FrightFest

7/10 - Pretty good, though the initially vapid characters took a while to gel. The gore shot for Jogger #1 was comedically bad.

Not very profound and most of the characters are not particularly likeable either, but certainly delivered some of the best kills of the fest. Very gory, with humour mixed in, including some very random elements - what was going on with those manatees?!!

Strangely had more issues with wobbly cam in this than in Boots on the Ground!

7.5 / 10

I expected this to be rubbish, since it had apparently won the Bronze award at some festival where the feeble Dead Shack got the Gold...

It didn't start well, with the familiar assortment of hateful, hard-partying, sex- and drugs-obsessed brats. But as soon as the game itself began I was suddenly impressed. Not the most ingenious of plots and it almost came off the rails with too much speech-making at the end, but I liked the style and the pacing, it all just clicked for me.

Also neat design on the opening and closing credits, the animated sequence and the game itself. Very neat indeed.

5 minutes in and hating all the characters I wasn't too enthused but once the first head exploded I was won over! One of the best of the fest!

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 anyway) and no explanation about why the game is doing this or where it comes from. Essentially it was just a plot device to get a gorefest moving. To be fair, the gory deaths are entertaining and it worked well as a Frightfest midnight film, but beyond watching people being reduced to bloody messes to an electronica soundtrack I wanted some more meat to the story.