Aaand here we are mid festival and it's certainly been a strange year, with far less attendees than usual and many who have ventured to the south of France have been out for a much shorter stay than in previous years. This is all not such a bad thing as it has been much easier to move around the Croisette melting pot.

The last couple of days have seen screenings of Christopher Smith's latest TRIANGLE, a twisty turny Aussie ship bound saga which I found very satisfying, NINE MILES DOWN from Anthony (MUTE WITNESS) Waller - which had a decent enough premise but failed to deliver the required shocks and suspense, UNDER THE MOUNTAIN from Jonathan King, one of our previous fest guests (BLACK SHEEP) which is a very nicely sustained teen audience tale that also delivers some nice adult oriented scares. The new Park Chan Wook THIRST an overlong but sporadically pleasing vampire tale with some coo lnew twists for the genre.

Amongst all this new mayhem there have been plenty of announcements for forthcoming genre product. Eli Roth producing a devilish tale entitled COTTON, Christophe Gans' FANTOMAS based on the age old French comics and films and an English language shocker from the INSIDE guys entitled LIVID.

I also spent time rushing around the various sales agents offices collecting flyers and screeners and viewing early footage from forthcoming genre items. This always takes a lot of time as their are many hundreds ofthese peppered along the length and breadth of Cannes, but some gems canbe discovered, so it's always worth the effort.

Also interviewed Jake West and the aforementioned Jonathan King on the beach for one of Ian's forthcoming podcasts. Still a whole slew of films to come over the next few days ranging fromthe obscure and unheard of to Von Trier's foray into horror ANTI CHRIST and Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERD'S.

Until the next time...

Paul.

Back to index