Category: GFF strand – FrightFest

Frightfest short about a Deliveroo driver instructed not to open the box they’re transporting. It’s basically the opening scene from Gremlins played for comedy. Cute and funny.

Super fun neo-80s meta horror comedy.

Joel is a smug obnoxious horror movie fanboy with more than a small dose of male entitlement and skeevy ego. His Nice Guy TM obsession with his flatmate leads him to tailing the latest guy she’s dating to a bar, in a jank boundary-crossing move. There he proceeds to drown his sorrows at not being appreciated for the romantic devotee and cinephile genius that he is. Passing out in a closet, he awakes after the bar is closed to find a backroom private meeting of a serial killer support group. Having to use all his wits and understanding of horror genre tropes to survive, Joel goes on a bloody nightlong fight for survival.

You’d think starting in such a low and unlikable place with the main character might alienate the audience, but his hapless incompetence and dawning self-awareness makes the movie an upbeat experience. It helps that he’s played by Evan Marsh in a way that rounds the edges off the worst of his character and gives him a plucky appeal.

In fact, the whole cast is awesome. Ari Millen plays the American Psycho archetype Bob, a charming psychopath who leads the murderous troupe. I loved Ari in Orphan Black where he played the Castor clones, so it was great to see him in this, pure revelling in how bombastic and playful he could get with it. Julian Richings is also in it, playing a Gacy-inspired killer clown. You may not recognise the name, but you’d know the face, he’s been in, like, nearly every horror movie made since the 90s. You’ve got comic actor David Koechner as a crazed mercenary with a love for wholesale slaughter. The whole thing’s bananas.

While the self-aware horror movie jokes sometimes stray into being a little self-indulgent, it’s only pleasantly so. Vicious Fun is stylish, funny, with interesting deaths and a killer score, celebrating as it skewers horror movie tropes.

Nice wee unsettling FrightFest short about getting an eye exam. All that darkness, and breath on your face, and taking away your ability to see clearly makes for fertile ground for the shivers. What’s that out the corner of your eye!

A black-and-white noir crime thriller, in the mould of old spy flicks or movies about socialites and cat burglars. Intrigue and tension abound in this tight, one room clue-cracker. The film is almost entirely silent, with minimal sparse dialogue and a little back and forth over text. The film is entirely carried on the performance of the central character played by Paul Bruchon, the only person we see in the film beyond their shoes or a silhouette. His frantic reaction to being trapped in this situation, followed by waves of relief as he starts to unpick the mystery is all communicated through his expression and physicality.

An unseen woman anonymously hires a burglar to retrieve an item from the house of wealthy man. However, before the burglar is able to make his escape, an entire party’s worth of people arrive at the house, and he is trapped in the back study where everyone has thrown their coats. Using only what is in the room, he must find out why what he’s taken is so valuable, who it is he’s taken it from, and what the stakes are in this game of cat and mouse. This all the while people come and go from the room, and he may be discovered at any moment!

Apart from the obvious film influences like Hitchcock, I was weirdly reminded of the puzzle mobile games. You know, stuff like The Room, where you have to click on everything to figure out how you can use it to unlock the door, or detective games like Innocent, where you get clues piecemeal from unknown and not entirely trustworthy sources and you have to solve the crime.

The Woman With Leopard Shoes proves you don’t need a big budget, an expansive cast, or even a massive set to make a film. Alexis Bruchon has basically made as tense and gripping a film as any Hollywood thriller, and he’s done it with a room, maybe 3 actors total, and some black-and-white film.

Thoroughly enjoyable possession movie. Cristina is a journalist and junkie who ventures back to her birthplace in Mexico for an ethnographic article. Having largely lost touch with her roots after her adoption and move to the US at a young age, she no longer speaks Spanish and has no belief in the religious and traditional myths and practices. So she takes no heed of warnings not to go into a cursed cave.

Cue possession and attempts at exorcism. I like that Cristina acts like she’s seen a horror movie before and reacts with some degree of practicality. She states clearly that a lot of the ‘signs’ of her possession could easily be manufactured by her so-called benevolent healers and that her food could be being drugged to make her see things. What she alone knows is that she still has heroin in her system, and as it starts to wear off, that could be causing vomiting and muscle spasms. So there is a credible ambiguity at play.

While the addiction as possession trope is a fairly worn one, and the film relies mostly on jump-scares, nonetheless The Old Ways is well put together, decently acted, and has interesting costume and set design. A totally solid movie for a Friday night.

A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio is a anthology of 8 short stories. Some are really good, like the one about the pile of clothes on the chair at the end of the bed. There’s certainly variety, with a period monster, angry mermaid, and scary clown.

With the radio announcer reading out the stories, it kinda sounds like the videos of reddit creepy pasta set to thunderstorms. Definitely got a bit of creep to it.

That was fucking awesome!

Assault on Precinct 13-style siege movie. Crackhead punks attack a veterans’ bar, mayhem ensues. Beautiful gore, mesmerising score. Stephen Lang leads an amazing cast.

See it!

Butt Boy is what happens if someone takes a Chuck Tingle story and films it like a gritty cop drama. A man with a portal in his ass is abducting kids and sticking them up there. Hot on his trail is a jaded, hard-bitten cop, and they play a game of cat-and-mouse throughout the movie.

Butt Boy has, without a doubt, the stupidest premise for a film of the entire festival, yet it is played entirely straight. All the humour is from how ridiculous that is, rather than any standard jokes in the movie.

Silly and weird.

A series of shorts of varying quality made by and about women. Some are very promising, some are not for me.I liked Safe Space, less so Panoptia.

A sensational film about religious frenzy. A nurse sets out to save the soul of her dying patient. Jennifer Ehle is wonderful as the patient, and Morfydd Clark is extraordinary as Maud.

Reminiscent of something like The Witch, this focuses on the ecstatics of devotion. A psychological horror with an unreliable narrator, Maud’s perspective on what is happening differs massively from the secular audience. The tension just winds up as that divide gets wider and wider.

Hold your breath.