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FRIGHTFEST 2004 FESTIVAL REPORT
WARNING: By necessity, this page contains a number of spoilers There's been something of a tradition at past Frightfests to kick proceedings off with a British film - sadly, for the most part they've been disappointments and usually got things off to a very dodgy start, a fact admitted from the stage by Frightfest co-organiser Ian Rattray. In the past we've been subjected to Lighthouse in 2000 [an under-achieving slasher], The Bunker in 2001 [the best of the bunch], the truly excerable Nine Lives in 2002 and the not-much-better Octane in 2003. For 2004, however, the fifth anniversary of Britain's most engaging genre festival, the tradition was wisely ditched in favour of a screening of the astonishing Korean thriller Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park of Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok JSA / Joint Security Area [2000] and Boksuneun naui geot / Sympathy for Mr Vengeance [2002] fame. The director was on hand to introduce the film via a translator, apologising to those who'd turned up expecting Hellboy and further apologising for offering up such a "weak" film! Weak is certainly not a word anyone could ever use in connection with Oldboy. The plot is as outrageous as it is enthralling, skating dangerously close to the ridiculous but just about staying on the tracks thanks to excellent performances and expert scripting - In 1988, Oh Dae-su is snatched from the street while on a drunken night out with his best friend and imprisoned by unknown captors. 15 years later, he's unexpectedly released and he sets out to find out who stole his life, murdered his wife and orphaned his baby daughter and why. Brutal, raw and uncompromising, Oldboy is the most savage revenge thriller in years - not even the excellent Kill Bill [2003 - 2004] comes close. It develops and builds on the themes that informed Boksuneun naui geot but takes them off in entirely unexpected directions, featuring some of the most unsettling scenes imaginable - don't expect to be seeing the live squid eating scene survive in many territories! When the big twist comes about three quarters of the way through, it's devastating, one of the most shocking reveals I've seen in many years - the implications resonate right through to the very last line of the film ["I love you"] which itself is deeply unsettling in its implications. The key to the film are the outstanding performances - Min-Sik Choi [recognizable to knowledgeable fans from the excellent Swiri [1999]] is brilliant as the tortured Oh Dae-su, his haunted eyes speaking volumes as the overwhelming tragedy unfolds around him. It's an emotionally draining performance as he roars through every emotion imaginable, from righteous anger, through terror and self-doubt right through to abject despair and self-loathing and Choi pulls it all off brilliantly. Wonderful though the direction, scripting, sound design and music are, Oldboy would be a much lesser film without him. He's given sterling support from Ji-tae Yu [from Natural City [2003] and Geoul sokeuro / Into the Mirror [2003]] as the "villain" of the piece who plays it to perfection, transforming a potentially clichéd role into an ambiguous turn that manages to beg our sympathy as much as our revulsion. In the pivotal role of Mido, Kang Hye-Jeong is excellent, her relationship with the other characters giving the film its queasy, unsettling undercurrent. Oldboy has been championed by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth and it's easy to see why. It's further proof - if any where really needed - that South Korea is the place to watch in Asia at the moment - and confirming the brilliant Chan-wook Park as one of the great contemporary directors. Inevitably, there was a nagging fear that after such a stunning opening, things could only go downhill from here. Thankfully, that proved not to be the case. Next up came the highly fancied French slasher Haute tension, playing here under its nonsensical English language title Switchblade Romance. For the most part, it's an astonishing film, stylish, brutal and relentless, taking unexpected twists and turns as it plays out every cliché of the slasher genre but gives them enough deviations to keep you off guard. Largely shot without dialogue after the first 20 minutes or so, it's a stripped down, in-your-face and classy crowd pleaser. Students Marie [Cécile De France] and Alex [Maïwenn Le Besco] arrive at the remote country home of Alex’s family to catch up on their studies only to fall foul of a psychotic killer who turns up in a rusty old van. The family is slaughtered, Alex is abducted and its up to the terrified but resourceful Marie to rescue her. But not everything is as it seems... Aja clearly had a lot of fun thinking up ways to wrong-foot a knowledgeable audience, never quite doing what we expect he's going to do - he endeared himself to Frightfesters by not skimping on the gore and the slaughter at the farmhouse drew an appreciative round of applause for its sheer audaciousness. But it derails somewhat when we reach the twist ending - the revelation that Marie is actually the killer doesn't quite hold together and certainly doesn't gel with everything we've seen throughout the rest of the film. It's also distracting that although both the audience and Alex now knows that Marie is the killer, we still see "him" represented on screen, from the viewpoint of Alex, as the male killer. Superficially, it's a clever twist - I for one never saw it coming - but it doesn't really work. Still, until it happens, Haute tension is a brilliant piece of work, bloody, tense and well acted and one can only hope that Aja makes more of the same, but without the need to play M. Night Shyamalan at his own game. Finally, an excellent first night was rounded out by Toolbox Murders, a film I had few expectations of - it was made by Tobe Hooper, whose career certainly hasn't suggested that he's up to much away from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, and was a remake of a film I think is pretty awful so what were the chances that it'd be any good at all? Well surprisingly, despite once again proving that Hooper is a one-trick pony, it was a lot better than it had any right to be. It's certainly a lot better than the original, a rather dull and prosaic slasher best remembered for the admittedly brutal nailgun attack on Kelly Nichols. Teacher Nell [Angela Bettis] and her doctor husband Steven [Brent Roam] move into a new apartment in the run-down Hollywood hotel Lusman Arms. Surrounded by a fine collection of eccentrics and weirdos and distressed by the poor state of the currently under-renovation building, Nell becomes increasingly unhappy. But things are about to get a lot worse when a masked killer begins using the contents of his toolbox as weapons on a mass-murder rampage. Hooper does well to give his remake a genuine 70s feel and its by far and away his strongest film in years. There's plenty of gore, tension by the bucket load and some very witty shocks, Hooper cleverly deflecting his audience away from where we think the scares are coming from and springing them on us from an altogether unexpected direction. Hooper makes nods to former glories [the killer favours power tools as weapons and turns out to be a hideous freak closely related to the monstrosity that haunted The Funhouse [1981]] and keeps the action moving even when the script [from the writers of Spiders [2000], Crocodile [2000] and Crocodile 2: Death Swamp [2002] - hardly an encouraging pedigree] takes a turn for the predictable near the end. The occult nonsense is poorly thought out and doesn't really add anything to the film, but Hooper makes what he can of it and keeps the violence and shocks coming thick and fast. Toolbox Murders went down well with an appreciative
crowd, bringing to a successful close the best opening night that Frightfest
has put together so far. It bodes well for the rest of the weekend and
if the next couple of days can live up this excellent beginning, we're
in for an excellent weekend. Fingers crossed...
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