FrightFest '24 ~ day 5

The Dead Thing

Director: Elric Kane.

With: Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes.

USA 2024. 94 mins.

 

It’s true that many didn’t think this gelled and just bored, but from the languid pace I found an interesting ghost story about the modern malaise of urban hook-up culture. Blu Hunt gives an assured turn as a woman who turns to fleeting sexual encounters to alleviate her dislocation and depression, leading to lust-motivated hauntings. Putting all-encompassing desire at the forefront of motivation gives this its quirk and the atmosphere is of a dreamy urban ambience.

 

 

A Desert

Director: Joshua Erkman.

With: David Yow. Kai Lennox, Sarah Lind, Zacary Ray Sherman.

USA 2024. 100 mins.

 

A solid, sunbaked thriller. A photographer goes on a road trip, bearing a mid-life crisis, and discovers – like so many horrors – that Some People Just Want To Fuck You Up. Even if that’s predictable, there are full-blooded performances, grittiness, beautiful cinematography, and enough inventiveness to make this memorable. A film that will surely earn itself cult status.

 

Ladybug

Director Tim Cruz.

With: Anthony Del Negro, Zachary Roozen, Scout Taylor-Compton, Charlene Tilton.

USA 2024. 107 mins.

 

Second supernatural lover of this Frightfest day. A lead character that does exposition for himself (“Home sweet home!”) and a narrative that takes a little too long to where it’s going, which is nothing objectionable but nothing original. Its best gag is the potential porn potential of the handyman. ‘Goosebumps’ for gay hipster art lovers.

 

Cold Wallet

Director: Cutter Hodierne.

With: Raul Castillo, Josh Brener, Melonie Diaz, Tony Cavalero.

USA 2024. 84 mins.

 

A zeitgeisty small time crime thriller. When their crypto-currency dreams die, a home invasion heist tale kicks in when three Redditors decide to force the CEO to reimburse everyone. Big house, sudden small-time crooks, manipulative CEO. It doesn’t necessarily say a much about people driven to desperate measures, but it does keep in mind the scheming that takes advantage of the needy and hopeful. A minor, unsurprising but solidly made thriller.

 

The Substance

Director: Coralie Fargeat.

With: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia.

USA/France/UK 2024. 140 mins.

 

Broad of satire, unconvincing of detail, full of glorious excess, ‘The Substance’ is an EC Comic horror full of crowd-pleasing absurdity – an extended ‘Creepshow’ tale. If I went in perhaps expecting Cronenberg-lite, in fact the callbacks were to ‘Society’, ‘Basket Case’ and even ‘TerrorVision’, the early films of Stuart Gordon; those grungy, silly, outrageousness, flabbergasting films that were the Eighties output of Empire Pictures and Troma. Surely Cannes can’t be as familiar of this output as the FrightFest audience and had never quite seen something like ‘The Substance’, therefore giving it awards.

 

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley look gorgeous and give it their all, and there is much amusement in the battle between youth and aging here, even if it never addresses the subjects of narcissism. The film’s call for kindness to yourself across the ages is a sincerely felt one, although the audience was baying with laughter at the inter-generational fight made flesh. Also, despite how much the film insists, they never feel like the same person, as “one”. It is as brilliant as it is stupid. The opening vignette that establishes Elizabeth Sparkle’s (Moore) waning fame is excellent, the constant unsubtlety less so (we get it: Dennis Quaid is gross). Internal logic and answering questions are not really in its interest (how could “Sue” (Qualley) possibly function as a huge star on magazine covers without history? Does she get an audition, accepted and film a show in a week? She taps a hollow wall and finds an empty room behind? Wait, who is behind “The Substance”, what is their agenda and what do they gain?).

 

But the comic book look, the art design, the practical effects are where ‘The Substance’ excels, pushing itself right to the end into a “fuck it” splatterfest until using out-there gore to return us to the beginning with an astute ending whose unsubtlety works. The FrightFest audience rightly treated the whole thing as a comedy with a little grit, stupidity and feminine anger, and for that it is a giddy body horror that wins by taking the lead of the body horror that came before.

 

____

 

And so, another very enjoyable FrightFest is over. I stayed in the main scree where there was lots of head trauma, sex-obsessed ghosts,

 

Favourite picks:

 ·         Stange Darling

• Dead Mail

·         Invader

 

Although the narrative shuffling of ‘Strange Darling’ would usually put me off just as gimmick, the style, the flare, the flirting and interaction of the leads, and intense sound-design all made it a total winner for me.

 

I gave ‘Dead Mail’ a chief place for being a most authentic period piece, for making its excesses prosaic and steeped in the ordinary, for making ordinary working people of the post office pro-active detectives.

 

‘Invader’, because stripped-down brutality accentuating ordinary life is the true stuff of horror for me. And uncompromising home invasion hits a nerve.

 

But it is ‘The Last Ashes’ and ‘A Desert’ that stick in my mind notable as runner-uppers.

 

If ‘The Substance’ was the Frightfest winner, I sadly couldn’t fully invest because it cared not for any subtlety or layers, however much I enjoyed its flare and outrageousness (I had similar issues with Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’). Although I thought  Tsigaridis’‘Two Witches’ showed promise, his ‘Traumatika’ fulfilled none of it. ‘Survive’ seemed to be the one to laugh at (without malice) but enjoyed. And in the enjoyable stakes, ‘The Invisible Raptor’ was far more solid and consistently funny than expected, and I had been waiting a long time to see ‘The Last Trip of the Demeter’, and thoroughly pleasing if unremarkable it was too.

 

The Hitcher’ proved it has always been a winner, and the screening of its new print at FrightFest was a great way to introduce it to a new converts.

 

I heard good things about ‘Protein’, ‘Derelict’ and ‘Charlotte’, so I will be looking out for them.

 

I barely ate the last two days and survived on snacks. By Day 5, I am just a film watching machine and can’t believe it’s coming to an end. I made fine new FrightFest pals and caught up and bumped in old ones between films. Ian Rattray caught me leaving ‘Member’s Only’ early for the night train and stopped for a chat. The most annoying audience was the cast, crew and friends of ‘Members Only’ (what I saw of it) and ‘Traumatika’ that cheered, laughed and clapped frequently at everything; the latter group seemed to laughing be *at* their own film, which was confusing. Seeing ‘Bookworm’ and ‘The Substance’ with a receptive FrightFace audience was thoroughly the best way to see them.

FrightFest '24 ~ day 4

The Last Ashes

Director: Loïc Tanson.

With: Sophie Mousel, Timo Wagner, Jules Werner, Luc Schiltz.

Luxembourg 2023. 120 mins.

 

A revenge Western drama set in 19^th Century Luxembourg opens with the kind of absurdist black-and-white maltreatments that remind of the absurdism/cruelty of, say, ‘The Painted Bird’ or Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel ‘Laprova’. Then fifteen years later in colour and Hélène is back to burn it all down so she can make peace with her trauma and move on. The violence and sadism of misogyny and the patriarchy is the enemy here, and the pleasure is in seeing our defiant protagonist Hélène (an excellent Sophie Mousel) putting in place the pieces of her long-term vengeance. The film takes its time with this, but the consistent tone and engaging and unusual setting is always compelling, always boiling its elements. Often pretty, some nastiness, occasionally shocking and a gratifying finale, fuelled by an outrage at the absurdities and brutality of religious misogyny.

 

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee

Director: Jon Spira.

With: Peter Serafinowicz, Harriet Walter, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante.

UK 2024. 104 mins

 

The animation that Spira employs to tell the tale of Christopher Lee’s may initially seem a little too cute, but by the end it’s all very moving. Lee’s history is fascinating and surprising long before he played Dracula, a role he seems to have spent the rest of his life trying to shake off, even up to his knighthood (which proves a perfect and hilarious note to end on). Regal, onery and, it would seem, surprisingly insecure. But it’s lovely to think he was having some of the best times of his life right up to his viewing choice with the nurses before he passed away.

 

AZRAEL: ANGEL OF DEATH

Director: E.L. Katz.

With: Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, Katariina Unt, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett.

USA 2024. 85 mins.

 

Silly, but always entertaining. After “The Rapture”, people give up the “sin of speech” (?), and instead seem to get over communication issues by whistling and meaningful looks. And even its post-apocalypse, you’ll still have the chance at a to-the-death fight to some electropop. And although the monsters seem be only roaring dirt-covered cannibals, there are some good moments of practical effects gore.

 

In comparing with ‘The Last Ashes’, here it is a matriarchy that Samara Weaving wants to burn to the ground, although apparently it is all resolved with a little maternal instinct.

 

Saint Clare

Director: Mitzi Peirone.

With: Bella Thorne, Rebecca De Mornay, Ryan Phillippe, Frank Whaley.

USA 2024. 92 mins.

 

‘Promising Young Woman’ as a High School comedy-drama, but missing the devastating sadness and intelligence of that film. Bella Thorne is memorable and well up to the task of trying to negotiate a general inconsistency of tone, but there’s a shallowness under the kitchen sink that’s thrown in (for example, the religious gestures the film makes aren’t explored). It’s a decent if superficial horror entertainment.

 

Invader

Director: Mickey Keating.

With: Vero Maynez, Colin Huerta, Ruby Vallejo.

USA 2024. 70 mins.

 

Shamefully, I had it in my head that ‘Strange Darling’ was directed by Keating and I was writing and saying how surprisingly different it was to what I knew of his work, although the Cool Retro vibe of ‘Strange Darling’ film was something I could see carrying over from Keating’s ‘Psychopath’. Anyway, after I had confessed and corrected my error (and put it down to sometimes just being stupid and getting carried away), ‘Invader’ was very different after all: rather than the stylisation and staginess, ‘Invader’ shouted a smash-and-grab intent. It’s a slender, brash and often intense home invasion tale told in hand-held fashion that – in their stage introduction – Keating and editor Valerie Krulfeifer warned we may have to look away and take a break from at times. And yes, sometimes the shaky-cam is confusing – blocking doesn’t seem to be a thing – but it is obviously deliberate rather than artless. Keating talked of trends in the nineties for films about Americans going abroad and getting fucked up, and how he wanted to invert that (and just stopped short of saying outright “Why do people want to come to Chicago?” Keating and Krulfeifer were light and breezy, likable and funny). And it’s true that the America presented here is litter-strewn, unfriendly, threatening and ultimately homicidal in a weirdo get-up. ‘Invader’ is a short but loud burst of social anxiety with no room for relief.