Halloween FrightFest Day 2

Halloween
Fright Fest Day 2

Eldritch USA,
Lovely Dark And Deep,
Superposition, Hood Witch,
The Last Video Store, Blue Light

Okay, so Day 2 of FrightFest was another, mostly good selection and I think it speaks for the quality of the films shown here this year that I didn’t fall asleep in any of them.

Eldritch USA
USA
Directed by Ryan Smith and Tyler Foreman
The first film of the day and the second of the festival’s quirkier offerings was this tale of sibling rivalry set in the town of Eldritch. Oh... and it’s a full-on zombie musical with some catchy tunes, a lot of horror movie references and some nice performances. There’s also a lot of Lovecraft references thrown in with all the other pop culture shout outs and, yeah, this was a nice way to start off a Saturday morning. I talked to the director briefly after the screening and I’m glad to say that he intends to issue a soundtrack on a proper, physical CD at some point (yay!). My one real problem with this was that around half the references were nicely put in but then were well over explained by the characters... which wasn’t necessary and kinda soured the joke sometimes. The kind of target audience this movie is going to appeal to will not need everything explained to them... they’re mostly in on the joke already. But, still... a really great movie and I hope this one gets some major distribution going on over here in the UK.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep
Portugal
Directed by Teresa Sutherland
Lovely, Dark, And Deep... a film forever marred by the use of a superfluous Oxford comma in it’s title on the print that played here... was one of the stand out films of the festival for me. Featuring a riveting performance by central lead Georgina Campbell (from last year’s Barbarian... reviewed here) as a forest ranger trying to solve the disappearance of her sister from twenty years before. I got kinda clued in as to the nature of the shenanigans on this one from some early visual and audio clues but it doesn’t matter because the movie looks absolutely spectacular and sounds amazing. Lots of dialogue free sections with some long drawn out sequences set in a nightmarish, parallel dimension (which is probably my less than subtle way of describing the enhanced mental state of some of the ‘victims’ of the film), the movie was like a more polished sidestep from The Blair Witch Project with a generous side helping of Twin Peaks thrown into the mix for good measure. Well worth a look.

Superposition
Denmark
Directed by Karoline Lyngbye
This equally gorgeous looking film with standout performances by Marie Bach Hansen (looking like the main female lead of every Bergman film ever)  and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard was very interesting but I also had a huge and disappointing problem with it. Namely that the premise is easy to figure out from the first, implicit shot of the movie... a ninety degree tilt of a landscape reflected in a river... and further reenforced by lots of scenes shot in rooms with big glass windows providing multiple reflections of the two actors. Things kinda went as I expected them to and, though there are some nice discussions to be had as to the fate of the child belonging to the central couple, I felt there are just two many movies around doing this kind of thing just recently for this to be, in any way, surprising or that inventive. Looks amazing though.

Hood Witch
Iran/France
Directed by Saïd Belktibia
Hood Witch tells the story of a modern witch (or is she?), played by exiled actress Golshifteh Farahani, who creates an app which is like a Yellow Pages for access to modern witches and sorcerers but, as a consequence of her success, is just trying to survive and get her and her son away from her country after the ‘howling pitch fork’ brigade wants to do her harm for her apparent murder of a character who she was trying to help. It’s a pretty intense and suspenseful piece with gritty, in your face camerawork and a nice turn from famous French actor Denis Lavant, who it’s nice to see is still working.

The Last Video Store
Canada
Directed by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford
Quirky film number three and not to be confused with another film released this year with exactly the same title (yeah, thanks guys), The Last Video Store is a low budget but quite entertaining comedy piece set in, well, the premises mentioned in the title (apart from the film’s prologue) and shows what happens when the VHS equivalent of the Necronomicon is inserted into a bank of video machines and starts transporting deadly characters from those VHS movies into the store, with risk to life and limb for the store owner and his equally trapped customer. It’s a nice piece of fluff with a lot to smile about for those who well remember the style of a lot of those old 1980s, straight-to-video cassettes you would rent out from places like your local off-licence. A bit of fun which was some much needed comedy relief after the intensity of the preceeding three movies.


Blue Light
USA
Directed by Andy Fickman
The last film of the day was the very first screening anywhere, which even the cinematographer had not seen yet, of a piece called Blue Light. The director, Andy Fickman, talked for about ten minutes before this and certainly didn’t outstay his much applauded welcome. This guy is as entertaining as heck and, wouldn’t you know it, the movie was really great. A road movie with an intense last act full of supernaturally charged death on a dark, forest roadway... this one had characters which you cared about but, who were a bit hyper, almost to the point of irritation. Except, you do find yourself investing a lot of emotional weight in them so that, when they start getting lured out of their truck and picked off one by one, it’s quite an effective piece of horror. I also enjoyed the fact that there was no ‘over explanation’ of the central, malevolent force by which the cast of characters inevitably meet their untimely demise.

And that’s a wrap. A nice movie to end the festival on and, after that, the real horror of the night bus home was the next thing to survive (and shout out to the drunk guy who sat himself down next to me for most of it, trying to engage with me between swigs of cider, thusly giving me an anxious hour back to my home town). Yeah... this year’s marathon didn’t kill me so, I guess I’ll be signing up for next year’s again at some point, for sure. 

Happy Halloween!