FrightFest

2/10 - Actively disliked this one. Irrelevant IR photography and filters made it look as uninteresting as the plot. The odd scene with blatently adult hellions didn't help.

Bad fest for Satanic births so far...

Thank you very much for posting these reviews.

I sat next to you 2 or 3 years back and found you were very agreeable company. I'm not there this year but am keeping up with things via your thoughts here. Enjoy the rest of the festival.

Best wishes,

Graham

This was our red herring film of the day. It started off very promising but just fell apart and it felt like we were watching a badly edited music video towards the end. Really liked the lead character but it just didn't know what sort of genre it wanted to be. The soundtrack also got very tiresome. It really was an abortion of a film, quite literally !

I'm going to stand up for Hellions - I thought it was a fine psychedelic horror film - great interior filming in the scene where the house was attacked, creepy little 'Trick r Treat'-esq hellion people. A bit derivative sure - but great fun for a Friday morning.

I fell asleep in this one. It was annoying

At the beginnning of day 4, this is still the worst of the festival for me. The setup in the first 20 minutes is reasonably decent - there's a scene where Dora and her boyfriend are lying in a pumpkin field that had a nice Ray Bradbury atmosphere. The doctor wearing his goblin ears was a good bit of visual wit, etc. Things just start to fall apart as soon as the Hellions arrive. Desaturating the image and applying a pink or violet tint did not help create the surreal dreamworld I presume the director was aiming for, it just made the film very unpleasant to look at. And as for that horrible repetitive soundtrack started up, it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. As if the visual and aural unpleasantness wasn't enough, it became a mess of random imagery and confused narrative, including characters acting like idiots. It was a relief when it was over.

2/10

What were the exploding pumpkins about? Anyone?

Not without its flaws as already documented, but I quite liked the story and I loved some of the visuals. 7.5 / 10

Great visuals...odd story, somewhat dreamlike and maybe we had all had our fill of possessed pregnancies after the night before. Still, about 5 films in and we'd had Michael Ironside, Lance Henrikson and Robert Patrick ! That's a result in my book.

I considerPontypoolthe single scariest movie I've seen so I think its good this one took a different approach and didn't try to outdo it. That said, while slightly disturbing it could've been a lot beter.

Absolute load of cinematic tosh. The biggest let down of the festival