trained up as an assassin to wreak vengeance on the men who killed his wife. As Veronica is put through arduous tests to face her worst fears and to survive in the wilderness, all the while she takes the word of William as gospel and complies with a certain level of teenage indignation. A group of four privileged white males like to take hunting trips, and what they like to hunt are pretty blonde girls. Who these men are or why they do what they do is never explained, but once they set their sights on Veronica their fortunes are undoubtedly about the change. As you would expect from a world renowned photographer this is beautifully shot, and there are some beautifully surreal hallucinogenic scenes. On the whole the film may not be more than the sum of its parts but overall this is a throwaway and fun little film with some great performances and some unsubtle social commentary on the patriarchy.

We Are Still Here is the directorial debut from writer and producer Ted Geoghegan, and it was perhaps one of the strongest offerings at FrightFest this year – a homage to the Lucio Fulci films of the 70’s with certain nods to Americana fables and myths akin to the likes of The House of the Devil. A creepy haunted house set-up with a fantastic cast, We Are Still Here dives straight in at the deep end. Paul and Annie Sacchetti (Andrew Sensenig and Barbara Crampton) move into a remote house following the death of their son Bobby, and when spooky goings on start to occur Annie becomes convinced that Bobby is still with them, so she calls on her friends Jacob (Larry Fessenden) and medium May (Lisa Marie). Throw in some creepy locals and a seemingly bottomless bottle of J&B Whiskey and you’ve got all the trappings of a classic retro horror film. Although it stumbles in the final act, We Are Still Here is an effective little shocker with some decent scares and an awareness of the genre that it more than happily wears on its sleeve.

Bernard Rose’s Frankenstein is a difficult film to love, the original story itself being unparalleled in its sadness and contempt for humanity. No matter which way you look at it, the monster is a tragic being and it is a difficult task to bring something new to this well-worn story. Rose manages just about, relocating the story to modern times, with a 3D printed monster (Xavier Samuel). It works to a certain extent; Carrie-Anne Moss and Danny Huston are the doctors that create the monster, a perfect replication of a human male that they instantly become enamoured with. Only the experiment is flawed, and the more the monster deteriorates the less its “parents” care for it. Fleeing the lab, the monster befriends a dog, a little girl and a blind man (Tony Todd), proving that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that human kindness is merely a façade that we evoke for those that we deem worthy on a surface level. None of this is played out with any sort of subtlety and I really could’ve done without the voiceover, but overall Frankenstein does a good job of modernising an already universal story.

As always I try to see as many female-made films as possible, and Another Me is written, directed and produced by an almost entirely female crew. Based on the novel of the same name by Scottish author Cathy MacPhail and directed by Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me), Another Me starts out pretty strong but unfortunately dwindles into eye rolling levels of hokum towards the end. Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) is Fay, a teenager with more problems than most; her dad is terminally ill and her mum is having an affair, not to mention the fact that she’s recently been cast as Lady Macbeth in the school play and can’t seem to remember her lines. A doppelganger has imposed on Fay’s life, but is it the manifestation of her current problems or something altogether more sinister? Turner gives an excellent performance as Fay and you sympathise with her, regardless of whether or not it’s all a figment of her imagination. The supporting cast of Rhys Ifans, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Claire Forlani are all excellent, but this doesn’t altogether save the film from being an above average supernatural affair that wouldn’t look out of place on ITV.

I was very much looking forward to The Hallow, the feature film debut from Corin Hardy (who will soon be taking the helm of the latest attempt at a reboot of The Crow), as I’d heard good things from its Sundance screening earlier in the year. Seemingly the hot ticket of FrightFest, which sold out in record timing, it seemed very much like the place to be. Tree surgeon Adam (Joseph Mawle) and his wife Claire (Bojana Novakovic) have recently relocated to rural Ireland with their young family so that he can work in the surrounding woodland. Almost immediately the locals take exception to these outsiders and quickly become hostile, breaking windows, making threats and giving them creepy gifts – most notably an old book of folk tales about The Hallow; malevolent faeries and child snatchers. The Hallow starts out very strong, benefiting enormously from an original premise and strong performances, from Mawle in particular. The monsters are great too; using mostly practical effects Hardy has created some of the creepiest beasties that I’ve seen in a long time. However, I found the final act to be a little disappointing; the story went from intriguing and unexpected to a very formulaic ending that all too neatly tidied everything up. Overall The Hallow is an enjoyable and creepy little film and I’m very intrigued as to what Hardy will do with The Crow.

Deathgasm was one of my most anticipated films of the festival, having heard many excellent things about it as it screened at other festivals across the world. A heavy metal comedy splatter film from New Zealand has got to be good, right? Thankfully it really was! Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a music loving teen that is sent to live with his ultra conservative uncle in a small town after his mother is arrested for giving a Santa Claus a blow job at the mall. He finds solidarity in local metal head bad boy Zakk (James Bake) and together they decide to form a band called Deathgasm. When Brodie finds some mysterious music that claims to be able to summon demons and grant power he decides that Deathgasm should play it, in the hopes of getting revenge on the school bullies that torment him on a daily basis and perhaps enable him to win over the girl of his dreams, Medina (Kimberley Crossman). Directed by Jason Lei Howden (better known as a VFX artist on the likes of The Hobbit films) Deathgasm is unapologetic in its outlandish carnage; ever wanted to see someone beat a demon to death with some anal beads or shoot them with multi-sided roleplaying dice? If the answer to those questions is yes then this is definitely the movie for you. Add to that an excellent soundtrack and some genuinely hilarious moments and you’ve got a winning combination, the perfect film to watch with a few beers and as big an audience as possible. This went down a storm at FrightFest and I can see it doing the midnight movie circuit for many years to come!

Click here for Part 2 of Steph’s Frightfest 2015 report.

Fifty Years of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Posted on August 6, 2015October 17, 2018 by Admin

By Tristan Bishop

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence” – as first lines go, it’s one of the best. Delivered by a disembodied voice over an image of a pulsing soundwave, the opening narration goes on to warn us about “…this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman…One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”. Then with supernatural timing the screen is filled with writing dancers and boozy male patrons encouraging the girls to ‘Go, baby! Go!’ as the incredible minor-key garage punk classic ‘Faster Pussycat’ by The Bostweeds clangs away on the soundtrack. Sixties cinema got no better than this.

Fifty years since the release of the film, critical appreciation has gone from strength to strength. Initially dismissed by the critics as just another skin flick (which makes one wonder if they even bothered to watch it, given the lack of nudity in the film), the film gradually received more and more attention, not least due to celebrities such as John Waters and Jonathan Ross proclaiming it to be their favourite film of all time. After being re-released along with many of Russ Meyer’s other films in the 90s, it became a camp favourite among a younger audience, and nowadays firmly holds its place in the canon of the greatest exploitation films ever produced.

The film itself is unusual in director Meyer’s filmography in a couple of ways – Firstly, as previously mentioned, it’s one of the few films of the director to feature no actual nudity, as apparently he was trying to stay ahead of the censors at the time. Secondly, it isn’t a sex comedy, as nearly all of his earlier and later work was in this genre. Faster Pussycat was made around the same time as Mudhoney and Motorpsycho (all these films were made in 1965!) and this was considered Meyer’s ‘Gothic’ period – where he made moody, violent films in black & white. Faster Pussycat is basically a throw-back to the Juvenile Delinquent (or JD) films so prevalent in the 1950s when everyone was afraid of what the youth explosion was capable of. The twist this time of course is that this bad ass biker gang consists of female go-go dancers, who go on the expected rampage of kidnap, theft and murder.

If you’ve never seen a Russ Meyer film it can be hard to describe what makes them so special. Beyond the fact that he usually cast a lot of unnaturally busty women in prominent roles, Meyer’s skill was in editing and dialogue – both delivered at a dizzying rate and so rhythmically satisfying that it’s a surprise that Meyer wasn’t a musician as well as a writer/director/editor. Whilst many aficionados of Spanish sleaze master Jess Franco praise the languid, jazzy feel that his musicianship brings to his films, Meyer worked to a different beat, his edits like a fast drum track unpinning the hip, snappy, sometimes shocking words spoken by his characters – like beat poetry with visuals. Faster Pussycat is a prime example of his technique, and unfettered from the fixation on nudity that characterised his earlier ‘nudie cuties’ (a genre which he defined with 1959’s Immoral Mr Teas) and his later, outrageous sex comedies (Supervixens, Up), it shines brightest here, perfectly fitting the low-life crime narrative.

The film’s three main protagonists are Rosie (Haji, an actress of British-Filipino descent who starred in many of Meyer’s later films), Billie (Lori Williams) and Varla (Tura Satana). Haji is a sultry beauty who speaks with an unspecified ‘foreign’ accent, Billie is a buxom blonde who can’t stop go-go dancing even when she’s off-stage, and Varla is possibly the screen’s best-ever bad girl, a truly Amazonian figure in tight black clothes who will think nothing of breaking a man’s spine. Satana, whose eye-catching looks resulted from her Japanese/Filipino/Cheyenne/Scottish heritage, worked as a dancer, a stripper, and almost married Elvis at one point! By her own admission she was actually in a girl gang as a teenager, and that won’t surprise anyone who has seen the film. Actress Susan Bernard who plays a girl kidnapped by the gang was reportedly terrified of Satana on set, and you can quite understand why, as she comes across on-screen as the real deal. It’s by far the best performance in a Meyer film, and I would argue, among the best in the history of exploitation films.

There’s some debate over whether Faster Pussycat can be considered a feminist film. It’s obvious that Meyer was making films for men to enjoy – in fact one gets the idea that Meyer was really just making them for his own titillation (and the vast fortune he made was a nice bonus), but, especially in the case of Faster Pussycat, which has little of the skin and sex of his other work (although there is, let’s face it, a lot of cleavage on show), there’s a kind of ‘accidental feminism’ on display. Meyer’s world is one of Super Women who prey on (and sometimes love) weak-willed men, and in a world where Marvel Studios still haven’t given us a Black Widow film, it still feels fresh fifty years on to have a trio of tough female anti—heroes carrying a film.

The gradual cult surrounding the film since its original disappointing release (although, having been made for the princely sum of $45,000 it made a decent enough return) has seen it referenced and homaged in everything from Spice Girls videos to The Simpsons, with Tarantino’s underrated Death Proof (2007) containing many elements of Meyer’s film (he gets a thanks in the credits). Even Rihanna’s current controversial music video Bitch Better Have My Money seems partially inspired by the lawless bad girl gang on show here (and the many arguments for and against that video can equally be applied to Faster Pussycat).

Meyer passed away at the age of 82 in 2004, having retired in 1979 to enjoy his wealth (and apparently a series of tumultuous relationships with dominant, large-breasted women). His gravestones states ‘King of the nudies. I was glad to do it’. And we’re glad you did it, Russ.

FrightFest 2015: Nia's Top Picks & Must-Sees

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Admin

By Nia Edwards-Behi

FrightFest is the place to see the largest array of horror and genre films on the big screen in the UK. Any film festival can be a marathon feat of endurance, but it’s always even more painful when you’re trying to decide between films and squeezing as much as you can between the schedules of various screens. Whether you’ve already got your pass or just planning on buying the odd ticket, a bit of help is at hand.

I’ve picked out my recommendations for the fest (based on those films I have seen) and picked the films I personally most anticipate (that is, those films I have not seen). I’ve only picked out new films, as frankly I would go watch any of the classic films, so take that as a given! Naturally the following selection is just based on my own taste, so do make sure you have a thorough trawl of the full festival line-up to make up your own mind! I’ve kept this to a total of six films, so consider these are only the very tip of my personal iceberg.

Top Recommendations

There are clear three top films for me that I would recommend out of the FrightFest line-up (again, this is of those films that I have seen for myself). My personal top three are Miike Takashi’s Over Your Dead Body, Bruce McDonald’s Hellions and Steven Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! – and it might be testament to my often contrary taste that these films will undoubtedly be crowd-splitters.

I know from last year’s Abertoir that Over Your Dead Body, a film I absolute adored, was one of the least popular with our audience (still, a healthy 3/5 score ain’t bad either). It’s a slow burn of a film, part-domestic drama, part-traditional kabuki play and part-vengeful splatterfest. The powerful central performances from Ko Shibasaki and Ebizô Ichikawa drive the human drama of the film, while Miike’s obviously adept hand drives the creeping dread that builds throughout. The film’s irresistibly gorgeous visuals beg to be seen on a big screen, from the play-within-the-film’s set design to the suitably unnerving sequences of bloodshed. (See Karolina’s review.)

Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is another one which I know others haven’t enjoyed all that much, but despite a certain level of incoherency and pacing issues, I really loved it. I’ve seen it more than once now and I still really enjoy the central drive of the film: teenager Dora Vogel (Chloe Rose) has to survive Halloween night while being terrorised by demonic trick-or-treaters. There’s a dream-like quality to the film that I really enjoyed, and the sense of unreality to proceedings really appealed to me. This nightmarish quality is there both in the stark cinematography and in the interesting sound design (and the main theme music still gets stuck in my head). The whole film is a fairly obvious metaphor, but the way in which it unfolds impressed me. It’s an atmospheric exploration of its subject matter, and it features an effective performance (and necessarily so for it to work) at its core.

Steve Oram’s directorial debut Aaaaaaaah! is a film which is honestly unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It’s an avant-garde film in the mode of British absurdity at its most, well, absurd. The lives and loves of an average family play out on screen in a relatively kitchen-sinky way, except for the fact that they communicate, behave and interact in the manner of apes. If you think it sounds weird on paper, wait until you see it, but Oram’s crafted a genuinely original, compelling, funny and bizarrely moving film. It’s one you’ve really got to see for yourself.

Most Anticipated

The three films I most want to see from the FrightFest line-up are again a broad bunch, which is testament to the wide variety of films on offer. Turbo Kid, Tales of Halloween and Remake, Remix, Rip-Off are my top three most anticipated films of the fest, and I’ve good faith they’ll all be ones that will go down a treat.

Turbo Kid’s been a film I’ve been following for a while now. Borne of the Froniteres genre market at Fantasia, the film follows a boy called The Kid and a girl called Apple in a post-apocalyptic wasteland as they fight for survival against the sadistic Zeus. The film promises to be a bloody, anarchic throw-back to 80s action flicks, almost an ideal companion piece to the rather more slick and modern Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s had rave reviews from its festival screenings so far, so I think by far Turbo Kid is a film not to miss.

I’ve had a small glimpse at Tales of Halloween when Axelle Carolyn presented her segment and the film’s trailer at this year’s BIFFF. This is a huge anthology picture, and it’s testament to the talent involved that it stands out from countless other anthology or portmanteau projects as the format falls back into fashion. Carolyn’s produced the film, as well as directing a segment, and the other directors involved are an impressive bunch: Darren Lynn Bousman, Mike Mendez, Neil Marshall, Lucky McKee, Adam Geirasch, Andrew Kasch, Dave Parker, Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet. No mumblegore nonsense here! There’s good pedigree here, and I do so hope that Tales of Halloween turns out to be a modern seasonal favourite. Carolyn’s segment, Grim Grinning Ghost, is a wonderfully traditional scare, and is simplicity at its finest – you bet I jumped right out of my seat. What’s particularly exciting is that with filmmakers like Lucky McKee on-board, you can almost guarantee that there’ll be some really stand-out weird segments to this film too.

The final film I would most like to see from the line-up is a documentary, another format which seems to be experiencing something of a heyday in the field of genre filmmaking at the moment. Remix, Remake, Rip-off takes us on a trip through the golden era of Turkish cinema, wherein a group of relatively amateur filmmakers were persistently and successfully ripping-off big-budget or better known films – anything from Star Wars to Straw Dogs goes! The subject of this documentary covers many of my interests – non-English language filmmaking, god-awful rip-offs, the concept of remaking…so I’ve no doubt that I’m going to have a real blast with this one when I finally see it.

Are you off to FrightFest this August bank holiday? What are you most looking forward to seeing? With a film selection that big, you can almost guarantee that there’s something for everyone there. BaH’s Steph will be attending, so expect much more on the gems of the fest next month!

Horror in Miniature: Five Terrifying Tabletop Experiences You Should Own

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Admin

By Dustin Hall

Gencon 2015 is next week, that’s the world’s largest tabletop and role-playing game convention, and with it will come a bevy of new offerings to the gaming world, including several fine new horror entries. While the filmic world of Horror may be languishing in a found-footage induced funk at the moment, Horror themed board games are just as powerful as ever. Whether you’re new to tabletop or looking to expand, here’s five favorites that should be in every collection, and with them a few recommendations for further expansion.

1. Arkham Horror

The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft has continued to grow and thrive long beyond the life of the man, thanks to many devoted fans and an open source merchandising license. While there is certainly a glut of mediocre Lovecraft products in the world, his Mythos has done rather well in the gaming world. Arkham Horror has long been the crown jewel in the Cthulhu gaming collection, and remains a fan favorite.

The game takes place in the titular city of Arkham, where Miskatonic University and many cults reside, along with many other beasts that come spewing out of portals. Taking the roles of different investigators, players work together solving mysteries, visiting other worlds, sealing portals and, hopefully, keeping the Great Old One who slumbers beneath the city from waking up. The game and its mechanics are unique, and somewhat obtuse, but the weird happenings and feeling of impending doom only add to the flavor. Town expansions allowing you to add Dunwich, Innsmouth, and more to the board ensure that no corner of Lovecraft’s literary world, or of the apocrypha such as The King in Yellow, is left untouched, as nearly every character, creature, and demonic denizen of the Mythos can be played with or against.

Though Arkham remains a personal favorite of mine, there are many other good Lovecraft games to hunt out, if you want to delve further into the madness. Eldritch Horror is an updated version of this game that sends players globetrotting as opposed to being stuck in town, and Elder Sign is more of a hellish, Lovecraftian Yahtzee. The truly obsessed can hunt down a copy of the recently released Cthulhu Wars, featuring tremendous, statue quality pieces of the Great Old Ones as they battle over a map of the Earth for world domination.

2. Betrayal at the House on the Hill

This old Avalon Hill game was recently brought back from the dead by Wizards of the Coast, and happily so. If you have any love for Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods then this game is screaming for your attention. The sheer variety of horror scenarios that come out of this game is astounding, and draws from dozens of your horror favorites for inspiration.

The game drops players, as a squad of typical horror protagonists, into an old haunted mansion. At first, only the entryway can be seen by the players. As each player moves through the rooms, tiles are flipped, and the house built, creating a fresh, chaotic maze of madness with each playthrough. At first the game is all about exploration, but with a name like Betrayal, that can’t last long. Eventually one of the players will be possessed, and the exact circumstances of that is what determines which of the 50 possible horror scenarios will be used by this betrayer to hunt down his former pals. Was the player secretly a wolfman? Will it be firebats or cenobites today? It all depends on what Macguffin is found where, and when. The remaining players have to think fast before they find themselves axed by their former friend.

Aside from offering a lot of variety, Betrayal at the House on the Hill offers a fairly lighthearted, yet creepy vibe, much like a Halloween spook show, and is mercifully easy to pick up and play. If you want to initiate friends into games that require more than going in circles and building hotels, this is a great place to start.

3. Zombicide

First off, its worth acknowledging that there are, literally, hundreds of zombie games on the market. Zombies have essentially taken over the horror film and merchandise market, and board games offer no exception. Everybody has taken a shot at making the definitive zombie game. While there are definitely other contenders, and often cheaper, Zombicide has my vote as the best.

This squad-based tactical game has lets 1-6 players team up and try to survive in a world already ravaged by the undead. Yes, you can play the game solo, as the zombies run on autopilot, and they are brutal! The game provides dozens of scenarios for teams to fight through, city streets, malls, prisons, and more, as hordes of zombies attack, each one represented by its own delightfully gory miniature. The game has a grisly sense of humor, and throwbacks to not just popular zombie lore, but every aspect of pop culture. To top it all off, this is just one of the most playable, smooth, well designed games you’ll ever play. And if you want a change of scenery, this year Zombicide also unleashes a medieval companion game that lets crews of Knights Templar go dungeon delving to save their township from the hordes of undead that crawl beneath their streets.

If that’s not enough to scratch your zombie itch, or its just out of your price range, consider also Zombies!, the original undead shoot-em-up game (which I personally dislike, but it does have throngs of fans), Last Night on Earth, another beautiful homage to the genre, City of Horror, which is great in that it allows players to stab each other in the back and leave one another for dead to escape the zombies, and lighter fare like Zombie Dice and The Great Brain Robbery.

4. Fury of Dracula

Long has this horror classic been out of print, and long have gamers watched helplessly as copies sold for $150-200 each on ebay. But no more! Happily, Fury will be reprinted this year by Fantasy Flight Games, with new art and revised rules. Much like Christopher Lee’s legendary Drac, this game will be revived again, and again, and again until it rules the Earth!

This game pits one player against all others, as they play the immortal Dracula, and they the hunters. The game is set during Bram Stoker’s novel, at the climactic point where Mina has been bitten, and Van Helsing, having chased Dracula from Carfax, now leads a team to intercept the vampire before he can reach his home, and again take rest in his native soil. Fury of Dracula is a cat and mouse game, where players try to guess the movements of the Dracula player as he maneuvers through Europe, feeding to regain strength, and leaving behind him vampire spawn, wolves, and the occasional false clue. The game includes a sun dial to track when the team finds Dracula. If they guess correctly they can find him in the day and will likely dispatch him, but if they cross the Count at night, they’ll find a truly fearsome foe instead.

Relying more on a game of wits and bluffing than action, Fury of Dracula offers a great cerebral challenge for players, and has a great deal of flavor pulled from Stoker’s original work. For any who aren’t a fan of vampires, or simply can’t wait for the reprint, Letters from Whitechapel offers the same general game mechanics, but pits the players instead against the infamous Jack the Ripper.

5. Vampire: The Masquerade

The only role-playing game to have an entry on this brief list, The Masquerade has become, unfortunately, very hard to find. However the game is legend for its flavor and its rock-solid world building. The rule book’s chapter headings read like prose from a fine novel, and the version of the vampire legend that it created became, for many, the definitive mythology for the creatures, inspiring further pop culture entries such as the Legacy of Kain video game series and the Underworld films, which were sued by the game makers for infringing upon their fictional setting. This game series survived the negative notoriety it received in the 90s for a group of its players creating a vampire cult and killing their parents, and endured to become a powerful gaming icon of the Goth-infused decade. It spawned novels, a collectible card game, a computer game, and a short-lived television series, Kindred, the Embraced. White Wolf, the publisher, essentially ended the series in the early 2000s, but the (expensive but worth it) definitive edition can be special ordered from them, for any who still want to play.

Players will find the game to have an unforgiving combat system that, against another vampire, will quickly kill their characters. But this game was never about the combat. Vampire is a game about story-telling, about living in and adding to the rich setting, and about pushing the personal buttons of your players to craft a living horror story for them to exist in. The game’s focal point is partially about survival, but also about players struggling to maintain their humanity after losing a piece of their soul to their macabre transformation, and struggling to remember that the regular people around them are individuals, not just morsels for them to feast upon. If they lose their humanity, they become feral beasts, and will soon be put down by other vampires who strive to keep their secrecy.

While Vampire: The Masquerade is not a current, featured title by any means, it remains one of the greatest story-telling tools any horror-loving group could ask for. However if the book seems just a little too 90s Goth for your taste, there are other offerings. Look to the Call of Cthulhu RPG for other story-centric, player torturing games, or All Flesh Must be Eaten if you prefer zombies over vamps. You can also never go wrong with the weird world of Deadlands, a radioactive steam punk western, reminiscent of Bioshock and Fallout as far as flavor goes, featuring mutants and zombie gunslingers in a new era of western lawlessness.

We’ve only scratch the surface here. Still out there are hundreds of wonders, like Games Workshop’s paranoid, alien dodging classic Space Hulk, or Panic Station, which is a throw back to The Thing, where one player is infected and threatens to turn all the other players, secretly, into biological terrors. Whatever your taste in horror, there is something out in the gaming world to suit it. Keep an eye on this year’s Gencon reports to see what new monstrosities await your dining room table.

Why us critics aren't just a bunch of bastards (or at least, don't have to be)

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Admin

By Ben Bussey

The jumping-off point for the diatribe to follow is also perhaps one of the most commonly-voiced sentiments of our time: I read something yesterday on Facebook which upset me a bit. Chris Alexander of Fangoria – the publication without which I think it’s fair to say the vast majority of us in the horror critic game wouldn’t be here – voiced his opinion on the art (if we want to call it that) of film criticism, and he didn’t have anything very favourable to say:

“Cinema is a complex art, an amalgam of ALL the arts in fact, a hybrid of many moving parts. And each film lives. It breathes. It is born. It is in utero while in production. It is birthed upon release. Filmmakers are like nervous parents sending their babies out into the world. And film critics tend to be bullies. Bullies who kick kids around. Like a child, each film has to grow…it needs time, distance, space to become what it will become. It needs to be studied. It needs to be forgiven. It needs to be seen at its best, at its worst. It needs to be loved. It needs to be dumped. It needs to find new love. It needs to be forgotten. It needs to be rediscovered. It needs to weather storms, survive trends. Film critics see a picture once. Only once. Often after seeing many other pictures in succession. Film critics are like bad teachers who judge your child after a preliminary meeting and label them for life. I find most film criticism empty and irresponsible and the enemy of art.” Read it in full here.

Having written for this site for more than six years now, I feel reasonably secure in describing myself as a film critic – and as such, these words hit home. My gut reaction was anger, and the thought certainly crossed my mind to vent that by throwing together some cleverly worded response which essentially amounted to calling the writer an idiot; much the same reaction many filmmakers have on reading unkind appraisals of their own work, I should expect. But I didn’t do this. I took a step back, cooled down, turned my mind to other things. Then I read it again, and realised that in fact there was a great deal there I agreed with, and deep down this was the real reason I was upset; because much of what Alexander said rang true, and I didn’t want it to.

On first reading, I felt Alexander was making like Kevin Smith, Uwe Boll and countless others before, bitterly dismissing the entire practice of film criticism as 100% worthless in one fell swoop. On reading it again, I realised the underlying sentiment actually seems to be a plea for reform on the part of most – not necessarily all – contemporary film critics. And I’d have to agree that this is indeed needed.

The notion of critic as bully has long been a popular one, dating back to well before Vincent Price subjected everyone who’d ever given him a bad review to a torturous Shakespearean death in Theatre of Blood. More recent representations of the profession and its practitioners on film don’t fare much better, from Peter O’Toole’s painfully aloof though ultimately re-humanised restaurant critic in Brad Bird’s Ratatouille (quick review: masterpiece), to Bob Balaban’s painfully snotty film critic in M Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (quick review: bag of wank), to the book critic that Tom Hanks throws off a balcony in Tom Twyker and the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas (honestly, I didn’t know what to make of that one). We may even recall that Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla featured Michael Lerner and Lorry Goldman as the somewhat incompetent New York Mayor Ebert and his aide Gene, the director’s way of getting revenge on the most renowned duo in the business for giving Independence Day two thumbs down (because obviously that really hurt Independence Day’s take at the box office…)

What a bleak picture all this paints of some grey, miserly bunch of misanthropes lurking in the shadows waiting to expunge the first glimmer of light. Well, hang on a tic. I, as we’ve established, am kind of a film critic myself, and you know what? All things considered I don’t think I’m that bad a person, nor are any of my colleagues here at Brutal As Hell; and, granted I don’t get out all that much, but plenty of the other critics I’ve encountered face to face have also been perfectly pleasant people, full of enthusiasm for their work and for film in general. So where does this idea that we’re nothing but a rabble of killjoys come from?

Perhaps the most frequently cited argument is that all critics are just frustrated artists themselves; that they have been left embittered by their own failures, and as such want to vent that frustration by tearing down the dreams of anyone else who dares to try and build something of their own. In some cases, no doubt, there is at least a grain of truth in this. I won’t deny that I myself have in the past had other artistic goals beyond reviewing horror movies. I pursued acting for a decade, eventually losing interest when I failed to get anywhere; I tried my hand at short film-making once, and was not pleased with the results, which put me off trying again; and back when Brutal As Hell started in 2009 I was concurrently writing short fiction for a while (the best of which I compiled in an e-book, From The Gut… ahem). So why did I ditch all that in favour of writing movie news and reviews? Well, I’m not going to lie to you – I found reviews easier. Plotting a short story, drafting it, redrafting it, polishing it up: it would generally take me anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks to get it in a shape I was happy with, after which there’d be the arduous task of trying to find someone to publish it, assuming anyone ever did. On the other hand, in those early days I could watch a movie, sit down later that day and hammer out a review in maybe a couple of hours, and have it online for anyone to see potentially that very evening. (Let me just emphasise – this was my approach starting out, not the way I still do things today.) In terms of itching that scratch, that need to get myself out there and actually reach readers, there was simply no contest.

This, no doubt, makes me seem an unprincipled opportunist in some eyes. But there was more to it than that. Somehow, being a critic just suits my personality more. I think I’m better at it than I am at fiction. And above all, I’ve always felt reviews play a vital role in the relationship between films and the wider audience; and, in the best cases, they can help films reach a far larger number of people than they might have done otherwise. And while there are filmmakers that bemoan the existence of critics, there are plenty more who recognise the importance of getting reviewed, regardless of whether the reviews wind up positive or negative.

The big thing that most critic-critics (I’m trademarking that) fail to take into account when painting us as big bad bullies the way Alexander does, is that it works both ways. Okay, so there are absolutely instances when reviews are unduly cruel and dismissive, but what about the reviews that are gushing with inordinate praise? Strangely, you never hear so many complaints about that – except from other critics, who know very well that the latest direct-to-DVD found footage flick with a five star cover quote reading “scariest film of the decade!” is anything but. Harsh write-ups might dent a filmmaker’s spirit, but isn’t there an equal danger in making them believe they’re the new genre master? Might this not have gone flooding straight to Shyamalan’s head after The Sixth Sense, paving the way to him disappearing ever further up his own back passage, pushing out little clag nuts like The Lady in the Water along the way?

(Sorry about that, Bob Balaban. Just know you’re cool in our book. You directed Parents.)

But then Alexander lays the charge that critics “see a picture once. Only once. Often after seeing many other pictures in succession,” and as such don’t give the film the proper attention. I can’t dispute this one so much. As I admitted earlier, time was I would tend to write a film up more or less as soon as I’d finished watching it with a view to getting a review online later that day. I’ve since become acutely aware that this really isn’t a sensible approach; you need to give a film time to sink in, at least 24 hours if possible, to really mull it over before putting all down – and when necessary, a second viewing may indeed be called for. Alas, I get the impression not everyone out there publishing reviews online these days feels similarly. As Mark Kermode discusses at length in his book Hatchet Job, the internet age and the rise of online fan critics has resulted in an obsession with getting the ‘first’ review online. This without doubt is something we’ve been guilty of in the past – and, in all honesty, will probably be guilty of again. There’s a particular rush for it in festival season; at my first FrightFest back in 2010, I hurried back every night on the last tube from Leicester Square to the west London flat where I lived at the time to get the big premieres written up as soon as humanly possible. Subsequently, I was guilty of a bit of that excessive praise thing I mentioned earlier, particularly in my write-ups of Hatchet 2 and the I Spit On Your Grave remake, neither of which I look back on with anything like the same fondness now. That said, I stand by my hugely enthusiastic write-up of Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape… which I believe was indeed the film’s first review to go online. And got me a rather larger quote on the DVD sleeve than Kermode’s. Yes, five years on that’s still a point of rather childish pride for me – but I’m grown up enough to realise that sleeve quotes aren’t the raison d’etre for going into criticism. Sadly, this is another sentiment clearly not shared by many others in my field, and again this is a real problem.

But we don’t always rush reviews out of some juvenile urge to beat everyone else to the finish line, like it’s some sort of performance sport. For a great many of us, it’s simply a matter of limited time. While old school professional critics may indeed attend press screenings day in day out, for those of us of the new breed the reality is often very different. Many of us don’t make a penny, let alone a living doing this, and instead of press screenings (very few of which take place outside of the major cities anyway) we have complimentary DVD or Blu-ray screeners, or ever more frequently nowadays a password protected link to watch online. The idea of getting to watch these films ‘at your leisure’ at first seems ideal; but for people with long working hours, household responsibilities and hopefully some semblance of a social life, invariably these screeners end up getting squeezed in at the end of the workday and on weekends. And it’s not just personal time that tends to be limited, as more often than not a filmmaker or PR agent will send out a screener requesting reviews come online to meet the film’s release date – and they don’t always provide as large a window as you’d like. So when finally flopping down on the couch (or worse, in front of the computer) at the end of the day, faced with a new movie of which you very often have little to no prior knowledge, there’s a good chance that unless it’s something earth-shatteringly brilliant you’re going to end up zoning out. This has happened to me more times than I can count, and it’s something I do my utmost to avoid nowadays; if I know I’m tired and just not in the right frame of mind, I’ll postpone the screener if at all possible. But again, there isn’t always the luxury of time.

None of this is to excuse lazy reviewing, but at least to explain why many modern critics don’t put in the time and effort the job really warrants. It might also go some way as to explaining why negative reviews often get spectacularly negative. Again, for many this is to all intents and purposes a hobby, and people generally want to get some fun out of their hobbies – and I’m not about to deny it, negative reviews can be an enormous amount of fun to write. But it isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be about being mean just for cheap laughs. Another key factor that critic-critics seemingly refuse to acknowledge is that – well – there are lots of movies out there that fucking well have it coming. I don’t want to sound like one of those red-faced conservatives huffing and puffing about how in my day kids didn’t get a medal at sports day just for showing up, but I do think there’s a potential danger in assuming that any and all films are of inherent value. If a filmmaker has really stepped up and given it their all, then fair play to them; but if you think that is the case for every filmmaker around, you’re delusional. Particularly in the realms of low-budget horror where we ply our trade, there are innumerable unimaginative rip-off merchants on both the creative and distribution ends, to whom quality control is almost non-existent. On such times when it’s abundantly clear that no real care or attention has been put in by anyone, I have no qualms whatsoever about letting rip on the film, nor do I discourage any of my BAH colleagues from doing likewise.

Even so, there’s also a potential danger in assuming straight off the bat that this not-so promising looking screener that just fell through your letterbox is going to be a piece of crap before you’ve even hit play – or by extension, assuming it’ll be great because you liked the director’s last one. First impressions must not be final judgements; we absolutely have to scratch the surface and look deeper. We must put aside our own preconceptions, even our own tastes, and do our utmost to engage with a film on its own terms; to recognise what target the film sets itself, and acknowledge whether or not it hits it. Case in point: earlier this week I reviewed The Hospital 2, a film I found much to be critical of, but ultimately had to admit achieved just what it set out to do. As a happy footnote to this, the film’s co-director Jim O’Rear thanked me for my review, negative sentiments and all: as he told me on Facebook, “Any filmmaker that thinks every review is only going to be full of positive comments is living in a dream world, as art hits different people on different levels and everyone takes away something different from their viewing experience. All we can hope for is a fair, well-thought-out review like the one you have written.” (That slightly-less common modern sentiment: I saw something on Facebook today that made me smile.)

As O’Rear’s comments reflect, a good filmmaker takes the rough with the smooth from their reviews – and a good critic must do likewise with the movies. A general rule of thumb for me is that if I read a review which is either 100% positive or 100% negative, I don’t trust it. In my reviews I feel honour-bound to emphasise whatever strengths can be found in even the crappiest of movies – and equally, to point out the faults, however minor, in any apparent masterpiece. Because they’re always there. Always. Nothing is flawless, and nothing is utterly irredeemable (though, by God, I’ve seen plenty that’s come close), and it doesn’t do anyone any favours to pay lip service to only the good or bad. Filmmakers may not automatically warrant a free pass just for having made a film, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be treated with respect. Much as I would like all filmmakers to be as gracious as Jim O’Rear, there will always be those who can’t handle a single bad word being said against their movies. That’s their problem. If a critic has given their work a chance, acknowledged the strengths and weaknesses, considered what the filmmaker has set out to do and how close they have come to that, and put all this down in clear, honest and hopefully entertaining words, then the critic has done precisely what they’re supposed to do, and certainly nothing worthy of contempt.

Finally, what all parties – critic, filmmaker, and reader – must never forget is the simple fact that it’s only ever one person’s point of view. Far too many people in this world seem to adhere to a position of “this my opinion and therefore it’s true,” and that line of thinking very rarely leads to anything but conflict. Then again, conflict can be healthy in its own way. It’s all just a form of broader debate. No single account you will read, or write, will ever be definitive. No one will agree (or disagree for that matter) with any critic all of the time. Nor should we. These are all just voices in a dialogue entered into by people with a common interest: the appreciation of cinema. It isn’t about whether the review is right or wrong, it’s about exchanging ideas, contrasting interpretations, all of which might ultimately lead to a new, potentially more interesting outlook. These are the times when film criticism is at its best; when it prompts the reader to reconsider a film from another angle. For a filmmaker, this might well help them recognise both their own failings and strengths, driving them to better themselves within their craft; for viewers, it may mean they come to see films in a whole new light. But to achieve this, critics themselves must first make a point of looking at things from different angles as well.

And when all’s said and done, don’t forget they’re only movies.

RIP Richard Johnson

Posted on June 6, 2015 by Admin

By Tristan Bishop

About fifteen minutes ago I learned of the passing of Richard Johnson at age 87. Johnson was familiar to fans of horror from his roles as Dr Menard in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) and as Dr Markway in Robert Wise’s version of The Haunting (1963), but his career was far more varied and full than many realised.

Johnson trained at RADA and went straight into John Gielgud’s theatre company in the 1940’s, before joining the Royal Navy during World War 2. After the war he took back to the stage and soon found himself one of the star players in London’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, appearing in many of their important productions. When Sir Peter Hall took over the direction of the theatre in 1959 it was renamed The Royal Shakespeare Company (aka RSC) and Johnson was asked to become an Associate Artist of the RSC, a role which he held for life, and he would return to the company for starring roles over the next four decades. It was in 1958 however that he first got a taste of acting in front of a camera, for a role in the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In 1959 he appeared in his first film, Never So Few, alongside Frank Sinatra and Gina Lollobrigida, and was snapped up by MGM to a six year contract, out of which came his role in The Haunting, where the 36 year old Johnson played a suave, yet driven parapsychologist out to discover the secrets behind the cursed Hill House. Johnson played Dr Markway to perfection, his easy charm the perfect counterpoint to the eerie supernatural goings-on, with the occasional small note of desperation and obsession creeping in to add to the unsettling atmosphere of what still remains one of the most frightening films ever made.

In the 1960’s Johnson married superstar actress Kim Novak (his second marriage) after meeting her on the set of The Amorous Adventures Of Moll Flanders (1965) and appeared as the lead character in the British spy films Danger Route (1967) and the two sixties Bulldog Drummond films, Deadlier Than The Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969). Director Terence Young had Johnson as his first choice for Bond, but Johnson turned down the role, citing the fact that he didn’t want to be tied down to another lengthy contract, but I suspect the real reason was that Johnson never courted super-stardom. Whilst he obviously enjoyed life to the fullest and took advantage of the trappings of the Hollywood lifestyle, he was far more interested in his art and the freedom to take it where he wished – plus one can only assume that his brief marriage to Novak showing him the more inconvenient side of fame may have put him off somewhat.

Throughout the seventies Johnson in appeared in TV (Cymbeline in 1974), Hollywood blockbusters (1974’s Anthony and Cleopatra) and even wrote and starred in Hennessey (1975) alongside Rod Steiger, but it was in 1974 that he appeared in his first Italian horror movie, 1974’s Exorcist copy Beyond The Door. Johnson had a natural affinity with Italy, falling in love with the food, the people, and, no doubt, the wine, and continued to act in Italian horror films for several years, appearing in The Cursed Medallion (1975), Island Of the Fishmen (1979) and The Great Alligator River (1979). Somehow also managing to appear in such films as British sleaze maestro Pete Walker’s The Comeback (1978) and alongside Malcolm McDowell in the brilliant anti-war film Aces High (1976), Johnson finished the seventies on a high in the iconic role of Dr Menard in Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), probably his most well-known role to today’s audiences. Johnson here was totally convincing as the bedraggled, alcoholic doctor on the remote Caribbean island of Matul, possibly responsible for an onslaught of the titular gut-munchers and trying to deal with the invasion corpse by corpse. Johnson got to utter the film’s most famous line – “The boat can leave now. Tell the crew” – in actual fact he got to say it twice as the line is actually two different takes rather than one repeated one.

Johnson made a couple more horror films in the 1980’s: the legendarily awful The Monster Club (1981), alongside Vincent Price, Donald Pleasence and John Carradine, and the interesting underground sci-fi/horror What Waits Beneath/Secrets Of The Phantom Caverns (1985), but spent the decade as CEO of the production company United British Artists, producing films featuring the likes of Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson, as well as theatre and TV (notably 1984’s docudrama The Biko Inquest).

In 1990 Johnson quit UBA in order to begin acting again, and over the next 24 years appeared in a dazzling amount of stage and TV work, including Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1992), which won him an award from the Guild Of Television Writers, and shows as varied as Tales From The Crypt and Doc Martin. In addition to acting, Johnson also taught the art throughout his life, both in the US and at RADA (he was appointed to the RADA council in 2000), wrote travel articles for newspapers, maintained a blog and teaching website, and started a directory of eco-friendly hotels. We also appeared in high profile film roles as varied as the villain in Tomb Raider (2001) and the grandfather in The Boy With The Striped Pyjamas (2008).

Johnson also did the occasional appearance at horror festivals, and it was at the Abertoir festival in 2013 where I was honoured to meet him and watch him take to the stage for Q&A sessions following screenings of The Haunting and Zombie Flesh Eaters. The session for Fulci’s film in particular, alongside the film’s composer, Fabio Frizzi (it was the first time the two had met!) was the undoubted highlight of the festival, with Johnson speaking of his love for the Italian film industry and Fulci’s film in particular – quite a refreshing change from the many distinguished actors who made these films for a quick buck and were embarrassed by the retrospective attention they acquired. “That spike in the eyeball scene!”, Johnson enthused, “Wasn’t that genius? So cinematic!”. He proceeded to bring the audience to tears of laughter at his impression of Fulci throwing a fit during filming, dropping to his knees and miming Fulci chewing on grass in frustration with all the energy of a man fifty years younger than he was. A deeply-felt and joyful ‘Long live Lucio!’ was Johnson’s closing statement, and the audience cheered and sobbed as one.

I count myself incredibly lucky to have been invited to dinner that night with Johnson and his wife Lynne, alongside the festival organisers, and I count it as one of the best evenings of my life. Even into his mid-eighties Johnson was hugely charismatic, warm and eloquent, and we talked about everything from his Italian films (I managed to identify a still from Island Of The Fishmen which they apparently had framed in their bathroom!) to the state of UK politics (let’s just say he wasn’t a fan of David Cameron). He also managed to drink enough to down most mere mortals and returned back to the Abertoir stage for another Q&A session afterwards, the consummate professional.

It’s no underestimation to say that being in the presence of Johnson made you feel special, his passion for his art, his fellow artists and for life itself was tangible and inspiring, and will no doubt continue to inspire those whom he crossed paths with. Long live Richard!

Photos courtesy of Abertoir Horror Festival/Matt Hardwick

'Like' this discussion of Unfriended

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Admin

By Keri O’Shea and Ben Bussey

Given how Blumhouse Productions have come to more or less completely dominate theatrically released horror these last few years, and how frequently their output leans toward ghost stories and/or found footage, at a glance it’s easy to assume their latest release Unfriended might not offer anything new. However, your intrepid BAH editors were sufficiently intrigued by the trailer and premise for director Levan Gabriadze’s film to venture out to the cinema on opening night – and, happily enough, wound up pretty glad they did.

Read on for their largely spoiler-free reflections, conducted as ever in a Facebook message chat – which seemed a little too appropriate under the circumstances…

Ben
(Checking in first) Right then – ready when you are.
Are you there?
OMG WHY ARENT YOU REPLYING
STOP FREAKING ME OUT UGH
DO NOT ANSWER IT KERI! NOOOOO!!!

Keri
Ha ha! Sorry Ben, contrary to our young protagonists I just had to wash up. Right, then…

Ben
Ah yes, the key thing that sets us apart from them – responsibilities!

Keri
Indeed!

Ben
Beyond the social responsibilities so central to the film, of course.

Keri
Well, I think that brings us on to one of the strong suits of the film, personally. It did a good job of capturing lolspeak in its natural environment…

Ben
Definitely. While I don’t personally use Skype, everything else about how the action played out felt very true indeed to the contemporary online experience. Well, I haven’t been stalked by a ghost, but you get the drift.

Keri
As I’m talking to you, I’m skipping back and forth between Last.fm, Tumblr and Twitter, so although I’m more or less a generation older than those kids in the film, it all rings very true! It was a clever framework – having everything unfolding via the different sites and messages received by one girl. Multi-media horror.

Ben
So how do we class Unfriended – a genuinely new angle on found footage, or something all of its own?

Keri
I do think it’s a new angle, yeah, even if not a new genre altogether. It happens in real time for one thing, so it disposes of the whole ‘tapes found somewhere’ shtick which dogs a lot of movies. Also, although you have young people zipping around between Skype and other sites, it all occurs within the space confines of a laptop – which again, gets rid of a lot of tropes we’re tired with. (Well, I am.)

Ben
Yeah, you’re definitely not alone on having long since grown exhausted with the found footage routine. As you’re well aware, whenever we get the screener discs in for the latest straight-to-DVD found footage movie, it’s become like an unlucky dip for the BAH writing team; nobody wants them, but everyone has to take one for the team now and then. Sitting down to watch them, I’m invariably bored shitless within half an hour if not sooner. That’s what made Unfriended so very refreshing: I was honestly never bored, not for a moment. Annoyed occasionally, but definitely not bored.

Keri
Yep – it did have a good pace. It gave just enough in terms of characterisation for us to accept, then ploughed on with its story. So – what annoyed you then?

Ben
I guess once we reached the final act and all the adolescent drama came to the forefront. I accept that it was necessary for the narrative and central theme, but as someone once said, I’m too old for that shit. I just wanted to slap them all and say “wait until you’ve got bills to pay you little ingrates. And get off my lawn.”

Keri
They were definitely Valley brats, yeah.

Ben
Of course, having said all that – young people do genuinely get depressed, even suicidal over this kind of teenage drama, as petty as a lot of it might seem to us jaded old codgers. So Unfriended is definitely addressing pertinent issues in an effective way – and crucially, I think, not in a judgemental way. The sexual politics of this one sit a lot better with me than those of It Follows.

Keri
On that topic, another thing it did well was illustrate how all proportion can go out of the window with things of an online nature. I mean, even we see it – people who seem to live for FB, or on the reverse of that, people who have no bearing to their online persona, and seem genuinely surprised when it turns out someone’s none-too-pleased by their online actions. But the way in which a moment’s joking around for one person can be life-changing (and even life-ending) for another… I don’t think the internet and etiquette have really caught up to one another, try as we might to promote this.

Ben
Trial by social media doesn’t look likely to die out anytime soon, alas.

Keri
And as such, for a 17 year old, being shamed online not only has massive significance, but to the perpetrators it’s something and nothing a lot of the time. “I didn’t mean anything by it” etc. I think the film wove a moral in about that… like, how passively Blaire, the main character, is revisiting a Youtube clip of their old classmate’s suicide… We’re meant to be revulsed, surely.

Ben
I’m SO glad all this wasn’t around when I was a teen. Back then if we used the internet at all it was to wait an entire day for a Quicktime video to load only for it to freeze within 0.5 seconds.

Keri
Ha ha, halcyon days.

Ben
But I digress… yeah, the seemingly casual viewing of a suicide video – right down to the fact that Blaire stops watching almost as soon as the gun goes off, despite the fact that we see there’s another minute or so of footage left. That clinical sense of detachment the internet can provide, making it all seem less real somehow. In a way – and I can’t quite believe I’m about to make this comparison considering how I hate the film in question – it brings to mind Diary of the Dead, which regularly beats us over the head with the message of how this generation seems incapable of processing events without video footage. The difference is the makers of Unfriended quite clearly understand how modern social media works, whilst Romero didn’t seem to really connect with what he was trying to tackle at all.

Keri
It was an odd blend of old ghost fable and modern, wasn’t it? The whole ‘one year since’ idea is as old as the hills…

Ben
Yeah, it’s like Prom Night or any number of bog standard slashers all over again. That’s another reason I enjoyed the film so much more than I was expecting – that it took such a stock premise, and a semi-found footage approach, yet made it feel genuinely fresh and engaging.

Keri
It knew when to poke fun at itself too…which can be risky, as it can blow the suspense altogether. Here, though, seeing as how this is the internet we’re talking about, it fitted very well.

Ben
The use of music was quite good. Funny yet creepy, kind of in the same vein as a Freddy Krueger joke. I did wonder if some of the deaths were a little too goofy, though.

Keri
I personally found it a lot creepier when the footage just started to warp and then went out altogether. You have to admit, when it starts doing that it’s pretty horrible. Mind you, I had a terror of Max Headroom as a kid so any sort of looping or similar…..UGH OMG

Ben
I liked how they did the scrambling image on the Universal logo at the opening too. I’m sure we all thought for a second, “oh great, the digital projector’s fucked!”

Keri
Well considering where we were watching it..! Wasn’t beyond possibility. But yeah, good move by them. And then the Chatroulette scenes, ha ha – standard.

Ben
Not nearly enough cocks, surely?

Keri
Well – at least they were in some way representative!

Ben
Going back to the subject of where we were watching it – I suspect we were among the oldest people in the room, but even so it was a very well behaved young audience. This definitely had some bearing on my own enjoyment of Unfriended, as I know a big part of what puts a lot of more devoted horror fans off mainstream films is how frequently the screens seem to be full of – well – dickheads.

Keri
Yeah, spotty herberts on an endurance mission, or else people who couldn’t put their phones away if they tried. Which led to one of the funniest moments for me last night – when the film had a mobile buzzing on silent and at least ten teenagers jumped out of their skins thinking it was theirs!

Ben
Ha! I must have missed that.

Keri
Look, if that’s what it takes to get people to turn the fucking things off then I welcome the new wave of internet ghosts.

Ben
Yep. Turn it off or Laura Barns will get you. But going back to what I was saying about being engaged from start to finish – what I particularly enjoyed about Unfriended was how it demanded you pay attention throughout, not just listening and watching several screens but reading as well. Quite a feat when you consider how subtitle-averse the wider audience tends to be. Contrast that with the standard found footage approach, where there are so many lulls, so many protracted silences, it’s no wonder people in the audience get vocal, impatient and unruly.

Keri
True. And as you say, the written English was truncated and sometimes a bit of a challenge (for us, I mean), but you had to read and watch carefully. Plus no one once said ‘Why are you filming?’ which is always a plus…

Ben
Indeed – and little to no shakey cam!

Keri
There is a God.

Ben
Hallelujah, Hare Krishna.

Keri
So – I guess we have pretty much said all we might want about Unfriended.

Ben
Yeah, I think we’ve just about covered it. I haven’t been looking too closely at the reviews but I gather it’s been getting a bit of a lukewarm response – so once again, call us Contrary as Fuck.
That said – I’m not too encouraged to hear they’re already working on a sequel. I really feel this would work best as a one-off unless they’ve got something very special planned. We don’t need another Paranormal Activity, as Tina Turner might have once sung…

Keri
Overall, I liked it. Although it used a few elements I definitely don’t like usually (bratty teens, for one) it did enough with them to make it work. I think its frame was ingenious and by and large, used to good effect (a few quibbles about what was shown and what wasn’t notwithstanding). It would be difficult to repeat this success and engage viewers all over again.

(Moment of no activity)

Ben
Keri are you there?
Why aren’t you replying???
OMG WHATS HAPPENING ARGHHH

Keri

OMG IS THIS YOU
QUIT IT

Ben
Never have I ever… walked out of a Blumhouse film thinking “wow, that actually is one of the best new horrors I’ve seen for a while.”

Keri
Likewise! Besties.

Unfriended is in cinemas now, from Universal.

A Decade in the Darkness – The Descent 10 Years On

Posted on March 11, 2015January 25, 2020 by Admin

Update, 14th March 2015: it’s been brought to my attention that The Descent did not in fact premiere in March 2005 at BIFFF, but that July at Dead by Dawn. Just goes to show – never assume IMDb to be definitive. Naturally I feel a colossal divvy for getting the date of the film’s 10th anniversary wrong, but it doesn’t in any way render this article invalid in spirit.

As much as I’m not generally one for sweeping statements, I can confidently say that, in my own humble opinion, there was no finer horror movie made in the 2000s than Neil Marshall’s The Descent. Certainly there are arguments to be made for other films of the decade, films which more directly embody the era’s predominant themes and motifs. In many respects Marshall’s sophomore movie is something of an incongruity, in that it’s a fantastical monster movie set in an unfamiliar rural landscape, as opposed to the comparatively kitchen sink, social realist, tying-people-to-chairs-and-torturing-them-to-death routine which dominated horror at the time (and to a certain extent endures to this day). Yet The Descent is absolutely reflective of the 2000s inasmuch as it brushed off the smug, post-modernist superiority complex of the 1990s, and brought a level of sincerity, emotional realism, palpable tension and unrelenting brutality that the genre arguably hadn’t seen in some time* – and yet, unlike some of its contemporaries, it also made sure not to forget about being genuinely, intensely entertaining at the same time. Yes, the 2000s were a great decade for horror, producing plenty more horror movies of note (without which, sites such as this one surely would never have come into being), but I struggle to name any other horror movie of the time which succeeded so completely on every level as The Descent.

Looking back, I think part of why it struck me so hard on first viewing (which, I should note, wasn’t until July 2005; today marks the 10th anniversary of its world premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Films) was that I didn’t necessarily go in expecting that much. I’d seen Marshall’s debut Dog Soldiers, and while I quite liked it I wasn’t nearly as sold on it as many seemed to be; I’ve warmed to it over the years, but at the time I found the humour quite hit-and-miss, the story a bit patchy, and the werewolf FX somewhat laughable. So when the Chinese whispers came around that the guy who made that was following it up with a straight horror which was the scariest thing to hit cinemas in years, I was healthily sceptical. After all, another genre motif that rose to prominence in the 2000s, and hasn’t really gone away, is how pretty much every new horror movie that comes along is marketed as the most terrifying thing you’ll ever see; The Blair Witch Project got that particular ball rolling in 1999, then in 2000 Final Destination hit the brainwave of filling their TV spots with night-vision footage of audiences screaming at the screen, and from that point on everyone was at it. No, The Descent didn’t show any petrified test audiences in their trailers, but the word-of-mouth still seemed too good to be true. This new movie about chicks in a cave might be a bit of fun, but no way was it going to be all that.

By the time Sarah got stuck in the tunnel, I was eating my words and filling my pants.

Another thing The Descent stands as a perfect example of, to my mind, is how a horror movie can reveal primal fears you never knew you had. Beyond one brief experience of being stuck in a lift, I’d never considered myself particularly claustrophobic, but once it came to that first tunnel sequence I found myself white-knuckled and short of breath with my heart pounding. When the ladies first descend into the mouth of the cave, there’s a sense of awe for sure, but it’s a wide-eyed, thrilling, inspiring sight; to go from such a majestic, wide open space to such a tiny, uninviting slither of air through a solid wall of rock – it’s just too jarring. Common sense dictates that human beings are surely not meant to traverse such terrain; and even if it is physically possible, common sense once again asks, why the hell would anyone want to? I knew then as I know now that I’d be damned if you’d ever get me down in a cave like that, though in the few comparable outdoor pursuits I’ve tried – notably rock climbing and abseiling – I’ve experienced similar flashes of doubt; moments when, whilst teetering on the edge, the thought “what the hell am I doing?” takes over my entire brain. I suppose the way you react under those circumstances tells you a bit about what you’re made of – and many of the best horror films provide a similar experience, in a somewhat safer form.

Small wonder, then, that a horror movie based around what we might now call an extreme sport makes perfect sense. That said, The Descent certainly isn’t designed to cut to the heart of the adrenaline junkie mindset. While there may be moments that address just what it is that drives our characters to these pursuits (take Juno’s declaration, “if there’s no risk, what’s the point?”), these are ultimately peripheral to what is really a story about friends banding together when one among them is in need – but in so doing, drawing to the surface tensions and secrets which have long been obscured.

One of the key talking points of The Descent on release and to this day is the film’s almost exclusively female cast, its only (human) male barely lasting the first two minutes after uttering maybe three lines of dialogue. As much as we might easily find to say on the subject, to debate just why Marshall chose to keep it girls only strikes me as perhaps a little counterproductive; when so many horror films cast women either as blatantly fetishised window-dressing or to create the illusion of a gender-neutral outlook, Marshall wisely just gets to business without making an issue of it, just as how the absence of women is never an issue in any number of similar male-dominated films we might mention. I’ve read complaints that it’s hard to remember who’s who, but I’ve never quite understood why some feel that way; if nothing else the diversity of accents – Scottish Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), English Beth (Alex Reid), American Juno (Natalie Mendoza), Irish Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), Danish Rebecca and Sam (Saskia Mulder and Myanna Buring) – should surely be enough for the viewer to keep track, assuming they’re paying attention.

Equally smart was the decision to leave sexploitation out of the picture. Six very fit young women squeezing through tight wet spaces, getting dirty and sweaty, breathing heavily, most of them gradually stripping down to their skin-tight vests as things get hotter… in different hands, there was clearly the potential for things to get more than a little voyeuristic here. The Descent does indeed boast a very sexy cast, but the movie never gets sleazy about it, barely a single shot in the film feeling at all ‘male gaze’-y. Still, as is often remarked in the DVD extras, it’s not hard to read a lot of vaginal symbolism into the whole set-up; Juno can talk about going “down the pipe” without it seeming too euphemistic, but apparently some lines relating to “tight cracks” were changed on set. Factor in how bloody most of them get as they sink deeper into these crevices and – well, read in any metaphors you like. Marshall admitted to taking a great deal of inspiration from the Alien movies, which are of course also notable for their female orientation and psychosexual overtones, but like Scott and Cameron before him, Marshall doesn’t let these elements overwhelm proceedings. If you want to dwell on the subtext, you’re more than welcome, but if you just want to be carted off on a killer thrill ride, the film more than caters for that.

And can you believe I’ve got this far without even mentioning the monsters yet…

Another point that’s often debated about The Descent is whether or not it really needs the Crawlers. After all, they don’t properly enter the picture until around 50 minutes into the film’s 95 minute running time, and the whole set-up had been suitably scary already, from the nightmarish opening tragedy, the aforementioned tunnel sequence, the traverse of an abyss, and a couple of nasty injuries along the way. However, the Crawlers give us that which a lot of other horror movies that have come in the wake of The Descent have neglected to provide: a satisfying pay-off to all that build-up. That slow-burn simmering tension approach, as exhilarating as it can be, will only take you so far, and without a suitably explosive finish it can so easily feel nothing more than a big tease** – something which I daresay the recent It Follows might have done well to consider. By giving our heroines a tangible foe to do battle with, The Descent more than pays off all the preamble, giving us a final act that remains to this day eye-watering in its relentless aggression, but felt even more so in 2005, when it was still fairly early days for the new wave of horror directors bringing full-on violence back (the ‘Splat Pack’ as Alan Jones dubbed them); Marshall was without a doubt a key player of this unofficial ensemble, and The Descent a pivotal work in their oeuvre.

The Crawlers are without doubt a key part of what makes the film work; and beyond that, they’re one of the few original movie monsters of recent times that really work, and hold up. Blind, rodent-like cannibal humanoids might so easily have come off a bit corny, or have resulted in a brash, semi-comedic tonal shift akin to From Dusk Till Dawn, but The Descent skillfully avoids self-parody, maintaining the grounded (quite literally) tone established from the first two acts even once the shit hits the fan, and the action gets progressively more out there. Some might argue that the big violent showdown is simply a cliche, but this need only be the case if the filmmakers haven’t put in the requisite effort, and The Descent puts the work in to make the Crawlers fit organically into proceedings without feeling like a concession to audience expectation. Marshall is able to pay homage to monster movies of years gone by without making it feel like a rip-off, much as how the use of flares and lightsticks allows for an 80s-esque red and green colour scheme.

And the question is, where would The Descent have gone in its final act without the Crawlers? This opens up an area of popular debate that I would like to delve into – and in so doing there will be spoilers.

Had The Descent not introduced the monstrous Crawlers just as the tension reached fever pitch, there’s really only one way I could have imagined it going: with one, some or all of the women going insane, and turning violently on one another. And the thing is, as others have suggested before me, we might wonder if this is what’s really meant to have happened anyway. Given that we see Sarah experience a waking delusion in the prologue scene following the loss of her husband and daughter, and that the film ultimately ends on her experiencing further delusions – first of escape, then of being reunited with her dead child – we might very well be left to ponder just how much of what we see in The Descent is entirely in her head. More than once, both Rebecca and Juno mention the possibility of experiencing hallucinations and panic attacks whilst caving; such lines are surely intended to leave the audience pondering whether or not this is what’s actually happening. I’ve heard speculations that have gone even further, some suggesting that literally none of what transpires is real beyond the prologue, and that the entire caving expedition is simply the fantasy of a deeply traumatised woman who has lost touch with reality completely. This, however, would leave questions to be asked as to how Sarah becomes aware of Juno’s affair with her husband – unless we take this, too, to be part of the fantasy, Sarah’s unconscious demonising the friend that abandoned her when she was needed most.

Alas, I fear I may have lost some readers here with my mention of Sarah’s climactic delusion, as when The Descent was released in the US in 2006 by Lionsgate, these final moments were removed. Now, I haven’t seen this US cut, and I suppose I understand why this happened – not everybody likes ambiguous endings that ask you to draw your own conclusions – but I really feel that to lose that ending is to severely undermine the movie (for one thing, the sporadic, out of focus shots of a birthday cake will no longer make any sense – unless these too were cut from the US edit?) Perhaps even worse, dumbing down the ending of The Descent only serves to confirm how the mainstream so often dismisses horror fans as a rabble of dunces.*** Once again – yes, The Descent absolutely works as an out-and-out white knuckle rollercoaster of a movie, but – like the masters of old – Neil Marshall understands that such an approach does not negate the possibility of intelligent, complex storytelling. Each time I watch The Descent I remain impressed by how subtly the infidelity subplot is handled, with nary a word explicitly spoken on the subject beyond Juno’s pointed comment “we all lost something in that crash.” Likewise the subtle ambiguity of the original ending. I’ve no doubt all this may have gone over the head of some viewers who were just out for something they could jump and spill their popcorn to on a Saturday night, but to assume that no horror fans are capable of getting it is just insulting – and considering what a major force in horror Lionsgate were in the 2000s, it does give pause for thought as to how they felt about the audiences that were filling their coffers. In addition, the knowledge that The Descent Part II followed on directly from that US ending is a huge part of what put me off that sequel; while I’ve caught bits of it in passing, I’ve never sat down to watch it from beginning to end.

It’s also been a little disheartening to see how Neil Marshall’s fortunes have varied in the years since. After following The Descent with 2007’s Doomsday (I almost never use this turn of phrase, but fuck the haters – that film is great) and 2009’s Centurion (perhaps his least satisfying film, but entertaining nonetheless), Marshall has subsequently been linked to numerous American movies – yet not a single one of them has wound up getting made to date. Sure, he’s done some very respectable TV work in the interim, notably two particularly epic episodes of Game of Thrones, but it’s hard not to sigh at the big screen potential which would seem to have been somewhat squandered over the past six years. I’m also a little disappointed that, Myanna Buring and Nora-Jane Noone aside, we haven’t seen more from the cast, but so far as I’m aware they’ve all gone on to have successful careers. But regardless of what anyone involved in The Descent goes on to do, having perhaps the best horror film of its decade on your CV is more than enough to take pride in – and while Buring has since said she considers Kill List the best film she’s ever been in, I must respectfully disagree.

* Some might argue the case for 28 Days Later, but I’ve got my issues with that one – and now’s not the time to get into that.
**Look, we agreed to leave questions of sexual metaphor to one side…
***And that’s crap, they all talk clever like what us do, innit?

Sexual terror, excessive synths & incongruous clams – Ben & Keri discuss It Follows

Posted on March 4, 2015December 1, 2021 by Admin

By Keri O’Shea and Ben Bussey

Oh dear, looks like we once again need to contemplate changing the name of this site from Brutal As Hell to Contrary As Fuck. Everyone and their uncle seems to be currently raving about It Follows, and not without just cause: it’s rare that we see such a well-publicised major theatrical release afforded to a no-star horror movie from indie beginnings which isn’t a sequel, remake, reboot or otherwise regurgitation. Our own Tristan caught an early look at it in January and was also mightily impressed, so when Keri and myself ventured out to see it on opening weekend our hopes were high. However, soon enough we were both left wondering quite what It Follows had done to provoke such widespread enthusiasm, as we found every bit as much to dislike in the film as there was to admire.

We discuss the matter at length – and in heavy spoilers – below…

Ben: Okay. Well first off, I think the only way we’re really going to be able to do this is going into full spoiler territory. Readers who want to go on unspoiled are referred to Tristan’s review – although I would say he’s a bit more positive about it than I am.

Keri: Yep – agreed. So – I think my first comment would be along the lines of what you said to me at the screening we went to. We see a hell of a lot of indie films passing through – some great, some godawful, and every shade in-between. What has It Follows managed to do that a million other indies fail to do – how is it the film has garnered so much attention, with a trailer running on mainstream TV?

Ben: Yeah, I’ve been pondering that one a lot and I honestly can’t put my finger on it. Looking back at what we saw at the 2014 fests, It Follows doesn’t necessarily seem any more commercial than, say, Starry Eyes or Spring – yet Starry Eyes went straight to DVD and Spring’s getting only a limited cinema release next month I think.

Keri: Very strange, and maybe blind luck – though if the filmmakers have any tactic for achieving this sort of exposure, they should bottle and sell that. It’s frustrating actually, as a fan – the sheer amount of films I see that never get to this stage. But that’s the game, I guess.

Ben: I dunno – maybe it’s a slightly easier sell inasmuch as it relates to a more universal adolescent experience? Putting the whole supernatural stalker STD thing to one side, it’s essentially about teenagers hanging out in the summer, and the bonds that form under those circumstances.

Keri: Hmm, I dunno. Honestly, Spring’s about a summer love affair, Starry Eyes is about ambition – all pretty universal and recognisable. But I guess we could talk a long time about the whys and wherefores.

Ben: True. And I suppose they’re both a bit more out there – not that It Follows is necessarily much more down to earth. Still, the key macguffin of the supernatural stalker that never looks the same twice – that is a pretty cool idea, and put to good use.

Keri: So yeah, onto It Follows itself. It’s gotten a lot of praise, and its unstoppable, morphing predator is one big reason why. On reflection now, do you find it was effective?

Ben: I do, yeah. It was an interesting device, never knowing who the threat was – so anytime you see an unfamiliar person walking towards the main character Jay, you’re immediately put on edge. That gave the whole thing a nice slow-burning tension. The problem for me was that it didn’t go anywhere with that – it was all build-up and no pay-off. It was as if by the final act they literally didn’t know what else to do with it.

Keri: I was gunning for the film at first – I thought the slightly Scream-esque beginning (where what might be the heroine gets offed in record time by…something) was really promising, mysterious. And the build-up was interesting. When I realised that the premise was so shaky (and I’ll get to the use of sex in a while) it did feel like a let-down. That’s the other side of the whole ‘good idea’ thing. It needs fulfillment.

Ben: Like you said to me on the night, it needed just a little more exposition. Clearly they wanted to play it mysterious, and that worked up to a point, but it became evident about 30 minutes before the end that they had no idea where they were going with it. As such it’s no wonder it ended on such a total anti-climax (or that’s how it felt to me, at least). And just to do the anal pick-holes-in-their-logic thing, it was never clear how the ex-boyfriend knew so much about the bloody thing when he apparently picked it up from a one night stand he never saw again…

Keri: True. Or, considering how quickly It had tore through the guys on the boat, how anyone survived for any length of time.

Ben: I forget, did we learn that the guys on the boat had died? As I recall they left that whole thing very ambiguous.

Keri: We sort of did as It was back after Jay within a few hours!

Ben: Well, they must have been easy pickings, then. And speaking of ambiguities, there was the strange question of when exactly it was meant to be set.

Keri: Yes – I did read David Flint’s review after we got back, and he alluded to the director’s assertion that the film should exist in a sort of non-time, not easily traceable to any specific era. The director wanted the film to have a timeless quality to it; I just found it disorientating, personally, and also if you want that timelessness then there are more sound ways to go about it.

Ben: As opposed to basically everything being 80s except a clam-shaped kindle. (Heheh, clam.)

Keri: Smacked of hipster. She needed to poke around in her clam (chortle) so she had a ready supply of literary quotes. God forbid she read books for that! And analogue is cool…

Ben: That just seemed an odd choice, as everything else about it belonged to an older era – the square analogue TVs that only seem to show 50s sci-fi, the cinema with a live wurlitzer player. I forget what the cars were like but I suspect they were what would be described as vintage.

Keri: Trying to obfuscate on the era, I’m sure – but it just dislocated the film to an extent.

Ben: The music too seemed almost more 80s than 80s. I mean yes, some films from that era do use some fairly screechy synth scores, but not quite to the extent they are here. In a way It Follows reminded of Nicolas Winding Refn and the Maniac remake, with the use of that kind of soundtrack balanced with slow build up – the difference being that Refn’s films and Maniac have those crescendos of violence that punctuate that quietness. It Follows rarely does that, even when it is violent.

Keri: Yeah, it had an odd effect. John Carpenter’s loudest moments all the time. All part of the retro/unretro thing it had going on.

Ben: But one of the big sticking points for both of us, I think, was the strange attitudes toward sex.

Keri: Absolutely. Sex and sexuality has been used as a prompt for horror for years – but this unseemly? It seemed to be conflating sex with revulsion in a …well, in a way that troubled me. I know you don’t go to horror for your cool PC attitudes to sex, but still.

Ben: It was as though this monster essentially just was sex personified – and evil. See how frequently It took some highly sexualised form – often naked people, generally grotesque.

Keri: The most horrific (and it was effectively horrific, no doubt about it) scene for me was the kitchen scene. Did you read that the same way I did? To me it looked like a traumatised rape victim turned monster. I also thought it was the same girl as the prostitute at the end, but I may be wrong there.

Ben: With her teeth all mangled, clothes torn, pissing herself – yeah, she certainly seemed like a rape victim. Not sure if it was the same woman as one of the prostitutes at the end but they certainly were presented in much the same way – as a figure of revulsion. I guess the question is, are we meant to share in that revulsion, or take it as indicative of Jay’s own sexual anxieties? And I’m really not sure about that one. This is clearly a film that’s screaming out for in-depth Freudian analysis (let’s not forget It appears as her dad near the end) and there are many people far more qualified than me to get into that.

Keri: Hopefully this isn’t one of those films for which the director thinks first of the film academics… See, the way I read the ending, he didn’t sleep with the prostitute, went home and had sex with Jay anyway, and as they walk off together into the sunset, the figure slowly approaching them up the pavement is It… He couldn’t beat his revulsion for the hooker, nor his desire for Jay. And then they really are fucked.

Ben: Again, like the boat scene it was ambiguous – but it didn’t seem like he was slowing the car down. Either way the ending didn’t seem to be saying other than “and so it continues…”

Keri: Yes, agreed with that. After seeming to deliberately conflate sex with STDs – Jay’s almost always absent mother wonders aloud if her daughter ‘caught something’ and Jay herself was peering into her own underwear after the encounter she first had – this is a sign of the times perhaps, of a world where sex is terrifying and harmful. (I could do a joke here about how It kicks someone’s back doors in…)

Ben: Must admit I felt some empathy for the lad. I know many of us had female friends as teenagers who were a bit crazy and we were so anxious to “help” them… I mean, to be in a situation where you might be able to fuck your dream girl AND feel all morally dignified and selfless in doing so, that’s a proper win-win.

Keri: For a few hours maybe!

Ben: Ah, but what a glorious few hours…

Keri: Ha ha!

Ben: Other big win for the lad – he got to accidentally shoot clam girl.

Keri: Ah yes, the possibly unintentional humour surrounding the world’s worst plan…

Ben: Again, this is where just a smidgen more exposition would have helped. They’d already shot the thing in the head and it had got straight back up – why the hell did they think electrocution would be any different?

Keri: Hmm, this is a film where It can pop up anywhere but they assert that getting in a car would get you ‘ahead’ of it somehow. I don’t know.

Ben: Nor do I – and alas, I suspect the writer-director didn’t either. But still, it’s a supernatural entity and as such not subject to the human laws of physics and whatnot, so I guess it’s all cool beans. (Sorry, not sure why i just used the phrase ‘cool beans.’ At least it wasn’t ‘amazeballs.’)

Keri: We’re at risk of just picking holes in the plot, I realise – and your phrases are getting more and more odd. Maybe we should wrap it up here…

Ben: Yeah, fair enough. Your final thoughts?

Keri: Okay, for me, an intriguing set-up with some genuinely creepy early scenes unfortunately collapsed underneath its own weight – not so much because the idea couldn’t be sustained throughout, but I think what pushed me away overall was the odd, unsettling attitudes to sex it held. Even if deliberately using that theme to create horror, it still felt like it was too heartfelt a message in several places.

Ben: Agreed all around. We have dwelled a bit heavily on the negative, and there is in fact a lot to admire about It Follows – it looks and sounds great, it is often quite tense and atmospheric, and the young cast are pretty good all in all – but if someone were to tell us tomorrow that it’s covert propaganda for that whole teen abstinence movement they have in the US, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. And I’m very surprised more people haven’t taken It Follows to task for it.

It Follows is out now in the UK & Ireland via Icon, and opens in US cinemas on March 13th from Radius-TWC.