-Ritchie gangster-fangster mash-up Dead Cert or in Kim Tae-kyun’s overlong and underwritten teen manga adaptation Higanjima: Escape From Vampire Island. The werewolves in Jonathan Glendening’s 13Hrs may buck convention with their hairlessness, and their destructive transformations may reflect the decline and fall of a propertied English family, but none of this quite saved the film from feeling like a soap opera with claws. As for the rubber-suited, dolphin-headed extra-terrestrials or their PVC-sporting antagonist assassins in Seiji Chiba’s outrageous (and awful) mockbuster Alien Vs. Ninja, the less said the better.
More interesting were those productions that went for less traditional movie monsters. Both Carlos Brooks’ domestic thriller Burning Bright and Patrick Hughes’ Ozploitation oater Red Hill unleash big cats – the former carefully building to its high-concept premise (a would-be co-ed and her younger autistic brother trapped in a house with a ravenous tiger) so that it somehow seems less preposterous than it sounds on paper, and the latter making its cryptid ‘black panther’ reflect the troubled history of race relations in a small Australian town – and an entire nation. Also from Australia, Josh Reed’s body horror Primal uses the feeding-and-breeding cycle of a primeval outback parasite to furnish the perfect context for the most taboo word in the English language.
Horror cinema can go for decades without exploiting Irish folklore, but this year not one but two FrightFest films resorted to the monsters of Celtic mythology. Brett Anstey’s witless, plodding Damned By Dawn tries (and largely fails) to blend Sam Raimi’s special brand of comic gothic with the legend of the Banshee, while Colm McCarthy’s Outcast reimagines the alienated, underground existence of the ancient aes sídhe in the modern setting of an Edinburgh housing estate. McCarthy’s film may have been relegated to the Discovery Programme, but it proved, unlike Anstey’s, to be one of the Festival standouts. Though certainly original, the creatures eventually revealed in Franck Richard’s The Pack are far less entertaining than the game of guess-the-genre that the director deftly plays in the film’s first third. On the other hand, the exquisitely realised gigantic squid-like aliens in Gareth Edwards’ low-budget triumph Monsters merely form the reflective background to a romantic adventure story in which a journalist and his employer’s daughter find themselves becoming the strangers in a strange land that they had thought they knew.
If the real monsters in Edwards’ debut are Americans with their knee-jerk militarism, insularity and xenophobia, there were plenty of other films at this year’s Festival exploring humanity at its most bestial. “We’re monsters,” declares the matriarch in Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, and although her impoverished family slays together to stay together, in this bleak state-of-the-nation allegory, all sectors of Mexican society seem equally governed by carnality, predation and a cool indifference to the lives of others. Tammi Sutton’s Isle of Dogs presents a similar dog-eat-dog underworld of criminals, prostitutes and cops, but the artifices of its many twists and turns never really add up to anything believable enough to be engaging, while the eclectic score (matching the film’s fluidity of genre) is placed so high in the sound mix that much of the dialogue has been rendered inaudible.
Several of the Festival’s human monsters were female. The heroine (Seo Young-hee) of Jang Cheol-soo’s Bedevilled is driven to vengeful insanity by her abusive treatment, exploitation and abandonment on a supposedly idyllic island of South Korea, while conversely David Blyth’s nightmarish Wound plays out its scenarios of incest, perversion, loss and revenge in the arrested unconscious of its protagonist (Kate O’Rourke). In Pang Ho-Cheung’s gloriously deranged Dream Home, on the other hand, a driven young Hong Kong woman (Josie Ho) readily slices and dices her way through eleven total strangers to realise her dream of owning an apartment with a harbour view, in what is perhaps the first horror film to exploit the anxieties surrounding the property market.
Robert Lieberman’s The Tortured turns the tables on the conventions of ‘torture porn’ by presenting us with a couple, tormented by grief and loss, who visit upon their son’s torturer-cum-murderer a twisted taste of his own medicine – only to discover that they might have made a terrible mistake. Never celebrating the couple’s vengeful actions, nor allowing them any easy ethical justification, the film lets no-one off the hook lightly – even if it suffers from its own bludgeoning lack of subtlety. Much better in this subgenre was Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones, where the torturers are a pretty-in-pink would-be prom queen (Robin McLeavy) and her unhealthily doting daddy (John Brumpton), the victim is a depressed schoolboy (Xavier Samuel) already prone to self-harm, and the hysterical grotesquery of the punishments meted out (in an improvised domestic disco) are offset by the film’s seriousness when it comes to dramatising the damage wrought on a small-town community by irrational acts of horror.
The monsters in Johannes Roberts’ F are silent, hooded youths who invade the corridors of a comprehensive school one evening – yet by showing no interest whatsoever in the motives or even identities of these faceless assailants, and instead choosing to focus on the creepy, somewhat unhinged persona of the English teacher (David Schofield) whose fears appear to have conjured them, the film adds an unsettling psychological dimension to all its frenzied cat-and-mouse thrills. Paul Andrew Williams’ Cherry Tree Lane takes a similarly bleak view of youth culture, suggesting that the gap of mutual incomprehension between a middle-aged, middle-class couple and their adolescent, drug-dealing intruders can only be bridged by violence and revenge.
Unfolding in real time and entirely within the confines of a suburban home, Williams’ film ought to have been a shoo-in for the prize of most claustrophobic film – but then along came Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried, in which truck-driving contractor Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up interred in a wooden coffin somewhere in Iraq, left to contend (by cell phone) with officious US operators, devious hostage negotiators, angry abductors, poisonous snakes and a fast-dwindling air supply in his desperate attempt to get out alive. Cortés boxes us right in with Paul for the film’s breathless duration, while still managing to expose the Coalition’s disastrously dug-in adventurism in the Middle East to the sort of incisive commentary that has eluded many other films set on far broader canvases. The final act of Buried is as tense as anything this reviewer has ever seen.
In fact, Buried was a ‘surprise film’, brought in after Srdjan Spasojevic’s shocking national allegory A Serbian Film had to be removed from the programme at the last minute. With its censor-baiting combination (often in one scene) of sex, violence and children, Spasojevic’s film came with a ready-made notoriety that led Westminster Council to demand, for the first time, that only a BBFC-approved version could be screened at FrightFest. When the BBFC insisted that an edit be resubmitted with 49 cuts, i.e. almost four whole minutes slashed and burned from the filmmaker’s original vision, the film was pulled. Similarly, the I Spit On Your Grave remake could only be shown in a (modestly) cut version. All of which lent a sense of timely urgency to Jake West’s documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, tracing the ill-conceived history of VHS seizures and censorship in the Eighties. Entertaining and horrifying all at once, it is West’s best film by a wide margin – and the subsequent on-stage panel discussion offered plenty of food for thought about how easily history can repeat itself.
Several of the films here thrived on diabolically sustained ambiguities. In Max Sender’s Christopher Roth, we are never quite sure whether a series of monstrous murders take place in the Italian countryside where a blocked thriller writer is vacationing (Joaquim de Almeida), or entirely in the author’s creative imagination. When, in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s After.Life, a schoolteacher (Christina Ricci) wakes up on a mortuary slab, we remain uncertain to the end whether she is alive or dead, and indeed whether the funeral director (Liam Neeson) is genuinely a psychopomp cursed with a sixth sense that enables him to converse with the recently deceased, or merely a psychopath who heavily sedates his still-living victims before formally sending them on their way. Similarly, Daniel Stamm’s faux-documentary Festival closer The Last Exorcism leaves us unsure whether the