FrightFest 2025 - Day 2

 

APPOFENIACS

Director:Chris Marrs Piliero

Cast: Sean Gunn, Jermaine Fowler, Aaron Holliday, Michael Abbott Jr

USA

 

If you liked "Lowlife", like hard-boiled crime fiction by the likes of Gifford and Leonard, this is sure to float your boat. Pulp ensemble, criminal and broad characters verging on the cartoonish and intersecting subplots may wear its Tarantino love too conspicuously on its sleeve, but there's plenty of escalating misunderstanding and mayhem of its own to carry you along. Mostly, all the foreshadowing pays off to a full-blown ending to leave you giddy with its excess. Also, its a film that highlights how terrifying AI in the wrong hands could be by not even exaggerating by much. Again, it's the people who are the problem.

 

 

 

WHAT SHE DOESN’T KNOW

Director:

Juan Pablo Arias Munoz

Cast:Sienna Agudong, Jessica Belkin, Conor Husting, Denise Richards.

USA

 

Despite nice performances and a big house, this is built on spoilt brat worries and all the emoting becomes tedious as the mystery becomes just as you suspect and offers nothing new. There’s meant to be a tale of friendship here, but stretched too thin and with too little payoff.

 

 

 

TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS

Director: Toshiaki Toyoda

Cast: Chihara Jr., Masahiro Higashide, Haruka Imô, Yôsuke Kubozuka

Japan

 

Where straightforward narrative gives way to the opaque spiritual ramblings about reaching across the universe in your little finger and ghosts hiring assassins, the sensation and kaleidoscopic achievements of the visuals and dominance of the music make for a compelling if baffling journey. The meaning and intention may be hermetic, but the experience is a genuine trip.

 

 

 

A SERBIAN DOCUMENTARY

Director: Stephen Biro

Cast: Srdjan Spasojeviċ, Aleksandar Radivojević, Srdjan Zika Todorović, Sergej Trifunovć

USA

 

With access to a shipload of behind-the-scenes footage as well as interviews with cast and crew, Biro's documentary makes the best argument for this most notorious of films, "A Serbian Film". Watching the effects work is a real treat. It helps that the filmmakers are the most eloquent and understanding of their intentions: if you aren't convinced by this of their most punk disgust at exploitation and the human condition, then you are doubtlessly the closed minds they're outraged by. Five years in the making, Biro spoke on stage of how inflammatory the film and its reputation still is. Perhaps the most shocking conclusion made is that the director Srdjan Spasojevic now feels he didn't go far enough.

 

They fuck you when you're born, they fuck you when you're living, they fuck you when you're dead - indeed.

 

 

THE TOXIC AVENGER

Director: Macon Blair

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon

USA

 

It may want to rest on its sentimentality unironically and Macon may not want to rest on Toxie's puerile nature to carry it through, but there's enough gore and gags to make this an audience pleaser. And funny how CGI bloodletting, whilst hitting the mark, still isn't as satisfying as DIY practical. Dinklage gives heartfelt, Bacon and Wood give sleazy, Tremblay gives trembly teen. Perhaps this is slicker but the original remains the real shocker.

 

 

FLUSH

Director: Gregory Morin

Cast: Jonathan Lambert, Elodie Navarre, Elliot Jenicot, Rémy Adriaens.

That a guy trapped in a Turkish toilet cubicle scenario can turn into a litany of disgust and end up a gorefest is testimony to its sheer invention. And it is funny. Wisely keeping brevity, there's no fat involved as details like drug-addict rats and trying to use ear pods while head-first in a toilet escalate into belly-laugh absurdity without ever losing its nastiness. A crowd-pleaser.

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.