DarkFest 7

Dark Climes and
Tripped Up Climbs

DarkFest 7
Organised by Allan and Yanni Bryce

It was February 2021. I was just under a year into what would be two and a half years of working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was a surreal (but strangely much missed) time and I had two things which reignited my appreciation of the art of film and reminded me that, sometimes, life could be worth living, for a bit, during those unusual times. One of those things was Severin’s Al Adamson box set (written up with links to all the reviews here) and the other started with a friend telling me that the great Caroline Munro was on a nice cover painting in a magazine in my local W H Smith. Now, after washing my hands for the recommended 20 seconds, I rushed to my local news vendor - masked up and keeping my distance from everybody - and purchased said magazine, The Dark Side.

And I rekindled my declining relationship with magazines again. Not because I’d ever not liked them but, I just didn’t realise people were still doing these things in print (thankfully... I hate digital editions of anything and just don't bother reading them). And the magazine was great and I haven’t stopped buying both that and its sister magazine Infinity since. The editorials by Allan Bryce are so fun to read and I really appreciate these gems of printed materials as I grab them each month. But then I discovered that, as an annual event, the Bryce’s organised a thing called DarkFest at the Genesis cinema (around the Whitechapel area of London). I’d not been tempted before now but the quality of the guests this year such as Caroline Munro, Linzi Drew, Valerie Leon and Eileen Daly plus loads of good stalls and six mostly cool horror movies taking place over 12 hours (from 11am to 11pm), all for the ‘great value for money’ sum of £40, seemed too good to resist this year. So me and a friend braved the rain and went to check it out.

Now, I’ve often said in my years of going to FrightFest that the horror film fan community are among the friendliest in the world and this was exactly the case here. Which is very fortunate actually as the crowding of all those stalls and wonderful people somewhat resembled the ‘stateroom scene’ from the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (if you know, you know) and moving around the event was sluggish at best. I got the wonderful Ms. Munro to sign my Japanese At The Earth’s Core souvenir programme, had a word with Linzi Drew and also got a beautiful lingerie calendar signed by the charming Mrs. Moon, the organiser of the Misty Moon events. Alas, Eileen Daly left before I could get near to her which was a shame... this is the third time I’ve tried to see her and fate always conspires to keep me away.

Now I was worried about how my friend would take the first movie shown, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas (reviewed by me here) since it’s... well it’s badly acted, badly written and badly directed. It’s also very fun but, luckily, my friend said it was her favourite film of the day. I then left her to the next movie so I could get a chance to visit some of the stalls and empty out my wallet (and also grab a hot dog) but when I rejoined her 20 minutes before the end of Scars Of Dracula (reviewed by me here only last week) I managed to trip over the stairs in the cinema in the dark and hugely exacerbated the pain in my knees after a perilous falling accident in 2019. As I type these words I am in total agony and can barely walk... which is not the best state to be in.

We then watched what is probably my favourite vampire movie of all time... the low budget, highly creative Razor Blade Smile starring Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver and directed by Jake West. It’s been restored and will be getting a proper Blu Ray release soon so I won’t do a full review yet but, if you’ve never seen this film, with Daly playing a Jerry Cornelius-like vampire turned assassin caught up in a deadly conspiracy... you’re missing out. It’s a wonderful film and deserves to be properly re-evaluated by modern audiences. I could never figure out why there wasn’t a string of Lilith Silver movies made after this one.

At this point I had a brief but nice chat with Rick Melton, the erotic artist whose magazine cover had caught my interest in the first place. He was a really nice chap and I am looking forward to a new book coming out, according to him, in about ten months time. Then, after this year’s ‘Slaughter Awards’, we saw one of Lucio Fulci’s best horror films, The Beyond (reviewed by me here). This was good fun but, surprisingly, had loads of walkouts. I’m guessing the audience was already very familiar with this movie and were somewhat jaded and needed refreshments by this point.

After that we were faced with two more films... Friday The 13th, which held no interest and, the mystery film which I’d correctly guessed was a screening of a new transfer of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Alas, the screenings were already running around 20 minutes late and we knew that if we stayed past the advertised time we would both have trouble catching our last trains home from Liverpool Street station so, at this point, we decided to call it a day. Alas, this was when I’d found that Eileen Daly had just flown the coop and all the stalls were beginning to get packed away already.

So, apart from the overcrowding at DarkFest 7 (but hey, at least everybody was friendly) and the late running schedule, I had a blast at this year’s event and something tells me that my friend (who preferred it even to FrightFest) and I will be back again around this time next year for DarkFest 8, which I assume will happen. I’ll report back on that one as the opportunity arises.