POSTCARDS FROM CANNES
May 21st - Day eight.

It’s a night in at Villa FrightFest. I’ve just been in the Jacuzzi, Greg and Ian are watching football (boring!) And Paul? Well he’s at yet another party hoping it will be better than the last. He might just get a canapé this time amongst the 5000 other crowded into the usual ten square feet of beach. The weather hasn’t really improved, which is good actually, because it means we’ve watched more movies than ever before. FrightFest August is looking to have a truly wide-ranging array of titles.

So what have we been seeing? In no particular order, file Jennifer Lynch’s SURVEILLANCE under CSI: Bland. If anyone other that David’s daughter had directed this laughable NATURAL BORN KILLERS riff, it would have quickly been dismissed as basic art house fare. We all loved Frank Henenlotter’s BAD BIOLOGY. It’s uneven, indulgent and absolutely hilarious. No one is making this type of midnight movie anymore. But Henenlotter’s fabulous-looking sleazoid shocker - about a girl with seven clits who gives birth to mutant babies every two hours meeting a guy whose fed his long schlong steroids - brings back the John Waters glory days.

One of my firm favourites here has been Agnes Merlet’s beautifully shot DOROTHY, which in essence is THE WICKER MAN meets THE 6th SENSE. Euro star du jour Carice van Houten plays a psychiatrist investigating nasty goings on in an Irish island community. Something else quite special is Mark Tonderai’s HUSH starring William Ash as an MI driver hunted by a white slave trucker. Great suspense and a terrific climax that everyone at the first Cannes screening cheered enthusiastically. J T Petty’s THE BURROWERS is a strange one, a monster movie set in the Old West. It’s THE SEARCHERS meets TREMORS but keeps it’s creatures off screen for a tad too long. Daniel (BLAIR WITCH 2) Myrick’s THE OBJECTIVE fails in its efforts to give an alien explanation to the Afghan Taliban fighting. Anthony Hicox’s return to the genre KNIFE EDGE is also a failed attempt to revive those Hammer-style Hitchcock movies of the early 60s like HYSTERIA and PARANOIC.

Oddest movie is Duane Graves and Justin Meeks’ THE WILDMAN OF THE NAVIDIDAD from Kim Henkel, famed producer of the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It’s a deliberately retro-styled BIGFOOT type Z movie that now only tests the patience. Ian getting up in the morning is scarier than the bloke covered in fur coats finally glimpsed in full at the end. I absolutely loved the Spanish BEFORE THE FALL about a meteor on collision course with the Earth that will obliterate all human life in three days (the original title being TRES DIAS). The ensuing panic leaves all prisons unmanned and a serial child killer escapes to return home for one last act of murder. F. Javier Gutierrez’ stunning genre crossbreed is one of the best-directed movies in the Cannes market.

Another Spanish movie is GOD’S FORGOTTEN TOWN that finds Nazi ghosts haunting a deserted mountain village. Not boring, just a bit too TV movie in many respects. MY NAME IS BRUCE really is for Bruce Campbell fans only. Trust me! But an absolute joy to watch is Howard McCain’s epic science fiction adventure fantasy OUTLANDER. Jim Caviezel is the astronaut crashing his spaceship in 700 AD Norway and unleashing a giant alien creature on the local Viking tribes. Big, glossy, and acted with conviction by John Hurt, Ron Perlman and Sophia Myles, there’s gore aplenty, the thrills are many and the CGI monster is pretty good too.

Today was my day off from the horror to indulge my other love, disco. And DISCO, one of France’s biggest hits of the year, was fabulous. Think THE FULL MONTY, French-style, with three Le Havre losers reforming their Bee Gees tribute band for a dance competition. Loved it. I followed that with what couldn’t have been a starker contrast. TONY MANERO from Chile is about a SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER fan entering a Manero lookalike contest. But he murders for the money to build a glass floor in the tacky club where he works. A brutal allegory of the Pinochet regime and its victims, this political shocker doesn’t shy away from violence or explicit sexuality, Favourite scene? When GREASE replaces SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER at his local cinema, the disco nut kills the projectionist, steals the film and runs the entire film over a torchlight in his seedy bedroom. I know just how he felt.

So, until next time

Alan.

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