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SYNOPSIS | REVIEW | PRODUCTION NOTES | TRIVIA | PRESS | QUOTES | KIM NEWMAN ARCHIVE | MEDIA |
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FRIGHTFEST 2003 FESTIVAL REPORT
The fourth London Frightfest looks to be the biggest and best yet. The line up of films looks even better than last year's outstanding offerings and for the first time, every one of the weekend passes has sold out, ensuring that the atmosphere in the balcony of the Prince Charles cinema off London's Leicester Square should be even better than ever. By 6:30 on a warm Friday evening, the crowds had already started gathering for the first night's screenings and expectations were high. There was much discussion as to what the "surprise" film was going to be (everything from the dreaded Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake to Scary Movie 3 were being touted) and there was the prospect of the belated return of Herbert West to look forward to later in the evening. But first, as ever, Frightfest opened with a British film, in this case Marcus (Long Time Dead) Adams' Anglo-Luxembourgian Octane, introduced by the producer with Adams curiously reticent to say anything to the audience when given the chance. A very dull hour and a half later, it was clear why he might have been staying silent. There's a good idea knocking around in Stephen Volk's script, but sadly it's been done many times before and usually a lot better than in this rather timid road movie - the "sex-and-splatter rituals" promised in the festival brochure turned out to be rather some anaemic fumbling in a wind tunnel near the end. Madeleine Stowe - almost unrecognisable - stars as a divorced mother driving her sulky teenage daughter Nat home after a visit to her fathers. As the already fractious relationship between mother and daughter falls apart altogether, Nat ends up with a sinister cult of blood drinkers who congregate in roadside service stations over night looking for victims. Octane begins well, but it soon becomes clear that the good things about Volk's script (a revisionist take on vampirism, the strange lifestyle of the nocturnal inhabitants of the roadside diners) are going to be glossed over in favour of glib imagery and cliched characterisation. Nothing much happens for the first half hour as we are forced to listen to Nat's constant whining - one almost cheers when she gets lured away by the blood cult but hopes that her mother might be as sick of her petulant ways and opt to abandon her are soon dashed. The last half of the film is a confusing mess as the main characters, including the mysterious "Recovery Man" - who isn't important enough to warrant a name but comes in useful for the info-dumps near the end that try to tie up the loose ends - converge on a research facility miles from anywhere. What they're all doing there isn't clear, nor is it clear why Jonathan Rhys-Myers has to have pretend sex with Nat in a wind tunnel before slitting his tongue with a razor blade... Dull and predictable, Octane is a disappointment from writer Volk, whose previous work has included Ken Russell's under-rated Gothic and the outstanding TV special, Ghostwatch. We should have been watching Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber's The Butterfly Effect next, but sadly Alan Jones' enthusiasm for the film has tipped off the suits back in Los Angeles and they've decided to hold the film back for Sundance 2004, meaning that Frightfest were barred from showing it. In its place, we got the mysterious "surprise" film - we'd been promised for some time that there was something special in the offing, a first chance to see a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. Prior to the event, word had it that it would be the Kate Beckinsale vehicle Underworld, but it turned out instead to be much-troubled The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which comes to the UK trailing tales of a fraught shoot with flooded sets and near punch-ups between director and star. And then there are those reviews... In truth, it's nowhere near the dogs dinner its been portrayed as in the States. It's no masterpiece to be sure, but get past the fact that it has virtually nothing to do with the Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill comic beyond the title and the very basic plot, and you're left with a handsomely staged if mindless blockbuster. Sean Connery - excellent as ever - stars as famed fictional adventurer Allan Quatermain who, in 1899, is recruited by the British government (represented, appropriately enough, by M from the James Bond novels and films) to help combat the menace posed by the mysterious Phantom and his army who are supplied with the most technologically advanced weapons of the day. To help him thwart the Phantom's plans to sabotage a peace conference in Venice and plunge the world into a devastating war, Quartermain is joined by Captain Nemo and the crew of his submarine the Nautilus; the vampire scientist Mina Harker; invisible petty thief Skinner; the immortal Dorian Gray; American secret Service agent Tom Sawyer; and the scientist Dr Jekyll and his monstrous alter ego Mr Hyde. Thinking about the plot for more than a few seconds isn't a great idea - it tends to fall apart the very instant you start questioning how the gargantuan Nautilus can fit into a relatively narrow and shallow river like the Thames, or start marveling at the film-makers' obvious ignorance of the culture, history or topography of Venice. But switch the brain off and you've got a wonderful looking romp with snappy one liners (when asked what he is by a dying opponent, the bullet riddled but unscathed Gray quips "I'm... complicated") and great performances. No, it doesn't make any sense, the action scenes are all edited in that deeply annoying hi-speed fashion that leaves them barely comprehensible and it tends to lose focus once it leaves Venice, but it's most certainly not the disaster you'd believe if you took the American reviews seriously. On the way out, I bumped into Ian Rattray for a quick chat and mentioned that Underworld had been mentioned as the possible "surprise" film. He confirmed that the Frightfest trio had wanted it, but the distributors wouldn't play ball. Ian was also on hand just before the final film of the evening to tell us that another "surprise" film had been lined up for Sunday morning and let slip that it was "British made" - start placing your bets now! The first night wound down with Brian Yuzna's belated Re-Animator sequel Beyond Re-Animator, the latest offering from his Fantastic Factory production unit in Spain. Hopes weren't high - the last time we saw Herbert West was in the disappointing Bride of Re-Animator and that was thirteen years ago. Herbert West has spent that time in prison for the deaths that occurred after his misguided experiments at Miskatonic University got out of hand. He's not been idle though and thinks he may have found the answer to why his subjects go mad once they're re-animated in the shape of "nano-plasmic energy" which restores the newly revived to some sort of normality. The arrival of a new prison doctor, Howard Phillips, acts as a catalyst for West who soon finds himself waist deep in zombie rats, revived half corpses, deranged reagent junkies and a re-animated disembodied penis... The good news is that it's a lot better than the first sequel - again, it's not great but it's a lot more fun than anyone expected it to be. It's more of a comedy even than the previous entries in the franchise and although not all of the comedy works, there are some very funny sight gags and Jeffrey Combs deadpan delivery is often hilarious. That's not to say that it skimps on the horror and Beyond Re-Animator is every bit as gory as you might hope for - there's some computer generated effects here but after the CGI heavy League, it was particularly refreshing to see some outrageously messy 80s style physical effects, courtesy of Screaming Mad George. Combs is the main attraction here, delivering the dreadful dialogue like he believes every word of it and commendably taking the whole thing very seriously. The rest of the cast are never anything other than merely adequate, except the great Simón Andreu (La novia ensangrentada (1972), Flesh + Blood (1985), Die Another Day (2002)) as the quite mad prison warden, who steals every scene he's in, even from Combs. The first day of Frightfest 2003 continued the rather
dubious tradition of opening the weekend on a less than spectacular
note, though there was nothing here that was quite as awful as last
year's opening film Nine
Lives (2002) - this is probably the only place on the
net that will claim The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
to be the highlight of anything (really, it's not as bad as they say,
trust me...). Tomorrow looks more promising, with the German Se7en
clone Tattoo,
the French Malefique
and the first three of the must-see films, Vincenzo Natali's Cypher,
Victor Salva's Jeepers
Creepers 2 and the long-awaited first public unveiling
of Jim Van Bebber's Charlie's
Family. Visit the FrightFest website
Last Updated: 15 October, 2008
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