FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

213 BONES

Director: Jeffrey Primm

Cast: Colin Egglesfield, Dean Cameron, Toni Weiss, Liam Woodrum.

USA

 

At first, there’s the promise of a straightforward non-postmodern slasher providing horror comfort food, but it becomes quickly apparent that this has all the subgenre’s weaknesses too. Predominantly, it hinges on a thoroughly unconvincing bunch of college student victims, and its not clear how they managed to get this far in their studies as they don’t appear to have any critical thinking at all. It goes through the motions, the kills are humdrum and then the killer with the ridiculous motivation is unmasked and the audience goes “Wha?”

 

 

TOMB WATCHER

Director: Vathanyu Ingkawiwat

Cast: Woranuch Bhirombhakdi, Thanavate Siriwattanagul, Arachaporn Pokin Pakor.

Thailand

 

It has the chief elements to appeal to the Gothic sensibility: a big remote house, portraits of the dead wife and the corpse of the dead wife itself on the grounds. All the couple have to do is put up with the husband devoting to the dead body for one hundred days. The trouble is that the husband was cheating on the wife, and she wants the hundred days to exact her revenge from beyond the grave. Cue the long-haired Asian ghost and no one believing the haunted wife driven to near-insanity. It is a standard, traditional ghost story, but it looks good and carries out its tropes with elegance rather than excess, at least until its ending where it goes a little loopy. 

 

 

The DESCENT

Director: Neil Marshall.

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, MyAnna Buring.

UK

 

Even after all this time, you’ll be likely to jump at least once again. Perhaps the attacks are edited to the incoherent side, but what mostly struck me once more this time is how much David Julyan's forewarns the tragedy from the very start. You are so invested into the girls foolishly going deeper and deeper underground that you almost forget that they’ll be monsters. Marshall has so far never captured this classic status again.

 

 

BONE LAKE

Director: Mercedes Bryce Morgan

Cast: Marco Pigossi, Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita.

USA

 

Perhaps the opening promises something less graceful, just to get the attention, but what follows is a slick, silly and thoroughly entertaining romp. The great performances are essential to above-average characterisation, which is important when the fragility of couples is the whole discourse: Diego and Sage are thoroughly convincing as a decent couple struggling to get over themselves. Perhaps not quite as twisty and surprising as it thinks, but its thoroughly engaging, gorgeously shot and played and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy.

 

REDUX REDUX

Director: Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus

Cast: Jim Cummings, Derick Alexander, Raphael Chestang, Debra Christofferson

USA

 

Emotion-led lofi scifi is often a good place to find something fresh in the genre, and this excellent multiverse tale impresses with how packed with emotional grounding it is. From grief making our protagonist pursue a hellbent mission to visit all the dimensions to kill her daughter’s murderer to a streetwise brat finding her limitations, the measured pace allows the loneliness to surface even when foregrounded and tent-poled by action set-pieces. Although mostly a two-hander there’s uniformly great acting, lowkey and immersive atmosphere, pleasingly clunky dimension-hopping freezer unit, a script only interested in the characters with little need to linger on backstory, allowing the existential and relationship questions to dominate. Proof again that an indie film with single well written conceit and a solid agenda of investigating the human condition can generate full-blooded, unsettling and rewarding entertainment.

Smile 2

Smile 2

Writer & Director – Parker Finn

2024, USA

Stars ~ Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage

 

Parker Finn’s franchise ‘Smile’ is proving to be quite the empathic franchise. Whether you see its premise of psychological illness as an infectious demon as questionable or as a manifestation of an old misconception, there is no doubting that Naomi Scott’s performance has the fiercest compassion. Just recently, I heard some work colleagues opine that as a celebrity had been into drugs and whatever, their untimely death was somehow unsympathetic, and obviously this lacks nuance, consideration and kindness. As Skye Riley, Naomi Scott’s raw turn as a successful pop star who is filled with self-loathing – and therefore most susceptible to the smile demon – never once drops the ball into implying she is deserving, even at her worst. The film goes a long way to determining that the celebrity life isolates and brings out the worst in an individual. It is Scott’s performance that is central and elevates the sequel to higher merit, even as it contains several showstoppers.

 

There’s more confidence here with the bigger budget and a deliberate focus that the original. It comes with many memorable images: a traffic accident blood smear like a smile; and the relentlessly smiling fangirl at the signing; a face pulled into a distorted grin in a vanity mirror, to name just three. The opening scene had me engaged in a way that ‘Terrifier 3’ didn’t manage at all – a carefully choreographed long take will always grab my attention – and by the end I was wondering why so many were saying they hadn’t seen something along the lines of ‘The Substance’ ever before. It won’t top ‘The Substance’ but then ‘Smile 2’ has a more eloquent agenda and characters and is more a bowl of multi-coloured candy than day-glo jelly. MikeMcGranaghan finds ‘Smile 2’s last act laughable, but as I was reading it as viewing the mental collapse of a flawed character, as well as the contagion potentially spreading, I was left strangely moved.

 

‘Smile 2’ spins through small-time crookery, popstar biopic, music video and supernatural curse so that the jump scares aren’t just cheap tactics (one jump scare had the entire audience I was with vibrating with chuckles at being caught for thirty seconds afterwards). And of course, the world of fame is the domain of fake smiles, although arguably Finn doesn’t quite make the most of this. Where he does is with the creepiness of an approaching dance routine, where the audience is the prey.

 

Going from the grey hues of the opening to the candy pop colourscheme of an endlessly superficial pop-world to more nightmarish shadows of horror, Finn uses the unique ability of cinema to undermine reality until everything collapses in on itself. When the biggest enemy is your own self-hatred, there is little reprieve and no winning.

 

All to say ‘Smile 2’ is a fun downer, a A24 horror version of Brady Cobert’s ‘VoxLux’ with a foot in James Wan jump scares. But like it’s predecessor, there’s a properly tragic feel and a haunting aftertaste and that most troubling and that most underrated ingredient that makes up horror: unfairness.

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.