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SYNOPSIS | REVIEW | PRODUCTION NOTES | TRIVIA | PRESS | QUOTES | KIM NEWMAN ARCHIVE | MEDIA |
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FRIGHTFEST 2003 FESTIVAL REPORT
The third day of Frightfest 2003 was always going to be hard work - the extra film added to the programme meant an obscenely early start for a Sunday morning and when I arrived at the ungodly hour of 10:30, not surprisingly the road outside the Prince Charles Cinema was hardly packed. A handful of hardy souls had ventured out, though many of the weekend pass holders opted to pass on the "surprise" movie, Guy Maddin's extraordinary Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, which is a shame as it's certainly unlike anything else they were likely to see over the long weekend. Anyone who's seen any of Maddin's previous work will know what to expect - he specialises in films that emulate the silent movies of the 20s and Dracula is no exception. Based on Mark Godden's ballet version of Stoker's novel, it follows the basics of the plot fairly accurately, though events are restructures - it begins in Whitby and Jonathan Harker's trip to Transylvania is dealt with in a quick fire, hallucinatory flashback late in the film. The Chinese Zhang Wei-Qiang is an unusual but effective choice for Dracula, giving the vampire lord an added exoticism that many other adaptations lack. Other cast members have clearly been cast for their dancing abilities though they certainly look the part, even if some of the moustaches are ridiculously fake… Deanne Rohde's production design is stunning - the towering, expressionist sets are perfect for Maddin's warped vision, adding to the hazy, surreal atmosphere. Add to this Mahler's almost overwhelming music and you've got a Dracula film quite unlike any other. Curiously, the ballet seems to have been confined to a number of set piece dances, some of which admittedly go on a little too long and Maddin's lighting, framing and editing doesn't always do the justice. That said, it's still a remarkable film and the perfect start to what's shaping up to be an excellent third day at Frightfest. Something of a pleasant surprise was up next - as anyone who has read my previous Frightfest reports will know, I'm not a great fan of the films of Adam Mason. His two features, The 13th Sign (2000) and Dust (2001) were unwatchable, while last year's short, Ruby (2002) was just plain pretensious rubbish. So I wasn't exactly relishing the thought of Prey, despite the fact that it only runs for 5 minutes. But surprisingly enough, this is an effective and brutal vignette about a hunter in the snowy wastes of the USA stalking his human prey. Powerful stuff with some excellent and very bloody effects and none of the irritating directorial mannerisms we've come to expect from Mason, this was easily the best thing he's ever screened at Frightfest. The lack of any credits betray its origins as part of an abandoned anthology film to have been made by those other stalwarts of the British low-budget scene, Jack West (Razor Blade Smile (1998)) and Alex Chandon (Cradle of Fear (2001)). The first "proper" film of the day was Byeong-ki Ahn's Korean Phone. I'd been looking forward to this as the South Korean industry has been making waves in the genre over the last few years with films like Ring Virus (1999), Yeogogoedam / Whispering Corridors (1998), Yeogogoedam dubeonjjae i-yagi / Memento Mori (1999) and Sorum (2001). Sadly, Phone isn't in that league - it has its fair share of shocks but is too derivative to be in the first division of Asian horror. Journalist Ji-Won (Ji-Won Ha) goes into hiding to escape the threats of the men she's implicated in an underage sex scandal and changes the number on her mobile phone to avoid the menacing phone calls she's been plagued by. The number turns out to have once belonged to schoolgirl Jin-hie who disappeared in mysterious circumstances - in fact she's been murdered and her vengeful spirit is using the phone number to try to bring her killer to justice. Unfortunately, she also kills those who own the number. Ji-Won investigates and comes to believe that her young niece Yeong-ju has been possessed by Jin-hie, leading to a plot twisting climax that has the film's best and most unexpected revelation. Ahn's icy, detached direction gives the film a chilly atmosphere and there are plenty of "faces-reflected-in-the-mirror" type scares, but one can't escape the fact that Phone is little more than an assemblage of everyone's favourite scenes and ideas from every Asian horror hit of the last decade. It's now obligatory that Asian horror films are compared to Hideo Nakata's groundbreaking Ringu (1998) and sure enough, it's the starting point for Ahn's film, replacing the cursed video with a haunted mobile phone - though accusations that Jin-Hie is a clone of Sadako are perhaps a little unfounded; there were an awful lot of Oriental ghosts with long black hair in film, literature and legend long before Nakata's film made them popular worldwide. There's no defending Ahn's shameless plundering of Nakata's Honogurai mizu no soko kara / Dark Water (2002) though, blatantly taking shots of hair leaking from a bath tap from the earlier film. Phone is a well made film and boasts a fantastic performance from Seo-woo Eun as the diminutive Yeong-ju. Her Exorcist-like outbursts - in particular her observation that Snow White's happy ending is "shit" - are both hilarious and unnerving, and her attempt to give her own father a full on kiss is simply disturbing - no doubt we won't be seeing a replay of that scene in the recently announced Hollywood remake. Next up came the longest of the short films on show, N(eon), from comic book artist / illustrator / photographer Dave McKean, best known for the covers for the Sandman comics and his Cages mini series. It's no surprise then that N(eon) looks great, but that really is all it has going for it. This dull, affected mess takes an agonising 28 minutes to tell the slight tale of a disaffected middle-aged man who wanders the streets of an out-of-season Venice in search of answers to his meaningless life and encounters a naked Eileen Daly as a ghost who repeatedly appears in a deserted square. The deadly monotone narration from former Velvet Undergrounder John Cale just makes a tedious experience all the more torturous. A truly painful experience. Of all of the films on offer at Frightfest this year, the one I was least looking forward to, the one I'd rather prejudged despite my best efforts not to, was The Last Horror Movie. I hadn't particularly liked director Julian Richards' previous film, Darklands (1997), so wasn't really looking forward to seeing his latest offering. Which just goes to show that you really shouldn't judge a film before you've seen it as The Last Horror Movie turned out to be one of the best films of the festival thus far. THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE LAST HORROR MOVIE It begins deceptively, with a young waitress being menaced by a serial killer in a remote American roadside diner. At this point, my heart sank - I was expecting a re-run of Octane, another British film trying to look American and yet another see-it-all-before teen slasher. But suddenly it cuts to British serial killer Max talking directly to the audience, telling them that he's taped over the film you've just rented from the local video shop and the film suddenly becomes the British answer to C'est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites Dog (1992). Over the next hour and a half, the witty, intelligent and disturbingly likeable Max (an outstanding performance from Kevin Howarth) leads us through his terrifying world of brutal murder - he's "done" 50 victims already - as he constantly harasses the audience to examine why they're continuing to watch even when it becomes clear that what they're watching is the real thing. James Handel's brilliant script - this is by far and away the best written film so far - has a lot to say and does it without preaching or getting heavy handed. It's an uncomfortable film, but a compelling one and that modern day rarity, a horror film that makes you think while scaring the hell out of you. Howarth takes centre stage throughout and is simply amazing as the unreadable Max - he himself admits that he's not mad, but offers no motivation for why he commits his appalling crimes other than that he wants to create the "last horror movie you'll ever see." Howarth was there at the screening and the best seat in the house must have been the one next to his - imagine the growing doubts of the poor soul sitting next to him when he or she realises that the perpetrator of these increasingly brutal crimes is sitting right next to them... The Last Horror Movie will work even better on video and DVD than it does on the big screen though one has to wonder what its prospects will be. With no big name stars and the still unshakeable stigma attached to British horror films, this could go unwatched by many who would love its perverse charm and uncompromising violence. And that would be a shame as this is one genre film that deserves to be huge. Curiously, some time ago, Richards told journalist MJ Simpson that The Last Horror Movie would be "about a group of media students who choose a derelict cinema as a location to make a slasher movie. Halfway through the shoot fiction becomes reality when they discover that the building is still occupied by its redundant projectionist who dresses up as killers from the genre's most frightening films and re-enacts the violence. Shooting will start mid June and the film should be completed by September.” Clearly that's not how it turned out and it's possible that this scenario will be one of the slate of films that Richards will be making through his newly formed Prolific Films outfit - all of a sudden, Julian Richards has become a director to watch. We barely had time to recover from the shock of The Last Horror Movie before we were plunged into Trailer Trash 2, a compilation of coming attractions culled from the depths of Frightfest webmaster Marc Morris' impressive video and DVD collection. The likes of Invasion USA (1952), Let Me Die a Woman (1978) and Roseland (1970) greatly amused an appreciate audience and warmed us up nicely for the main attraction, the indescribable Gozu, one of the latest offerings from the frighteningly prolific Takashi Miike. This insane, mind-numbing masterpiece sees Miike venturing into David Lynch land in an extraordinary tale of confused identities, yakuza gang politics and bizarre sex. Yakuza hitman Ozaki is losing it, seeing threats and dangers to his crew boss everywhere - we first see him messily assassinating a Chihuahua he believes to be a "yakuza attack dog"! It falls to another member of his crew, Minami, to deliver him to the "dump", a car crushing yard in Nagoya. But a freak traffic accident apparently kills Ozaki - whose body then vanishes. This is just the start of Minami's nightmarish journey through a strange netherworld where elderly inn owners try to make him drink her breast milk, where a minotaur appears in his room and licks his face, where the skins of dead yakuza are hung up on racks like dry-cleaned suits and where Ozaki appears to have been reborn as a young woman. Minami's climactic attempts to consummate his lust for his reborn "Brother" provided one of the biggest laughs and best gross-out moments of the whole weekend. A single viewing of Gozu simply isn't going to be enough for anyone to get a handle on it. It was clear afterwards that just about everyone at Frightfest loved it, but the bewilderment was clear on everyone's face as they trooped out of the Prince Charles. No-one had a clue what it was all about, but we were mostly united in our believe that it's a quite extraordinary and brilliant film. It's one that will surely reveal a lot more layers and subtleties with repeated viewings. Amazingly, Gozu was made for release in Japan on video only, part of the current wave of "v-cinema" productions. Unlike Western direct-to-video slop, the Japanese are embracing the form as an outlet for talented directors wanting to put out films that probably wouldn't receive much of a theatrical release. Sadly, Gozu hasn't received much of a release of any kind - it was due for release on tape and disc in Japan in July 2003 but still hasn't shown up, despite being screened at Cannes and various other prestigious festivals around the world. When it does finally surface, put this very near the top of your shopping list. It'll drive you mad, but you'll love every minute of it. Day three came to a close with the much fancied and heavily hyped Cabin Fever, introduced by a ten minute video talk from director Eli Roth who comes across as an enthusiastic genre fan who can do a mean David Lynch impression! Roth won over the audience immediately with his nostalgic pining for the genre's glory days of the 1970s and his criticisms of the recent crop of post-Scream horrors. The film itself does everything it sets out to do and does it with some style. There's little here that's original - it borrows shamelessly from classics like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Evil Dead (1982) as well as obscurities like The Alpha Incident (1977) - but it's done so well that it's hard to resist its grisly charms. Roth set out to revive the look and feel of the 70s and 80s horrors that he grew up on and that much he does exceptionally well - the backwoods setting could have come straight out of any number of rural horrors from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hill Have Eyes (1977) to Just Before Dawn and Mothers Day, and the gore was strong enough to please most fans. The audience at Frightfest certainly lapped it up, loving the black humour (it's not a spoof - it's a proper horror film that just has some very funny lines) and over-the-top, old school violence and reveling in the chance to show off their knowledge of the genre by spotting all of Roth's sly references. Somehow, he even managed to get the rights to use extracts from David Hess' songs from the Last House on the Left soundtrack! Cabin Fever
was an excellent way to finish a very long and tiring day and the majority
of Frightfesters went home pleased and geared up for the final day,
which offers some very diverse films, from the gore of Uwe Boll's House
of the Dead and Rob Zombie's House
of 1000 Corpses to the Spanish sex thriller Between
Your Legs and the latest from Pusher and
Bleeder director Nicholas Winding Refn, Fear
X. Visit the FrightFest website
Last Updated: 15 October, 2008
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