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.

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.

Nosferatu

Nosferatu

Director ~ Robert Eggers

Writers ~ Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker

2024, United States - United Kingdom -Hungary

Stars ~ Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Defoe,

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

 

And with the greyscale and cinematography of the first few minutes, I was hooked, wondering if it would continue. And it does: Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is exceptional, and the layers, the depths of the darkness and shadowplay captured are stunning. (The shot of the forest crossroads early on is a favourite.) It’s a lush and gorgeous-looking film throughout, although Eggers’ visual command has never been in doubt.

 

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original has an uncontested legend and influence as a visual horror tone poem, and so there will always be that “remaking is sacrilegious” and “Why??!!” objections, as if remaking hasn’t always in cinema’s DNA. So that aside, the criticisms I have noted are: there’s no colour; it’s boring; it’s just a ‘Dracula’ rip-off (!); and for Robin from Dark Corners, it’s laughable with bad dialogue and acting, and he’s not the only one. None of which landed with me or challenged my enjoyment and sense of being impressed. (Robin is more chastising Eggers’ film for being not the film he wanted rather than what it is, which is a starting point that rarely gets off the runway for me: his summary is that the film is bad, unnecessary and laughable. I enjoy Dark Corners, but we disagree here) 

 

The performances stand out. Nicolas Hoult is great at conveying a man out of his depth but trying to fall back on patriarchal constructs to convince himself he’s in control, especially with his wife. Willem Defoe is reliably ornate, but not as gung-ho as Simon McBurney as Knock, biting off pigeon heads and scenery with equal gusto. Lily-Rose Depp gives it her all, certainly giving Ellen Hutter an agency, with the moment where it all goes ‘The Exorcist’ both a high-point with her physical contortions and most groan-worthy when it goes all Demonic Voice.

 

Speaking of voices: Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok provides a most thick and mannered accent. Skarsgård trained to lower his voice an octave and speaks a likeness of the dead language of Duncian, and where I was left in wonder at the topography of his pronunciation, others apparently found it ridiculous. The look is daring in that Orlok looks exactly like the corpse of a period nobleman, neither as monstrous as Max Schreck – a true otherworldly nightmare that makes you wonder how he would convincingly move in the real world – or as seductive as many others. Manuel Batencourt says that “In choosing to make Count Orlok repulsive, you sap it of both the metaphorical potential and the effect you want on your audience.”, but Schreck is the yardstick here rather than Lugosi or Reeve, and the effect is to present something more probable than either: a regal strigoi, if you will. It is obsession and decay rendered here rather than temptation and ravishment and the reeking charmlessness is all to the point.

 

In performances, the hidden treat here is the impressive turn by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, providing as a character a touchstone to the normality under siege by the supernatural, and losing. In many ways, he does as much to carry the baggage as Depp, chapping at the bit as his domestic bliss is increasingly under siege.  

 

It is a pretty, lush film, full of nuance, a few shocks and a pleasing depth of Craig Lathrop’s set design and period detail. The altitude of Gothicism and melodrama here falls between Eggers’ meticulousness of ‘The Witch’ and the plunge-ahead romp of ‘The Northman’, a taste both sombre and ripe with hints of black humour. It’s almost as if Eggers has found the balance now to be both mainstream and true to his esotericism. A labour of love for a project that seems to have defined his career from the very start when he put on a theatre production of ‘Nosferatu’, Eggers says he saw this as a chance to tackle the weaknesses of Bram Stoker’s novel. Indeed, by the second half, it becomes not only an allegory for the pestilence and pandemics of the era but reads like the upper-class male fear of foreign seduction of English women in which the men bond almost homo-erotically to fend off immigrant brutes. By the time the novel gets to Van Helsing’s effusing about male camaraderie, any melodrama conveyed by the films are totally in situ. Eggers speaks of using this as an opportunity to accentuate female agency, and certainly his ‘Nosferatu’ is the Ellen Hutter show with Van Helsing conceding patriarchal authority to her self-sacrifice for the greater good. Also note that it is ultimately Count Orlok that comes across more as an addict.

 

All these facets are agreeable, searching explorations of the original, and if adaptions of well-worn text are to probe weaknesses and a few nuances instead of being comforting facsimiles, then ‘Nosferatu’ is a noble effort. Not least, it is full of arresting imagery and accumulating to an unforgettable final horror portrait. If it speaks to you, it’s just very enjoyable and the artistry makes it just a bit special.