FrightFest 2025 - The Home, Cognaitive, Night of Violence

 

FrightFest 2025

 

 

I always say that when you get the FrightFest bug, you can’t resist. The scramble for tickets gets more intense every year, especially if you have a group of friends that you rely on for interfilm drinks. I’ve been coming ever since ‘A Serbian Film’ was banned (2010 – and there’s a documentary about that showing this year) and I don’t plan on giving up. It helps that I am travelling distance and costs me so much less than others paying for hotels, dogsitters, etc. It’s a great way to deny reality for a few days.

 

And of course, huge respect to the filmmakers for getting it done, regardless of my opinion - and it is my opinion.

 

The Home

Director:  James DeMonaco

Cast:Pete Davidson, John Glover, Ethan Phillips, Bruce Altman

USA, 2025

 

A brisk pacing, some unexpected feints and practical gore - plus lots of eye trauma - make this diverting. Pete Davidson makes for a slightly soulful protagonist to guide through a plot you can guess from early on, even when padded out by too many nightmare sequences. And there’s an even a pathetic phallacy hurricane for the revenge massacre. It’s a mess, scruffy at the edges, increasingly loopy and one of those to add to the Old People Are The Enemy subgenre.

 

 

Cognaitive

Director: Tommy Savas

Cast: Piper Curda, Noel Fisher, Josh Zuckerman, Natasha Bahnam

USA

 

Decently acted chamber piece where a bunch of obnoxious programmers must stave off homicidal AI that wants to take over the world. Enough decent lines and pace to entertain, with tech-bro narcissism front and centre in the tar
get. To this end, Noel Fisher's performance is the stand-out full of nervous-psychotic manipulative-charmless energy. It's slick and pacey enough with its mini-robot being its most memorable feature. If the AI argument is that man is his own worst enemy, there’s nothing here to counter that.

 

 

 

Night of Violence

Director: Illya Konstantin

Cast: Gigi Gustin, Russ Russo, Kit Lang, Caitlin Borek

USA

 

A meet cute at the office party massacre doesn’t have enough of the violence promised, and it becomes mostly people running around a huge office building. It helps that masked marauders like to walk slowly for sinister effect. Lots of stabbing, but the most effective gore is the stapling of a huge gash. The huge chasm between the sadness of its message and the popsong uplift of its resolution and the gleeful satire of its fake adverts makes for tonal imbalance.A film tired out by its own padding and lack of invention.