Everyone is trying to put a brave face on it. But, frankly, Cannes is much quieter this year in every respect. In past years you couldn’t walkthrough the Palais or the main streets without fighting off swarms of press, buyers, sellers or hangers-on. Now there’s plenty of space. It seems that most people are coming for three or four days this year as opposed to the whole event. And it really shows. Perhaps this weekend will be busier as it usually is. But you can see the film market stalls have wider corridors between them, when usually you could just about squeeze through the rammed space. So Le Credit Crunch really is impacting on people and films here.

There were no free shortcake biscuits at the Scottish stall in the British-Pavilion either because of cutbacks. Now that’s one Crunch I do miss! It was up early this morning to get to ANIMALS, based on a script by Skippand Spector. Starring Marc (BUFFY) Blucas, Nicki (JEEPERS CREEPERS 2) Aycox and Naveen (LOST) Andrews, it’s about a pack of cannibalistic manima ls and how construction worker Blucas rebuffs his killer instincts, bequeathed him during rough sex with Aycox, to settle for the bar girl he really loves. The terrific cast really put this one across in some quite sexy and intriguing scenes. It might have minimal gore and the story hardly takes any original swerves, but I thought it was pretty good second tier terror.

Then it was on to the film I was most looking forward to, OSS 117: LOST INRIO, the sequel to CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES. Perhaps I was looking forward to it too much as returning director Michael Hazanavicius’ sequel proved a bit of an anticlimax. It still looks 60s fabulous and Jean Dujardin is as wonderful as ever as the chauvinist, racist French agent Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath. But it tries too hard to be funny telling the story of an ex-pat Nazi plot in Brazil to form a Fifth Reich and how our intrepid Eurospy royally screws it up to win the day without really trying. Some fantastic sequences aside – the crocodile spit-roasting, the zimmer frame hospital chase, the hippie beach love-in – it follows the same narrative schematic, with circus trapeze flashbacks to explain OSS 117’s vertigo, and is very much a case of diminishing returns. Shame.

Next up was the promo reel of the new French horror THE PACK from the LaFabrique mob who brought us INSIDE. Franck Richard’s blood-eating ghouls saga looks fine, so far. This was followed by Pierre Olivier Thevenin andJacques-Olivier Molon’s HUMAINS/HUMANS about a tribe of Neanderthalsliving in the Swiss Alps looking for females to breed with in their Devil’s Gorge lair. Ludicrous from start to finish, it resembles a group of extras from ONE MILLION YEARS BC wandering onto the CALVAIRE set. HUMANSis proof positive that the French Wave of horrors isn’t all MARTYRS and-INSIDE. You won’t be seeing this one anytime soon.

Tonight is the annual karaoke party hosted by the lovely Tim League from Austin’s Fantastic Fest. And I’ve been practising my entry for days now,‘Help Yourself’ (a Tom Jones hit in case you didn’t know). And tomorrow it’s one of our fullest movie days so far: TELL TALE, PAINTBALL, Chris Smith’s TRIANGLE, Jonathan King’s UNDER THE MOUNTAIN and Park Chan-wook’s THIRST. Speaking of BLACK SHEEP director King, we didn’t recognise him at first because he’s lost so much weight. But we’re hearing great things about his scary children’s fantasy.

Alan

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