Monolith

The
Brick
Inside

Monolith
Directed by Matt Vesely
Australia 2022
Black Cat White Rabbit Productions
Screened 26 August 2023 at FrightFest, London

Wow. Okay... I think I’ve now seen what will easily, by a long chalk, be my favourite film of this year’s FrightFest. Monolith has a few actors in it but, it’s essentially a one hander. Which seems a contradiction but, to explain, it stars Lily Sullivan who gets an on screen character name billing of ‘The Interviewer’. She is the only actor in this movie who you will properly see... and the whole film deals with her and is shot at one location only (her parents beautiful house, while they are on vacation). All the other characters in the film are portrayed either by the sound of their voices only (the majority of them and sometimes coupled with a photo reference of them) or, in one instance, a ‘home video’ of a person’s birthday party. And that’s it.

So Lily Sullivan has to do all the heavy lifting but, hey, she does it easily and she’s helped out by some great direction and editing, a superb script (by Lucy Campbell) and one of those intriguing concepts, the exploration of which just gets more gripping as the movie goes on.

Sullivan plays a disgraced journalist who didn’t procure the necessary evidence before making claims about a villain... and has been discredited, even though the person she was talking about was obviously guilty of all her accusations. So, she lands a new job doing a podcast for a place in the vein of all those uncanny and supernatural shows which deal with ghosts, UFOs and various other unexplained phenomena. She has all of her podcasting equipment set up at her parents’ temporarily vacated house but... she just can’t get a good angle for a story and her new editor is screaming for her to hit her first deadline.

Then she gets an anonymous tip to call someone and stumbles on a story which she podcasts about as she goes, episode by episode, capturing the imagination of the listening public and doing huge numbers as she continues her investigation. An investigation of strange black bricks which suddenly turn up in peoples homes (how remains a mystery until much later on because, none of the hordes of listeners who call in want to reveal how they got their black brick). The bricks are causing visions and unusual sensations and also might be a similar phenomenon to something which the UK government were looking into at some point as a possible sound or verbally transmitted infectious disease. And things, as you would expect, start to land closer to home as she continues her investigation.

Okay, so I don’t have anything bad to say about this movie, unusually. It’s near perfect. But there are some nice things I should highlight.

One is that the director, Matt Vesely, seems almost obsessed with verticals. One of the rooms the main character inhabits, the one you see the most of from different angles, has a backdrop of floor to ceiling windows split into about six vertical sections looking out at the surrounding land and, as you might expect, Vesely uses this to frame his lead actress within the space and compartmentalise her within the shots. It’s done really well.

Another thing he does is play around with sound a lot. Lily Sullivan’s character is a wizard with sound as she controls, edits and manipulates the voices of the people she interviews, so the audio design is giving a lot of attention here. Some of the shots like the long opening, are just black which slowly (very slowly) fades up slightly to reveal the focus of the shot... such as the texture of a microphone in the opening sequence. And the director employs this kind of tactic a few times as well as doing things like holding shots of the on screen representation of two voices, picking up the graphic of the sound waves as they are recorded... which is a nice touch.

Now, there are no real surprises if you think things out as you go. For a while you will find yourself looking at every part of the screen to figure out how the director will reveal the inevitable arrival of a brick into the central protagonist’s home environment. However, there are a lot of clues as to the nature of the brick and so, in some ways, you may see it coming well in advance. For example, if you listen carefully to the first interview subject which starts the film off and appears to be nothing to do with the subject ‘the interviewer’ will find herself researching (but you may be best served remembering it), then you’ll probably find yourself with a little clue about where the film is ultimately heading, by way of homaging a certain 1950s science fiction film which has been ‘officially’ remade at least three times (to my knowledge).

And you’ll probably figure out fairly early on from where the brick will arrive. You’ll figure out the delivery method (with more clues in the main character study) and will probably be wondering if it will be Route A... the more mainstream, cinematically acceptable safer route which would, in real life, be the most dangerous method of delivery for the character... or Route B which would be a little less watchable, perhaps but, a lot less dangerous for a character in a similar situation. And I won’t spoil it for you by giving any clues but, I reckon most people will be primed to know how the brick will be arriving into the main protagonist’s life.

But, unlike most films, the lack of surprise there is not a weakness. It’s absolutely perfect and in turn leads to a finale which is even more dramatic and gets to, admittedly, another cinematic cliché (fans of M. R. James or 1990s J-Horror will know what I’m talking about here) but it works really well and it’s a good ending.

And I’m not sure there’s much else I want to say about Monolith. It’s an absolute gem of a movie which keeps the level of intrigue building throughout and which has a great conclusion. I can’t wait for a Blu Ray release of this one so I can show my dad. A really wonderful piece of paranoiac, cinematic art and everyone associated with this one should be heartily congratulated. Catch this one as soon as you get an opportunity to, is my advice. 

How To Kill Monsters

Monster Mash

How To Kill Monsters
Directed by Stewart Sparke
UK 2023 Dark Rift Films
Screened 25 August at FrightFest, London

Well now. I was really hoping for a nice, light hearted gorefest of a ‘pick me up’ for my second helping of FrightFest this year and, on first appearances from the trailer and synopsis, it looked like this might be what I would be getting with How To Kill Monsters. The director said some good things about it being just a fun, gory movie with no political messages before the movie started and... probably said some equally good stuff a the end of the movie (alas, I didn’t stay for the Q&A... the movie had made me quite melancholic with the state of modern horror and I just wanted to get home by that point).

So the film is billed as a comedy horror but, I didn’t find it either funny or frightening, truth be told... I’ll get to that later.

The film has the ‘to be admired’ audacity of taking a very familiar genre cliché and running with it to make it the whole of the movie, rather than just a twenty minute sequence of a story. The cliché in question being when the surviving protagonist of a science fiction or horror movie (or, you know, that lovely genre mix of the two) turns up and gets arrested by the police because they think he or she (in the case of this movie it’s a she) has killed a load of people and won’t listen to his/her crazy story about an alien/monster/cyborg/robot or ‘insert other appropriate killing machine’ responsible for the slaughter of those around him/her. Then, while they are still trying to process the character through and build a case against him/her... the monster/robot/mad axe murderer (what have you), turns up to continue the slaughtering spree with the constabulary and their assorted prisoners... as the local law enforcement and the prisoners, together with the former main suspect (who now becomes the one with all the knowledge due to previous experience), all team up together to fight said slaughterer, with results that usually end with the death of almost everyone except the original protagonist.

So there you go... that’s the set up for this one in a nutshell and it pushes that genre cliché front and centre and explores it as a feature length story. It has some nice acting turns from the likes of Lyndsey Craine, Arron Dennis, Fenfen Huang, Daniel Thrace and Juné Tiamatakorn, is relatively intense and suitably bloody, making good use of practical effects (yay, no crappy looking CGI blood here, for sure) and, despite the fact that I had a generally lukewarm reception to it, it keeps the momentum going at a fair lick for the majority of the story.

That being said... I didn’t find How To Kill Monsters scary (not sure it was supposed to be, to be fair... it’s one of those gory, body count kinds of movies) and, well, maybe I have lost all my sense of humour lately but I just didn’t find myself smiling even once throughout the film’s running time. And, yeah, I get it... humour is very subjective and just because I didn’t find it funny it doesn’t mean other people won’t. Case in point, the four girls sitting on my right for the screening were just eating it up and loving every minute, laughing a lot and generally having a good time with it. I’m pretty sure though, by the looks of things, that at least two of them (or more) were actually part of the cast too so, yeah, maybe that’s to be expected.

All in all, sorry for the extremely short review and I really didn’t want to be having to say this but, so far this year I’ve seen two out of two duds at FrightFest. Still, I have a few more to see yet over the next couple of days* so I’m keeping optimistic as to what lays ahead. This one, however, wasn’t for me.

*Spoiler alert... the next movie I saw at FrightFest was absolutely sensational.

Arrow FrightFest Halloween Edition 2019

BooManji!

Arrow FrightFest
Halloween Edition 2019
Horror Marathon
Saturday 2nd/Sunday 3rd November 2019
Mini reviews for the movies Candy Corn,
The Haunted Swordsman, We Summon The Darkness,
Uncanny Annie, Swallow, Trick, Scare Package

After having to come to terms with maybe not being able to go to this year’s Halloween FrightFest Marathon, due to the illness of someone very close to me, I was delighted to find I was able to attend after all. I enjoyed it so much last year (read my review here) and, if anything, this year rammed it home to me that even though the movies might not always be all that great (I didn’t like too many of them except one stand out one which I’ve named this article after), it’s worth being there to pick up that vibration of a community spirit to the FrightFest events and, even though I’m mostly too shy to talk to people, it’s just an atmosphere of togetherness that I like to sit in my seat and bask in.

As to the movies themselves... well looking at a load of new horror films in one sitting is always going to be hit and miss (and personally, I think they only showed three horror films this year with one of those being very much a comedy-horror... the other four consisted of a fantasy puppet movie, two slashers and a film about the perils of marrying rich). This year’s selection was, perhaps, less interesting than last year’s but none of the films were in any way made in an amateurish way (a complaint that maybe could be levelled at one or two of the previous Halloween FrightFest screenings), so it was a solidly programmed affair, at the very least...




Candy Corn
USA 2019
Written and directed by Josh Hasty.

First up was Candy Corn. This film was obviously cheaply made but didn’t, as I said above, look unprofessional. This is an old school ‘revenge from beyond the grave’ story where the local town idiot, who gets picked on every year on Halloween by the former bullies of his old school, is accidentally beaten to death by them. However, he has recently got a job helping out a travelling sideshow carnival (yeah... you just know there’s going to be a ‘one of us!’ reference in this to Todd Browning’s original Freaks... not the only film in this year’s selection which does this) and when he is found by the head of the show, Dr. Death (played brilliantly by Pancho Moler), he is revived as a vengeance filled zombie creature to take out the people who were involved in his death.

While the film has a nice 1950s EC comics feel to it, it’s never really that great and the deaths are not nearly as imaginative as perhaps they ought to be for a film which relies on a traditional ‘body count’ mentality injected into the proceedings. It did, however, have a pretty great and memorable score, co-composed by Michael Broker and director Josh Hasty. People were even still whistling it in the queues for the toilets in the small break between films.



The Haunted Swordsman
USA 2019
Directed by Kevin McTurk

Next up was special effects guy extraordinaire, Kevin McTurk’s new short film (about 16 mins long), The Haunted Swordsmen. Like his previous two shorts, he and his crew have worked long hours on this puppet movie, building the characters and sets with exquisite detail and over many years. This tells the short story of a ronin who is trying to hunt down the demon who slew his shogun. For a puppet show, so to speak, it felt more epic and looked more breathtaking than the majority of the other films on the programme. It’s interesting because the main character’s face has no movement built into it (indeed, the mouth on that one character is done with CGI on the rare occasions he speaks because he was originally written without any lines) but due to the lighting and context of the shots of his face, you kind of project the expressions onto him yourself as you are watching. Ultimately though, the film was a bit of a teaser because it’s the part of a story where the defeated hero is given a new challenge or quest to find a magical weapon in order to defeat his enemies... so it does kinda feel like there’s a lot more of the story to tell. Still, it’s a really nice piece and I was really happy to be able to see this one on a big screen.



We Summon The Darkness
USA 2019
Directed by Marc Meyers

Next up was We Summon The Darkness, a movie which, like the great giallo All The Colours Of The Dark, is a straight thriller masquerading under the guise of a horror movie. Alas, it’s revealed as the movie plays out, that the supernatural trappings are all just hot air and, really, this amounts to not much more than a serial killer movie. After a strong start with a group of three women who really have some interesting chemistry, it kinda falls apart. Again, this is partially because there is a so called ‘twist’ half way through the movie but, honestly, anyone who’s been paying attention to the shenanigans of the girls in the first five minutes will know exactly what that twist is right from the word go. So it does get kinda irritating watching through this and waiting for the other characters to catch on. I was impressed with some of the performances but not the clichéd storytelling so this one was another ‘miss’ for me.



Uncanny Annie
USA 2019
Directed by Paul Davis

Ironically, it was the next movie, Uncanny Annie, which easily won the Halloween Edition FrightFest ‘best movie’ best screening for me this year. Ironic because, out of all of them, this one is actually a TV movie, made for a horror anthology series in the US called Into The Dark. So yeah, I was really glad this was here because there’s probably no other way I would have gotten to see it. The premise, too, is really simple but quite effective as a narrative hook. It’s simply a horror movie remake of the original Jumanji. A group of students play a board game one Halloween in memory of their dead friend who died the year before but, pretty soon, the evil spirit haunting the game has trapped their reality in the box and they are trying to play through the game while it starts killing off the players one by one. It looks fantastic, has a kind of gothic air about it (especially with the graphics on the board game... I’d love to own this set) and is, for me, the only movie in this years Halloween FrightFest which even approached being a little scary or having any tension about it. I also loved the way that, by the end of the movie, the game has become a kind of punishment for some of the players who are hiding some guilty, if kinda obvious, secrets. Plus it had a great one liner earlier on which was the funniest moment of this year’s programme... not to mention a ‘blood tearing out of the eyes’ moment which was obviously lifted from the Christopher Lee death scene from one of the Hammer Dracula movies (Tarantino put the same homage in Kill Bill Volume 1).  Had a really good time with this one.



Swallow
USA/France 2019
Directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Next up was Swallow, the ‘best looking’ movie of this Halloween’s edition of Frightfest. Although, despite one of the programmer’s ‘allergic’ reaction/tirade to people wondering why it was showing here, I’d have to say I also would question its place here. It’s not a horror movie and as to the line of defence that says Frightfest represents The Dark Heart Of Cinema...? Well I didn’t think it was all that dark either, to tell the truth. It was kinda nice and gentle to watch though and mainly focused on the brilliant lead actress Haley Bennett, playing housewife Hunter, as the director filmed her and some other outstanding actors in beautifully uncluttered shots, more often than not using upright vertical slices along the frame to position various players and objects in.

Hunter has married a wealthy man and it shows the way she reacts to the everyday loneliness of being a housewife with not much to do, alone in a huge house with no company. It kinda follows in the footsteps, to a certain extent, of Marina de Van’s In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) but, instead of developing an obsession with cutting and eating portions of her own body, Hunter develops an obsession with swallowing objects which... well.. aren’t mean to be swallowed. It’s kinda cool but low key and, I think, a little over hyped in terms of the effect it might have on people... it’s really not a disturbing film. It is a feminist movie, to an extent and I did like the tangents it went off on towards the end of the film but, ultimately, I’ve seen this kinda thing done before. That’s not to diminish this one though.... but I did and still do question why it was bundled into the FrightFest package (as I did with the film The Unthinkable, which was easily one of the best movies of the year last year but, again, don’t know why it was playing at FrightFest).

Ultimately though, Swallow is a stand out film and in terms of the impeccable cinematography, I did think as I was watching it that, the shot design coupled with the look of the lead actress made me feel like it was watching an early Cindy Sherman photograph coming to life. Also, the musical score was quite interesting and reminded me a lot of composer Bernard Herrmann. Not in the way that it was orchestrated as such but, more in the way that it seems to be accompanying the psychological environment of the movie and using short, repeat, motifs to slowly transform and surround the lead actress. This one is also definitely worth at least one watch if you happen to come across it.



Trick
USA 2019
Directed by Patrick Lussier

Trick was another of those ‘serial killers with supernatural trappings’ kinds of movies but, by the time you got to the end and the final twist (which, again, if you half squint at certain points in the movie, you can kinda see coming a mile off), it revealed itself to be just another slasher movie and, frankly, the Italians are much better at those kinds of things. It was a speedy ride and the performances were good  (heck, it even had genre actor Tom Atkins in it) but, ultimately, it didn’t have a whole lot of substance to it and the cinematography and the way it was edited were not enough to hold the picture up by themselves on this one. The one good thing it did have was that a couple of the deaths which, again, this genre thrives on, were at least a little more imaginative than those on show in some of the other films here.



Scare Package
USA 2019
Directed by Mali Elfman, Courtney Andujar,
Hillary Andujar, Anthony Cousins,
Emily Hagins, Aaron B. Koontz, Chris McInroy,
Noah Segan and Baron Vaughn

Last up for the day was Scare Package, a comedy horror anthology which has seven segments and which boasts, on the poster, seven different directors. As to that last thing... count the names above and you do the maths.

This film, which is held together by a linking story set in a video store, has a kind of mission statement to it to basically ‘send up’ one or more famous horror tropes in each segment. Like FrightFest itself, it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair with the stories told within but the film started off really strongly with the first three segments being very funny (and also very gory, in places). I was completely on the film’s side before I even got out of the first segment so, frankly, found myself quite puzzled when the film rapidly went down hill after about a third of the way through. Some of the later scripts are just not funny and the postmodernistic references start to get on the nerves after a while. By about halfway through the film I was just waiting for it to finish and it was a really dull, slow crawl to the finish line Which is a bit of a shame but I think some of the writing was frankly not good in certain sequences. 

And that was the end of my Halloween FrightFest marathon, which started at 11am and finished around 12.30am the next morning. As expected, some films stood out while others quietly shuffled into the background but, I’ll say it again, the sense of community spirit that you get with horror folk attending these things it pretty cool and the ticket prices for the day passes are still good value for money. If I had one complaint about the format it’s that the intervals between the films are way too short. People need to go to the loo and eat or grab a drink. I think the festival could definitely do with starting an hour or more earlier and just having slightly longer gaps... especially when, due to Q&A sessions with people behind the films, things start to run a little late towards the end of the day and those gaps get even shorter. Other than that though, I had a great time, am looking forward to next year’s event and, as an added bonus, got to see one of the directors do a live pumpkin carving demonstration where he did a full Halloween pumpkin in exactly one minute (it was great hearing the audience counting him down too). As always, FrightFest is definitely worth a visit and if you’ve not been to one you might want to consider going next year.

Madness In The Method

Methadone Actor

Madness In The Method
2019 USA Directed by Jason Mewes
screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay, so my second feature at this year’s Arrow Fright Fest (now in its 20th year) was a much more positive experience for me than Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary (which I reviewed here).

Madness In The Method is the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes, who most people would best know as Jay to director Kevin Smith’s Silent Bob. This one was a blast and though I was initially skeptical of this guys ability to helm something like this, given his on and off screen personae and how easy it is to be fooled into thinking the character created by Kevin Smith based on Mewes,,, and Mewes himself... are one and the same, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how good this was. Of course, since I am already an admirer of the duo in all their big screen appearances (I even forced myself to watch Scream 3 just to catch their cameo), I am part, of a ready made target audience and, although this movie wasn’t written by Jason himself (I suspect he had a fair amount of input in that process, credited or not), it’s actually a kind of mockumentary fantasy written about him.

Right from the outset, fact is blended with fiction as Mewes fills us in on just who he is and charts both his career path with Kevin Smith (done with some nice animated Jay and Silent Bob inserts) and his various trouble with substance abuse in one form or another. We learn about his former trade as a roofer and how tough it was for him growing up etc. And... I suspect it’s one of those films which Hollywood loves where fact and fiction are blended. The film is full of cameos, some as major roles such as Vinnie Jones and others falling somewhere in between that and what is, in this movie, Stan Lee’s final cameo performance. So, for example, both Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the two title character actors from TV’s Lois And Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman, have recurring roles in this.

It’s a bit like Fellini’s great masterpiece Eight And A Half, only filtered through a young Hollywood vibe.... in terms of the central character, Mewes playing a fictional version of himself who very consciously wants to crawl out from his stoner typecasting in which he finds himself trapped and reading a not so mythical book about Method Acting before ‘really’ getting into the ‘killer’ mindset of his latest role. I should probably also mention Paul Mazursky’s 1970 movie Alex In Wonderland as a kindred spirit to this film also... but I haven’t seen it myself (or I have and it's been so long I've forgotten it) so I’ll just drop that here in passing.

Okay, so this is a film which never gets dull and explores Mewes’ ‘descent into the method’ as he turns from accidental murderer to, by the end of the film, something else entirely. This is not a horror movie rather than a comedy thriller with the emphasis firmly on the comedic (so I don’t know why it’s playing at FrightFest but I’m certainly not complaining) but it is quite impressive and I especially liked the way the film is edited. Mewes calls some nice cuts here and, although it annoyed me at first, there’s good use made of a little, rotating, ball of Mewes’ head bouncing off the sides of his computer on a screensaver which shouts his catchphrase ‘Snootchy Bootchies’ every time it hits a side of the screen, used to punctuate the structure of the film and to show time and location shifts in the narrative... which is, by its nature, quite freestyle.

I also loved the idea that Brian O’ Halloran, who played Dante Hicks in three of the Jay And Silent Bob movies to date, plays himself as a director who is about to direct a large budget, major Hollywood production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was genuinely nice to see this guy again although he is in a somewhat darker story here. And like I said, this film is full of cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Judd Nelson and even Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith. There’s also an interesting performance by a modern character actor (future Elisha Cook Jr in the making?) called Mickey Gooch Jr, who plays a handle-barred moustached detective obsessed by his suspicion that it is, indeed, Mewes who is behind the killings in the movie. He’s pretty good in the movie but he was even better in the Q and A before the movie, regaling the audience with his tales of the production, which is obviously set in LA but had its shooting locations split between LA and Derbyshire, here in the UK. A very entertaining fellow, despite his choice of head gear.

Oddly, Kevin Smith himself comes off as a little of a darker version of what I perceive to be his true life persona here. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of a few deliberate deviations from real life, especially when Mewes and Moobs (Smith) do the lion face, lemon face routine from Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Also, it’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is definitely portraying a heavily fictionalised scenario bearing in mind the final fate of Vinnie Jones in the movie, which is actually pretty funny, I thought.

So there you have it. Turns out Mr. Mewes can actually direct pretty well, as well as act and, cannily, put together a movie which, in spite of its free form narrative style, holds together very well as a coherent, linear story. Whether it will actually get any kind of physical home media release over here in the UK is anybody’s guess but, if it does, I’ll certainly be shelling out to have another look at Madness In The Method, for sure. So now looking forward to the next film in my 2019 FrightFest experience, The Banana Splits Movie. Review to follow in a couple of days.

Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary/Troll Bridge

Mary In Haste

Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary
(aka Exterminadores do Além Contra a Loira do Banheiro)
2018 Brazil Directed by Fabrício Bittar

Plus

Troll Bridge
2019 Australia Directed by Daniel Knight
Both screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay so, the first feature film I picked out to see at this year’s FrightFest (sponsored by Arrow Video again this time around and celebrating it’s 20th Year) was... well it was a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned. It had potential and, don’t get me wrong, this so called horror comedy seemed to go down a treat with the FrightFest audience that I saw it with... who seemed to be laughing in all the right places... but in all honesty, I just totally failed to engage with it. However, there was a silver lining in terms of the short film that the programmers had paired it with and which was shown before this one... but I’ll review Troll Bridge towards the bottom of this post.

Okay, so Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary is a terrible mess of a movie and I was really expecting a lot more from it. A lot happens in terms of ‘over the top’ set pieces including a pickled, still-born foetus attack, a basketball bludgeoning and an altercation between a security guard and the demonically possessed excrement he’s just excised from his body. It’s a wild ride in many ways and, on paper this looks like just the kind of film I could normally get behind and which would suit, what a very special person in my life would call, my ‘gnarly brain windings’.

Alas this film, which follows the antics of four ‘Ghostbusters inspired' charlatans (for the most part) who are trying to hit it big with their reality style internet show and who go to investigate a school where the famous ‘Bloody Mary’ legend has taken grip... played by Dani Calabresa, Léo Lins, Danilo Gentili and Murilo Couto... was, for me, just very dull. It shouldn’t have been because it was full of comedy horror action and lashings of practical, gory effects but, ultimately, this failed to connect with me in the way I thought it would.

Now I don’t mind the tonal clash of comedy and horror... that’s a combination which has proved to work really well throughout the history of cinema and mixing these genres can often do pretty well for people. I think here, though, my main problem with the movie was that there was only one character who I could empathise with on any level and, frankly, that person gets killed early on in the film when the character’s head explodes, blood splashing over the faces of this protagonist’s colleagues. The people who have to carry the rest of the film are basically non-likeable idiots who I would steer clear of as best I could in any real life situation and who, frankly, I would be happy to watch die in an unpleasant manner early on in the movie. Ironically, it’s the characters who are the least relateable who manage to survive the film to the end.

The acting was way too over the top to be credible. Yes, I know it was probably supposed to be but these people really didn’t do themselves any favours and their exaggerated mannerisms and flailing limbs as they run and scream from each new ‘horror’ really didn’t help matters. I started off trying to have a good time with this movie but, by about half an hour in, I really wasn’t ‘on its side’ anymore.

If I was to find anything good or memorable about the film it was the scene where a still born foetus is possessed and breaks out of its bottle in the science classroom to attack one of the main protagonists and, also, the fact that the girl playing this schoolgirl variant of Bloody Mary looked really sinister when she was in the full make-up. This wasn’t enough to save the film for me though which was, bizarrely, distributed by Warner Brothers in Brazil. Despite mild flirtations of a metatextual nature with two characters who are there mostly for ballast plus tonnes of references to much better movies and TV shows, I wouldn’t recommend this film or ever need to watch it again myself.

There was that silver lining though..

Playing before this film was the Australian short Troll Bridge by director Daniel Knight and based on one of Terry Pratchett’s short Discworld stories. Now I’m not a fan of Terry Pratchett. I tried to read his first Discworld novel when it came out but for some reason couldn’t get into it. This short film is lovely, though and tells the story of an ageing Cohen The Barbarian, played by Don Bridges and his talking horse, voiced by Glenn Van Oosterom. I’d never heard of these characters before but loved the way the dialogue went, as the elderly barbarian goes to wake a troll under a bridge and ends up reminiscing with said monster about the ‘old days.’

The CGI, which I think the director who was interviewed for the audience just before the screening said took something like eight years in post-production, is actually quite charming with the troll being almost Disneyesque in his realisation. Added to this, the short has some beautiful dialogue and even more breath taking cinematography... although the amount of CGI work here makes it hard to tell whether cinematography is the right word to use. But the film does look gorgeous, is what I’m trying to say.

Also, the seemingly suicidal path of Cohen’s desire to finally take on a troll may seem pretty much like a death wish but, once all the whimsy and nostalgia has played out and he and the troll have parted company, you realise that Cohen’s encounter with said creature went more than ‘according to plan’ and that, despite paying 25 gold coins in toll to said troll, he actually comes away with something far more precious to him for use in his ‘barbarian hero’ career.

What can I say? This was a charming piece and really the only thing that made sitting through the main feature worth the price of the ticket on this one. I’d urge people to try and seek out Troll Bridge whenever or wherever it is screened as much as I would tell them not to bother with Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary. Somewhat of a mismatch of a double bill, I thought but at least I got to see something of note on my first FrightFest screening of 2019. And, as it happens, the second feature length movie I saw there that day, the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob fame, certainly topped my expectations. More on that in my next review so, watch out for it either tomorrow or the day after.

FrightFest Halloween Edition 2018

Abra Cadaver

FrightFest Halloween Edition 2018
Horror Marathon Saturday 3rd
(and technically 4th) November 2018
Mini reviews for the movies Reborn, Deep Clean, Parallel, Mara, Peripheral, The Unthinkable,
The Predicament and Abrakadabra

It’s been a while since I’ve done an ‘all nighter’ (or in this case, an ‘all dayer’) as in sitting in a cinema for more or less back to back movies for a substantial period of time. I’ve only done this twice before, in fact. Once at The Empire Leicester Square (which is now no longer called The Empire but everyone knows it as such) back in 1989 with the debut of Star Trek V - The Final Frontier, preceded by the four previous movies with an absolutely brilliant audience and a laser show before each film. That one must have run for about 12-13 hours. Then again, in 2005, I did a slightly shorter but certainly wonderful all nighter put on by Celestial Pictures at the Curzon Soho which was four Shaw Brothers movies back to back - The Monkey Goes West, The Mighty Peking Man, Oily Maniac and The Super Infra Man... which must have gone on for 8 - 9 hours.

This year, I enjoyed the sense of communal spirit on the five FrightFest films I saw at the August Bank Holiday weekend event so much that I returned to The Empire Leicester Square (or Cineworld as it insists it is at the moment) for a FrightFest marathon which ran for around 14 hours - the most I’ve ever done back to back, to date. This was also partially inspired by the fact that I really wanted to see three of the movies they were screening and tickets were £15 each which... when the day pass was only £45 for this venue and with a couple of free DVDs thrown in to boot... seemed like the best way of doing this. I was a little bit worried I might get too tired but, no, my love of film kept me wide awake for most of it (although the first two films had me slightly sleepy, for some reason).

Now, I thought that since I saw so many films yesterday, it would be too much for me to remember everything about each film and I usually try to write a review while one is still fresh in my mind before seeing the next film. It’s hard to do that with 8 back to back movies so, hopefully my regular readers won’t think I’m cheating at this too much if I do one of those combined capsule review collections encompassing the day because... well, I just think this will be both a better use of my time and will also help capture the flavour of the event in a more concise format, so to speak.

Reborn
USA Directed by Julian Richards
Festival print.
So first up was Reborn, a fairly ridiculous tale about a somewhat washed up Hollywood B-movie actress called Lena O'Neill, played by somewhat less than washed up Hollywood genre actress Barbara Crampton. This tells the story of a past that comes back to haunt her at just the wrong time, when her agent played by legendary actress Rae Dawn Chong (curiously disassociated with the movie and completely uncredited if you try and find her included in the listings on the IMDB at the moment) is trying to get her to read for an audition with great director Peter Bogdanovich (who makes a lovely cameo appearance at the end of the movie).

The past that comes back to haunt her is her left for dead stillborn baby Tess, played by Kayleigh Gilbert, who is somehow brought back to life by some dodgy and unexplained electricity, is raised by the pervert morgue assistant who whisks her away with him and who, by the time of her 16th birthday, can somehow manipulate electrical current, just like Electro in the Spider-Man comics I used to read in the early 1970s... and use her powers to kill people who get in the way of her reunion with her mother.

The film is... nicely performed but doesn’t hold well together as a story, it has to be said. There’s a lot of leaps of faith and when a couple of seemingly unrelated deaths cause Detective Marc Fox, played by Michael Paré, to somehow make the unbelievably correct conclusion that someone is using ‘powers of electrokinesis’ then that just about kills what little credibility the picture had. Sure, I understand it’s trying to parody, somewhat, the kinds of films Barbara Crampton used to headline in the 1980s (some posters of which are, bizarrely, on display in her teaching workshop for aspiring actors) but it either didn’t take it far enough or maybe didn’t reign it in enough. The audience did give a big, collective chuckle when the electrokinesis stuff came up out of the blue, that’s for sure.

Also, there were a fair few mistakes on display in the film. Such as a shot towards the end when the detective pulls his car into the front drive of Lena’s house next to her parked car, which has its hazard lights on, for some reason. However, when we get the close up of the shot, the lights on her car are definitely off. Also, when we are told one of the characters is 16 and was ‘stillborn’ in the year 2000 (dating this film as being set in 2016), why are we then confronted by a tombstone which dates her as living from November 2002 - November 2018? This makes no sense. This wasn’t my favourite movie of this year’s FrightFest, that’s for sure. 

Deep Clean
UK Short Directed by Matt Harlock
Festival print
Next up was a short movie called Deep Clean. This was an interesting concept about what really goes on in those builder's tents when roadworks are being done... aka, plugging up interdimensional portals where hostile, alien, plastic baby mannequins are trying to take over your body. It was a nice idea and I can see why the creators are trying to develop it into some kind of TV or web series but I felt the execution on the all important, alien horror scenes was a little drab, to be honest.

Parallel
Canada Directed by Isaac Ezban
Festival Print
Parallel was next and I was really looking forward to it as it’s by Isaac Ezban, the director of The Incident (which I absolutely loved and reviewed here) and The Similars (which I still haven’t gotten around to watching yet but, don’t worry, due to the kind actions of a film friend, it’s ‘in the pile’). This is his first English language film and it wasn’t actually written by him this time. This kinda shows, actually, because it’s not nearly as strong as The Incident, although the concept is sound and it has some great performances. It’s the old cliché portal to parallel universes plot again but, this time, the group of people who completely luck into this ‘never once explained’ device try and use it for monetary gain by comparing what works well in one slightly different version of their reality and using it to progress themselves in their own reality.

There are some lovely moments and a nice lot of ‘moral dilemma’ issues are raised but ultimately it felt like a throwback to 1980s Americana. It starts off strong with a set up showing just what lengths a person will go to in order to replace someone in one of the parallel dimensions and, to an extent, this informs the ending which shows that this film could easily be franchised or turned into a successful TV show. However, it never really lives up to its pre-credits sequence and I just felt the director could have done something a little more original with this. It’s not really a horror movie but there is a nice sequence in the movie when we see the effect of what happens when you cross over when the mirror portal changes state into a physical glass object when you’re halfway through the jump. So, yeah, a nice gory moment where half a person’s face and body slide down the front of the mirror and the internal organs all pile up onto it. Parallel is an okay film but, for me, not quite as standout as the next movie in the day. 

Mara
UK Directed by Clive Tonge
Festival print
Mara is a British film which seems to be set in the US as a criminal psychologist, Kate (played by Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), gets involved in a series of murders involving both herself and others who have been suffering from the very common condition of sleep paralysis... only this version has many of them being systematically targeted, haunted and eventually killed by an ages old sleep demon called Mara. This is based on a real folklore myth from various cultures and I personally came across the intrusion/confusion of incidents of sleep paralysis when I was looking at alien abduction stories a couple of decades ago. The film is absolutely brilliant (if a little obvious at times) and easily stands up against a lot of the big budget US horrors we are getting these days from the likes of Blumhouse Pictures.

The writer/director, (who was very nervous at the festival but needn’t have been because his movie was one of the two standout films of the day), cannily builds in a set of horror rules for the benefit of both the characters and the audience, as he introduces us to the ‘four stages’ of Mara’s modus operandi which gives us a kind of countdown for each character and the order in which we know they will be killed off, overlapping different timelines for different people but, because of these rules, making it so it’s very easy to keep track of things. The film also utilises sound design in a very unsettling and knowing manner, such as the ticking of the swinging arm of the Chinese cat Kurylenko’s character has in her apartment and using this and other sound effects (including a nice musical score which I’m hoping may get some kind of CD release) to build tension by stopping or starting the sound in various scenes. Nice stuff and I hope this movie gets the theatrical release it deserves.

Peripheral
UK Directed by Paul Hyett
Festival print
Next up was Peripheral, directed by Paul Hyett who helmed Howl (which I reviewed here). This stars Hannah Arterton (little sister to Gemma) as Bobbi Johnson, an inflammatory and successful writer who is in hiding in her flat and trying to write her second novel. This is all set in said flat and involves her becoming somehow symbiotically bonded with a new piece of hardware/software writing kit which is sent by her horrible agent and which is constantly getting upgraded while she has to deal with all the distractions this brings... along with dealing with her drug dealer ex-boyfriend and a psycho follower who knows where she lives and who sends video tapes of herself slowly self mutilating until Bobbi agrees to phone her. The film get s darker as it goes on and the performances, especially Arterton’s, are all excellent. It’s basically another metaphor for the creative process (something which seems to be doing the rounds again at the moment in modern cinema) but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Parallel or Mara and some of the ideas such as the main protagonist's fingers, hands and toes slowly turning blacker seemed a bit muddled (even when the director tried to explain that one in the Q & A). I’m glad I saw it though.

The Unthinkable
(aka Den blomstertid nu kommer)
Sweden Directed by Victor Danell (as Crazy Pictures)
Festival print
And then came the absolutely best film of the day. The Unthinkable, aka Den blomstertid nu kommer, which google tells me translates as The Flower Time Now Comes, is a story about a terrorist or possibly opposing country’s military, invasion of Sweden. It takes the form of a mystery but it felt like what would happen if someone had asked the late, great Polish director Kieslowski to make a military/civilian action flick. The thing is, it’s all done through a lens which is all about the main protagonist Alex, played by Christoffer Nordenrot, his unrequited love for childhood sweetheart Anna (played by Lisa Henni), his subsequent career as a much loved progressive pop music artist and his turbulent and destructive relationship with his violently tempered father Bjorn, played by Jesper Barkselius, who managed to make both his wife and then his son desert him.

It’s a beautiful and moving tale and takes a full half to three quarters of an hour just setting up the back story of the characters. As a consequence, when the mystery of the invasion swings into place a decade or so later, you have a real emotional stake in the each and every one of the characters (even some of the minor ones) and you really feel every loss and moment of self sacrifice and redemption. This is an epic movie in every sense, something any director should be proud to have on their CV and it’s so moving that it brought tears to my eyes by the end of the movie. Also, the few jump scares of the day were provided in this film as various unexpected bullet hits and other action moments are handled in such a way that the director manages to never telegraph each new act of antagonism. That being said, I have no idea why this movie was playing at FrightFest but I’m really glad it did because it’s definitely one of this year’s best movies as far as i’m concerned. I’m hoping this will get a general release in this country next year at some point because, frankly, people need to experience the artistry of this film.

The Predicament
New Zealand
Short Film Directed by Steven Baker
Festival print
Then we had a 15 minute short film called The Predicament which was about 14 minutes too long. This has a nice central premise of three people... a woman, her partner and their irritating third wheel of a friend... who get trapped in a car with no keys and have to stay in it for many hours as zombies are trying to get at them. Even when it turns out one of the characters has an ulterior motive and kinda caused The Predicament to happen, it just feels too long for the content and I have to say that it was pleasant but I lost interest fairly quickly, I’m afraid.

Abrakadabra
Argentina/New Zealand
Directed by Luciano and Nicolás Onetti
Festival print
Last up was a brand new giallo which looks and feels like it’s been shot in the 1970s. Indeed I appreciated the authenticity of the direction and performance style a great deal. It’s like the writers and directors were not trying to imitate the style of the films made by the great giallo masters such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Sergio Martino but, instead, going for the look, feels and sound of one of the lesser interesting gialli of the early 1970s time period. And I appreciated a lot of the brilliant, old school flourishes, the blown out colour on old 70s looking stock and the lightning in a bottle moments of purely authentic giallo tomfoolery. It even had a very Cipriani sounding score and at one point, although this seemed to be completely unmentioned on the end credits from what I could see, a cue used as source for a scene which was lifted straight from Piero Umiliani’s score for one of my all time favourite gialli, Mario Bava’s Five Dolls For An August Moon (which I reviewed here).

For all that, though, I had a hard time with this film and felt that it suffered from the same problem that Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof half of Grindhouse suffered from, in that it was too close to the kind of film it was trying to be (rather than the post-modernistic stew which I might find more entertaining at this point) and, in this case, it just felt like I was watching a very dull, sluggish and sleep inducing example of the genre with, admittedly, the odd dash or brilliance in terms of the mise en scène. This, along with Reborn, was one of only two films where I was kinda hoping it would end soon and was clock watching down on it. However, I did enjoy parts of it and overall it contributed to what was a pretty decent and certainly varied day of cinema watching.

All in all, then, FrightFest was worth the struggle of getting home from central London in the small hours of a Saturday (although the city was completely packed with people still as I was leaving the cinema) and I thoroughly enjoyed the community feeling of being in a room full of horror film afficionados who were there for a good time. The scares were very light on these, I’d have to admit but, in some cases here that really didn’t matter and the artistry of the cast and crew made up for it on a lot of these projects. Among the world premieres here we were even shown three exclusive clips from the new Soskia Sisters 'reimagining' of David Cronenberg's Rabid... which makes me feel a little more comfortable with going to see it. This is something I would definitely do again and so I’m kinda hoping I have the financial resources to sort out a similar expedition next Halloween. Definitely one of my more memorable outings this year and watch out to see if some of these films will be hitting the cinema next year. in this country. Fingers crossed.

AfterDeath

More Questions Than Afters

AfterDeath
UK 2015
Directed by Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt
FrightFest presents.../Icon DVD Region 2

AfterDeath is an interesting movie and, for the most part, a quite effective one. It starts where another film’s twist ending might actually be the big reveal but here it’s the set up. We begin the movie with the realisation that the five central protagonists (the entire cast not counting the ‘voice’ of a demon) are actually all dead.

The movie kicks off with Robyn (played by Miranda Raison) waking at night to find herself washed up on a beach. She flees the sands because she is chased by some fairly aggressive smoke monster thingies and arrives in a cottage. Inside she finds three of the other five actors in the film engaged in a ménage à trois on the couch. They are Sam Keely as the truly unlikeable Seb, Elarica Johnson as Patricia and Lorna Nickson Brown as Livvy. After an exchange, of sorts, she finds the fifth of this group (including herself), Onie, played by Daniella Kertesz, trying to slice up her own wrists but, alas, no blood and no death. She is informed that they are all dead and this leads to Robyn throwing out the most hilarious and sardonic line of the film about what the others did when they discovered they were dead and in some kind of afterlife limbo... “so you thought... threesome”.

It’s an ‘afterlife’ then, which we have here but, it’s not the ‘afterlife’ our main protagonists, all of whom perished in a fire at a night club, were expecting. As the movie goes on, they try to discover the rules of their predicament, as they are obviously not in heaven and they are not entirely certain they are in hell. It’s interesting because, last year I saw a film at the cinema called A Ghost Story (reviewed here) where the audience can slowly put together the rules and vocabulary of the haunted limbo world from observing the environment of one of the main characters. Here, though, it’s a slightly different kettle of fish because these five people need to find out what’s going on and why they are in a cottage which is familiar to each of them (not saying any more than that, don’t want to post any spoilers) and how they get out of there. Especially since, at regular intervals, the unreachable lighthouse in the distance shines on them and brings a burst of pain into their lives. Also, why does one of their number keep disappearing at the drop of a hat, only to reappear again a little later. And what are these wretched smoke monsters all about?

Robyn is the most determined to find out what the hell is going on and tries to steer the rag tag group towards some kind of logical escape plan... leading us through the usual antagonistic response scenes, the bonding scenes... and so forth. All the leads are pretty cool in this and as the film goes on, a little more is revealed about each character and things start to make a little more sense.

It is, it has to be said, a one trick pony of an idea (which I suspect I also might have said about A Ghost Story and that was awesome)... but the writing, direction and performances are such that the mystery behind the shrinking universe they find themselves inhabiting (without giving anything relevant away there) doesn’t get too old and the premise never really begins to flag until the last quarter of an hour or so of the film. By this point, perhaps, the ending is fairly obvious in terms of the various paths it could take but even by then the dialogue is still quite spiky and the last line of the film is especially irreverent and bound to wind up, I suspect, a certain cross-section of the audience.

Also, for a cheaply budgeted British horror film, I was surprised at just how effective and realistic the moving smoke demons in this one were. I tend to hate a lot of the more obvious CGI moments in movies and am always the first to criticise them but the special effects here seemed really good to me so... yeah, congratulations to a horror film for even getting me to mention them.

Not much else to say about Afterdeath but, like a lot of the FrightFest presents movies put out by Icon, I would say this one would work best as one film out of a screening of many (which is how it would have originally been seen at FrightFest, I guess) rather than something you watch on its own. Definitely a good movie for one of the middle ingredients of a private horror all-nighter and with the cheap price of the FrightFest DVDs at the moment, definitely worth a purchase if you are a fan of theologically themed horror movies. I’ve seen similar ‘people trapped in a puzzle’ stories filmed with far less panache and imagination over the years than this one.

Upgrade

STEM Fatale

Upgrade
2018 Australia Directed by Leigh Whannell
UK cinema release print.

Blimey... this film took me by surprise. At least in terms of how well put together it is.

Upgrade is a film which was actually showing at last weekend’s FrightFest... where I ignored it completely in favour of other films. Which I’m glad I did now because... why pay extra out on a more expensive ticket when you can see it for considerably less at your local flea pit a week later? I had no idea what this was about when I saw it mentioned in my local cinema listings but the title did ring that FrightFest bell in my mind so I looked at the trailer online and immediately knew I had to see this thing.

The film is written and directed by Leigh Whannell who, amongst other things he’s done as a writer, has written and acted in the Insidious movies (he plays Specs in these movies and also directed one of them). Here he writes and directs (but doesn’t act in) something which is not a horror movie... instead it’s a full on science fiction epic made with, I would imagine, a much lower budget than some studios would throw at it but he gets absolutely first class results with what he has to spend here. The film looks great and plays like a slick and somewhat dirty sci-fi movie of the 80s or 90s... think early David Cronenberg meets Robocop and you’ll have some idea of how this movie feels.

The film is gritty and unashamedly violent but it's also is hugely entertaining and gives you something to think about too. The story is all important and this doesn’t feel like a load of set pieces half heartedly sewn together to give the audience a thrill ride... that stuff is just the icing on the cake here. This is exactly the kind of stealth movie making we need more of in modern cinema and my respect for this writer/director is really beginning to grow now.

After an opening credits sequence where logos and the title of the film are announced, rather than written, by a computer voice over a graphic representation of the sound waves of that voice, we find the film is set in a near future, not too far from the world of Blade Runner (reviewed here) and just a little step further on from something like Hotel Artemis (reviewed here). It introduces us to Grey Trace, played by Logan Marshall-Green and his wife Asha, played by Melanie Vallejo and establishes their loved up relationship in exactly the way you’d expect it to unfold before their world is pulled apart. Grey fixes up old style petrol driven cars for rich customers and we are introduced to another important character in the film, Eron Keen played by Harrison Gilbertson, in this capacity. We are then shown the dangers of technology when Asha’s self piloting car crashes and her and Grey are mugged. Or appear to be. Asha is shot  in front of Grey, who has been paralysed by a bolt shot into the top of his spine and he watches her die while the gang of villains get away.

We are then treated to a long sequence establishing how the incapacitated Grey survives and is plunged into the depths of despair, trapped in a body he can’t move and how he has to become reliant on technology he hates to do even the simplest thing. He can’t even help Detective Cortez, played brilliantly here by Betty Gabriel, who I’d seen run over by a train only weeks before at the same cinema in Unfriended - Dark Web (reviewed here), as she tries to find the people responsible for Grey’s plight.

Then Eron Keen, who also happens to be the head of a techno giant corporation, offers Grey a revolutionary chip based computer programme called STEM, which he plants into his spine and which enables Grey to move his limbs and get around again. Better than that because, when Grey lets STEM take over his body... STEM is represented by a HAL9000-like voice in his head (voiced by Simon Maiden), talking to him... he turns into a killing machine and is more than capable of finding the killers and dealing out justice himself. However, there’s more to this movie than it just being a simplistic, sci-fi laced revenge movie and that’s about all I’m going to say in regards to the story content as I don’t want to put any spoilers in here.

Upgrade is an absolutely brilliant and entertaining experience though and, where the film does delve into clichéd sci-fi areas, it does it with such a sense of grace and self awareness that you really can’t fault the writing. Nor the acting as Marshall-Green positively shines as Grey, doing a really great job which involves a lot of comedy timing, as well as the portrayal of depression and intimidating intensity called for in certain sequences of the movie.

It’s a grim film in some ways but there’s a lot of humour in here too... mainly coming from Grey’s inner dialogue with STEM and also his own reactions to what his body is doing on his behalf when he lets STEM take over. For instance, when he sees what he’s doing to people trying to attack him or when he’s looking away because he can’t bear to see what he’s doing to one of the bad guys in an interrogation scene (the camera stays with Grey’s face as we hear him slicing up the face of someone to get information).

The film also has a pretty cool score by someone called Jed Palmer which really pumps up the emotions and enhances various scenes. Alas, it’s only available away from the movie as a download so until a proper CD comes out, it looks like I won’t be able to listen to the music from this one. Which is a shame... would have been an instant purchase for me.

And I haven’t got much more to say about Upgrade. It’s a damn near perfect slice of sci-fi and I didn’t quite see the ending coming... at least not in quite the same variation as the writer went for here and, when it did look like it was going to throw away all the good work that was done with a nauseatingly nicey nice ending, it immediately sobered you up again with an alternative dose of reality which, while technically making it look like it could be continued for a sequel, absolutely shuts down the possibility of turning this into a franchise and making it much more of a self contained story. Which is something I appreciated. So, yeah, if you’re into gritty, low budget, visceral science fiction movies done right, Upgrade is definitely something that you should see. I hope this one gets a Blu Ray release soon because it’s going straight onto my Christmas list. Catch it while it’s playing.

Luciferina

The Sexorcist

Luciferina
2018 Argentina Directed by Gonzalo Calzada
26th August screening at FrightFest 2018

Wow. Well I have to say that, of the five films I saw at this year’s FrightFest, Luciferina was easily the standout movie for me. And that’s saying something, considering I actually got lucky and saw five pretty good movies this time around.

Right from the start of the film, the director states his intentions that Luciferina is the first part of a Three Virgins Trilogy, in much the same way that Universal branded their recent version of The Mummy (reviewed here) as part of their new, probably now aborted, Dark Universe. Indeed, if you stay long enough into the end credits here you will find that the next two intended installments of this series will be called Immaculada and Gotica and… I can only hope this director has more success with these than Universal did with their Dark Universe because, frankly, this film is an absolute blast.

The film starts off with a young woman called Natalia, played amazingly by Sofia Del Tuffo, who is an apprentice nun at a convent and who is the main protagonist of the movie. Right from the start we are clued in to the fact that she is gifted with some kind of ‘special religiously manifested powers’, as she can make here eyeballs go a milky white and see people’s white auras of spiritual goodness when she needs to… presumably to check that they are pure people at heart. Anyway, the plot moves along when she goes home to what’s left of the family unit she rejected when she hears her mother has died in what is being called a suicide. She returns to find her father bandaged up (after being attacked by her mother) and unresponsive, with her angry sister Angela, played by the strikingly good looking Malena Sanchez, at her throat. And Angela’s bunch of short fused friends are not much help to the situation here either but Natalia agrees to go with them to a remote place to take a spiritual, drug fuelled journey to find herself and the dark secret at the heart of what made her father and mother so weird and gruelling to live with in the first place. Pretty much the equivalent of a peyote dream I would guess but, as you would probably suspect from a film in this vein, things go much more wrong than anyone is expecting and it all leads to a confrontation between the forces of darkness and light, culminating in a long scene which is what inspired me to title this review... The Sexorcist.

That’s pretty much all I am going to say about the plot because you need to discover the joys and twists of this movie yourself. Some of them are more obvious than others but everything is so well presented and it’s almost like watching a modern equivalent of something like Alucarda (reviewed here), although it’s not quite the same experience and it’s even more beautiful to look at.

Indeed, alongside the always welcome shots of female nudity which become, by the end, almost essential to the plot in terms of the conflict between good versus evil... where Calzada uses the age old trick of ‘who is on top and dominating’ the sexual positions to show us which side of light and dark are winning the battle at any given moment... we have some very beautiful cinematography incorporating some lovely shot designs which, in this, are very much pitched towards the centre of the screen. It’s not always symmetry the director is after but I would say a good 90% of the film uses either static images or smooth moving camera to make the main focus of the shot hit the middle third of the screen and it’s a technique which works surprisingly well. There are some odd shots which are pitched to the side of the screen and I wasn’t quite sure why he did that in those particular moments given the nature of the design in the majority of the movie. The two I can remember are when Natalia and Angela are sitting on some garden furniture at night and they are the main focus on the right of screen, drawing the eye into the master shot and then, a little later, one of the shots of their boat journey places them on the right of screen too. For the most part, though, the choice seems to skew to placing things front and centre in the composition but it also turns out to be quite a functional thing as well.

For instance, in one of many dream sequences involving a specific location and something scary walking up from behind Natalia, he uses Natalia’s proximity to the screen and the fact that she’s blocking the centre of the shot, to build the sense of tension as a creature gets nearer. Every time she moves to the right of screen to look behind her at the creature, we see it has gotten a bit closer before she returns to her position and blocks the view again. This is repeated a couple more times to obstruct the audience view and leads to the inevitable ‘oh my gosh it’s right there with you’ moment but this was a really cool sequence, even if it was a little predictable and it’s a good example of the cinematography enhancing the film in a very practical way in terms of helping the story along. There’s a scene later in the film which isn’t set in the dream world where, as you kind of know is going to happen, the character finds herself in exactly the same position and situation at the same location she dreamed of (more than once, in fact) and echoes of this earlier scene prickle at the back of the subconscious of the audience because, by this point, the director doesn’t need to repeat that exact moment to the finish to achieve that same tension... he’s already done it so well earlier in the film.

Luciferina is, bearing in mind its remote location in terms of where it places the characters, actually quite gory as well with lots of facial mutilation and death. The writer/director gives us a mentally unstable/villainous character right from the time we meet Angela’s friends... her boyfriend, in fact. It’s the thorough nastiness of him and the moment where he leaves the group of friends with the unvoiced threat of coming back and killing them that’s a nice bit of a set up for something which happens later in the film but... yeah... I really don’t want to give any spoilers away here because it’s such a lovely film and you should discover it for yourself, if you can get the opportunity. I will say, though, that Natalia certainly finds out a lot about her past from a time when she can’t remember and that there are a couple of sequences in this film that might make some viewers think of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed here).

So yeah, loads of gory violence, a fair amount of nudity and sex and it’s all supported by a very nice score by... well I don’t know who it’s composed by because the IMDB doesn’t list it. I would love to find out because it’s really well done and I would really like to pick up a CD of this at some point. I knew I was in for something special, in terms of scoring, when the opening Three Virgins Trilogy logo came up and I was treated to a piece of music which sounded, in the first few bars, just like a piece from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Omen... and not just because of the strong choral content either. As the film progresses, though, the beauty of the score becomes apparent and it plays so appropriately well with the images that I would love to give this a spin away from the film.

The one, slightly false note in the film comes not from the score but from the last minute or so of the movie. Once character says something and you know it’s only there to set up the idea that there are supposed to be two more sequels and... I think with the strength of the branding on this, it maybe didn’t quite need that. Other than that, though, I can’t stress enough just how great a piece of horror/exploitation movie making Luciferina is... shot through with some absolutely exquisite cinematography and with a central protagonist you really want to root for (Sofia Del Tuffo really does a fantastic job here). Definitely a recommendation from me if you are into horror movies and I just hope it gets a UK release at some point. And I certainly hope those sequels get made sometime soon, too.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Maxa Head Wound

The Most Assassinated
Woman In The World
(aka La Femme La Plus
Assassinée Du Monde)
2018 USA Directed by Franck Ribière
Belgium/UK/USA
24th August screening at FrightFest 2018

I’ve talked about Paula Maxa on here before.

Almost two years ago I reviewed a really great book called Theatre of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 (which can be found here) and buried somewhere in the middle of it I had this to say...

“... a particularly interesting performer called Paula Maxa who met with an unfortunate demise 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways on the stage of the theatre and was also the victim of a stage rapist attack at least 3,000 times. I would love to see a full biography of this lady emerge some day. As it is, the writer reprints, in a later section, a longish and autobiographical newspaper story of her early years from the time, although I can’t really hazard a guess as to the truth of the claims made by Maxa here. This amazing little article written in her own words certainly whets the appetite for more information about this sensationalist performer who seemed more than happy to play and wallow in the kind of unsavoury elements found in the plays in which she performed.”

Now, The Most Assassinated Woman In The World isn’t a biography of the actual person per se but it does use the memory of the real life person to unwind what is, in essence, a kind of giallo tinged thriller set on and around the stage at the famous Grand Guignol of Paris. A tale in which Paula Maxa, played with much screen presence by an actress called Anna Mouglalis, becomes the central figure, used by the writers and director to weave a tale which is much less about trying to explain the truth of this lady and more about using her legend to conjure up an atmosphere of the milieu in which she found herself.

And I can’t actually blame the writers for doing so, it has to be said.

My reason for this is because there seems to be very little known about the lady in question beyond her public facade. Or, more accurately, much known through her own efforts to promote herself which, as far as I could tell, amounts to obviously fake flights of fancy presented as fact, which I myself find less credible, even, than some of the stuff the great Salvador Dali used to claim about himself over the years. She doesn’t even have her own page on Wikipedia, just a brief mention on a page about the theatre most closely associated with her name, so I fear any attempts to research a proper biography of her will probably have found any trails leading to the person behind this theatrical icon have long grown cold (that being said, I think there may be a French language attempt at a biography but I can’t find an English translation to be able to read what it says about her).

But, as long as there are works which mention her or use her in such a way as she is used here, she isn’t going to be falling into complete obscurity just yet, I suspect.

Ribière’s film is impressive, opening with an old, often Victorian, horror trope of a lady walking down a dimly lit street on a night shrouded by fog, as she hears the clicking footsteps of someone following her through the lonely lane. The presence of such a well worn cliché is not so impressive but the flawless and entertaining execution of it here certainly is and, as the film wears on, we get embroiled in a series of real life murders taking place in the vicinity of the Grand Guignol and we follow the footsteps of a crime reporter called Jean, played by Niels Schneider, as he looks for a link between the murders of the grizzly spectacle of the theatre and tries to discover if the real Parisian murders are somehow linked or inspired by them. And, of course, he also becomes the love interest for Paula Maxa as he seeks an introduction to her and strikes up a relationship, of sorts, with her as the film plays on.

The film itself plays out as an elaborate set of tricks on the audience which are a direct parallel, in a way, to the trickery and sleight of hand effects which the Grand Guignol used on a nightly basis. As we are treated to re-enactments of a couple of the little vignettes (in style at the very least) which were so popular at the time, we are let in on the secrets of their execution while at the same time, the director tries and, sometimes, succeeds to use ‘similar in spirit’ cinematic tricks to wrong-foot the audience and pull them into the illusion which lies at the centre of the movie.

Now, I have to admit that, one of the first times he does this I was not that impressed. An early scene which presents itself at first as a flashback to a younger, long dead character in a mirror got my guard up almost instantly as I realised that the director was trying to use the mechanics of the old Groucho/Harpo mirror sequence from Duck Soup to surprise the audience and... sure enough, I was less than astonished. I think, perhaps, this was because the person in the foreground being reflected could not, exactly, match the movements of the person in the mirror. However, the director uses much of the trickery and deception throughout the movie with a defter hand and, although I would possibly condemn this in other films for being too obvious and condescending, I think they all get away with it here because the subject matter is so close to that kind of audience manipulation that it rings truer than it would in other movies. There’s a lovely shot, for instance, where Paula and Jean are laying upside down on a bed with their heads at 180 degrees from each other while the camera spins around slowly as they converse to keep them near the top or bottom of the frame. Which is okay and at first seems a little over contrived until the director pulls back the camera completely to reveal the artifice of the shot and you realise... yeah, contrived is definitely the word but, deliberately so.

There are also some nice scenes of murder and suspense where the film almost goes into 1970s giallo territory, with Keren Ann’s lovely score rising to the occasion in such moments to complete the illusion that we’ve just accidentally wandered into a Dario Argento or Sergio Martino movie. And, like these sequences, the film as a whole has a certain atmosphere which is never quite rendered fake to the central figure and doesn’t really ever get dull. It has a sense of verisimilitude which holds the narrative together even though, as you continue your journey through the film, the majority of said narrative is revealed to be so much smoke and mirrors, depending on your reading of the films final scenes.

I was perhaps a little disappointed with the aftermath of the denouement of a certain scene containing what is, for the movie, Paula Maxa’s last appearance at the Grand Guignol (although certainly not in real life, as the film-makers will tell you with a little summary at the end). I was pretty sure I knew where the narrative would be heading after the latest theatrical portrait of a ‘Maxa grizzly demise’ and, sure enough, it did exactly what I thought it would with the characters. Even so, the end is not so bad and certainly fits in with the way the rest of the story has been framed and presented. A particularly telling moment is in a mid-post-credits scene where a variation of the opening sequence is replayed and the audience are reminded of the danger of believing all that they see.

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World is a nicely presented, slick homage to both the ‘idea’ of Paula Maxa and the Grand Guignol where she flourished. Its an entertaining film and definitely worth a watch for lovers of the form and for those who want to catch up a little on the history of blood and gore which found its way into horror movies. There’s even a scene where Jean takes Paula to see the newly opened 1932 Fay Wray/Lionel Atwill two-strip technicolour movie Doctor X, which should bring a smile to the face of anyone familiar with these kinds of genre movies. This one gets a hearty recommendation from me and, if we are lucky enough in the UK to actually get this one either properly released in our cinemas or put out on a nice Blu Ray format disc, then this one is definitely worth a look, I would say.

So that was my first film of five in this weekend’s FrightFest and I will, hopefully, be publishing a few more reviews from the festival over the next week or so.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

Night of the Living Deb

Debbie Does Zombies

Night of the Living Deb
USA 2015 Directed by  Kyle Rankin
Icon/FrightFest Presents... DVD Region 2

I may have mentioned it a few times on here that I don’t usually respond that well to comedy shenanigans unless it’s written by Woody Allen or stars The Marx Brothers but, every now and then a movie comes out which will tickle my funny bone in just the right way (not the way that leaves the whole arm paralysed and makes you grimace in pain while you wait for circulation to return). Night Of The Living Deb is just such a movie and it really breathes new life (and death) into the not that old ZomRomCom sub-genre of flesh eating zombie movies.

The movie stars this little whirlwind of an actress called Maria Thayer as the title character, Deb Carrington, beginning with her being egged on to talk to the “50 shades of heeey” guy at the bar they are having their 4th of July eve celebrations in. The guy's name is Michael Cassidy and, playing Ryan Waverly, he makes an excellent foil for Deb’s amazing one liners. The chemistry between them is wonderful as they suddenly, on their ‘morning after’, find themselves in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with Ryan, at first, not all that enthused about what might have happened the night before they woke up in bed together.

However, this particular ‘day after’ is an onslaught of zombie carnage as the two try to pick up friends and relatives to save from destruction, including famous genre actor Ray Wise as Ryan’s dad, the head of the water company responsible for accidentally turning the majority of the town’s population into flesh devouring monsters. On the way through this trip of a movie, various genre tropes are discussed, movies quoted and there are so many funny gags coming at you all over the place that for a moment there I actually did have a Groucho flashback because Thayer’s delivery is that good as the love struck, over enthusiastic survivor with a heart of gold. Indeed, although the film isn’t a 1930s screwball, romantic comedy in name, it certainly does have a lot of moments that viewers might notice as Deb’s character is as persistent and unflappable in the pursuit of Mr. Waverly as Katherine Hepburn was with Cary Grant in some of those classic movies like Bringing Up Baby so, you know, you can probably tell I thought a lot of this movie on first viewing.

The film is full of the necessary ‘zombie splatter’ scenes with many classic moments from the history of zombie cinema being referenced here but there’s also some nice commentary on the genre too. For instance, there's a nice little scene when Deb slows them down to a halt as a zombie slowly shuffles towards them and she makes a comment about not worrying too much because these are obviously the old style, classic zombies which shuffle about like they’ve got cerebral palsy. Only to be told by Ryan that the zombie in question is someone he knows and he really does have CP... and then the fast running zombies suddenly appear to continue the pursuit.

In regards to this kind of zombie tribute, there’s also the much hackneyed scene where the characters identify that they have two shots in their revolver and so Deb says they can ‘tap out’ if it comes to it. Quite besides the fact that Ryan stresses his displeasure at the idea of being shot in the head if he’s about to become a zombie, he points out that when Deb is making the ‘tapping out’ motions, the order she does it in has her killing herself before shooting him... which really isn’t going to happen. And it’s great little moments like this that really liven up what could have been a not so good film and turn it into a truly fun and entertainingly great one.

There are also some great gags in the details too and I particularly loved the comment on the mentality of the people of Maine (which looks like it kinda matches my own in this regard) when the camera pans past some graffiti on a wall which says, “Your all going to die” but with the correction added where someone has crossed out the word ‘your’ and replaced it with the grammatically correct “you’re”. I love stuff like this and this movie could probably have gone on for another hour before I got bored with it. I also especially liked the throw away stuff near the end about the sanity of the way in which ‘zombie begets zombie’ (which is how I say this without putting spoilers in to give the game away) is something which defies logic in the wide variety of zombie movies. It’s a nice little moment and it gives rise to hope at the climax of the movie.

The film is not all that predictable... well, okay, it kind of is in terms of where the story might be heading but it takes the least predictable route there, for the most part. It also isn’t without its problems... well... only one problem that I could detect actually (apart from not having a sequel made). When a broadcast is made from a TV station towards the end (presumably, at least partially, in homage to Romero’s original version of Dawn Of The Dead), the consequences of that broadcast are shown and they are the kinds of things which would take a day or two to be happening in the world outside the small town which this feature uses as its setting. However, we then cut back to the main action and it could only have been 5 minutes or so, at best, in terms of the chronology of the narrative so... yeah. I suspect the director realised that though but just relied on the great God of artistic licence to make the scene work which is... well, I’m a little pernickety about such things but this is such a joy to watch that I can forgive it that little slip up easily.

And that’s really all I can say about this one. Night Of The Living Deb is absolute gem of a movie and, like Alan Jones says in the introduction to this ‘FrightFest presents...’ DVD... they get everything right. The DVD also has a ‘Making of featurette’, which I didn’t watch... and a Blooper Reel which, contrary to the majority of blooper reels I’ve seen, is actually quite funny, for the most part and doesn’t outstay its welcome. If you are a fan of either zombie movies or comedy/horror films then you could do a hell of a lot worse than to watch this truly genius little film. All I can say is, please, can we have Dawn Of The Deb now?