FrightFest

I thought this was extremely funny when it was starting out, but gradually got worse as went along. I think the two problems were firstly that they didn't have enough material for a full feature, so there are long excursions from the main plotline when I wanted the film to get on with it, and second...

One of the best of the festival. This was an intense thriller that went down well with the crowd. It doesn't do anything new, so that might be a problem in its memorability, but the way it tells its story, with its dual timelines and gradually rising level of intensity helps to fix the viewer's atte...

Excellent Christmas horror with some great twists, rising tension and a lot of interesting psychological interplay between the killer and the victim. I could feel the Frightfest audience getting into this a lot, laughing at the beginning and then gasping at the shocking moments later on in the film....

This felt a lot like Pulp Fiction with its cast of colourful criminals and interlocking achronological storytelling. There were a lot of these Pulp Fiction knockoffs in the nineties, so Lowlife feels like its coming late to the party but it justifies its existence through strong characterisation and...

It feels cartoonish and videogame-like throughout, in the same way that Lynch's previous film Everly did, but here it focusses on humour more than horror. There's not much gore: the violence tends to be a slapstick sort, and the film generally cuts away just before the bloody demises of the villains...

Did anybody else go and see this? A bit of disclosure: I hate Dapper Laughs and everything he stands for, but I went to see this because I had friends involved in its making. On the plus side the film isn't offensive or misogynistic in the same manner as British laddish horror comedies like Lesbian ...

To say too much about this will give the plot away, and one of the main pleasures is to watch the unexpected directions it takes. It starts off very well with some harshly brutal but compelling scenes that are effectively disturbing, but the second half of the movie is told through flashback, and be...

It probably wasn't for the best that this was the film chosen to finish off the first evening. Saying that this film was abstract is the nicest way of putting it. Incoherent would be more accurate. The basic idea is that a serial killer is executed and his madness and evil causes a group of psychopa...

This Kane Hodder documentary was one of the better movies I saw at Frightfest. Even if you don't know and don't like Hodder's movies, he still has a very inspiring life story, going from spending six months close to death after a fire-stunt gone wrong to setting a world record for the longest full-b...

Lots of fun gore in this one, but has problems preventing it from being a fulfilling story. It gets the plot moving very quickly but then it's just a succession of gory deaths and that means there's almost no characterisation (some characters' personalities seem to change over the course of the film...

I got a bit teary at the start with Adam Greens tale about his hardships and his relationship with Wes and Romero and I wish him all the best (plus Adams cute as a button), but I hope for a little more innovation in future endeavors. I missed the intro because I got confused about the starting time...

If you've seen The Game or the recent Fear, Inc. you have a good idea what to expect, with a constant barrage of twists trying to confuse the viewer as to whether things are really happening or not. With these sorts of movies there's always a tension between how many of the reversal twists can be pi...

Underwhelming horror comedy. Neither the horror or comedy is as successful as it could have been, with the horror often soft-pedalled and shot in darkness, and the comedy having more misses than hits, with most of the humour being based around the characters getting drunk and insulting one another r...

I thought Curse of Chucky was a reasonable return to form and surprisingly good for a sixth entry, however Cult of Chucky , while retaining some of the fun, is a definite step down. Don Mancini introduced the film saying that the "cult" of the title was meant to represent the fans and that...

The acting and characterisation is good and sells the rising tension, anger and desparation. A lot of the time in these limited location movies, things can get boring and repetitive, but the compelling performances and direction hold interest all the time. It just seems to lack something: there isn'...