DAY 5: Frightfest 2013
On the last stretch now, but still
much to go. There have been ominous mentions that the big screen, with its
capacity of holding 1330 Frightfesters, is to be closed down; even though the
showrunners aren’t saying too much it would seem it is going to split into two separate
screens (at time of writing, official announcement by the Empire is pending).
Already I am thinking that Frightfest would be a slightly lesser experience for
loss of the big theatre… but that’s just the pessimist in me.
“Dark
Touch” has a fine grey Irish atmosphere in which its young
protagonist, maltreated and confused, discovers and explores her psychic
powers. At first her telekinetic powers are uncontrollable and she reads the
phenomenon around her as the house having a rage, but once she is taken in by
another family who try to draw her out of herself, Niamh soon works out what
she’s about and learns to focus her powers against the abuse and inanity of
adults. Marina Da Van’s film starts well
enough and there are a number of decent set pieces when Niamh’s power lets
loose, but the film struggles as it goes on: some of the adult behaviour seems
a bit daft and certainly there was unintentional humour causing audience
laughter; at other times, certain things do not quite seem clear enough. This
means that the birthday doll party scene ends up as unconvincing and
unintentionally funny because surely the adults would have had more sensitivity
than to let Niamh go to a doll party (after she experienced her infant
sibling’s death) and perhaps it is not quite vivid enough that she casts some
psychic influence over the other kids (otherwise their mutilation of the dolls
is ridiculous). Similarly, the finale is agreeably downbeat and striking some
resonance with the kids emulating the inanities and casual control of their
parents, but it also feels as if some footage making the sequence fully
coherent has been left on the cutting room floor. Full of promise, it
nevertheless ends up unsatisfying and feeling somewhat incomplete.
On the other hand, lair
Erickson’s “Banshee Chapter” – 3-D!
– has very little to offer at all except a bunch of tiresome clichés. It has
some found-footage/character-cam aesthetic, which means we reach the ridiculous
situation where found-footage is in 3-D. This gives way to the director’s camera,
but Erickson films with the same swirling and swinging camera as a
character-cam, so the entire film feels like “found footage”. It’s a mess. The
premise is that the American government experimented on people with
mind-altering drugs; Internet journalist Anne Roland investigates (and is badly
played by Katia Winter). Ted Levine steals the show as a burnt-out ex-beatnik dopehead
but to little avail. The Frightfest programme states that this is “Based on
real documents, actual test subject testimony and uncovered secrets about
testing run by the CIA”, but if true their main achievement was in summoning
post-“Ringu” spooks. Despite the “true story” angle, this is of very little
interest, tired and trivial.
“ODD
THOMAS” is one of those oh-so-cute supernatural-superhero wish-fullfillment
tales that have characters with first names like “Odd” and “Stormy”. Eponymous
Odd Thomas is a young man with the ability to do whatever the hell the script
needs him to do: he sees dead people and spends his time avenging their deaths
(wait, how many would he need to save in small town USA?); but he also sees
wraith-like death creatures that are never quite called demons, even though
devil worshiping turns up elsewhere; and then there is a guy who apparently
wants to be a serial killer even though he is actually plotting to be a mass
murderer (the script throws this all together). And then Odd Thomas can see
dead people except for when he is being haunted himself… er? The film can barely go five seconds without a special-effect of
some kind. It seems to be some teen-orientated adventure but with jokes about
Ed Gein’s belts made of nipples and a mall massacre: that weird, particularly
American mixing between the daft and the genuinely disturbing without an inch
of self-awareness leaves the whole thing a bit clueless and unfocused and a
hodgepodge of horror junk that just leaves it as a pile of various crap thrown
against the wall. “Odd Thomas” has found far more favour with others than from
myself, because diverting as it may possibly be, it just seems to me to be more
mainstream filmmakers waving various horror tropes and attributes at the
audience and ending up incoherent instead of genuinely and gleeful chaotic. There
is little sense it actually knows what it is doing except chucking a bunch of
stuff onscreen. It is based on the novel
by Dean R Koontz and directed by Stephen Sommers, and you can take those as
warnings.
Jorge Michel Grau’s “We Are What We Are/Somos lo que hay”(2010) was the very first film I ever saw at
Frightfest, years back. It was the only film I saw at Frightfest that year
(because they banned “A Serbian Film” at the last minute) and I thought it was
minor classic. Bill Sage’s American re-interpretation is moody, slick and
getting much praise, but it is elegant and stylised where Grau’s original is
dirty and desperate. The original is about a broken underclass beyond repair,
it’s about starvation and struggle where Sage’s remake is mostly about ritual
and bullying patriarchy. Sage doesn’t really get into the nasty stuff and the
very ritual that ought to show without qualm the exact gristle of the family’s
cannibalism is all off-stage, so that we get a sympathetic backstory about the
ceremony but not its truth. On its own terms it is a fine variation slice of American Gothic, but it is a far less
nourishing and angry affair.
Aharon
Keshales and Navot Papushado introduced their “Big Bad Wolves” as a kind of revenge upon their parents who
brought them up on Grimm’s fairy tales wherein the monsters are euphemisms and
allegories for paedophiles. “Big Bad Wolves” succeeds on that level and many
others: as a shocker, as a mystery (did he do it?), as black comedy and as a
scathing indictment of torture and men who want to be, in various ways, big bad
wolves. After a deceptively elegiac opening, inclining towards fairy-tale, the
brutality sets in: the police are beating up the prime suspect in the case of a
missing little girl but they aren’t careful and cause the investigation to tank
when their ‘interrogation’ is. Meanwhile, the girl’s father has his own plans
to make the prime suspect confess. All the clues are there but you may not notice
them the first time round for the film moves between black-humoured farce,
social commentary, very real horror and stark violence that you may not quite
see its greater game. A brilliantly
scripted and cruelly played condemnation of man’s inclination to violence as a
recourse and resource.
And so, "Big Bad Wolves" is the very last film to be screened at the Empire's major screen. Festival organiser says he cannot reveal too much but looks forward to something different and better. And why not? I for one will miss the gigantic auditorium.
But I will still be back next year for Frightfest.
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