FrightFest 2011: Steph’s Report (Part 1)
by Stephanie Scaife
Traditionally the August bank holiday weekend is synonymous with the last hurrah of summer, people insist on BBQing come rain or shine and enjoy the three day weekend relaxing and hoping for sunshine. For me however it means one thing… FrightFest, the UK’s best known and largest genre film festival.
I’ve been coming to FrightFest since 2003 when it was still housed at the much loved but (at the time) rather dingy repertory cinema The Prince Charles, just off of London’s Leicester Square, a 300 seat cinema that dipped in the middle and didn’t have air conditioning. Despite the rather humble and inauspicious beginnings FrightFest has continued to grow in size and popularity into a festival which now spans across five days, is housed in the 1300 seat Screen 1 of The Empire cinema and attracts a host of international filmmakers and genre fans.
FrightFest is always a mixed bag, I’ve seen films that have completely blown me away (Let the Right One In, Red, White and Blue) and films that are so diabolically bad they’ve left me longing for those 90 minutes of my life that I’d just lost back (House of the Dead, The Tortured) but from experience I’ve found it’s best to keep your expectations low and your caffeine intake high because there are always a few surprises and almost certainly never a dull moment.
2011 kicked off on Thursday with Troy Nixey’s feature directorial debut Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, based on a cult 1973 TV movie of the same name and produced by Guillermo del Toro. The film stars Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes as Alex and Kim, an architect couple who have invested in a 19th century mansion that they are in the process of restoring when Alex’s young daughter Sally reluctantly comes to live with them. Unbeknownst to the new owners of the mansion, the cavernous basement houses a race of small but very evil fairy folk whose primary diet is made up of children’s teeth. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is adequately creepy and I enjoyed the monsters, although it could have benefitted from holding out on showing them so fully and so often from quite early on in the film. Holmes and Pearce are watchable and the little girl who plays Sally is also convincing and not nearly as annoying as so many precocious young child actors can be. Ultimately though there was nothing particularly new here and it all felt overly familiar. The ending seemed awfully rushed and abrupt despite the long set up to get there but I’d recommend it above most widely released horror films, despite it not being nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be.
Final Destination 5 was exactly as you’d expect. Someone has a premonition and foresees their own death; they narrowly avoid their fate and save a few friends along the way. But of course they were never supposed to survive and death comes a-knocking in increasingly ridiculous ways as the remaining survivors are killed off one by one. Meaning that plot wise this is exactly like the four other Final Destinations films that came before. However, this was the perfect opening night film for FrightFest, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Really it’s not a very good film at all, but it’s good fun and the death scenes are all wildly unfeasible and excessive. It’s the kind of film you can sit down to watch with your friends and have a few beers and instantly forget about it the next day. Nothing lost, nothing gained. The 3D was also okay for a change, and I am not a fan of the current 3D craze.
Friday was a real mixed bag of films that I had almost zero knowledge or expectations of. Kicking off with Jordan McClure’s Rogue River, which was essentially a film let down by the often unfathomable and almost always idiotic actions of the central characters. Mara (Michelle Page) drives to a remote woodland location to scatter the ashes of her newly deceased father, only to have her car towed away by the local sheriff. Lucky for her then that the kind hearted Jon (Bill Moseley) is there to offer her a ride into town. Jon insists on taking Mara to meet his wife Lea (Lucinda Jenney) on the way and she is soon convinced into staying for dinner and spending the night. Things soon go from bad to worse and Jon and Lea turn out to be, unsurprisingly, insane sociopathic murderers. I found Rogue River to be rather infuriating; it starts off relatively well and has a few surprising and disturbing moments but as it goes on the plot becomes more and more ridiculous and the actions of the characters become increasingly unfathomable. This is an almost entirely forgettable straight-to-DVD horror that doesn’t particularly warrant either praise or scorn; it’s just one of many unoriginal horror movies that borrows heavily from other better films and is unlikely to impress even the most forgiving genre fan.
Next up was The Holding, the directorial debut from Susan Jacobson, starring Kierston Wareing (Fish Tank) as Cassie Naylor, a single mother in financial difficulty who runs an isolated cattle farm in the English countryside with her two young daughters. One day the mysterious Aden (Vincent Regan) turns up claiming to be an old friend of Cassie’s missing husband Dean. Aden is quick to work his way into their lives despite the misgivings of Cassie’s eldest daughter Gemma. This psychological thriller plays out a lot like a really long and suspenseful episode of Emmerdale Farm, and as much as I wanted to like it there were just too many plot holes to make this film entirely effective or convincing. The cast all put in strong performances, particularly Regan as Aden, and the film looks good thanks to some decent camera work. However, the half-baked script really makes for infuriating viewing. During the Q&A afterwards the director talked about removing supernatural elements from the script which had been present in the original draft; however, I’m not sure that they were all entirely removed making some aspects of the film baffling and inexplicable, particularly the central plot twist surrounding Aden. It’s a flawed but promising first feature from Jacobson, who I hope to see more from in the future, and a film that I would somewhat reluctantly recommend.
Urban Explorers is somewhat difficult to review as the print they received didn’t have any English subtitles and one of the central characters spoke entirely in German… meaning that the vast majority of the audience, including me, could only understand about 80% of the spoken dialogue. However, this bog standard subterranean horror tale reminded me of something like Creep meets The Descent but not as good as either (which isn’t saying much really, Creep was rubbish). It’s undeniably ambitious and the director was certainly very enthusiastic and dedicated but overall the characters were far too disposable and I didn’t care one way or another whether or not they died. There were also some unresolved plot lines introduced early on that never really went anywhere, rendering them pointless. Later that evening when recounting to someone what films I’d seen that day, I completely forgot about this one and had to check the listings to remember what it was I’d watched. This essentially sums up my feelings on Urban Explorers.
Next up was The Glass Man starring Andy Nyman, Neve Campbell (sporting an awful English accent) and the always fabulous James Cosmo. The Glass Man is the feature length debut from Christian Solimeno, and it is an intriguing if overlong psychological thriller that missteps by revealing its central plot twist way too early on. It somewhat manages to redeem itself with the rather fantastic and understated central performances from Nyman and Cosmos but I found it to be a rather infuriating viewing experience and niggling problems made it altogether unconvincing. For the most part everyone else seemed to really love this, but it left me feeling a little cold. The less you know about this film the better, so I won’t give too much away but it’s neither as effective nor as clever as it thinks it is and ultimately I was just mostly bored (you can also read Ben’s more favourable review here).
Having already seen Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, which is great fun and I highly recommend it, I decided to check out Kidnapped in the Discovery Screen, which is a smaller screen running parallel to the main festival that shows smaller and lesser known releases. This is both a blessing and a curse: it’s good because you always have the options to see more than one film but it’s bad because it means you have to make some tough decisions as to what to see and what to miss. Kidnapped is a fantastic debut from Miguel Angel Vivas, an uncompromising home invasion story that is an extremely tense and accomplished first film. It was covered by Marc earlier in the year and you can read his review here.
Keep an eye out later in the week for the second part of my FrightFest coverage.
(Editor’s note – also look out for Ben’s festival report soon.)
