FrightFest 2005 - Day Three

The penultimate day of FrightFest 2005 kicked off the first of this year's short films. One of the great things about the FrightFest line-ups of years past was the opportunity to see some of these shorts that you'll likely never get a chance to see anywhere else - a few of the previous years' offerings have turned up in late night / early hours TV screenings but for the most part, they sadly vanish without trace. Last year, FrightFest experimented with the notion of showing all the shorts in one block but this year they've been scheduled through the last two days.

The Ten Steps had in fact already turned up on BBC2 in one of those late night slots and is easily the best short film FrightFest has ever shown. The premise is so simple one can't help but wonder why no-one had thought of it before - a teenage girl left alone for the evening with her obnoxious little brother finds herself having to descend into the basement when the fuses blow plunging the house into darkness. Having already suffered a panic attack in the cellar when the family first moved into the house, she's understandably terrified. But dad's on the mobile phone to help her out by counting down the ten steps that lead into the darkness...

To say any more would be to ruin the wonderful climax but suffice to say that it was the single most effective and unsettling moment we've seen so far all weekend. There will be those who claim that they saw it coming but doesn't everyone claim that after the event? Director Brendan Muldowney turns the screws slowly across the film's 10 minutes running time and by the time the credits roll we'd been so expertly wound up that there was a moment of stunned silence before a rapturous round of applause.

These short films are, tragically, almost impossible to track down [the FrightFest brochure suggests that a future FrightFest Presents... DVD release might be a compilation of some of the shorts already seen at previous festivals - let's hope so!] but make it a mission to track this one down and be prepared for 10 minutes of unadulterated genius and add Brendan Muldowney to that one-to-watch list.

The first feature of the day was the three year old The Collingswood Story, getting its long overdue UK debut. Clearly influenced by The Blair Witch Project [1999] [and that's OK by me - I'm firmly in the camp that loved it!] it's an effective and frequently downright chilling no-budgeter presented entirely as though we were eavesdropping on a series of webcam Internet telephone calls.
The set-up is slow and deceptive - Rebecca has left home to go to university and to help them keep in touch her boyfriend has set her up with a webcam and some net-phone software. It's Rebecca's birthday and John sets her up with some bonkers phone cam "freaks" to keep her entertained. One of these is online psychic Vera Madeline who warns the couple that Rebecca's new home town, Collingswood, was the site of a series of brutal cult-related murders, one of which took place in her new house.

As the film progresses, Rebecca sets up her laptop with an extra long phone lead so she can keep John with her as she explores the house - but when she starts poking around in the attic they both get a lot more than they bargained for.

It's another simple concept and another one that worked remarkably well. Director Michael Costanza takes care to ensure that we actually get to know and like Rebecca and John before he plunges them into their nightmare, ensuring that out discomfort in the film's closing minutes is all the more difficult to endure. The performances of the two leads, Stephanie Dees and Johnny Burton, are so natural and unaffected that it almost becomes uncomfortable eavesdropping on their conversations like this.
The climax is fantastic and unbearably creepy as Rebecca ventures into a darkened attic armed only with a flashlight and her trusty laptop only to find... Well to say more would be to ruin it all and that would be doing The Collingswood Story a grave disservice. There has already been a Region 1 DVD release for the film but it seems to be rarer than hen's teeth at the moment [anyone any idea where I can find a copy online?]. Do whatever it takes to track down a copy and be prepared for one of the best and most genuinely unnerving indie films of the past few years.

The Victim was the next of the day's short films, a clever, affectionate tribute to Alfred Hitchcock shot by Robert Grieves as a series of colourful, stylised animatics that retagged some of Hitch's best known scenes. The Birds [1963, North By Northwest [1959] and Psycho [1960] were just three of the classics getting the treatment in this hugely enjoyable and inventive short.

Takashi Shimizu shot the extraordinarily weird Marebito in just eight days before heading off to the States for his lacklustre remake of his own international hit Ju-on [2003], The Grudge [2004]. Fellow J-horror icon Shinya Tsukamoto [director of the Tetsuo films] stars as Masuoka, a video cameraman obsessed with experiencing genuine terror after filming a terrified man's gruesome suicide in the Tokyo underground system. His search for real fear leads him into a bizarre underworld beneath Tokyo where he finds a naked girl chained to a rock. He takes her home, names her F and tries to work out who this odd girl might be - she walks on all fours, has worryingly sharpened teeth and seems to survive only on blood. But is everything really all as it seems? Who is the woman who keeps following Masuoka claiming that he has a daughter she believes is staying with him? And who, or what, are the Deros, the "detrimental robots" that lurk in the network of tunnels beneath the city?

Marebito - also known in some quarters as The Stranger From Afar - looks for all the world like the work of a man knowing that he's about to sell his soul to the Hollywood machine and making one last stand for arty non-commercialism before being consumed and tamed by Tinsel Town. It was made as part of a deal between the Film School of Tokyo and the Eurospace cinema in Tokyo that resulted in the creation of the Bancho film label, a series of eleven films divided into three groups - Eros Bancho, Comedy Banch and of course Horror Bancho, the idea being to give students a chance to work with some professional crews.

Not having seen any of the other titles in the Horror Bancho series [Hiroshi Takahashi's Sodomu no ichi, Hiroyuki Minato's Tsuki neko ni mitsu no tama and Yoichi Nishiyama's Unmei ningen] it's hard to say how successful the project was but if Marebito is any indication of the quality of the rest of the films they might well be worth tracking down. Shimizu finally gets the chance to move away from the Ju-on films that he seems to have been obsessively making and remaking for some years and proves beyond doubt that he's a lot more than just a one-trick pony. He's helped enormously by Tsukamoto who turns out to be every bit as compelling an actor as he is a director, turning in an intense and riveting performance as a man obsessed.

Those who have yet to warm to the delights of J-horror will find Marebito just too slow and off-the-wall for their tastes but if you've been living off a steady diet of these most unsettling of genre films for the past few years you're going to love this. Defiantly uncommercial [at least to Western eyes], with a plot that's hardto follow and ultimately inconclusive, it's not for everyone. But if you've a taste for the bizarre, the challenging and the relentlessly eerie, this is the one for you. Ignore the negative reviews that are bound to follow from some quarters and trust me on this one - the best J-horror I've seen for several years.

Director Jake Kennedy has got to be one of the most pissed off men in the country this weekend - his short film We All Fall Down was due to be shown next but when it arrived, the disc or tape turned out to be completely blank! Just how fed up must he be today...?

With the announced Anthony C. Ferrante film Boo! having failed to turn up as expected, we were given a chance to see the latest Wes Craven offering in its place. Red Eye was being hailed in some quarters as a change of direction for Craven but as Alan Jones pointed out in his introduction it's nothing of the sort - a mere detour rather than a full-blown departure for pastures new.

Rachel McAdams is Lisa, a young woman scared of flying, who finds her trip home from her grandmother's funeral even more terrifying when the apparently charming Jackson [a brilliant turn from Cillian Murphy] turns out to be an assassin who is threatening to have her father murdered if she doesn't help him complete his plan to assassinate a politician and his family.

It's lightweight stuff, a typical summer blockbuster, but it's definitely something of a return to form for Craven whose notoriously inconsistent career had bottomed out again recently with the so-so Scream 3 [2000] and the truly awful Cursed [2004]. Slick and effective, it cranks up the tension to almost unbearable levels, boasts a taut, well thought out script and makes the most of limited and claustrophobic sets. The performances are all excellent - McAdams makes for an appealing heroine, turning the tables on her tormenter in the final stages to enthusiastic applause from the FrightFest crowd; Brian Cox is under-used but as wonderful as ever as her father, completely unaware of the danger he's in; but the show is stolen by Murphy, proving again after Batman Begins [2005] that he does villainous rather well.

The final fifteen minutes or so find Craven back on home turf as the deranged and wounded Jackson goes on the rampage, proving almost unstoppable as he takes a pen to the windpipe, several beatings and even a couple of bullets in his dogged pursuit of Lisa. Craven might want to get away from his horror roots but after the failure of his non-genre dream project, Music of the Heart [1999] he's clearly not prepared to wander off too far. The hinted at possible appearance of Craven himself never happened by the way, but no-one seemed to mind.

On Saturday, we'd been told that at 5:00 we'd be able to talk to J-horror legend Hideo Nakata via a live satellite link from Hollywood, though the organisers were already joking then that it was all going to go horribly wrong. And sure enough, it went spectacularly belly up when the link failed and we ended up with a few minutes of a bored looking Nakata answering a couple of questions from an unseen American interviewer before the link died!

But all was not lost - the star of the afternoon turned out to be Stephanie, a student writing a dissertation on Nakata and Japanese horror who was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to talk to the man himself via mobile phone on stage in front the FrightFest crowd, asking her own questions as well as those posed by the audience. Though clearly scared to death, she did a fantastic job and fair play to Alan, Paul and Ian for giving her the chance.

It was the first time this weekend that we got anything like the community atmosphere that we enjoyed at the Prince Charles - the Odeon West End is a fantastic venue but as we're all still getting used to it, there seems to have been a change in mood that was certainly rectified by the supportive and understanding reaction to the disastrous satellite link - and to Alan, Ian and Paul's attempts to keep us all entertained whil the technical problems were investigated. So some good really does come from everything after all...

The big film for Sunday night was the international hit Nochnoy dozor / Night Watch, the much hyped Russian blockbuster finally picked up for UK distribution by Twentieth Century Fox. The company seemed rather paranoid as it despatched its own security team to confiscate mobile phones from all those watching the film for fear of bootlegging. It's not entirely clear what they were expecting - it would be one hell of a phone that was capable of recording an entire 114 minute film in anything like watchable quality. And why take phones with still capabilities? There are pictures from the film all over the Internet, the film is available for [illegal] download from a number of peer-to-peer servers and there's even a Russian DVD release that's not impossible to track down, so surely any of us who wanted our own copy or stills could get them anyway... It seemed an unnecessarily draconian step from Fox who made few friends tonight and succeeded only in causing minor chaos in the lobby as we all queued up afterwards to get our phones back.

But what of the film itself? Could it live up to the extraordinary hype that preceeded it? Well, almost... Introduced by director Timur Bekmambetov in a brief taped speech, it's a visually dazzling and complex epic that charts the never-ending struggle between the forces of Light and Dark as they hold an uneasy truce that has endured for centuries but which is now in danger of being broken as both camps search for the Great Other, one of a race of superhumans. When the Great Other makes its choice between Dark and Light, the truce will be over and the stage set for the last battle between good and evil.

Visually, the film is stunning - CGI is used extensively but with imagination and verve [witness the jaw-dropping descent of a rivet from the engine of a stricken airliner through the night skies over Moscow, down an air vent and into a woman's cup of coffee!] and the script has a genuinely epic feel to it. But it is very confusing [thanks possibly to it having been re-edited for its UK and US releases] and sometimes Bekmambetov gets so carried away with his rapid-fire editing, jerky camera effects and CG-enhanced action that it isn't entirely clear what we're meant to be looking at.

It's entirely possible that repeated viewings will be particularly rewarding and it's by no means a bad film - quite the contrary, it's an exhilarating ride and it brims over with ideas and concepts that we've not seen before. It even manages to add a few new wrinkles to vampire lore [in the world of Night Watch vampires aren't invisible in mirrors, it's the only way you can see them when they choose to hide in the mysterious Gloom]. But it was probably a bit too much for weary eyes this late into FrightFest - it's breathless pace and retina-scarring imagery might have been better appreciated on opening night before the infamous Sunday FrightFest fatigue had set in...

Having safely retrieved my mobile phone it was on to the final films of the day. The Eel was the short film postponed from the day before and was introduced by its director Dominic Hailstone. I'd tried to watch The Eel before in its Internet incarnation but the image was so small and dark that it was impossible to make out what the hell was going on. I was certainly not expecting that ending - an eel thrashes around in a tank of water before transforming into a Lovecraftian monstrosity in a blaze of excellent physical effects inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing [1982]. An excellent score and moody black and white photography adds to the menacing atmosphere in what turned out to be a pleasantly nasty 3 minutes.

And then we were into the only chance for London audiences to see Paul Schrader's Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist on the big screen. Controversially shelved by producers Morgan Creek who felt it was too cerebral and re-shot by Renny Harlin as the dreadful Exorcist: The Beginning, the Schrader film had been highly anticipated in some quarters as it surely couldn't be as bad as Harlin's atrocity. Could it?

Well, the good news is that it is better than Harlin's film. The bad news is that it's still not very good. The first hour or so was the best, benefiting from a strong performance from Stellan Skarsgård as Father Lankester Merrin, suffering a loss of faith in post-war British East Africa after a particularly harrowing experience at the hands of the Nazis in Holland. He's supervising the excavation of a strange church which seems to have been built then buried immediately - but to what end?

Unfortunately, the film unravels completely in the final stages as Merrin comes face-to-face with the demon in the pagan temple beneath the church, the evil sprit that the church had been built to contain. The climactic confrontation is completely at odds with what The Exorcist [1973] told us about Merrin's first encounter with the demon - the struggle is hardly the life-or-death battle that the first film made it out to be [Skarsgård barely breaks into a sweat] and no-one seems at all sure whether the demon is meant to be Lucifer himself [it manifests as a slightly effeminated, bald figure almost identical to a mosaic of Satan in the church] or Pazuzu [never named as such in the film].

Some of the theological debates that Schrader seemed determined to focus on raise some interesting points and it was certainly commendable to try for a more psychological approach to now over-familiar material but it's all so laboriously presented that frankly I just lost interest in what was going on. Add to this some of the worst CGI ever committed to film - the computer generated hyenas and oxen are unbelievably shoddy - and a damp squib climax and Dominion disappointingly turned out to be almost a complete disaster. Only a strong score and some excellent performances keep it watchable.

It was a sad way to end Day Three of FrightFest 2005 and a bitter pill to swallow for those of us who have long been admirers of Schrader's work - maybe I was just expecting too much. Still, I'd return to this ambitious and undeniable more intelligent version of the tale long before I was dragged kicking and screaming into a repeat viewing of Harlin's fiasco.
KEVIN LYONS