The Zone Horror Frightfest 2006 - Day One

It's that time of year again as hordes of horror fans descend on London's Leicester Square for the annual Frightfest, four days of horror, science fiction and all round weirdness on the big screen. Like last year, the event is being held at the Odeon West End and again like last year, the 2006 Frighfest kicked off with a trilogy of archive screenings. Last year it was Romero's Dead trilogy to tie in with the screening of Land of the Dead (2005). This year, it was a trilogy of Hammer films.

At first there seemed no particular reason for the screenings, billed as a Homage to Hammer, but in fact all three films have been doing the rounds in newly struck prints. It was this more than anything else that eventually persuaded me to go along - I had originally planned to start this year's Frightfest with its official opening night film but the chance to see three vintage Hammers on the big screen proved too strong a lure.

The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss was on hand to introduce the Hammer retrospective and as ever he was witty and full of interesting observations, his very clear love of British horror shining through bright and clear. The day and indeed the weekend kicked off with The Hound of the Baskervilles, Hammer's 1959 adaptation of the classic tale that still manages to rattle the cages of Conan Doyle purists everywhere. And it still holds up remarkably well after all these years, despite the odd questionable performance. Bernard Robinson's sets are astonishing given how little money he had to work with, and Terence Fisher's direction is every bit as assured and inventive as we've come to expect from the Grand Master of British horror. It may take liberties with Conan Doyle (who surely would have approved of the tarantula, if not the human sacrifices), but it still has so much to offer, not least the excellent performances from Christopher Lee (who, as Gatiss noted, gets a rare chance to kiss the girl!), Peter Cushing (brilliant as Holmes who he would revisit almost a decade later in TV's Sherlock Holmes to equally impressive effect), Andre Morell as Watson and a lovely turn from Miles Malleson as an eccentric bishop.

Next up came one of Hammer's least effective films, the frankly rather tedious Countess Dracula (1971). I have a pretty long and strange relationship with this one - I still have very distinct memories of being eight years old, way back in 1970, and going to the cinema with my film-loving mum and seeing a trailer for Countess Dracula. God knows what film she'd taken me to see, nor why the cinema had chosen to show this trailer with what I assume must have been a kid-friendly film. But I can still distinctly remember being awe struck by this rare glimpse of an adult world that I was only dimly aware of - the X certificate seemed exotic and tantalising even then and the image of the hideously aged countess led my impressionable little brain to believe that this was going to be the best film ever made.

Sadly, when finally got to see the actual film itself years later on late night television it was a major disappointment - slow, dull and lacking the oomph of director Peter Sasdy's other films of the time, notably Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Hands of the Ripper (1971). Every Hammer film had its share of naff performances, but Countess Dracula is nothing but bad turns. It really needed someone of with the presence and authority of Peter Cushing to give it some gravitas, though even he would have been defeated by Jeremy Paul's poorly written script.

Much better was Twins of Evil (1971), John Hough's rollicking vampires-vs-witchfinders romp, the final part of their Karnstein trilogy which began with The Vampire Lovers (1970), faltered with Lust For a Vampire (1971) and finished with a bang here. A gaunt and haunted looking Peter Cushing makes the most of a villainous role, with little to chose between his hate-filled puritan Gustav Weil and dapper vampire Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) in the audience hate-figure stakes, and a young David Warbeck hangs around in the wings waiting to step in and play the noble hero.

But the show is stolen by Maltese Playboy playmates the Collinson twins, Mary and Madeleine, who, although sometimes noticeably dubbed, give wonderful performances as the good-girl-bad-girl leads. There are some moments of embarrassing juvenilia (most awkwardly Kata Wyeth's suggestive stroking of a candle!) and Warbeck's song is just horrible (though certainly no worse than the legendary Strange Love from Lust For a Vampire), but overall Twins of Evil is great fun, well directed by Hough and crammed full of 70s Brit-horror starlets - Wyeth (Hands of the Ripper (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Burke and Hare (1972)), Judy Matheson (Crucible of Terror (1971), The Flesh and Blood Show (1972), Scream... And Die! (1973)), Luan Peters (Lust for a Vampire, Vampira (1974), The Devil's Men (1976)) and Kirsten Lindholm (Crescendo (1970), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust For a Vampire) among them.

All three of the Hammer films looked simply stunning in their newly struck prints, showcasing once again just how far the company could make their meagre budgets stretch. As Frightfest co-organiser Paul McEvoy noted at the start, this was the first time the films had been seen on London West End screens for decades and it was a joy to revisit films that I'd only seen on the small screen in all their glory.

After a welcome longer break, Frightfest proper began with the film that I was most looking forward to. I've been a fan of Guillermo del Toro since Cronos (1993) and have loved just about everything he's done since (the only exception being Blade II (2002)) so the chance to see the first ever public screening of his latest, El laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth (2006) was certainly going to be a highlight of the weekend. When it had its last airing, at the Cannes Film Festival, Laberinto was rewarded with an astonishing 20 minute ovation from the crowd it was being hailed by many, including co-organiser Alan Jones, as del Toro's masterpiece.

They're not wrong. In his introduction (which he shared with one of his producers, Alfonso Cuarón, director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Children of Men (2006)), a clearly excited del Toro told how people had wondered if Frightfest was the right place for Laberinto and certainly it's not a conventional horror film - in fact it's very difficult to pin down exactly which genre it belongs in. There are certainly some highly effective horror moments but the film is just as much a war movie, a fairy story, an exploration of the causes and effects of Fascism and so much more besides. But a masterpiece it certainly is, a worthy companion piece to del Toro's brilliant El espinazo del diablo / The Devil's Backbone (2002) with which it shares a background set against the Spanish Civil War and its immediate fallout.

It's far too early in the morning to do justice at the moment to the thematic complexities of Laberinto, a film that virtually demands a repeat viewing as soon as the end credits start to role - it will need careful re-examination to unpick the many strands that run through the brilliantly written script. Laberinto looks at Fascism, the effects of war, divorce and remarriage on children, the potency of a child's imagination and the enduring effect that folk tales have on all of us.

Del Toro gets superb performances from all involved, particularly from Sergi Lopez as the brutal but never stereotypical Fascist army captain Vidal and Doug Jones (Abe Sapien from del Toro's Hellboy (2004)) as the faun Pan (though he's never actually referred to by name throughout the film) and the wonderfully disturbing Pale Man. But the real find is Ivana Baquero as the young heroine Ofelia - she gives one of the best performances from a child actor that I've seen since Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999).

During his brilliant Q&A after the film (del Toro is one of the nicest, funniest and most infectiously enthusiastic directors currently at work in our genres), del Toro asked that if we love El laberinto del fauno as much as he does that we spread the word as far as possible. So that's what I'm doing here - if you see only one fantasy movie this year, this is the one to see. Deeply moving with out ever being sentimental, laced with some shocking violence and proudly sporting a densely layered and rewarding script which mixes H.P Lovecraft with Lewis Carroll, this is genre film-making at its absolute best. Do yourself a favour and be the first in the queue when it opens near you. And read as little as you can about it first - come to it unprepared and with your mind wide open and you'll be rewarded with one of the best films of the millennium thus far.

So how on Earth were they going to follow that? Rather well as it happens as director Adam Green took to the stage to introduce his hilarious retro-slasher Hatchet (2006), an outrageously violent mix of low brow humour and hardcore gore. Green admitted that he wanted to return to the heady days of the 80s slasher movie, but wanted to bring the red stuff back to a genre that had become too PG-13 oriented since it was reborn in the post-Scream (1996) era. And he succeeded with a crowd-pleasing blood-fest that gave us some brilliantly over-the-top violence, cameos from some of the genre's best-loved stars (Robert "Freddy" Englund, Tony "Candyman" Todd and four-time Jason Vorhees Kane Hodder as the Elephant Man lookalike killer) and a wonderfully funny script delivered to perfection by a well-chosen cast.

Defiantly - and proudly - old-fashioned (the poster tags promise us that it's "not a remake. It's not a sequel. And it's not based on a Japanese one.) Hatchet is something of a dream for those who hanker for the old days of 70s and early-80s American horror. The climax explicitely quotes from both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Friday the 13th (1980) but although Green quite obviously knows his genre well, he refrains from too much slavish recreation of former glories, preferring instead to keep his audience off guard with a series of well-staged shocks and jumps that had everyone in the Odeon gasping.

For those who miss the days when American horror films were just plain old gratuitously violent, Hatchet is a dream come true. Green's effective directorial sleight-of-hand misdirection, John Carl Buechler's old school gore effects (I doubt you'll see this much blood in any other film this year!) and the wonderful cast make Hatchet a must-see - and Green, as much am over-enthusiastic fan as the rest of us, announced during his Q&A that it was about to get a North American theatrical release means that Hatchet, and its monstrous maniac Victor Crowley, are coming to a screen near many of you soon. Make sure you see it!

As day one started to draw to a close and tiredness started seeping in, we were given the first of this year's short films. As I say every year, the shorts are often among the highlights of any Frightfest and this year we've got a bumper crop. Sadly, the first one, Gasoline Blood (2006) left me a bit cold. Introduced by writer / director David Pope and some of his cast and crew, Gasoline Blood was a fairly generic zombie movie, dressed up to look like a lost 70s movie (complete with added film grain and a fake 1979 copyright date!) and seemed rather pointless. The "plot" just has a trio of film-makers scouting locations falling foul of a pack of zombies - and that really is it. No back story, no explanations, just zombies eating people. Which is fine as far as it goes - but it doesn't really go all that far.

Much better was the final film of the evening. I had some doubts as to the wisdom of showing a subtitled film so late in the day as eyelids were starting to droop and thoughts were turning to bed. And it's always difficult to know how to approach any film that's being hailed as a "first" as there are no frames of reference. Frostbiten / Frostbite (2006) is being trumpeted as the first Swedish vampire movie - and on the strength of this one I for one can't wait to see many, many more. Extremely funny, adding a few new wrinkles to vampire lore and packed to the gills with genuinely oddball moments (reluctant young vampire Sebastian (Jonas Karlström) can understand what dogs are saying to him - and it's usually not very nice!), Frostbiten is a real find, a completely out-of-the-blue experience the likes of which we rarely get these days.

The somewhat eerie Swedish settings (night last for a month and the whole film is shot in darkness of an unsettling half-light) give the film a look that you won't find anywhere else and the strange sense of humour is refreshingly original. Great performances all round help and director Anders Banke (making an astonishingly assured debut) avoids the usual clichés, though the vampires themselves were, disappointingly, from the Lost Boys / Buffy strain of the undead. That said, they're still fun - the demon vampire leader is a bit naff, but the teen vampires are hilarious and the climax is first rate as the strangest family unit ever seen in a horror film head off into the darkness.

God alone knows if Frostbiten will get a release that we can actually access - just how marketable is a Swedish vampire movie? - but do whatever it takes to track down a copy, especially if, like me, you've become a bit jaded by identikit vampire movies over the last few years. This one might just be enough to restore your faith and is certainly the first film in ages that I actually want to see a sequel to. Fantastic stuff that played extremely well to an appreciative Frightfest crowd.

And so Day One drew to a close and what a day it was! Tomorrow we've got a real mixed bag, everything from Irish horror to documentaries about the made up Klingon language, from another slasher to an anthology movie starring Snoop Dogg...
KEVIN LYONS