Halloween FrightFest Day 1

Halloween
Fright Fest Day 1

The Waterhouse,
He Never Left, Maria

And just like that, it was already time for this year’s Halloween edition of FrightFest, which is always my favourite of their two yearly, London based events. Normally that takes the form of a marathon session starting Saturday morning and going on into the small hours of Sunday morning. However, just to make thing worse for us old codgers with no stamina, they expanded it into two days... Friday from 6pm until around 12.30am on Saturday morning followed by Day Two starting 11.30am until 1am Sunday morning. I actually coped with the night buses and only getting four hours of sleep much better than I thought I would and was surprisingly buoyant by the time the last movie had played. And thanks muchly to new film friend @phetheringtonnz who was sitting beside me for eight of the films and who talked movies with me during the intervals.

Okay, so very brief reviews, as usual, for the Halloween edition with Day 2 reviews following tomorrow (at least that’s my plan).

The Waterhouse
United Kingdom
Directed by Samuel Clemens
So the first movie up was The Waterhouse, which is about three men who turn up at an isolated, spooky house (owned in real life by one of the lead actors... who is indeed spooked by the place himself) as a rendezvous for a multimillion pound art heist. However, things are not as they seem and, even before three ladies are suddenly thrust into the mix with them... things start to go wrong and a supernatural force starts to make itself known.

This was quite a taut and beautifully shot, well performed film which opens strongly when, after the usual establishing shots of one of the three driving to their destination, over the credits, one guy finds himself alone at the place and has to go room to room with his gun drawn, checking each one because something just doesn’t feel right. All this extended sequence played out with no dialogue and it’s a testament to the director and editor that a scene which would have played as standard padding in any 1970s TV cop show felt absolutely intense.

After the film had finished, one of the lead actresses asked the audience to raise their hands as to whether they’d guessed a certain twist before the end and, yeah, like many there I raised mine and had been watching the movie unaware that it was even supposed to be a twist. However, I didn’t get annoyed for being ahead of the game as usual because there’s a truly wonderful reveal in the last few shots of the movie, which I don’t want to even hint at here, which explains exactly why the movie is really called The Waterhouse and, it’s a really great moment. I was not disappointed and hope this movie gets some kind of release in due time.

He Never Left
USA
Directed by James Morris
The second movie was, as far as I was concerned (as was my audience neighbour’s view too, it turned out), the worst movie of this year’s FrightFest. He Never Left is a ‘serial killer’ in a drive-in motel picking off customers where a fugitive from justice is laying low. Colin Cunningham provides a very strong... or at least very enthusiastic... performance as said fugitive, written as a man afflicted with psychotic explosions of anxiety and anger. It’s a shame, then, that the film is really just a bit... well... it’s just a bit meh. Some people, especially those who can watch endless American slasher movies, will find a small place in their heart for this one. Sadly, that description doesn’t apply to me.

Maria
Argentina
Directed by Gabriel Grieco and Nicanor Loreti
All of the films playing at this edition of FrightFest were premiere screenings of some sort... UK, European or even World Premieres. Although Maria, which is one of the three ‘quirky’ movies playing here this year, had already screened at Sitges a short while ago, this is a newer, extended cut of the film and is probably closer to the one that gets a general release, if that happens. And I hope it does because it’s an oddball movie set in the near future about a famous pornographic actress called Maria, played by Daria Panchenko, who gets killed in a car crash but who gets brought back to life in a very overt and deliberate nod to Robocop. She then, after being absent for a while, goes back to her day job without too many people knowing that she’s now a superhuman cyborg who, when she goes into orgasm overload and shuts down on her next porn shoot, starts killing off shady bad guys in her combined thirst for vengeance and justice.

The film plays out, in spirit at least, almost like Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakroh (as that particular film was originally called before various abbreviated versions of the title replaced it) with a dash of Robo-Geisha thrown in for good measure. I was about half an hour into it and slow on the uptake before I realised that the film, which starts off with some of the opening sentiments from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (reviewed here), has a title that is a nod to the central character in that movie, as played by Brigitte Helm. Some of the gory effects when Maria goes into hard ‘kill mode’ were deliberately obscured by ‘digital distress’ but, because it’s inconsistent in it’s usage, I suspect this might more have been required to obscure any failings of some of the practical effects on a low budget, more than anything else (I could be wrong though). Worth seeing for the castrating machine in Maria’s vagina alone, the detailed mechanics of which you’ll see in the post/mid-credits scene.

So that was Day One of this year’s Halloween FrightFest and, hopefully I’ll put Day Two up tomorrow.