FrightFest 2005 - Day Four

Thanks to the vagaries of the London Underground timetabling policies [and, to be fair, my own dodgy memory - I'd forgotten that my local station closed on Bank Holidays] I got the Odeon West End just in time to catch by the skin of my teeth the first of many bone-crunching set-pieces that make up the quite extraordinary Thai action thriller Kerd ma lui / Born to Fight. Following in the wake of the even more extraordinary Ong-bak [2003], this is more of the same non-stop action, all of it delivered full contact with no wires and apparently no regard for personal health and safety.

After his partner is killed arresting notorious drug lord General Yang, cop Daew joins his sister on a charity trip with a group of athletes to a remote village. Where, quite by chance, Yang's militia turn up, slaughter half the village in a tremendous set-piece and hold the rest hostage until they get their leader released. But they have something else up their sleeves in the rather nasty shape of a nuclear missile aimed at Bangkok...

The distinction between actor, stunt man, athlete and suicidal maniac seems to be particularly blurred in Thailand and it's a small miracle that no-one was killed during the making of this quite astonishing film. Bodies are regularly beaten, broken, thrown from moving vehicles and otherwise badly abused for your entertainment in some of the most outrageous action scenes you'll ever see, all underscored by an excellent, pounding techno score - we were all worn out by the end cheering, applauding and wincing at every one of them. A personal favourite was the head-on collision between a truck and a motorcycle that saw the bike-riding Daew escaping certain death by leaping onto the roof of the truck at the very last second.

At heart, it's just Die Hard in a village but the plot is the last thing you're concerned with here. The sentimental nationalism won't travel well either but when you've action of this calibre - all of it seemingly performed by the actors themselves; can you imagine Hollywood "hard men" like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme or Diesel wanting to go through this even if they were allowed to? - that shouldn't hamper its international appeal.

If you are lucky enough to catch Born To Fight [a Region 2 DVD is on it's way any day now] be sure to sit through the end titles to catch behind the scenes footage of the stunts being prepared and evidence of just how close to serious injury and even death these madmen came when it all goes horribly wrong.

Brit horror legend David McGillivray [who penned such 70s faves as House of Whipcord [1974], Frightmare [1974] and Terror [1978]] was on hand to introduce his belated return to the genre, the short film Mrs Davenport's Throat which he wrote and produced for director Keith Claxton. I had the good fortune to interview McGillivray many years ago and he hasn't changed one bit - he's still as dry and self-deprecating as ever, taking some good-natured [and probably unrepeatable!] pot-shots at Alan Jones who took it all in great spirit.

The film itself is perhaps a little overlong but packs quite a punch with its genuinely surprising twist-in-the-tail. A chauffeur picks up Mrs Davenport at Lisbon airport and drives into town. He turns out to actually be an aggrieved associate of her late husband looking for the considerable sum of money he owes - but Mrs Davenport isn't all she seems to be either and turns the tables in spectacular fashion.

Despite a sluggish start, this is a well-crafted and ultimately quite gripping short whose twist you simply won't see coming. And the final shot is genuinely chilling in its implications. The great news is that McGilivray is already hard at work on another project - he's been away too long and its wonderful to have him back.

Wonderful isn't quite the word anyone would choose for Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, an unofficial in-name-only "prequel" to the Romero classic screened just three days ago. Cribbing most of its moves from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead [1985] is suggests that the zombie outbreak chronicled by Romero was caused by the accidental release of a secret germ warfare weapon retrieved from a defecting Russian agent - and now it's loose in a psychiatric hospital...

Oh, where to begin... There's nothing in any of the publicity material I've seen to suggest that Day of the Dead 2: Contagium was meant to be a comedy yet it raised more laughs than any other film this weekend. It's hard to work out if that's what the makers wanted but one gets the horrible feeling that they were taking it all terribly seriously - at least they started off that way and gave up when they realised what an appalling piece of shit they were making.

Lousy dialogue, dreadful effects [apparently a third of the budget was wasted on them] and acting so awful that even Edward D. Wood would have thought twice combine to create a truly terrible film good only for laughing at in derisory fashion. Which is what we all did of course. Particularly at the performance of Andreas Van Ray as the hospital's head doctor, as eccentric a turn as you'll see anywhere.

Quite what any of this has to do with Day of the Dead is quite beyond me. Fans of Romero should be aware that the same production company, Taurus Entertainment, have just completed Creepshow 3 - you have been warned...

P is an unusual film in that it's a Thai ghost film, featuring traditional Thai mythology, but shot by an Englishman. Director Paul Spurrier was on hand to introduce the film, endearing himself to the crowd with his tales of how, while studying at film school, he would rather read Fangoria than Cahiers du Cinema and preferred horror films to the "classics" decreed required viewing by his tutors!

The film itself is a remarkably assured, affecting and genuinely creepy tale of lost innocence - it was apparently Alan Jones' favourite film of the whole festival and it's easy enough to see why. Suangporn Jaturaphut stars as Aaw, a young village girl gifted in the ways of Khmer witchcraft who is lured into working as a hooker in a sleazy Bangkok bar in order to earn money to buy the medicine to cure her ailing grandmother. As she entertains her foreign clients [one of them played by Spurrier himself], she uses her magic to dispose of rivals but fails to remember the rules laid down by granny with disastrous consequences - she's soon transformed in the organ-stealing phii borb, a vampire like creature from Thai legend and is on the rampage through the city.

Although slow to get going, P proved to be one of the genuine finds of the weekend, an atmospheric and frequently brutal gem that also manages to be genuinely moving. Aaw's descent into the clutches of the phi borb, her desperate attempts to contain the evil she's unleashed by chaining herself to a radiator hoping to starve it - and herself - to death and the ultimate Exorcist inspired sacrifice of one of her friends add a depth to the film that would otherwise have made it a less interesting film. As it is, it's definitely worth tracking it down although in his post-film Q&A, Spurrier noted that the film had yet to open in Thailand after the government there decided to try to deny the existence of the sort of sex-tourist frequented joint portrayed in the film - so the chances of it turning up any time soon might be slim.

Spurrier also noted that he only got to appear in the film because of the startling scene where Aaw gets her revenge on the owner of the club who breaks her in on her first night on the game by conjuring up a snake that bites him somewhere extremely painful while he's in a toilet. The actor originally cast for the role understandably bailed out when he found that a genuine cobra was going to be let loose in his pants and as Spurrier was the only other Westerner on the set he got the part by default!

The longest breaks we'd been getting all weekend were the ones before the last two films of the day and they'd been a welcome chance to rush out in search of food and drink. Today, however, the hour long respite was being eroded by some unadvertised extras, the first of which was the chance to help choose which of five short films from the Tartan Shorts competition would be included on the forthcoming UK DVD release of Julian Richards' excellent The Last Horror Movie [2003]. Richards himself was on hand to help introduce the films which began with William Sinclair's Automaton in which a jealous man uses a strange device to enter the mind of a woman and force her to kill her new lover.

Lawrence Axe's self-help was the simplest of the set - a young man listens to one of those self help CDs unaware that something is creeping up on him... In The Chop by Jim McRoberts a young schizophrenic roams the streets having a conversation with the voices in his head until he finds an axe and gets an idea how to use it. The Divine Eugene Hicks by Anthony Hurley features a vain, narcissistic employee at a fertility clinic with some odd ideas about eugenics. And finally in Geraldine Geraghty's Golf Sale an American tourist follows those ubiquitous golf sale signs that crop up almost everywhere in London and gets more than he bargained for...

The idea had originally been for us to vote on forms but when they seemed to go missing, Alan Jones took the stage to try out a "clap-o-meter" approach to picking the winner - the louder we applauded, the more chance the film had of winning. Of course it didn't work and an increasingly frazzled Alan succeeded only in whittling it down to two contenders, self-help and Golf Sale. Finally a show of hands declared self-help the winner and you'll be able to get the chance to see it when The Last Horror Movie gets released on 24 October.

A lengthy [and black and white - if we're back at the Odeon next year they need to invest in an NTSC compatible video projector] series of clips from Tobe Hooper's latest film, Mortuary, was another  added bonus though judging from the footage on offer it's not going to amount to much more than another teens-menaced-by-zombies snooze-fest. There was also a trailer for the Masters of Horror TV series in which 13 of the biggest names in the genre [Argento, Dante, Carpenter, Landis et al] have contributed one hour-long episode each. Unfortunately, the trailer made it all look rather dull and predictable and one can only hope that these genuine giants of the genre have not had their wings clipped by TV.

Director Christian Alvart was on hand to introduce his gripping serial killer thriller Antikörper / Antibodies, a compelling and thoroughly nasty piece of work that borrowed liberally from Manhunter [1986], The Silence of the Lambs [1991] and Se7en [1995] and fashioned it into something fresh and inventive. Rural cop Michael Martens is still trying to solve the mystery of who killed a young local girl when he learns that notorious serial killer Gabriel Engel, the Dark Angel, has been apprehended. Believing that Engel might have been the culprit - though he's only killed boys during his reign of terror - Michael travels to the city to interrogate him. But Engel is planning to play some very disturbing mind games with Michael, games that will eventually test Michael's Christian faith and put the lives of those he loves the most in jeopardy...

Revolving around a towering performance from Wotan Wilke Möhring as the tortured Michael, Antibodies is a fabulous, dark-hearted thriller that builds slowly to a nerve wracking finale. It's not your usual serial killer flick - after the stunning opening sequence there are no killings - as it takes a more psychological approach to a now well-worn subject. Exploring weighty subjects like faith, guilt and the idea that evil may be a virus easily transmitted to anyone exposed to it, and with a plot that twists and turns in the most unexpected directions, Alvart has fashioned a truly compelling film, one of the highlights of the entire weekend. The only drawback were the terrible subtitles - all too often they were unreadable as they vanished into a white-on-white blur though thankfully the big ideas were all put across effectively and coherently.

Alvart came back on stage for a Q&A and introduced leading man Möhring who had paid for his own trip to London just to be here for the screening. During the talk, Calvart confirmed what some of us were already dreading - that the almost de rigeur Hollywood remake was already on its way...

And so after 21 features, 9 shorts, 1 documentary and more clips and trailers than I can remember now, the final film of FrightFest 2005 was looming. And it was the one film that I was really looking forward to, the much-hyped Australian shocker Wolf Creek. Based loosely on a number of different killing sprees that have haunted the Australian Outback for years it begins slowly as we follow three 20-somethings as the set off on a road trip across the Outback to Sydney. The travellers - Australian Ben and English tourists Liz and Kristy - stop off at the meteor crater in Wolf Creek National Park but find themselves stranded when their car mysteriously breaks down and the watches all ominously stop...

But help is at hand in the garrulous shape of Mick Taylor, a cheery 'Ocker' who offers to take them back to his camp and fix the car. Only when Liz wakes up alone in a shed to find that she's been drugged, gagged and bound do we get to the truth of the matter - Mick is a brutal killer and the travellers are his next victims...

Although the build-up is slow the payoff is everything I could have hoped for. Once Liz wakes up the film steps up several gears and never slows down again until its chilling climax. Truly frightening, Wolf Creek is the bleakest, most emotionally draining cinematic experience I've had for many a long year. The violence is brutal, matter-of-fact and a far cry from the gimmicky deaths of your average slasher - the 'head on a stick' sequence in particular is horrifying, all the more so for Taylor [brilliantly portrayed by John Jarratt] appearing to be so normal, so ordinary. No wise-cracking one-liners or stereotypical cackling and ranting here - just a cold-eyed, ruthlessly efficient killing machine who simply doesn't care one jot what happens to his victims.

Greg McLean introduced the film with his producer and two leading ladies and hoped that the film would prove to be as "fucked up" as we'd heard it was. He was in luck - it is, and a lot more besides. The last time I felt this shattered by a movie was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] from which Wolf Creek borrows some of its grimy, relentless ambience. Yes, it's that good. There will, inevitably, be a backlash against the hype that's preceding the film. Ignore it - this is the best horror film to ever come out of Australia, the best genre movie from anywhere for an awful long time and one that will stick in your mind long after the end credits have rolled. Quite brilliant and the perfect closing movie for the sixth FrightFest.

And there it was - FrightFest 2005, the first in its new home and the biggest and most ambitious yet. The new venue was generally excellent though there were problems - the old FrightFest communal spirit took a lot longer to get going this year; the stage lighting was terrible [though to be fair, no-one, not even the organisers, seemed to know where to stand to be seen properly] and the seats, particularly for those of us who are ridiculously tall, are far less comfortable than they were in the Prince Charles. But overall, it's a fine new home for the festival and the teething problems encountered this year will all be ironed out for the next bash. As we all trooped out into the warm late-summer night there was already word that another one-day FrightFest was on the cards, possibly as early as November.

All that remains now is to congratulate and thank Alan, Ian and Paul for another excellent weekend and say a big thanks to all those of you came up to say hello during the four days. And leave you with our traditional summing up:

The Good: Romero's Dead quartet [that's going to take some getting used to...], Dead Meat, The Neighbour No. Thirteen, Wild Country, The Roost, The Collingswood Story, Marebito, Red Eye, Night Watch, Born to Fight, P, Antibodies and of course Wolf Creek.

The Bad: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Day of the Dead 2: Contagium.

The So-So: A Bittersweet Life, Evil Aliens, Do You Like Hitchcock? and 2001 Maniacs.
KEVIN LYONS