FrightFest '07: Spiral

Director Adam Green's debut feature, Hatchet, has inspired a legion of devoted fans - which probably has as much to do with Green's own infectious enthusiasm and personality as with the quality of the movie itself. But while Hatchet was a love letter to the slasher genre, Spiral is something completely different.

Collaborating again with Joel David Moore, Adam Green has managed to create a film which is sweet, funny, and creepy - and he won't have to battle with the MPAA to get less than an NC-17 rating this time.

Spiral, like Hatchet, isn't a sequel or a remake, nor, despite the title, is it based on a Japanese one. Instead, it's the story of a young man whose life isn't quite what it seems. Ostensibly, Mason seems like the stereotypical nerd: he has a rubbish job, no friends, a rubbish apartment, and suffers chronically from some illness which requires an inhaler (either asthma or angina, presumably; it's not quite clear which). But Mason has a talent, and a secret: he's a great painter, but his obsession with the girls who model for him seems to be getting ever so slightly unhealthy...

Despite the low budget, Spiral looks great, and its original jazz soundtrack means it sounds great, too. Joel David Moore wrote and co-directed the film as well as playing the lead, and the film is essentially a two-hander between Moore and Amber Tamblyn as the almost unbelievably chirpy love interest. Spiral plays its cards close to its chest, and, unlike almost every other movie shown at FrightFest this year, the ending was never obvious. Hints were dropped throughout; but they were occasionally contradictory, meaning you never quite know where you stand. Even at the film's denouement, there are some questions left tantalisingly unanswered - which is probably for the best, since leaving some things up to the audience's imagination is infinitely scarier than telling them everything.

Spiral's not the kind of film that'll have you covering your eyes or hiding behind the sofa. It's much more subtle - and much more insidious - than that. It's not a perfect film, by a long shot, but it's a good one, and between this and Hatchet, it seems Adam Green has a bright, bright future ahead of him. And deservedly so.

IMDB link

FrightFest '07: Bank Holiday Monday

It's 9am. It's a bank holiday, so most people are still tucked up in their beds. But the sun's shining... and zombies have taken over Leicester Square!

The final day of the Film4 FrightFest kicked off with a screening of the British indie zombie movie, The Zombie Diaries. And what better way to celebrate than by trying to break the world record for the biggest zombie walk ever? Zombie themed music playing in the background established an appropriately spooky atmosphere as more and more members of the undead poured into the square...

This is Zombie Diaries director Kevin Gates, getting into the spirit of the thing.

A zombie isn't just for Christmas...

Joe Lynch and some others take refuge from the top of the Leicester Square Odeon.

Hatchet director Adam Green looks on as the zombies take over.

Send... more... paramedics!

Even Chaplin wasn't safe.

Professional make-up artists were on hand to transform anyone and everyone into the walking dead.

And believe it or not, these zombies are doing the Hokey Cokey. They also formed a conga line around the square, rushed into various shops and restaurants in the vicinity, and, later, were spotted running around Nelson's Column.

Zombies, eh?

FrightFest '07: Seed

Although it was written at the same time as Postal and deals with many of the same issues - the corruption of government, the general state of the world - Seed is almost Postal's polar opposite. Where Postal was light and funny, Seed is harsh, dark, and brutal.

In 1970s America, criminals sentenced to death faced the electric chair. The only problem was, the electric chairs weren't always particularly effective, and a little known law says that if a criminal is electrocuted three times and survives, he must be set free. When notorious serial killer Max Seed is electrocuted twice and lives, the local authorities take the law into their own hands and decide to bury him alive.

This turns out not to be a particularly good idea.

Much of the film is lit only by light sources explained by the plot - a character carrying a torch, a streetlight, the moon. And although the arrest sequence at the beginning of the film is maybe a touch overlong, the fact that you can only see what the characters are seeing (usually only a small circle of light cast by a small torch) makes for some really creepy moments. Where most slasher movies play scenes like this - serial killer stalks a group of people - for laughs, Seed plays everything very, very straight. There's no titillation here, and no comedy; just some real nastiness.

There's also very little in the way of characterisation. We never get inside Seed's head, and nor do we develop relationships with any of his victims. Oddly, the film is probably more chilling because of that: it's just violence. Seed is a nasty, nihilistic movie that says the world is like this. People are like this.

There are two scenes which particularly stand out. One is the now notorious introduction, which uses footage of real animal torture obtained from PETA. Playing something like that in the middle of a horror movie festival which featured so many slasher comedies which invited their viewers to laugh at human bloodshed was something of a shock. The other scene is a long, steady shot of Max Seed killing the wife of one of the men who buried him alive. She's a conservatively dressed middle aged woman - no semi-clad 20somethings here - so there's no element of torture porn. Instead, the camera never falters as Seed delivers blow after blow to the woman's head with a hammer; at first, just playful taps, then increasingly harsh blows. Each one makes you flinch and desperately wish the scene was over, but it just goes on and on, getting nastier and nastier.

It's a strange film to try to evaluate. Immediately after it's over, you feel drained; but it seeps into your head and stays with you for hours afterwards. The more I thought and talked about this movie, the more ... well, I can't say that I liked it, as such; it was too depressing for that. But there's a lot of skill in this film, and a lot of anger. The horribly bleak final scene just hurts.

IMDB link & Will Sanderson interview

FrightFest '07: KM31

Driving along a lonely stretch of highway late at night, a woman accidentally hits a figure standing in the road. And when she gets out to investigate, another car hits her, putting her in a coma and plunging her sister, boyfriend, and sister's boyfriend into a spooky ooky world of ghosts and soggy women in drains.

KM31 was massively popular in its native Mexico, but unfortunately, it doesn't offer anything beyond location that we haven't all seen before. Many times. Soggy dead girls might not be as common on cinema screens as they were a year ago, perhaps, but the memory of all those derivative J-horror wannabes hasn't faded yet. Every step of KM31 treads firmly in the footsteps of all the movies that went before, from the spooky-eyed boychild to the weeping woman with the hideously decayed face to the helpful old woman in the woods who turns out to be a bit more sinister than she seemed.

The film is stylish enough, and it makes sense and all, but it's just another replay of a formula we all got fed up of a long time ago. We've not seen soggy dead girls in Mexico before, but since they don't do anything different there than they do in Japan, is there really any point?

IMDB link

FrightFest '07: Postal

Postal will be a controversial film. It's trying to be. But it's also, perhaps surprisingly, really quite good.

Uwe Boll is best known for making film adaptations of computer games, and also for being one of the most hated filmmakers alive. It's not a reputation that's justified, and I could name a slew of directors much, much, much worse than he is off the top of my head. Postal might just change that.

Based roughly on the computer game of the same name, Postal follows the adventures of a man pushed to his limits. Everything about the Dude's life sucks, and his attempts to change his fortune only make things worse. When he turns to his cult leader uncle for financial help, the Dude unwittingly enters into a battle with the Taliban, with the owners of a Nazi theme park, and with a pack of tree-hugging religious fundamentalists. There are a lot of controversial elements in that last sentence alone, and people who haven't seen the film will probably manage to build up quite a righteous anger. But Postal isn't only an equal opportunities offender; it's also almost affectionate in its mockery. The message at the centre of the film seems to be that we're all human; we're all living on this planet; if we keep fighting one another over silly issues like religion and skin colour, we'll never face the real issues.

The humour is largely on the silly side, and there are a few gags that don't quite work, but on the whole, the jokes hit the mark. The problem with some of them might be that while it's easy, from a position of privilege, to point out how silly some issues seem, to people who actually have to face religious or racial persecution on a daily basis it's really not all that funny. Postal isn't going to change the world. But, shockingly, it might actually make you think.

Putting aside controversy for now, Postal really works as a movie. It looks great, for one thing. It's not a particularly high budget movie, but it looks really, really good. The uncut version that played at FrightFest sags ever so slightly in the middle, but a few minutes are going to be excised for pacing reasons before the film goes on general release, so that's not worth worrying about. The violence is cartoonish and relentless; the finale, literally explosive.

And although there aren't really any A-list names amongst the cast, the actors are all great. Zack Ward is a genuinely good comedic actor; he's endearing enough that you identify with and root for him, even though he's really rather inept, and does, of course, go 'postal' during the movie. The situations he finds himself in are somehow familiar, if amped up to absurd proportions. The job interview scene, for example, is really well observed, and hysterically funny throughout ("what is the difference between a duck?" made me laugh even on second viewing, and, I imagine, will still amuse me on third, fourth, and fifth viewings). That scene also features Rick Hoffman, last seen stealing the show in Hostel; most of the characters in this film, even the most minor ones, are played by recognisable and talented comedians. Dave Foley deserves a mention, too, and Uwe Boll's own cameo is one of the best self-parodies I've ever seen.

In a way, it's almost a pity that the subject matter is so controversial, because it'll mean that a lot of people won't see this movie. Then again, dealing with controversial subjects didn't do South Park any harm, did it?

IMDB link

FrightFest '07 Photo Diary

Thursday 23rd August

Okay. I'm in Central London, it's the August Bank Holiday weekend - and it's time to watch a lot of horror movies at the Film4 FrightFest.

The bright orange pass around my neck says one thing: I'm a glutton for punishment. As for the zombie Spider-Man shirt... well, that's open to interpretation.

The first film of the weekend was the New Zealand-made creature feature Black Sheep. I can only assume these guys were there to promote it; otherwise, that's just kind of weird. A growing crowd were milling around the outside of the cinema, most of whom had the same orange passes around their necks that I did.

I tried to take a picture inside the cinema of the 700-odd strong audience, but my camera doesn't like places without much light and the pictures didn't come out. So you'll just have to take my word for it: there were a lot of people there, and they all laughed and clapped and cheered through the first movie. It was a really good start to the weekend.

After the movie, Black Sheep t-shirts were thrown out into the audience. I actually didn't catch this, but I'd spent about five minutes whining that I really wanted one, so when it fell into the gap between my boyfriend and the guy next to him, they let me take it. Thanks guys!

The less said about the second movie of Thursday the better. Black Water is probably the most boring film about a killer crocodile you'll ever see.

Friday 24th August

The first film of Friday was another screening of Adam Green's Hatchet, which actually showed at last year's FrightFest. This year's screening was different, though: it was actually being filmed as a DVD extra, with Adam Green and festival organiser Alan Jones performing a live commentary from the side of the stage. Adam Green is a really, really funny guy, and seems really nice, too - he spent the entire festival hanging out, talking to fans, signing autographs and watching movies.

Anyway, moving on, the next film was a Russian fantasy called The Sword Bearer. And it was very long, very self-consciously arty, and not very good. Hmph.

Reinforcements were needed by mid-morning. This is the Mega Sizzler: the only way to get through a weekend-long slog through horror movies. It's sort of become a bit of a tradition.

Yum yum. (Blech.)

Next up was The Signal, in which all the world's electronics start broadcasting a signal that causes people to go crazy and kill one another. Something about the mixture of paranoia and absurdity didn't quite work for me, but everyone else loved it.

Alan Jones introduced probably the festival's most unremarkable film, 1408. Which isn't to say that it's bad, but that it just... is.


Director Mikael Håfström fielded questions from the audience after the movie, though I'm not sure anyone really needed to know anything about it. As evidenced by the fact that someone asked about John Cusack's personal chef.

After all that excitement, Friday afternoon saw the traditional FrightFest goodie bags being handed out. This picture shows a selection of the loot, after I'd got home, rooted through it and thrown out the stuff I wasn't interested in.

Saturday 25th August

I, um, overslept on Saturday morning and missed the beginning of the first movie. So while I waited for it to finish and for people to emerge from the cinema, I sat down with a Ben & Jerry's milkshake and tried to figure out which movies I'd end up skipping...

And then I got bored and decided to take a couple of touristy photos of Leicester Square to include in my photo diary.

Charlie Chaplin. Nuff said.

I'm trying to think of something to say about Saturday afternoon's next two movies, Joshua and Storm Warning. But they weren't very good, so I'll leave it.

Kirin was one of this year's festival sponsors; and, on the way into Wrong Turn 2, everyone was handed a free can of beer. Awesome. (And it's actually really nice beer, so the promotion seems to have worked, because I'll definitely choose to drink it again in the future. Maybe I'm just a sucker for freebies?)

David McGillivray and Alan Jones hosted the annual FrightFest quiz on Saturday afternoon. Although I liked my answer to the first question ("What was the original title of the script for Saw 2, before it became an official Saw movie?" "Another Derivative Piece Of Old Shit" - my boyfriend went for "Wankers in a House") I knew so few of the other answers that I didn't even hand in the answer sheet. Bah!

Wrong Turn 2 director Joe Lynch takes a picture of the audience while Pervirella star Emily Booth explains the Zone Horror Cut! short film competition. Basically, you need to make and submit a 2-minute horror movie, and, if the panel of judges think yours is the best, you win £5,000. Coincidentally, this is the amount of money necessary to hire Sean Pertwee for a day's filming...

Wrong Turn 2 was fun, but the free beer had reminded us that alcohol existed, so we retired to the cinema bar afterwards to mingle with fans and film-types rather than sticking around for Disturbia. My boyfriend wanted to take a picture with Emily Booth. So, here they are. Awwww.

This is the faintly nauseating, Escher-esque view of the multiple staircases from the bar. Arghhhhh...! (Actually, there's another level of stairs that I couldn't fit into this picture, but you get the idea.)

Joe Lynch's Wrong Turn 2 production diary was featured in the FrightFest programme. One of the anecdotes in it was about sharing a maggot with Henry Rollins. As a result, we thought it'd be funny to get Joe to autograph a can of white chocolate maggots...

It says "Eat yer maggots!" which I find almost unreasonably funny.

And then some dude scribbled on my programme!

Neil Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, was at the festival to present some footage from his new movie, Doomsday. I may have been slightly starstruck when I met him, because, dude - Neil freakin' Marshall! *isn't worthy*

Sunday 26th August

The highlight of Sunday for me - and indeed the whole festival, for me - was the Uwe Boll double bill of Postal and Seed. Boll introduced both movies, and answered questions from the audience after each movie...



Postal went down extremely well, while Seed caused some controversy - but that's kind of to be expected, right? A lot of the audience seemed won over, both by Boll's new movies and by the man himself. In person, he's entertaining, personable, and very likeable, and this came across in the Q&A. I can also exclusively reveal that Boll's ice-cream preference is for nut-covered chocolate Magnums.

Before the next movie, Waz, the director, writer, and some of the cast of The Cottage turned up to promote their movie. Unfortunately, it looked like a pile of wank; if I hadn't been sick of mutants-in-the-woods slasher movies before FrightFest, I would be now, so the prospect of yet another one (with, surprise, comedy and mayhem... yawn) wasn't enormously exciting.

Waz was the only movie I walked out of halfway through; I'm not sure it was actually worse than some of the films I saw through to the end, but it was the last straw. Sunday ends here for me... and you'll have to wait for part 2 of this photo diary for coverage of the last day of the festival - and the zombie walk world record attempt.

FrightFest '07: Botched

The prospect of seeing Sean Pertwee in a Russian heist-gone-wrong caper is enormously exciting. Sadly, though, he only has about two scenes, and he's putting on a Russian accent, so it's hardly worth it. And as for the rest of the movie? Well, there aren't many things more painful than a comedy that really, really isn't funny.

The basic plot is that Stephen Dorff is a rubbish criminal. After a spectacularly failed heist, he's given a chance to redeem himself: he has to steal a treasured relic from a Russian towerblock. However, because he's rubbish, he screws it all up, and during his attempt to escape the building he ends up in a broken down lift with a handful of hostages on a floor which doesn't technically exist. To make matters worse, there's a lunatic on the loose who thinks he's the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible - and by making matters worse, I mean both for the characters in the film, and for the audience.

Seems the filmmakers thought that fake Russian accents and a man dressed up for a D&D LARP added up to comedy gold, which, well, maybe it could have if they'd written some jokes or something even faintly original or clever, but they didn't. Botched is yet another comedy created by people who think comedies are easier to make than real films; and while, if you're a comedian, that might be the case, this time it just fell flat. It doesn't help that the entire movie plays out in a series of grey, characterless corridors that actually look like they only had one corridor, and they just had the characters walk into it from different places.

The title's really quite appropriate, when you think about it.

IMDB link

FrightFest '07: Wrong Turn 2

Pop quiz: name a movie where a small group of people heads out into the middle of nowhere... Got deja vu? It's not surprising: Wrong Turn 2 is another film where a group of idiots find themselves in the middle of the woods at the mercy of a load of murderous sub-humans.

Wrong Turn was pretty bad to begin with, so, given the clichéd premise and the fact that this is a sequel to a terrible movie, Wrong Turn 2 is shockingly enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, the script is pretty execrable, but between the efforts of director Joe Lynch, the able cast, and lots and lots of gore, it's a fairly fun ride, even though (or maybe because) it's completely braindead.

Actually, that last sentence could be summed up in about two words: HENRY ROLLINS. The man is awesome. In Wrong Turn 2, he plays a kickass military type who's hosting a brand new reality TV show, The Ultimate Survivalist: The Apocalypse. The show is set in a fake post-apocalyptic world where only a handful of people have survived; every day, they'll face various challenges, and every day one of them will be 'killed' until the ultimate survivor wins $100,000. Unfortunately, the game's taking place in the woods where the mutants from Wrong Turn live, so the game becomes real pretty darned quickly.

After about 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately, as soon as the mutants show up, the reality TV show premise is abandoned and it becomes a very typical stalk-and-slash - only with lots and lots of gore. People get cut in half, blown up with dynamite, pushed through wood chippers, and shot full of arrows; it's a straight to DVD movie, so it can get away with being unrated and Lynch has taken full advantage of this.

It's really a pity that this immediately followed Storm Warning at FrightFest, because the two movies are very similar, and they're both in a genre which is (deservedly) dying on its ass. Wrong Turn 2 is the better movie of the two, because it's more gleeful, deliberately sillier, and without that undercurrent of meanness that's so common in this kind of movie nowadays; it's better than the original Wrong Turn for the same reasons, actually. Joe Lynch himself is a highly entertaining bundle of manic energy, and it's really that, rather than anything in the screenplay, that pulls this movie through.

Well, that, and Henry Rollins.

IMDB link

FrightFest '07: Storm Warning

Pop quiz: name a movie where a small group of people heads out into the middle of nowhere, gets lost, and ends up being terrorised by hillbillies. Whatever you answered with, give yourself a point. You could have a gold star, but honestly, it's too easy a question; there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these films. Some of them are better than others, and, honestly, most of them are better than Storm Warning.

In this particular permutation of the well-worn formula, an Aussie guy and his beautiful French girlfriend hire a boat for the day. Although it's bright and sunny when they set off, the weather soon changes, and because they're stupid, they decide to take a bizarre route through some swampy storm drains back to the boat hire place, instead of just going back the way they came. As a result, they soon find themselves stranded and, as is the wont of people in this kind of horror movie, they find and break into a farmhouse. Although the place initially looks abandoned (though there's a blow-up sex doll on prominent display) the couple stumble across a shed full of marijuana plants, and before they have time to engage their brains and leave, the owners of the house are home.

Obviously, the owners of the house aren't happy about people breaking into their home; they're also moronic rednecks who proceed to terrorise the unsuspecting yuppie couple in various ways. All of which you've seen before. In the last ten minutes, the tense and threatening atmosphere that had built up in spite of (rather than because of) the director's best efforts is dispelled by rampant absurdity. Logic is thrown out of the window in favour of some splatstick nonsense and...

It's just so tiring. We've seen it all before, a hundred times over. This wave of meanspirited, illogical, badly written redneck horror movies needs to end, now. There's nothing left to do with this genre, and it's time everyone came to terms with that.

IMDB link

FrightFest '07: Joshua

This film is a mess. Masquerading as a sub-Omen/Bad Seed scary child horror film, it's really not much more than a made-for-TV movie about yuppies who can't look after their children.

The eponymous Joshua is a slightly strange child - he's gifted at playing the piano, highly intelligent, articulate, and well-read. Apparently, these signifiers point straight to "evil." And although Jacob Kogan gives it his all, Joshua doesn't actually seem to do anything in the film that's actually evil. The events in the film are triggered by the birth of his baby sister: his parents (a very shouty Sam Rockwell and a woman with obvious mental health problems that no-one in the film seems prepared to acknowledge) gives all their attention to the new baby, so Joshua starts acting out in order to win some affection.

Honestly, with the typical unreliable narrator bit going on, it's actually very hard to point to anything Joshua does during the course of the film that can actually be called evil. Sure, sometimes he's a bit creepy, and sometimes he's a bit naughty, and sometimes he's annoying, but - his parents neglect him to tend to their new baby, obviously favouring her because she's a good child whereas baby Joshua had been a bit of a handful. There are plenty of moments in which Joshua reaches out for their affection and they either ignore him or slam a door in his face. Honestly, I was rooting for the kid; when a child psychologist accuses Rockwell of abusing his child, you're presumably supposed to feel sorry for him, but it was more like he was just getting his comeuppance.

The final scene where Joshua sits at a piano and composes a love song to his gay uncle which implies he'd planned for his parents to be taken away so he could live with him is, well, troubling, to say the least. It comes off as more of a gay panic movie then, especially since all the signifiers of 'evil' in Joshua could equally be read as pointing to his homosexuality. So there's that, but really, the first problem with the film is that it's very, very dull. Nothing happens: it's not a horror movie.

IMDB link