FrightFest

This arrived at Frightfest as the most hyped-up film and in the event it was good, but a bit of a disappointment. First of all the acting is superb: the whole film rests on the shoulders of Essie Davis and seven-year-old Noah Wiseman, they're both never less than riveting and Wiseman gives a complet...

Mediocre but acceptable US horror, full of jump scares with loud music stings. A few of the scares are quite effective, many just seem cheap. The script at least tried to be a bit original in the twists that occurred along the way and the use of dual timelines, but it needed to be a lot tighter and ...

I didn't really like it. A shame as I thought that Bustillo and Maury's Inside was a modern classic of intense terror and Livid was good. The setup of why the kids are targeted doesn't make sense: the bearded guy insists that the police will eventually take the kids seriously, but surely the police ...

Rom-zom-com in the current US indie comedy deapan style. I rather liked it and there were some good funny moments but the whole thing felt a bit throwaway and forgettable. I don't know why there were so many poor reviews: it seems like it would be hard to dislike it. Audrey Plaza's performance was f...

Not particularly suited for the festival. It started off very well, with a gradual series of reveals building up a good air of mystery, and Laurence Fishburne adding some gravitas to the proceedings. About halfway through things start to go downhill, with an increasing number of reveals that are sil...

Fascinating triptych of shorts set in a Northampton nightclub that is also a form of purgatory. Filled with symbolism and mystical concepts, this was one of the most interesting things shown. Alan Moore's dialogue is great as always. The only thing that let it down a bit was that some of the second ...

Some of the scenes of the zombies attacking were really good and inventive, and there are some cool shots of the Nazi zombies striding around. Unfortunately a lot of the humour didn't work for me: basically all the humour involving slapstick gory violence was excellent, and all the character-based h...

Show Pieces was a highlight of the discovery screen for me. Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins' Q&A afterwards was probably the best Q&A I saw at the festival. Robert Englund's Q&A for Nightmare on Elm Street was also really good. And of course the two short film showcases had some great stuf...

Micro-budget hardcore torture porn. It's mostly a single setting and the film does a good job of keeping things tight and fast-moving, with dialogue driving conflict between the characters. Production values are low and some of the acting is a bit dodgy but there's a lot of amusement and tension: me...

This comes with the promise of Franco Nero and a killer mermaid, but both of those two are hardly in it. Instead, what it it's mostly a fisherman stomping about stabbing people. It's a very unoriginal and predictable slasher film set in the Mediterranean but with 30-somethings instead of teens which...

This is tied with Housebound as my favourite film of the festival. It's got excellent cinematography and a fascinating story. It reminded me of last year's Stranger by the Lake in that it figurates homosexual desire as a muderer seducing the protagonist, but here it's more about repressed desire and...

The story isn't especially original as it's a variation on the selling-your-soul trope and it doesn't do anything interesting with the concept, but there are some beautifully composed visuals and sound that contribute to a dream-like quality that the film has. There are some nice characterisation to...

This was showing on the smallest screen, but I went because it looked interesting and I'd seen House at the End of Time and Stage Fright . It's a very stylistic horror, heavily indebted to the Italian stylists and Satanic panic films of the seventies, but featuring a lot of modern colour-grading and...

There's not much to say about this one other than that it delivers on the promise of its title. I enjoyed it quite a bit, the zombie beavers are cute and funny and it does the routine of teens being slaughtered in a cabin in the woods to decent and often amusing effect. Not entirely predictable in i...

Very poor stuff. It presents itself as a political commentary on student activism and the relationship between the developed and undeveloped world. There is plenty of material that could have been mined for commentary, but it doesn't really have a political viewpoint, more a cynical nihilism in whic...