FrightFest Halloween 2022

FrightFest Halloween 2022

 

Tripping the Dark Fantastic

Director: LG White.

With: Simon Boswell, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, LG White.

UK 2022. 93 mins.

 

Simon Boswell in concert at Earth Theatre, London in 2021, with each track coming with some backstory from Boswell and interviews with a few director cameos. I have always loved ‘Santa Sangre’ and ‘Hardware’ scores (the former being one of my all-time favourite films) and the performances here are impressive with Boswell’s 12-piece band, Caduta Massi. Stepping in for Goblin – who had to cancel due to COVID – Boswell sticks a coffin on stage and concentrates on his horror scores. I still don’t care for ‘Demons’, and there’s some dodgy lyrics, but it’s a wonderful mix of rock-out and classical approaches via circus tunes, because Boswell covers a lot of ground and styles.

 

I thought a concert film/documentary was a curious/audacious way to start the Frightfest Halloween day, but I was thoroughly entertained. LG White – Boswell’s wife – is still editing and throws in lots of overlapping visuals to try to capture the stage activity and live video backgrounds featuring cameos (Iggy Pop! Argento!) and film clips. It’s a fine presentation.

 

Freeze

Director: Charlie Steeds.

With: Johnny Vivash, Ricardo Freitas, David Lenik, Jake Watkins.

UK 2022. 90 mins

 

Starts out promising a low-budget ‘The Terror’ Lovecraftian monster movie, which is all good. There’s admirable ambition, the Norwegian ice-scapes are breath-taking, but there’s some dubious acting and, worse, the monsters are somewhat ill-served. Not only is the fun design given away immediately (no build-up here - but just look at it!), and perhaps we can step back from questioning their logic (assumedly they are amphibious monsters that get their fishy food diving under the ice? Seals? Bears?), but their squat-walking really doesn’t seem to be any sense (I mean, they’re in a cavernous environment).

 

Gnomes

Director: Ruwan Suresh Heggelman.

With: Moïse Trustfull, Duncan Meijiring.

6mins.

 

I can report that Paul McEvoy, once of the FrightFest founders, sat near me and laughed his socks off to this. The main source of humour to this swift and hilarious short is the splatter excess. The designs of the gnomes and their attack machines are delightful. It’s a show-piece kill segment that doesn’t waste time in being outrageous.

 

Mad Heidi

Directors: Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein.

With: Casper Van Dien, David Schofield, Alice Lucy, Leon Herbert

Switzerland 2022. 92 mins.

 

A parody frontloaded with its best gags, but then gets districted by women’s prison satire and then weighed-down by increasingly leaning on plot rather than jokes. Nevertheless, agreeable enough fun, powered mostly by Casper Van Dien’s consistently funny villainous performance.

 

Outpost

Director: Joe Lo Truglio.

With: Beth Dover, Dallas Roberts, Dylan Baker, Ato Essandoh.

USA 2022. 84 mins.

 

Takes a moment to settle down and make sense, but soon settles in to a seemingly straightforward tale of a woman trying to escape a troubled past of domestic abuse by becoming a fire marshal atop a forest lookout. A film unafraid to takes its time, strong on empathy and performances – Dylan Baker as the prickly neighbour and Ato Essandoh as Kate’s taciturn boss were personal favourites.       

 

It was obvious from the Q&A afterwards that Joe Lo Truglio wanted to be as sympathetic to his approach to PTSD with a potentially conventionally conventional thriller, and it is this that distinguishes ‘Outpost’ and motivates as well as allows for its narrative surprises.

 

On The Edge

Directors: Jen & Sylvia Soska.

With: Aramis Sartorio, Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska, Mackenzie Gray.

Canada 2022. 114 mins.

 

Aramis Sartorio gives his all while the Soskas pose and pout their performances. Any message about female empowerment is filtered into sadism-revenge fantasy as a family man that books a dominatrix in a hotel gets more than he bargained for. This sadism-revenge agenda also guided the Soska’s far superior ‘American Mary’ but the body-horror fascination there is replaced by two-bit Catholic morals here. Anal rape is the main source of humour. But even more egregiously is the badly recorded diagetic dialogue and amateurish sound mix that makes much incomprehensible. Which is problematic for a film that is constantly talking at you. Eventually it devolves into strobe lighting and bible verse and a simplistic morality play that makes a nonsense of any of its transgressive and feminist intent.

Look to 'Promising Young Woman', 'The Beta Test' or even 'The Special' for more nuanced, troubling and fun interrogations of these themes.

 

The Offering

Director: Oliver Park.

With: Nick Blood, Allan Corduner, Paul Kaye, Emm Wiseman.

USA 2022. 93 mins.

 

Introducing the film, director Oliver Park said it portrayed beat-for-beat terrifying nightmares he’d had since he was a toddler. One can only imagine that his nightmares came with bangs and blares and musical stings. Certainly I anticipated a more surrealist, nightmare-logic to the film, but what followed was a far more conventional horror. It relies too much on jump-scares, which quickly become tiresome, despite being distinguished by its Jewish family drama and folklore context, good performances and funeral home setting. 

______

Favourites: ‘The Outpost’, ‘Gnomes’.

Surprised I liked: ‘Tripping the Dark Fantastic’.

Sad that: I ended up being a little indifferent to ‘Mad Heidi’ after the opening had been such parody bonkers and fun. 

FrightFest online 2021 - night #2: 'Broadcast Signal Intrusion' & 'Coming Home in the Dark'

 

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

 

Director - Jacob Gentry

Writers - Phil Drinkwater & Tim Woodall

Stars: Harry Shum Jr., Kelley Mack, Anthony E. Cabral

2021, USA

 

In the late nineties, a loner video archivist still grieving over the loss of his wife stumbles upon infamous pirate broadcasts, becoming obsessed. Harry Shum Jr makes for an untypical and engaging protagonist, guiding us through every frame and Gentry provides great aptitude and directorial flourish in keeping lively what could have been a more static premise. By always searching for an active approach to scenes, by never quite being obvious, Gentry conveys the increasingly panicky and desperate mindset of it flailing protagonist. Oh, and Ben Lovett's laid back score is a treat, namechecking the beloved conspiracy movies that came after Nixon, etc.

It’s a fascinating film less concerned with resolving than portraying how conspiracy theorists are never satisfied, using their obsession to fill deeper needs and losses. Increasingly, everything becomes ominous; ambiguity is the word until it’s never quite certain what’s a red herring. Maybe a second watch will help or maybe it will just deepen the mystery: this is the horror of never quite knowing, of no closure, of the human condition. But there is something to disturb in a more traditional sense: the broadcasts themselves are unnerving, the stuff of nightmares as creepy masks and distorted playback tend to be.

 

Coming Home in the Dark

 

Director - James Ashcroft

Writers –  James Ashcroft & Eli Kent, (Based on the short story by) Owen Marshall

Stars - Daniel Gillies, Erik Thomson, Miriama McDowell

2021, New Zealand

 

Sometimes, it’s just a pleasure to have a less playful, more straightforward horror, the aim of which is just to upset and horrify. There is nothing new in ‘Coming Home in the Dark’, but it does take it’s time to reveal its full aim. As soon as a couple of men wander sinisterly into an idyllic family picnic in a New Zealand vista, you know what’s coming. But the cat-and-mouse and mind games here are superior to most, due to a canny script and excellent, non-hammy playing by Daniel Gilles. Superior performances all round and the film makes sure it keeps playing its cards right to the end, not necessarily explaining everything. It never quite overbalances itself and therefore stays upsetting to the very end. A beautifully filmed and haunting thriller.

Piercing

PIERCING

Nicolas Pesce, 2018, USA

Nicolas Pesce’s follow up to ‘The Eyes of my Mother’ is another oddball affair and likely to prove unequivocally divisive. But if it’s one thing that seems clear just from these two features is that Pesce is following his own agenda and doesn’t mind being an acquired taste. His explorations into horror are the ingrowing kind, thoroughly opposed to the mainstream. 

“Can we eat first?”

‘Piercing’ begins with a striking montage of building miniatures. Like the Onetti brothers’ ‘Abrakadabra’, its aesthetic is clearly a homage to the ‘70s giallo, another growing genre trend after the wealth of ‘80s reverences. This means it also reuses music from ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ and ‘Tenebrae’: I guess that maybe we can thank Quentin Tarantino for making reusing the soundtracks from other films a trend – sometimes incongruously.* 

And then it becomes instantly queasy arthouse horror with a twitchy man hovering over a toddler with a knife. He doesn’t do it, but the urge is strong, so he rents a hotel room with the intention of murdering a prostitute. Like performance art, he mimes the murder for practise.  But then Mia Wasikowska turns up at the door and… things don’t go as planned. 

Christopher Abbot seems about to deliver a consummate performance of the meek-seeming killer, but Wasikowska then introduces something more playful and equally dangerous. If not dangerous, then unpredictable. The actors relish turning the tables on one-another within Naomi Munro’s sumptuous, slightly unreal art design. And all the time, the tone of Seventies giallo frames it all, the bold colours, the simultaneous perversion and flippancy.

Based on Ryū Murakami’s novel, ‘Piercing’ plays with assumptions until the audience is in the submissive role of wondering just who’s in charge. Rarely has S&M been played so openly and brazenly with the viewer as Pesce artfully removes one block after another from underneath until we are left as uncertain as can be. This is sly, adult material and very stylish. Steve Abrams is frustrated by 'Piercing' and that's as it should be, surely.  Of course, the ending will be the decider in dividing opinion, but it is completely in keeping with the S&M agenda and leaves the audience teetering on the edge of satisfaction. 

• Yes, I am aware that Cattet and Forzani’s ‘Amer’ utilises the music of other films but that feels more in the service of giallo mash-up that ‘Amer’ is and not in the service of their vinyl collection.