Before setting out on the last day of Frightfest 2003 I want it to be completely clear that I've enjoyed this year's event immensely and am hugely grateful for all of the hard work that the organisers put into getting it all together. I mention that now as, to be honest, the final day turned out to be a massive disappointment.

The day should have started with the short The Last Dream / Dernier reve which somehow failed to turn up, being replaced instead with a handful of trailers, giving UK audiences their first big screen look at the promos for, amongst other things, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and the new Tarantino, Kill Bill. The first film of the day was Uwe Boll's House of the Dead, a ridiculous but fun adaptation of the video game of the same name.

A group of young 20-somethings arrive on a remote island [ominously known as Isla de Muerte by locals] for a rave party and run into a pack of fast-moving zombies, the result of evil experiments centuries before by a now immortal Spaniard. The survivors take refuge in an old house and prepare for a bloody showdown with the undead.

With a hysterical [in every sense of the word] central zombie killing set piece, loads of inappropriate bullet time effects, some of the worst dialogue you'll ever here and some crowd-pleasing head crushing and entrails spilling, House of the Dead was a very silly but effective start to the day. Boll and his cast clearly aren't taking any of it seriously which helps, though Boll should have words with his dialogue / ADR people as their dialogue is often incomprehensible. Boll makes no bones about this being a game adaptation and even edits in brief clips from the game itself to punctuate the mayhem, a tactic which works well enough at first but which soon becomes very tiresome. It's always good to see Clint Howard and Jurgen Prochnow at work and their performances steal the show, though the script gives them very little to work with.

House of the Dead is a fun piece of brain dead sleaze but to be honest I'd be more than happy not to have to see it again - it simply hasn't got enough substance to make it worth revisiting. But as we'll see, it's a masterpiece compared to some of what was still to come...

The real highlight of the day was up next, Martin Gooch's 10 minute short Arthur's Amazing Things. This hilarious vignette stars Mark Felgate as the eponymous Arthur, a boring office worker with a crush on one of his co-workers, the frankly terrifying Lindsay Dawn Mckenzie. So desperate is he to attract her attention that he invents a series of useless gadgets before hitting the motherload when he creates a pair of wings that give him the power of flight. His true love is suitably impressed, but for Arthur it's going to be a short lived triumph which is just going to end very messily indeed...

Very funny stuff, Arthur's Amazing Things features a marvelous narration from comedy icon Leslie Phillips, some genuinely funny sight gags and a wonderful final shot. Anything featuring an appearance from current EOFFTV fave Emily Booth can't be all bad and Arthur's Amazing Things emerged as the unlikely hit of the final day of Frightfest 2003.

Things then starting to go a little awry. Manuel Gomez Pereira's Between Your Legs / Entre las pienas was promoted in the programme as a "Spanish giallo" and the organisers had made it perfectly clear throughout the weekend that they'd been trying to show the film at Frightfest for the past two years - they'd got it now as it's about to be released by new distribution company Nucleus Films, created by director Jake West and Frightfest webmaster Marc Morris.

Sadly, the ecstatic build-up for the film from the organisers failed to translate into much audience enthusiasm. Between Your Legs turned out to be an OK [and it's really nothing more than that] Hitchcockian thriller - what it certainly isn't is a horror film, a fact which seemed to go down very badly with a large part of the audience. I know that some of the weekend pass holders complained to the organisers afterwards and there were accusations afterwards that the film had been shown simply because the organisers liked it, with no real thought as to whether it was the right sort of film for Frightfest. This may be a tad unfair, but the question does remain what was it doing here? Coming after House of the Dead and before House of 1000 Corpses, it seemed an odd choice for a weary final day audience who greeted the end credits with a stony silence.

Things didn't get much better with the latest film from Pusher and Bleeder director Nicholas Winding Refn, the disappointing Fear X. John Turturro stars as a tormented shopping mall security guard whose wife has been murdered. Becoming increasingly obsessed with finding out who did it, he pores over hours of security video looking for clues, clues that will lead him from a snowy Wisconsin to Montana where he runs into a police conspiracy.

Fear X was another very poor choice for the final day of a horror festival, a day which really should have been full to the brim with hardcore genre movies to keep flagging spirits going through to the end. This tedious art house film again seemed to be horribly out of place. It takes Refn an hour and a half to tell a story which, frankly, would have had trouble filling a twenty minute short. It's a painfully slow film and the l-o-n-g gaps between dialogue as characters simply stare numbly at each other for what seems an eternity before responding becomes incredibly irritating before the credits have rolled. Before the film began, Alan Jones promised us that the last ten minutes would "have your eyes out on stalks" - as the crowd trooped out of the Prince Charles Cinema at the end, I wasn't the only one who wondered if maybe he'd missed something. The last ten minutes are exactly the same as the eighty that went before it before the film finally stops leaving one to wonder what all the fuss had been about.

By now I must confess I was ready to call it a day and head home for some much needed sleep, but there was still one more film to come, Rob Zombie's highly anticipated House of 1000 Corpses, introduced by the director himself and his girlfriend / star Sherri Moon. The film played very well with the Frightfest crowd who lapped up its delirious, non-stop barrage of surreal imagery and most people seemed to come away from it very well pleased. For me, the film didn't quite gel - there are lots of great moments and a thunderous soundtrack, but the whole never quite hangs together properly.

Four young people traveling the back roads of America in 1977 fall foul of a bizarre family in a remote house while researching the legend of the appalling Dr Satan and his obscene experiments to create superhumans from mental patients. The travelers join a quintet of abducted cheerleaders in the family's house of horrors, while various parents, police and other bystanders are slaughtered by the Texas Chain Saw Massacre inspired clan.

The biggest problem with House of 1000 Corpses is that it doesn't seem to have any discernable story beyond the brief synopsis given above. Zombie clearly knows his stuff, but it results in him simply ransacking the best bits from every genre film and TV show he's ever seen and placing them end to end in the hope that some sort of plot might emerge. It looks to be exactly what it is - it's what a heavy metal fan / musician things a horror film should be, so we get lots of mad cackling, lots of hairy people shouting at each other and lots of leering over-acting.

That said, some of it shows real promise - Zombie's going to be a genre force to reckon with when he gets to grips with writing and House of 1000 Corpses showcases his raw talent in some deeply unsettling moments. And that's the problem really - it's just a film of "moments." It's much better made than I'd feared it would be and it's perfectly clear why the suits at Universal crapped themselves when they saw it and ditched it - this certainly isn't your multiplex friendly teen horror and will be a difficult sell to a non-genre loving audience.

So that was it for another Frightfest. 17 features, 5 shorts and more trailers than you can shake a stick at. The general feeling outside afterwards was that this year's bash hadn't quite lived up to expectations and wasn't as strong as last years line-up - there was nothing this year quite as execrable as last year's Nine Lives, but neither was there anything as good as Frailty, Honogurai mizu no soko kara / Dark Water, Jian gui / The Eye and Donnie Darko. There were a lot of fair-to-middling films this year, which isn't to say that it was a total loss - as ever Frightfest proved itself to be the biggest, best and friendliest genre festival in the UK and I for one will be there next year. To Sum up:

To sum up:

The Good: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tattoo, Cypher, Charlie's Family, The Last Horror Movie, Gozu and Cabin Fever.

The Bad: Octane, Between Your Legs and Fear X. And a special mention to the unbearably awful short N[eon].

The Indifferent: Beyond Re-Animator, Malefique, Jeepers Creepers 2, Phone, House of the Dead and House of 1000 Corpses.

As ever, it just remains to thank Kasia, Steve, Pete and Dave for their company throughout the weekend and also to thank everyone who came over and said hello between films. And of course a big thanks to Alan Jones, Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray for putting the whole thing together. Only 52 weeks to go before the next one...

Visit the FrightFest website