FrightFest

3/10 - Emotionally uninvolving... and otherwise just an incoherent mess anyway. If the Empire IMAX seats weren't as tight I'd have walked out of this one.

Had been looking forward to this, but was disappointed - a pretentious film with numerous repeated scenes and camera work that was more often confusing than clever. The story threatened to become interesting a few times and I liked the nightclub scenes and part of the soundtrack (not the old music though!), but ultimately the plot was quite basic and overall it wasn't as clever or smart as it seemed to think it was. 5 / 10

You guys are far too kind...

I think even calling this a film is a stretch. More a simulacrum of scenes stolen from other films, put through a confusion filter and thrown together in some vague hope it will cohere into something watchable. It doesn't. A plot-less, pointless mess, incompetently shot and edited. 1/10

1/10 Bunch of arse.

Utter fucking shite.

I really liked Pod a few years back so I'll be generous and say the director was going for a Lynchian feel to this film but fell short. I'm all for a bit of surrealism but this just felt repetitive and unrewarding.

Oh dear. I actually quite liked it. Although I could see by the people leaving in droves that it wasn't going down well.

Probably not a good choice for a late-nighter, but I enjoyed the arty cinematography, heightened sound effects and off-kilter music choices. In fact I think it would've worked better if they'd cut out Larry Fessenden's incongrous performance as Henry Earl Starkweather, dropped the unnecessary voiceover and abandoned any pretence of a plot.

I HATED this movie, it was a complete mess of confusing elements that tried to be linked stories and failed miserably. Just as Soapmaker says, I think it would have been a lot better without the starkweather plot and just did them as 3 short stories - the rapist/femme fatale, Lumbering masked killer/police officer and the mental patient.

Doing that would also help account for the various time issues (what time period were we in?!), which only added to the confusion. I did love the escaped mental patient character, though, as long as she wasnt doing the overly long song peice.

I really liked it. Stylish, experiential cinema, not of the kind you often see. It looked and sounded amazing on that screen. One of my favourite films of the festival. Genuinely surprising, immersive and engaging - far more so than a lot of by-the-numbers stuff on the main screen. I think I am in a minority though

Horrible, boring and not a last movie of the night in anyone's book.

Masks do not a film make.

Should have been swapped with Meatball Machine Kodoku

1/10

TheDukeAbides wrote: ↑Wed Aug 30, 2017 7:53 pm Should have been swapped with Meatball Machine Kodoku

And then I could have had an early night!

But you're right, Psychopaths wasn't a good choice for a late-nighter, it would've been far more at home on a Disco screen.

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 psychopaths to congregate in the town over a single night (although I can't quite make sense of this because some of the psychopaths seem to have been operating in the town for a while). It sounds like it has potential for a straightforward horror movie, but the realisation is to have the entire movie made up of a sequence of vignettes involving the psychopaths killing/torturing people or doing "crazy" things which often involve long monologues to the camera. All the vignettes are stylish with nice composition and use of music, but they never add up to anything resembling a plot or explanation of events and it becomes impossible to care about any of the characters or their murderous antics. A shame, because some of the performances might have been effective in a better movie, with Ashley Bell standing out as a psychopath who thinks she's a fifties housewife. It was bad but unfortunately not bad in a way that a Frightfest crowd can still enjoy. I saw quite a few walk-outs as people got fed up with it and left.

This was dissapointing, from the write up and trailer this was one that I was really looking forward to. No real story to tell, with the most interesting parts being the mask guy and the Ashley Bell character. I sort of feel bad for Ashley Bell because she did a great job and it feels like a waste in a movie like this. It was almost interesting but I would never put myself through watching this movie again.

I thought it was perfect for a late night. What would you rather watch round midnight, the complex plot of Villainess?
The plot is easy to follow, on the night a killer is executed the city goes crazy and blood thirsty and it's explained through narration

If you go channel surfing you'll easily find much worse horrors out there. Something like Feed the Ghost with Nicolas Cage- yeah it has a plot but it's so bland and a lot of horrors are like this nowadays. This was creative, visually interesting. It gave me what I wanted: mayhem, violence, good music, wild visuals, surprises and the singer/killer was awesome. She should get her own spin off.