Frightfest runs 26-29 August
LONDON, Friday, 26 August
For its sixth anniversary, Frighfest is burying its past and moving on to bloody pastures new. Regulars of the festival will look back fondly on all the screams, torture and entirely gratuitous bloodletting that took place in previous years at the Prince Charles Cinema. Now UK's premier fantasy, sci-fi and horror film festival has shuffled across Leicester Square to a different slaughterhouse, Odeon West End, Leicester Square. In keeping with trends in the horror movies of today, this new venue is slicker, cleaner, and more sterile than the Prince Charles - but already after Frightfest's first day, the carpeted floors are starting to feel sticky with popcorn, drinks, sweat, and who knows what else...
First up was George A. Romero's entire Holy Trinity shown in sequence - Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Dawn Of The Dead (1977) and Day Of The Dead (1985) - the horror trilogy that spawned a thousand (other) zombie flicks and documented the shifting political landscape in the US over three decades. These films have rightly earned their place as horror classics, combining grand guignol with grand ideas, and putting the "gory" in allegory - and it was a rare treat to see all three on the big screen, even if the projected DVD format detracted from the sharpness of the original images (especially in Night Of The Living Dead. This was followed by a presentation from make-up and SFX artist Greg Nicotero, who cut his teeth on Day Of The Dead and has since worked with Romero on Land Of The Dead (2005). Animatronic zombie heads were passed amongst the hungry audience.
Next was a screening of Land Of The Dead, introduced by Romero himself, who also followed the film with a Q&A, assisted by Nicotero and producer Mark Canton. Romero's fourth zombie film features superb make-up and gore effects, with inventively crowd-pleasing dismemberments of both the living dead and the living living - but if the film's blood runs deep, unfortunately in other respects it is far too shallow. No doubt Romero aficionados will be waiting with baited breath for the extra guts to appear in the DVD release - but the film could also do with more development of character and plotting to lift it from its current, decidedly cartoonish incarnation. Like each of its predecessors, this zombie flick has moved its politics with the times, now focussing on social inequalities and their violent consequences in Bush's post-9/11 world - unlike the previous films, though, this time the political message lacks much subtlety, and the gleeful spectacle of one of his zombies shoving its hand deep into a victim's mouth seems to reflect the film's more general tendency of ramming its ideas down the viewer's throat. So, probably the weakest in what is now Romero's tetralogy - but still a lot of fun.
For my money, Kim Ji-woon's A Bittersweet Life was the best (new) film of the day. It is a Tarantino-inflected tale of a mob enforcer (Lee Byeong-heon) whose fastidiously controlled, emotionally disengaged life is disrupted when he begins to harbour a desire for the young girlfriend (Kim Min-ah) of his boss (Kim Yeong-cheol). with consequences that spiral out of control. An intelligent reflection on the uneasy intersection, where the revenge and romance genres collide, it is made with all the visual flair that one might expect from the director of The Quiet Family and A Tale of Two Sisters.
Last was Jake West's low-budget, splatter-filled, Welsh-set comedy 'Evil Aliens', which tries to do to alien invasion flicks what Braindead and Shaun Of The Dead did to the zombie film - but whose campy humour will only appeal to the most avid pupils of the Carry On school. Bizarre, but a no-brainer, which is probably a good note on which to end for a day so dominated by zombies.
Saturday, 27 August
Here's a brief round up of today's films:
Do You Like Hitchcock?
Dario Argento is Italy's finest director of macabre thrillers. Alfred Hitchcock is the world's acknowledged master of suspense. So you'd think that when Argento agreed to direct Do You Like Hitchcock?, the first in a planned series of made-for-television movies celebrating Hitchcock and his stranglehold on cinema, the result would be a meeting of deranged minds. Instead, however, this pastiche of Rear Window, Strangers On A Train, Blackmail and Dial M For Murder, with its "who cares?" plotting, its over excess of go-nowhere McGuffins, its absurd mishandling of suspense and its lack of a satisfying twist, makes it a lot less knowing than it would like to be, and really does neither director much credit. The prominent presence in the film of posters for Argento's previous, equally disappointing The Cardplayer serves only to consolidate the impression that the one-time king of giallo has well and truly lost his crown.
Dead Meat
Writer/director Conor McMahon's debut and Ireland's first ever horror feature, the ultra-low budget Dead Meat, is a zombie flick with a strong sense of place - in this case the farms, heath lands and abandoned abbeys of a backwoods Irish county. McMahon has liberally body-snatched motifs from George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead and The Crazies - but Dead Meat is also nourished by more local anxieties about modern practices in animal husbandry and their consequences for the food chain (animal AND human). With shuffling flesh-eaters and mad cows galore, Dead Meat is gutsy, gory and grimly funny, and at 80 minutes is just about the right-sized helping for its overall unoriginality and somewhat repetitive plotting (run, chomp, run, chomp) not to become too indigestible.
The Neighbor No. 13
Adapted from Inoue Santa's popular manga, this beautifully realised Jekyll-and-Hyde headscratcher follows the struggles of mild-mannered Juzo (Oguri Shun) to contain the psychopathic rage of his scarred alter ego 13 (Nakamura Shido) against Akai, a thuggish bully from his past who has now moved into the apartment upstairs with a wife and young son. Occupying an abstract space somewhere between Ichi The Killer and Oldboy, with a Lynchian visual style, near unbearable tension, and a Moebian narrative structure that will have you running in mental circles trying to establish exactly what has happened, might have happened and will happen, Yasuo Inoue's film is an arresting exploration of the paradoxical dynamics of revenge, and is far and away my favourite film of the festival, if not the year, so far.
Wild Country
Craig Strachlan's feature begins as a typical piece of Scottish social realism, with headstrong Glaswegian teenager Kelly Ann (Samantha Shields) pressured into giving up her newborn baby for adoption to another family. From the moment, however, that she and four friends go on an overnight trek into the countryside organised by community priest Steve (Peter Capaldi), the film rapidly metamorphoses into a lycanthrope survival story, without ever forgetting the themes of maternity, surrogacy and religious hypocrisy with which it began. Unsurprisingly for a film with such a low budget, the werewolves are far more convincing when reduced to fast-moving silhouettes in the dark than when they are finally revealed in the full light of day - but the naturalistic quality of the acting goes some way to compensate for this, and it is not often that shape-shifters get to growl with a Scottish accent.
The Roost
Writer/director Ti West lets the bat out of the bag with his feature debut, a conventional genre flick that sinks its fangs into the viewer's affections, thanks to sheer directorial flair. After car trouble on Halloween, four young friends are stranded in the sticks and find more than they bargained for at the only nearby residence (the same house and barn where parts of Hitchcock's Marnie was filmed). This scenario is no more original than the black-and-white introductions and comments by a Crypt Creeper-type horror host that frame it - in fact both have been seen together as recently as 2003 in Rob Zombie's House Of 1000 Corpses - but Tom Noonan's excellently hammy turn, as the TV host more than makes up for the impression that his scenes have little function beyond padding out an otherwise very short film. Jeff Grace's screeching soundtrack is chillingly effective, and West shows real skill at manipulating his lighting and camera angles so that viewers feel left in the dark as much as the terrified characters. No one would call The Roost a masterpiece, but it may well prove the breeding ground for a new talent in horror.
2001 Maniacs
Tim Sullivan's remake transforms Herschell Gordon Lewis' gory 1964 drive-in classic into a madcap modern-day ghost story, where a bunch of hapless college kids are taught a lesson in treating the South with respect - even as the film itself mercilessly parades every hillbilly cliche in the book. Pneumatic Southern belles, serenading banjo players, sheep worriers, hoedowns, overt racism, good ol' fashioned manners - all are present and politically incorrect in the ghost town of Pleasant Valley, where the Northern students become honoured guests for an annual Jubilee, without realising that they are what is on the menu for the finger-lickin' barbecue finale. An outrageous, bloody feast of redneck grotesquery, gutsy humour and old school tits-and-ass, 2002 Maniacs is good dirty fun, but only if you are willing to leave your brain at the door - or at least on the plate.
